Joe and Harry looked at each other. It was mirage, they knew that, yet there had been the headland, and the ship, her every spar and rope familiar to them. It was magic; that was what the Eskimo said, but he was quite confident that it was bad magic, and that this was to show them that ship and crew were lost, —had sailed far away to the unknown, never to return. He would go to Icy Cape with them if they wished, but they would find only winter ghosts there. Nevertheless it was their only clue, and they decided to go. With their friends camped only a few short miles to the southwest, they headed in the opposite direction and began struggling through the mush ice, across floes, making a toilsome but sure progress to the northeast. At noon they camped on a floe, ate seal meat, and, after a brief rest, toiled on. At night they camped as before. Thus for two days they steadily worked up the coast. At nightfall of the second the wind came in again from the west, with squalls of snow and a recurrence of severe cold, but the next day they went on still, and by noon were rounding the headland. The air was thick with snow, but in a lull they sighted what seemed to be the ship, and cries of thanksgiving went up from the weary wayfarers. “The ship! the ship!” they cried once more, confident that this could be no mirage. The Eskimo shook his head. “Bad magic,” he said; “ghost ship.” But the boys knew better. The Bowhead lay at anchor in mush ice and among floes, ghostly enough in the whirl of flying snow that made the outlines of spar and sail white against the leaden sky, but the ship in very truth, and never so welcome a sight in any man’s eyes. They shouted and hallooed, and listened in vain for any response as they neared her, and their exultant hearts grew cold with fear as they got none. A terrible weird loneliness brooded over her, and it seemed to the exhausted boys as if they struggled to her side through a bad dream. There was no greeting as they stepped on deck, only the wail of the wind through the icy shrouds. The deck was drifted with snow that held no tracks. The cabin, the forecastle, the galley, all showed signs of hasty leave-taking, and were untenanted. Then, once more in the cabin, the truth came upon them with stunning force. The ship had been abandoned, and they with it were left to face the long loneliness of the coming Arctic night as best they could. Joe sat down with a pathetic slump in his broad shoulders and buried his face in his hands, losing his cheerful courage for the first time; nor did he note for quite a while that Harry was face down on the captain’s berth sobbing with homesickness, loneliness, and utter physical exhaustion. Of the hour that these two spent in the full realization of their misfortune, it were best to say little. Up to that hour they had been boys. In it they passed through the crucible that melts and reshapes souls, and they came out of it men.