atmosphere, and wanted to read the barometer affixed to a stake just
outside the tent. Yet when he had noted that it was, after all,
stationary, he stood for a moment looking out across the ice with
unseeing eyes. Then from a pocket in his furs he drew a little folder of
morocco. It was pitiably worn, stained with sea-water, patched and
repatched, its frayed edges sewed together again with ravellings of
cloth and sea-grasses. Loosening with his teeth the thong of walrus-hide
with which it was tied, Ferriss opened it and held it to the faint light
of an aurora just paling in the northern sky.

"So," he muttered after a while, "so--Bennett, too--"

For a long time Ferriss stood looking at Lloyd's picture till the purple
streamers in the north faded into the cold gray of the heavens. Then he
shot a glance above him.

"God Almighty, bless her and keep her!" he prayed.

Far off, miles away, an ice-floe split with the prolonged reverberation
of thunder. The aurora was gone. Ferriss returned to the tent.

The following week the expedition suffered miserably. Snowstorm followed
snowstorm, the temperature dropped to twenty-two degrees below the
freezing-point, and gales of wind from the east whipped and scourged the
struggling men incessantly with myriad steel-tipped lashes. At night the
agony in their feet was all but unbearable. It was impossible to be
warm, impossible to be dry. Dennison, in a measure, recovered his
health, but the ulcer on McPherson's foot had so eaten the flesh that
the muscles were visible. Hawes's monotonous chatter and crazy
whimperings filled the tent every night.