Frontin waved his hand at the ice around. “One or a dozen. We ha’ been carried in the ice for weeks, up one channel and down another--ah! I see that heaven has declared me a liar.” He moved suddenly. “The man’s not dead after all.” The two clambered down, leaping and sliding into the hollow where the ice was pooled with blood. Frontin turned the man over, lifted head to lap, tenderly soothed the poor hurt and disemboweled thing that had been human before the claws of the bear ripped so deep and far. The man’s eyelids fluttered open, and his vacant gaze fell upon Crawford. He spoke feebly in English. “The smoke--the smoke! It is a sure sign; I tell you, haste and slay them--no parley, no hesitation! No quarter to man or woman. English or French, slay them or they will kill us all. That smoke means a ship. I--I--ah! You--you are not Moses Deakin! Who are you?” Intelligence leaped into those eyes, a last flicker of fast-dying fires. “Where are you from?” demanded Crawford imperatively. “Your ship? Where is she?” “Blast you to hell and sink you lower!” was the response. “Ho, Moses--Moses Deakin! No quarter to them--no quarter----” That was all. The hurt thing was at peace. Now silence fell upon the two men--silence of wondering and slow comprehension. Frontin rose, turned his dark and glittering gaze upon the empty white desert surrounding them; his saturnine, hawk-nosed visage was wrinkled in perplexity. Crawford began to stuff tobacco into his pipe and stared down at the dead man, his wide and heavy-lidded eyes veiled thoughtfully. Frost and bleak winds had darkened the thin lines of nose and cheek and chin since he had left Newfoundland behind him, only to intensify their hard and aggressive determination. Whence had this man come? No other ships had come through the roaring turmoil of the straits, according to the Eskimos. For weeks the _Northstar_ had been carried back and forth and roundabout in the grip of ice and fog and currents, now out almost to open water, now back in the straits with the drift. Yet the presence of this man showed that some other ship was at hand, and any other ship spelled peril of the utmost to Hal Crawford. Here in the bitter north, as on the golden main to the south, powder was the only lawgiver. During a generation and more, English, French and Bostonnais had disputed for possession of Hudson’s great bay and its beaver trade. A year previously, the English Company of Adventurers had swept the French from the bay posts; what would happen this year or the next, no man could predict. The Iroquois war whoop had resounded from the dark pines these ten years, meeting at the apex of a great overland triangle the scalp-yell of the Sioux. The heroic Danish colony had perished in mad horror years ago. Freebooters and fur-pirates slipped in through the straits and out again before the ice formed. Here only the fittest could survive; the conquered met with no quarter, whether from man or from nature.