WHAT MANNER OF MEN?
Buried many feet in the snow, with the struggling mass of dogs above and around them, Polaris and Rose Emer heard the muffled shock of the mighty crag and felt the rock beneath them vibrate. Masses of ice hurtled through the air and fell in the snow all about them, but they were unscathed.
When they floundered with much effort to the surface of the snow the crystal cliff that had been their home was gone. The waves were tossing and eddying where it had plunged over. Where it had ground the side of the point snow and ice had been torn away, leaving exposed the naked gray rocks. Around the head of the promontory drifted a long, low mass of yellow ice, water-worn and unlovely, that had been the bottom of the berg.
About them the snow was crusted, and the crust was punctured with many pits where fragments of the ice from the berg had fallen, and with other pits where the seven dogs of the pack had pitched headlong. One by one the gray runners crawled to the surface and emerged like rats from their holes to sprawl upon the snow crust, looking exceedingly foolish, as is the manner of dignified dogs when they are spilled promiscuously into such a predicament.
A little way from where the man and woman stood the sledge was upended in the drift. If walked over quickly the crust of the snow was firm enough to offer footing.
Polaris soon righted the sledge, which had suffered no harm in its fall, and inspanned the team. They set off for the shore over a succession of dips and rises along the back of the promontory.
Where it was joined to the shore, however, they found an obstacle. The land bristled with a bulwark of rocks, snow, and ice of a height to make it impossible for the man to guide the sledge over it.
Rose Emer had come to look to Polaris in the face of each new difficulty, finding in him an infinite resource and genius for surmounting them. She turned to him now, and found that he had solved the puzzle.
"We can scramble over this," he said; "you and I and the dogs, and we will find a spot suitable for landing the sledge along the shore. Then I will return and manage with the sledge across the drift ice. It is wedged in the cove yonder so firmly that it will be no great task."
The girl glanced down into the cove, where the glittering scum of fragments rose and fell with the swell of the waves, and her eyes widened; but she offered no objection. She had yet to see this man fail in what he attempted.
Using his spear for an alpenstock, Polaris took her by the arm, and they made the ascent of the rocks. Sometimes he lifted her as lightly as though she were a babe and set her ahead of him, while he climbed to a farther projection of the crags. Sometimes he carried her bodily in one arm and climbed on easily with the double weight.
So they reached the far side of the obstruction, and after them scrambled and leaped the pack.
To the east a plain stretched away toward the hills and the mountain wall—a plain rifted deeply with many gulleys and chasms, but passable. They found with little difficulty a break in the rocky rampart that fringed the bank of the cove where the sledge might be landed, and there Polaris left the girl and the dogs. He leaped onto the drift ice with a wave of his hand and set out across the cove for the point, marking as he went the safest and easiest course for his return with the sledge.
Rose Emer watched him cross and ascend the sloping side of the point. A moment later he reappeared, dragging the sledge, and launched it on the return trip. He disdained to lighten the load of it, in which manner he might have made his transport much more easily in two journeys.
Leaping from one large cake of ice to another, he hauled and pushed and dragged the entire load. Where dangerous intervals of small ice lay between the larger pieces, he crossed over, and with a heave of his magnificent shoulders pulled the sledge quickly across. What ten men might well have hesitated to attempt he accomplished with seeming ease.
He was more than half-way across the cove when the attention of the girl was distracted from him by a disturbance of the ice near the cove's mouth. Where there had been little motion of the drift ice she saw several of the fragments pitched suddenly from the water, and as they fell back she thought she glimpsed beneath them in the water the passing of a large, dark body.
As she wondered the ice was thrown violently aside in half a dozen places, and in the eddying water she saw the rudderlike fins and lashing tails of a school of some sort of monsters of the sea. They were headed in the direction of the laboring man.
She called a warning to him, but in the midst of the grinding of the drift and the noise of his own exertions he did not hear it. With no warning the danger was upon him.
He had dragged the sledge to the center of one of the larger cakes of ice, and paused to select his next objective. There was a rush in the water under the ice, the drift was parted suddenly, and a monstrous head with open mouth and a terrifying array of gleaming tusks rose dripping from the gap.
Over the edge of the man's floating footing this dread apparition was projected, a full eight feet of head and giant body thrust out of the sea in an attempt to wriggle onto the ice cake. The big flake of ice, perhaps fifteen feet across, tilted from the water under the weight of the monster, and it seemed that the man and sledge would be pitched straight into the yawning maw.
Then, with a clash of disappointed jaws, the head was withdrawn, the monster sank from sight, and the ice raft righted.
Rose Emer sank on her knees in the snow. Around her crouched the dogs, yelping, baying in fury at the sight of the diving danger. "Ah, Heaven help him!" she gasped. "The killer-whales!"
Such were the monsters which beset Polaris. All around the piece of ice on which he floated with the sledge the smaller drift was thrashed by their plunging bodies. Again and again they thrust their frightful snouts above the surface and strove to hurl themselves onto the ice cake. Some of them were more than twenty feet in length.
When the first hideous head appeared from the deep and nearly overturned his float Polaris stood as if frozen, staring at it in amazement. Such a thing he had never seen. He crouched on the ice and tightened his grip on his long spear. When he saw the number of his enemies he realized the futility of an attempt at battle with such weapons as he bore.
Immediately he became alert to outwit them. With his agility he might have essayed to cross the ice and elude them safely were he unhampered by the unwieldy sledge, but not for an instant did he consider abandoning it.
In a glance he picked out the next resting-spot, some feet distant across the drift. He pushed the sledge almost to the edge at one side of the cake, and sprang to the other side, halting on the brink and bracing himself, with his spear-blade dug deeply into the ice.
There was a rushing and thrashing of huge bodies as the killers piled over one another in their eagerness to reach their prey. Several frightful heads were thrust from the water, their dripping jaws snapping within a few feet of the intrepid man. Quick as light he dashed across the ice cake, snatched up the ends of the long harness, and crossed the drift to the next large fragment. Watching his chances, he yanked the sledge across to him.
A dozen times he repeated his tactics successfully and worked in near to shore. If he could accomplish his ruse once more he would win through; he would be above water so shallow that even the bold killers would not dare to follow him for fear of being stranded there. But nearer to the landing the drift had been ground finer, and there was not between him and the shore another large piece. There he made a stand and considered.
He heard the voice of the girl calling to him.
"Shoot!" she cried. "Shoot and wound one of them! If you maim it badly the others will turn and attack it. Then you can get away!"
Polaris tossed his arm in sign that he had heard, and drew from their holsters his brace of heavy revolvers. He had but an instant to wait. One of the savage killers reared his immense and ugly snout from the waters less than a rod away. Polaris fired both guns straight into the gaping jaws.
That was nearly his undoing, for so mighty a plunge did the scathed and frightened monster give that it shot nearly the whole of its ponderous body across the edge of the ice where the man stood and cracked the cake clean in two. Then it sank into the water, convulsively opening and closing its jaws, as if it would eject the stinging pellets which it had received. The water was dyed red around it.
In a trice the band of killers, which had dived at the report of the shots, surrounded their wounded comrade, and the carnage began. All thought of the man on the ice was abandoned for the moment as they rent in fragments and devoured one of their own kind. Above their horrid feasting the waves foamed crimson.
When he saw how things were faring below him the man lost not a moment in crossing the remaining drift, dragging the sledge to the shore.
He turned and saw the baffled killers flock sullenly off to sea, whipping the drift contemptuously from their wake with lashing tails.
"Rose Emer, I thank you," he said simply. "I was hard put to it to know how to save the sledge, and you told me the right thing to do."
She smiled admiringly. A savage apparition to be feared; an instrument of deliverance sent by Providence; a friend and comrade to be admired and trusted—all of these things in turn had Polaris been to her. She found him a man wonderful in all his ways—a child of the vast chaos, yet gentle, fierce and fearless in the face of peril, but possessed of a natural courtesy as unfailing as it was untaught—savage, savior, friend. Was he not becoming more than a friend—or was it all a glamour of the snows and seas and dangers which would fade and thrill no more when she returned to the things of every day?
Eager to be on the march after the days of enforced inactivity, they set off at once for the base of the mountain wall to the north, hoping that somewhere in its curving length they might find a pass or a notch in its face through which they might win the path to the far-away ship.
Under the cracking lash of the Southlander the dogs ran fast and true; but ever the mighty wall of the mountains stretched on, unbroken by notch or crevice, its side gleaming with the smooth ice of many thawing torrents that had frozen and frozen again until it was like a giant's slide.
If a man had many weeks to spare to the task he might cross it, cutting his steps laboriously one by one. For them, with their dogs and sledge, it was impassable.
The curve of the range pushed them relentlessly farther to the south as they went on to the south where far away across the plains lay other hills, above which cloud masses curled and drifted always.
On their third day's journey inland they found that which altered all the course of their wanderings, and led them on to great new things. They crossed the trail of the unknown.
Swiftly the seven gray coursers of the snows were speeding, noses down and plumed tails awave in the breeze of their going. The girl sat on the sledge, and beside it the man raced, light of foot as the dogs, and never tiring.
Then, in the midst of his stride, Marcus, the leader, set his four feet hard on the snow crust and slid on his hams, the six others piling up at his back in confusion with sharp yelps of consternation. Over the tangle of the pack whined and cracked the long whip of Polaris, and cracked and whined vainly. Marcus would not budge. He lifted his gray muzzle in a weird howl of protest and bewilderment, and the hair along his spine bristled.
Behind him Octavius, Julius, Nero, and Hector took up the cry of astonishment, and the mellower notes of Pallas and Juno chimed in.
Polaris straightened out, like the good driver that he was, the sad kinks in the harness and ran forward; but he had gone but a few paces when he, too, stopped in the snow, and stood staring ahead and down.
They were at the brink of a trail!
There it lay, stretching from somewhere near the base of the mountains, away across the great plains—a broad, recently traveled path, with footprints plain upon the snow—the footprints of men!