“Yes, sir. The-aw’s hills, and big ones, a long way ahead, but I’m no’ goin’ up that mast again. It would be suicide. I’m done. I’ll nev-ah fo-get yon stone ghost, no, not if I live to be ninety.” Then Joey, sniffing the morning, uncurled himself, stretched, yawned loudly, and thought of breakfast, for he had passed a rather disturbed night, the second in one week. To cope with such excitement, a dog needed sustenance. CHAPTER VIII. IN A WILD HAVEN Fortune has her cycles, whether for good or ill. The _Kansas_, having run the gauntlet of many dangers, seemed to have earned an approving smile from the fickle goddess. A slight but perceptible veering of the wind, combined with the increasing power of the sun’s rays, swept the ocean clear of its storm-wraiths. Soon after passing the pillar rock, Courtenay thought he could make out the unwavering outline of mountainous land amid the gray mists. A few minutes later the waves racing alongside changed their leaden hue to a steely glitter which told him the fog was dispersing. The nearer blue of the ocean carpet spread an ever-widening circle until it merged into a vivid green. Then, with startling suddenness, the curtain was drawn aside on a panorama at once magnificent and amazing. Almost without warning, the ship was found to be entering the estuary of a narrow fiord. Gaunt headlands, carved on Titanic scale out of the solid rock, guarded the entrance, and already shut out the more distant coast-line. Behind these first massive walls, everywhere unscalable, and rising in separate promontories to altitudes of, perhaps, four hundred feet, an inner fortification of precipitous mountains flung their glacier-clad peaks heavenward to immense heights,—heights which, in that region, soared far above the snow-line. The sun was reflected with dazzling brilliancy from their icy summits, and wonderful lights sparkled in rainbow tints on their slopes. Delicate pink deepened to rose crimson; pale greens softened into the beryl blue of stupendous glaciers, vast frozen cataracts which flowed down deep and broad clefts almost to the water’s edge.