Ken felt that he had given half his life with that final shell. Completely surrounded by a hundred or more of the sealmen, he could not possibly hope to maneuver the torpoon up to the hole in the ice and leave it, without being overwhelmed. He had held off the swarm long enough for the others to escape, but for himself it was the end. So he thought, and wondered just when that end would come. Soon, he knew. It would not take them long to overcome their fear when they saw that he no longer reached out and struck them down in sudden bloody death. Now it was their turn. "Anyway," the torpooner murmured, "I got 'em out. I saved them." But had he? Suddenly his mind turned up a dreadful thought. He had saved them from the sealmen, but they were up on the ice without food. There had been no time to apportion rations in the submarine; all the supplies were stacked around him in the torpoon! Searching planes would eventually appear overhead, but if he could not get the food up to the men it meant their death as surely as if they had stayed locked in the _Peary_! But how could he do it without shells, and with that living wall edging inch by inch upon him, visibly on the brink of rushing him. Some carried ropes with which they would lash the torpoon down as they had the others. Must all he and those men had gone through, be in vain? Must he die--and the others? For certainly without food, those men above on the lonely ice fields, all of them weakened by the long siege in the submarine, would perish quickly.... And then a faintly possible plan came to him. It involved an attempt to bluff the seal-creatures. * * * * * Thirty feet above the lone man in the torpoon was the hole he had blasted in the ice. He knew that from the cone of light which filtered down; he did not dare to take his eyes for a second from the creatures around him, for all now depended on his judging to a fraction just when the lithe, living wall would leap to overwhelm him. Now the torpoon was enclosed by what was more a sphere of brown bodies than a circle. But it was not a solid sphere. It stretched thinly to within a few feet of the ice ceiling where, in one place, was the hole Ken had blown in the ice. He began to play the game. He edged the gears into reverse, gently angled the diving-planes, and slowly the torpoon tilted in response and began to sink back to the dark sea-floor. Motion appeared in the curved facade of sleek brown heads and bodies in front and to the sides. The creatures behind and below, Ken could not see; he could only trust to the fear inspired by the damage his propeller had wreaked on one of them, to hold them back. However, he could judge the movements of those behind and below by the synchronized movements of those in front; for the sealmen, in this tense siege, seemed to move as one--just as they would move as one when a leader got the courage to charge across the gap to the torpoon.