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Page 25
Plank after plank fell out on the floor. He laughed over the easy
task of destruction. "Aha! young Aldersley! It doesn't take much
to demolish your bed-place. I'll have it down! I would have the
whole hut down, if they would only give me the chance of chopping
at it!"
A long strip of wood fell to his ax--long enough to require
cutting in two. He turned it, and stooped over it. Something
caught his eye--letters carved in the wood. He looked closer. The
letters were very faintly and badly cut. He could only make out
the first three of them; and even of those he was not quite
certain. They looked like C L A--if they looked like anything. He
threw down the strip of wood irritably.
"D--n the fellow (whoever he is) who cut this! Why should he
carve _that_ name, of all the names in the world?"
He paused, considering--then determined to go on again with his
self-imposed labor. He was ashamed of his own outburst. He looked
eagerly for the ax. "Work, work! Nothing for it but work." He
found the ax, and went on again.
He cut out another plank.
He stopped, and looked at it suspiciously.
There was carving again, on this plank. The letters F. and A.
appeared on it.
He put down the ax. There were vague misgivings in him which he
was not able to realize. The state of his own mind was fast
becoming a puzzle to him.
"More carving," he said to himself. "That's the way these young
idlers employ their long hours. F. A.? Those must be _his_
initials--Frank Aldersley. Who carved the letters on the other
plank? Frank Aldersley, too?"
He turned the piece of wood in his hand nearer to the light, and
looked lower down it. More carving again, lower down! Under the
initials F. A. were two more letters--C. B.
"C. B.?" he repeated to himself. "His sweet heart's initials, I
suppose? Of course--at his age--his sweetheart's initials."
He paused once more. A spasm of inner pain showed the shadow of
its mysterious passage, outwardly on his face.
"_Her_ cipher is C. B.," he said, in low, broken tones. "C.
B.--Clara Burnham."
He waited, with the plank in his hand; repeating the name over
and over again, as if it was a question he was putting to
himself.
"Clara Burnham? Clara Burnham?"
He dropped the plank, and turned deadly pale in a moment. His
eyes wandered furtively backward and forward between the strip of
wood on the floor and the half-demolished berth. "Oh, God! what
has come to me now?" he said to himself, in a whisper. He
snatched up the ax, with a strange cry--something between rage
and terror. He tried--fiercely, desperately tried--to go on with
his work. No! strong as he was, he could not use the ax. His
hands were helpless; they trembled incessantly. He went to the
fire; he held his hands over it. They still trembled incessantly;
they infected the rest of him. He shuddered all over. He knew
fear. His own thoughts terrified him.
"Crayford!" he cried out. "Crayford! come here, and let's go
hunting."
No friendly voice answered him. No friendly face showed itself at
the door.
An interval passed; and there came over him another change. He
recovered his self-possession almost as suddenly as he had lost
it. A smile--a horrid, deforming, unnatural smile--spread slowly,
stealthily, devilishly over his face. He left the fire; he put
the ax away softly in a corner; he sat down in his old place,
deliberately self-abandoned to a frenzy of vindictive joy. He had
found the man! There, at the end of the world--there, at the last
fight of the Arctic voyagers against starvation and death, he had
found the man!
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