Kane’s promptness saved the party. A sledge was hastily loaded, Ohlsen deposited upon it, wrapped in furs, and an immediate departure made. The thermometer stood at 76° below freezing. For sixteen hours they struggled on, till at length they came to a place where Ohlsen had to acknowledge he was quite “at sea,” and could not recognise the landmarks. Kane continues:—“Pushing ahead of the party, and clambering over some rugged ice-piles, I came to a long level floe, which I thought might probably have attracted the eyes of weary men in circumstances like our own. It was a light conjecture, but it was enough to turn the scale, for there was no other to balance it. I gave orders to abandon the sledge, and disperse in search of footmarks. We raised our tent, placed our pemmican in cache, except a small allowance for each man to carry on his person, and poor Ohlsen, now just able to keep his legs, was liberated from his bag. The thermometer had fallen by this time to minus 49° 3’ and the wind was setting in sharp from the north-west. It was out of the question to halt; it required brisk exercise to keep us from freezing. The men ‘extended’ in skirmishing order, but kept nervously closing up; several were seized with trembling fits, and Dr. Kane fainted twice from the effect of the intense cold. At length a sledge track was discovered, which followed, brought them in sight of a small American flag fluttering from a hummock, and lower down a little masonic banner, hanging from a tent-pole hardly above the drift. It was the camp of our disabled comrades; we reached it after an unbroken march of twenty-one hours. “The little tent was nearly covered.... As I crawled in, and coming upon the darkness, heard before me the burst of welcome gladness that came from the four poor fellows stretched on their backs, and then for the first time the cheer outside, my weakness and my gratitude together almost overcame me. They had expected me; they were sure I would come!” The tent only being capable of holding eight, while there were fifteen souls in all, they had to take “watch and watch” by turns. When sufficiently rested and refreshed, the sick men were sewn up in reindeer skins and placed on the sledge. Although they left all superfluous articles behind, the load was eleven hundred pounds. “We made by vigorous pulls and lifts nearly a mile an hour.... Almost without premonition, we all became aware of an alarming failure of our energies. I was of course familiar with the benumbed and almost lethargic sensation of extreme cold.... But I had treated the _sleepy comfort_ of freezing as something like the embellishment of romance. I had evidence now to the contrary.