AMERICA!
"They say the wild man is going to live," said a voice.
"Yes, Doc Clawson says he'll pull through all right," said another.
"He's had a close call, if ever a man had. I wonder who and what he is."
"So do I," rejoined the first voice. "Do you believe that, that he is a
wild man?"
"Dunno. What you goin' to believe?" The first voice became
confidential. "I heard Doc tell the mate that he hadn't spoke an
English word in all his sick ravings, except 'Lady,' which he might
have learned from the girl. Then there's the knife. Captain's got that.
It ain't like no metal any one ever saw. There's letters on it Doc says
are Greek, but nobody here can read 'em. Doc says he believes what the
chap jabbers is Greek too."
"He's got a queer necklace, too," chimed in the second voice. "It's
made of the same kind of stuff as the knife is, and strung with red
pebbles. Wonder what they'll do with him?"
"Sh-h-h! Don't you let your wonderin' run away with you. Cap's
actin' queerer and queerer. Did you notice him when he came aft this
mornin'--after the talk he had with the doc? I tell you somethin's gone
wrong, all right--"
Scuffling footsteps broke the tenor of the voices, and they faded away
to a murmur, and then to silence.
Those scraps of a conversation drifted to the mind of Polaris, where
for hours and hours a tiny spark of comprehension had been struggling
back into being. They were the first words that his returning
consciousness had understood.
He opened his eyes.
Surely that knot in the oaken beam above him was an old friend, the one
shaped so like the head of a horse. And that row of iron bolt-heads;
how often he had counted them over! He lay in a white-covered berth in
a small cabin, in which every seam and stitch and object was strangely
familiar, but which his reawakening consciousness refused to recognize.
Sunlight was streaming in through a partly opened port, and with it
came the sound of the sea.
Slowly, for he found it required considerable effort, he turned over
on his side and looked about him. Where was he? Above all, how had he
got there? As he moved he felt something at his neck slip, and through
the open throat of the linen garment he wore fell the heavy loop of the
necklace of Kalin.
Wondering, he stared at the iridescent links of ilium and the dull
red stones. Then the spring that held the tight-wound coil of memory
snapped, and the past unrolled like an endless ribbon.
He was weak. He had been ill. Yes, now he held the key--that
conversation he had just heard. The "wild man" of whom the sailors
talked was himself. He smiled. Already his yellow beard had grown long
and ragged, and covered his throat. The knife, and the necklace--all of
the talk had referred to him.
And they said that in all his delirium he had spoken no word of
English! He smiled to himself once more. So even when his conscious
self had departed from control of his body and mind, he had held fast
to his fanciful resolution. Rose Emer must also have kept her promise.
Not a soul but herself guessed who he was.
But that last part of the sailors' talk? What did that mean? What
_were_ they going to do with him?
In an instant he was alert and bitterly suspicious. He was on a ship,
a ship at sea. He was in the power of the American captain, the man
who had sought and probably found the great and mystic pole; also the
man who was the affianced husband of the girl whom Polaris had carried
across the snow deserts in his arms. Now he had a duty laid upon him,
which he secretly guessed would conflict sorely with the wishes of the
captain. While he lived, he would strive to carry out that duty.
* * * * *
But why had he lived? At the end of his terrible journey darkness had
fallen upon him in the camp; why had it ever lifted? If it had not, he
had been freed of his promise, and would have been content.
What had happened since then? Where was Rose Emer? The gossip of the
sailors had included no news of her; but so the inference was that all
was well with her. Where was Marcus? How long had he been ill?
These questions remained unanswered. He could not know that he had
lain heavy and inert on a sledge for days, with only the thickness of
their fur parkas separating him from Rose Emer, while Scoland's men,
abandoning all that did not make for speed, had driven dogs to death in
their wild dash back to the Felix.
He could not know that he had been given up for dead by the men, and
that, even then, that conclusion brought little of regret to the heart
of the American commander. Nor could he know that Rose Emer would not
have it so, and that, under her entreaties, the supposed corpse had
been carried on to the ship, and to the good medical man on it, who
found that somewhere in the fastnesses of the silent form stretched
before him a tiny flicker of life still abode, and would respond to
care.
That care he had received, and in good measure. To Dr. Clawson he
most certainly owed his life--twice over. Having saved it once, the
integrity of the physician withstood the hint, almost brutally direct,
from Scoland, that the man would be better off if he were let to die
quietly.
Polaris was the one fly in the ointment of the daring captain of the
Felix. His vague suspicions concerning the origin of the stranger and
his business in the snow land had become an obsession. From the girl
he could obtain no satisfaction, and only food for more suspicion. She
would say little of her rescue, and less of her rescuer, taking refuge
from anything like investigation in the declaration that the stirring
of the memory of those days in the wilderness was too much for her
already overwrought nervous system.
Scoland was a man greatly daring; he also was a man who would scruple
little to remove, by any means that seemed safe to himself, any
obstacle which stood between him and that which he desired. He had
striven for a great prize and won. Another prize lay almost within his
grasp. Should an obstacle to either intervene, he would do his utmost
to sweep it aside.
Was this strange wanderer an obstacle? Could he be one of a party who
had penetrated the fastnesses of the snows, to wrest from jaws of berg
and glacier the secret of the pole?
Captain Scoland had heard of no such party. When he thought of how the
man came, proofless, he smiled at his own suspicions. And yet--might
not others have waited for the return of this man, as the crew of the
Felix had waited for himself?
Then there was the strange demeanor of the girl, her reticence and her
almost rapt interest in the man. Even now she might have been haunting
the sick man's cabin, but that Scoland had persuaded her that his mind
was gone, and that he was well enough off as far as the needs of the
body were concerned.
To do the captain justice, the attitude of the girl, her interest in
the strange man, were the minor considerations. Everything must step
aside for his glory as the discoverer of the pole. Already the press of
two hemispheres was heralding his successful return, and the savants
of the nations were awaiting his proofs. There must be no cloud on his
title, no question of his right. He would make that sure.
An unsuspected cunning in dealings with other men had been awakened
in the breast of Polaris. Suddenly awake to the full consciousness of
his mental powers, he was swayed by his suspicion, by the warnings
his father had given him long ago, his oft-repeated advice as to the
intentions and possible actions of the first white men he was apt to
meet.
He was awake from delirium, and his head was clear. To all appearances
his mind still wandered. A little observation taught him when a sailor
brought him food from the cook's galley, and when to expect the visits
of the doctor. They soon found him changed in one respect. He accepted
food, and once or twice they surprised him floundering weakly about the
little cabin. But he showed them no brightness of mind. His glances
were vacant, his manners those of an imbecile almost.
He bided his time.
His strength came back to him slowly, although he concealed that fact.
They were far up the coast, not two weeks journey from New York, when
he first came to a realization of being, after his long siege of brain
fever and weakness. In those two weeks he took every measure to prepare
himself against their landing on American soil.
He knew not at all what he should face, but he wished to be ready for
it with all his old-time strength and agility. Not entirely could he
disassociate his mind from the idea that opposition and trouble must be
answered with the strength of one's body.
The man who brought the food and the physician who tended him came only
in the day time. Therefore Polaris spent most of his days supinely in
his berth. At night he was supremely active. Up and down the narrow
confines he paced. He leaped lightly. He stretched and strained each
limb and muscle.
Hour after hour he endured the severest "calisthenics"--not those
taught in the gymnasium, but anything and everything in the line of the
motion to which his surroundings lent themselves.
* * * * *
At length the Felix day in Quarantine. The next day they would dock.
Scoland would meet and accept the homage of a nation which had gone
temporarily wild over his exploits. Before that landing he would
dispose of the living problem which lay and gibbered in the berth in
the cabin that had been Burleson's.
Privately Scoland made arrangements with the authorities at a big
institution for the care of the insane up the river. They were to send
for the man. The captain explained that the patient was a member of his
crew who had lost the balance of his mind due to the hardships he had
endured.
That night Polaris checkmated all the captain's carefully made
preparations. Tense with excitement, the son of the snows had realized
that they lay near the land. Then he had seen it from the port.
Snatches of talk of the sailors told him that it was New York at
last--the city of his dreams. One scrap of conversation focused all his
long-nursed doubts.
They had sailed to Quarantine through an almost continual blare of
every kind of noise-making instrument on the decks of every ship they
passed or met. With his head at the port Polaris caught, in a sudden
interval of quiet, a few words from the deck above him. He recognized
the voice of Captain Scoland, talking to the mate.
"They'll come for him in a launch at Quarantine," he said. "It's all
arranged. Here's the cabin key. Better take a couple of the boys to
help the keepers. He might try to make trouble."
That was all--_and enough!_
Soon after his return to consciousness Polaris had learned that the
door to the cabin where he lay was kept locked always. It had been one
of his earliest causes for suspicion. Some time after midnight that
night he set his powerful shoulder to that door, and pressed his weight
against it. Minutes he stood there, gradually increasing the pressure,
until the lock sprung in its wards with a slight snap, and the knob
yielded in his twisting fingers.
The man who had brought the food had left in the cabin a few rough
garments such as the sailors wore. Polaris had donned them as he
occasionally left the berth in the day time. He wore them now. Had any
one met him, he scarcely would have been recognized as the "madman." He
had found a razor in Burleson's cabin, and had shift to shave himself
cleanly. He had hacked off the most of his long hair with the same
instrument, and had disposed of the evidences of his tonsorial efforts
by throwing all through the port into the harbor. Around his neck he
wore the necklace of Kalin.
Only a half-defined notion of what he was about to do was in his mind,
but there was no fear.
He stole along the silent corridor, and gained the deck and the
rail, without being observed by the lone sailor on watch near the
wheel-house. Ready to his hand, it seemed, were a short length of plank
and a trailing rope, attached firmly to some part of the ship, but long
enough and loose enough to serve him.
With the plank under one arm he clambered over the rail and let himself
down with the rope. He could not swim a stroke, but he reached the
water, and with one arm over the stout bit of plank, he struck out
fearlessly for the glittering skyline of the great city that lay ahead.