HURLED SOUTH AGAIN
When his strong form had bounded from her view, the girl turned to
the little hut and shut herself within. She cast herself on a heap of
blankets, and gave way to her bereavement and terror.
Her brother's corpse was scarcely cold at the bottom of the abyss. She
was lost in the trackless wastes--alone, save for this bizarre stranger
who had come out of the snows, this man of strange sayings, who seemed
a demigod of the wilderness.
Could she trust him? She must. She recalled him kneeling in the snow,
and the courtierlike grace with which he kissed her hand. A hot flush
mounted to her eyes. She dried her tears.
She heard him return to the camp, and heard the barking of the dogs.
Once he passed near the hut, but he did not intrude, and she remained
within.
Womanlike, she set about the rearrangement of her hair and clothing.
When she had finished she crept to the doorway and peeped out. Again
her blushes burned her cheeks. She saw the son of the snows crouched
above the camp-fire, surrounded by a group of monstrous dogs. He had
rubbed his face with oil. A bright blade glittered in his hand. Polaris
was _shaving_!
Presently she went out. The young man sprang to his feet, cracking
his long whip to restrain the dogs, which would have sprung upon the
stranger. They huddled away, their teeth bared, staring at her with
glowing eyes. Polaris seized one of them by the scruff of the neck,
lifted it bodily from the snow, and swung it in front of the girl.
"Talk to him, lady," he said; "you must be friends. This is Julius."
The girl bent over and fearlessly stroked the brute's head.
"Julius, good dog," she said. At her touch the dog quivered and its
hackles rose. Under the caress of her hand it quieted gradually. The
bristling hair relaxed, and Julius's tail swung slowly to and fro in
an overture of amity. When Polaris loosed him, he sniffed in friendly
fashion at the girl's hands, and pushed his great head forward for more
caresses.
Then Marcus, the grim leader of the pack, stalked majestically forward
for his introduction.
"Ah, you have won Marcus!" cried Polaris. "And Marcus won is a friend
indeed. None of them would harm you now." Soon she had learned the name
and had the confidence of every dog of the pack, to the great delight
of their master.
Among the effects in the camp was a small oil-stove, which Polaris
greeted with brightened eyes. "One like that we had, but it was worn
out long ago," he said. He lighted the stove and began the preparation
of a meal.
She found that he had cleared the camp and put all in order. He had
dragged the carcasses of the dead dogs to the other side of the slope
and piled them there. His stock of meat was low, and his own dogs would
have no qualms if it came to making their own meals off these strangers
of their own kind.
The girl produced from the remnants of the camp stores a few handfuls
of coffee and an urn. Polaris watched in wonderment as she brewed it
over the tiny stove and his nose twitched in reception of its delicious
aroma. They drank the steaming beverage, piping hot, from tin cups. In
the stinging air of the snowlands even the keenest grief must give way
to the pangs of hunger. The girl ate heartily of a meal that in a more
moderate climate she would have considered fit only for beasts.
When their supper was completed they sat huddled in their furs at the
edge of the fire. Around them were crouched the dogs, watching with
eager eyes for any scraps which might fall to their share.
"Now tell me who you are, and how you came here," questioned the girl.
"Lady, my name is Polaris, and I think that I am an American
gentleman," he said, and a trace of pride crept into the words of the
answer. "I came here from a cabin and a ship that lie burned many
leagues to the southward. All my life I have lived there, with but one
companion, my father, who now is dead, and who sends me to the north
with a message to that world of men that lies beyond the snows, and
from which he long was absent."
"A ship--a cabin--" The girl bent toward him in amazement. "And burned?
And you have lived--have grown up in this land of snow and ice and
bitter cold, where but few things can exist--I don't understand!"
"My father has told me much, but not all. It is all in his message
which I have not seen," Polaris answered. "But that which I tell you
is truth. He was a seeker after new things. He came here to seek that
which no other man had found. He came in a ship with my mother and
others. All were dead before I came to knowledge. He had built a cabin
from the ruins of the ship, and he lived there until he died."
"And you say that you are an American gentleman?"
"That he told me, lady, although I do not know my name or his, except
that he was Stephen, and he called me Polaris."
"And did he never try to get to the north?" asked the girl.
"No. Many years ago, when I was a boy, he fell and was hurt. After that
he could do but little. He could not travel."
"And you?"
"I learned to seek food in the wilderness, lady; to battle with its
beasts, to wrest that which would sustain our lives from the snows and
the wastes."
Much more of his life and of his father he told her under her wondering
questioning--a tale most incredible to her ears, but, as he said, the
truth. Finally he finished.
"Now, lady, what of you?" he asked. "How came you here, and from where?"
"My name is Rose--"
"Ah, that is the name of a flower," said Polaris. "You were well named."
He did not look at her as he spoke. His eyes were turned to the
snow slopes and were very wistful. "I have never seen a flower," he
continued slowly, "but my father said that of all created things they
were the fairest."
"I have another name," said the girl. "It is Rose--Rose Emer."
"And why did you come here, Rose Emer?" asked Polaris.
"Like your father, I--we were seekers after new things, my brother and
I. Both our father and mother died, and left my brother John and myself
ridiculously rich. We had to use our money, so we traveled. We have
been over most of the world. Then a man--an American gentleman--a very
brave man, organized an expedition to come to the south to discover the
south pole. My brother and I knew him. We were very much interested in
his adventure. We helped him with it. Then John insisted that he would
come with the expedition, and--oh, they didn't wish me to come, but I
never had been left behind--I came, too."
"And that brave man who came to seek the pole, where is he now?"
"Perhaps he is dead--out there," said the girl, with a catch in her
voice. She pointed to the south. "He left the ship and went on,
days ago. He was to establish two camps with supplies. He carried
an air-ship with him. He was to make his last dash for the pole
through the air from the farther camp. His men were to wait for him
until--until they were sure that he would not come back."
"An air-ship!" Polaris bent forward with sparkling eyes. "So there
_are_ airships, then! Ah, this man must be brave! How is he called?"
"James Scoland is his name--Captain Scoland."
"He went on whence I came? Did he go by that way?" Polaris pointed
where the white tops of the mountain range which he skirted pierced the
sky.
"No. He took a course to the east of the mountains, where other
explorers of years before had been before him."
"Yes, I have seen maps. Can you tell me where, or nearly where, we are
now?" he asked the girl.
"This is Victoria Land," she answered. "We left the ship in a long bay,
extending in from Ross Sea, near where the 160th meridian joins the
80th parallel. We are somewhere within three days' journey from the
ship."
"And so near to open water?"
She nodded.
* * * * *
Rose Emer slept in the little shelter, with the grim Marcus curled on
a robe beside her pallet. Crouched among the dogs in the camp, Polaris
slept little. For hours he sat huddled, with his chin on his hands,
pondering what the girl had told him. Another man was on his way to the
pole--a very brave man--and he might reach it. And then--Polaris must
be very wary when he met that man who had won so great a prize.
"Ah, my father," he sighed, "learning is mine through patience. History
of the world and of its wars and triumphs and failures, I know. Of its
tongues you have taught me, even those of the Roman and the Greek, long
since passed away; but how little do I know of the ways of men--and of
women! I shall be very careful, my father."
Quite beyond any power of his to control, an antagonism was growing
within him for that man whom he had not seen; antagonism that was not
all due to the magnitude of the prize which the man might be winning,
or might be dying for. Indeed, had he been able to analyze it, that was
the least part of it.
When they broke camp for their start they found that the perverse wind,
which had rested while they slept, had risen when they would journey,
and hissed bitterly across the bleak steppes of snow. Polaris made a
place on the sledge for the girl, and urged the pack into the teeth of
the gale. All day long they battled ahead in it, bearing left to the
west, where was more level pathway, than among the snow dunes.
In an ever increasing blast they came in sight of open water. They
halted on a far-stretching field, much broken by huge masses, so
snow-covered that it was not possible to know whether they were of rock
or ice. Not a quarter of a mile beyond them, the edge of the field was
fretted by wind-lashed waves, which extended away to the horizon rim,
dotted with tossing icebergs of great height.
Polaris pitched camp in the shelter of a towering cliff, and they made
themselves what comfort they could in the stinging cold.
They had slept several hours when the slumbers of Polaris were pierced
by a woman's screams, the frenzied howling of the dogs, and the
thundering reverberations of grinding and crashing ice cliffs. A dash
of spray splashed across his face.
He sprang to his feet in the midst of the leaping pack; as he did so
he felt the field beneath him sway and pitch like a hammock. For the
first time since he started for the north the Antarctic sun was shining
brightly--shining cold and clear on a great disaster!
For they had pitched their camp on an ice floe. Whipped on by the gale,
the sea had risen under it, heaved it up and broken it. On a section
of the floe several acres in extent their little camp lay, at the very
brink of a gash in the ice-field which had cut them off from the land
over which they had come.
The water was raging like a millrace through the widening rift between
them and the shore. Caught in a swift current and urged by the furious
wind, the broken-up floe was drifting, faster and faster--_back to the
south_!