Slung across the breast of the man was a fur-wrapped bundle. With measured tread he walked on to the door of the shelter, paused, and with no word let his burden gently down into the snow. A corner of the robe fell aside and disclosed the face of Rose Emer. She had swooned, and lay like one dead. Captain Scoland sprang forward with a strained cry of surprise and question. The strange man stood for an instant, his unseeing eyes fixed on the snow reaches beyond the valley. Then he tossed his arms above his head and pitched backward, inert and lifeless. The tottering wreck of a dog crept up and licked his face. CHAPTER XXI AMERICA! "They say the wild man is going to live," said a voice. "Yes, Doc Clawson says he'll pull through all right," said another. "He's had a close call, if ever a man had. I wonder who and what he is." "So do I," rejoined the first voice. "Do you believe that, that he is a wild man?" "Dunno. What you goin' to believe?" The first voice became confidential. "I heard Doc tell the mate that he hadn't spoke an English word in all his sick ravings, except 'Lady,' which he might have learned from the girl. Then there's the knife. Captain's got that. It ain't like no metal any one ever saw. There's letters on it Doc says are Greek, but nobody here can read 'em. Doc says he believes what the chap jabbers is Greek too." "He's got a queer necklace, too," chimed in the second voice. "It's made of the same kind of stuff as the knife is, and strung with red pebbles. Wonder what they'll do with him?" "Sh-h-h! Don't you let your wonderin' run away with you. Cap's actin' queerer and queerer. Did you notice him when he came aft this mornin'--after the talk he had with the doc? I tell you somethin's gone wrong, all right--" Scuffling footsteps broke the tenor of the voices, and they faded away to a murmur, and then to silence. Those scraps of a conversation drifted to the mind of Polaris, where for hours and hours a tiny spark of comprehension had been struggling back into being. They were the first words that his returning consciousness had understood. He opened his eyes. Surely that knot in the oaken beam above him was an old friend, the one shaped so like the head of a horse. And that row of iron bolt-heads; how often he had counted them over! He lay in a white-covered berth in a small cabin, in which every seam and stitch and object was strangely familiar, but which his reawakening consciousness refused to recognize. Sunlight was streaming in through a partly opened port, and with it came the sound of the sea. Slowly, for he found it required considerable effort, he turned over on his side and looked about him. Where was he? Above all, how had he got there? As he moved he felt something at his neck slip, and through the open throat of the linen garment he wore fell the heavy loop of the necklace of Kalin.