Suddenly Jim touched me on the arm and pointed ahead to a spot he had been watching through field glasses. At first I could not see what had attracted his attention in the wide valley down which a river flowed. Then a moment later I saw houses. The Fokker began to descend. We were passing over a fairly large settlement and making for what was certainly a landing field. There were hangars and dozens of planes in the open. Men began running toward us as presently we taxied down the field. They paid no attention to the big Fokker, which made a good landing a hundred yards away, but raced toward us. Almost before we had stopped I threw open the cabin door and Jim and I climbed out. We had felt for some time the possibility that we were the only men left alive in the world. Now the mere sight of other men had become a wildly exciting adventure. There was something familiar about the man nearest to us when we landed. I looked at him again. "Billy Matthews!" I shouted. "How did you get here?" I had gone to college with Billy and we had been in the same company in France. He had been connected with the government air mail service during the past few years. He threw his arm around my shoulders. "I was afraid you'd gone like most of the boys, young fella." He stood off and looked me over. "You look pretty fit," he said. "Oh, I'm all right," I said impatiently. "I want to know what happened? I've been stuck up in Labrador and don't know anything. This is Jimmy Nelson, by the way. He was wireless operator where I was stationed." The two men shook hands. Meanwhile a crowd had gathered around us. "There's no time to talk about that now. You come with me and get a little sleep, and then we'll have to put you to work." I laughed. "All right. What kind of work?" "Finding people who escaped the catastrophe and are now starving to death. "No, not here, of course. We have plenty of supplies and are getting more all the time. This settlement is practically part of Upernavik. The town proper was too near the coast to be quite safe. All of us who could get away from the United States made for this point. The scientists agreed that there would be more chance of escaping here than any place else we could reach." "How many got away?" He shook his head. "No way of telling. People started in everything that could fly and came down all over. Most of them are done for. Those who succeeded in landing in out-of-the-way places are the ones we are trying to rescue now." "How many reached here?" "About three thousand." "Everybody else in the United States dead?" "Most of them, I'm afraid, though we don't know definitely yet. There are six hundred planes here, and we're using them to locate any people still living. That is, we're using about half of them for that. The others we have to use in getting fuel and supplies." "Where are you getting them from?"