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Page 7
He paused again.
"You see, Dick, it's like this; there's a girl--" his face flamed
suddenly, "no--no, a woman, a grand, noble, man's woman, back in God's
country who is a great deal to me--everything in fact. She don't know,
hasn't a guess, that I care. I never spoke to her about it. But if
anything should turn up I should want her to know how it had been
with me, how much she was to me. So I've written her. You'll see that
she gets it, will you?"
He handed the little package to Ferriss, and continued indifferently,
and resuming his accustomed manner:
"If we get as far as Wrangel Island you can give it back to me. We are
bound to meet the relief ships or the steam whalers in that latitude.
Oh, you can look at the address," added Bennett as Ferriss, turning the
envelope bottom side up, was thrusting it into his breast pocket; "you
know her even better than I do. It's Lloyd Searight."
Ferriss's teeth shut suddenly upon his pipestem.
Bennett rose. "Tell Muck Tu," he said, "in case I don't think of it
again, that the dogs must be fed from now on from those that die. I
shall want the dog biscuit and dried fish for our own use."
"I suppose it will come to that," answered Ferriss.
"Come to that!" returned Bennett grimly; "I hope the dogs themselves
will live long enough for us to eat them. And don't misunderstand," he
added; "I talk about our getting stuck in the ice, about my not pulling
through; it's only because one must foresee everything, be prepared for
everything. Remember--I--shall--pull--through."
But that night, long after the rest were sleeping, Ferriss, who had not
closed his eyes, bestirred himself, and, as quietly as possible, crawled
from his sleeping-bag. He fancied there was some slight change in the
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.
The only pleasures left them, the only breaks in the monotony of that
life, were to eat, and, when possible, to sleep. Thought, reason, and
reflection dwindled in their brains. Instincts--the primitive, elemental
impulses of the animal--possessed them instead. To eat, to sleep, to be
warm--they asked nothing better. The night's supper was a vision that
dwelt in their imaginations hour after hour throughout the entire day.
Oh, to sit about the blue flame of alcohol sputtering underneath the old
and battered cooker of sheet-iron! To smell the delicious savour of the
thick, boiling soup! And then the meal itself--to taste the hot, coarse,
meaty food; to feel that unspeakably grateful warmth and glow, that
almost divine sensation of satiety spreading through their poor,
shivering bodies, and then sleep; sleep, though quivering with cold;
sleep, though the wet searched the flesh to the very marrow; sleep,
though the feet burned and crisped with torture; sleep, sleep, the
dreamless stupefaction of exhaustion, the few hours' oblivion, the day's
short armistice from pain!
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