A MAN'S WOMAN




I.


At four o'clock in the morning everybody in the tent was still asleep,
exhausted by the terrible march of the previous day. The hummocky ice
and pressure-ridges that Bennett had foreseen had at last been met with,
and, though camp had been broken at six o'clock and though men and dogs
had hauled and tugged and wrestled with the heavy sledges until five
o'clock in the afternoon, only a mile and a half had been covered. But
though the progress was slow, it was yet progress. It was not the
harrowing, heart-breaking immobility of those long months aboard the
Freja. Every yard to the southward, though won at the expense of a
battle with the ice, brought them nearer to Wrangel Island and ultimate
safety.

Then, too, at supper-time the unexpected had happened. Bennett, moved no
doubt by their weakened condition, had dealt out extra rations to each
man: one and two-thirds ounces of butter and six and two-thirds ounces
of aleuronate bread--a veritable luxury after the unvarying diet of
pemmican, lime juice, and dried potatoes of the past fortnight. The men
had got into their sleeping-bags early, and until four o'clock in the
morning had slept profoundly, inert, stupefied, almost without movement.