“Either that star is wrong and our compasses are right or the other way about, but ’tween you and me, Bud, I’ll bank on the North Star every time and dish the compasses.”
“I know exactly where the trouble comes in, Bill; funny I couldn’t have thought of it before,” said Jack, brightening up as though his brain-cells had decohered. “The North Star and the compasses are both right. You know that the magnetic north pole and the true, or geographic, north pole are not in the same place.
“In fact the magnetic pole is way south of the true pole—let me see, if I remember rightly it is pretty close to the meridian which is one hundred degrees west of Greenwich and on the sixty-eighth parallel, and is, consequently, nearly twenty degrees south of the geographic pole. This is the reason, then, our compasses point to the east instead of to the north; the only thing we don’t want to forget to do is to allow for this difference.”
“Right you are, Jack,” Bill made answer, for of all times that his admiration for his partner welled in his breast it was when the latter explained what he called “this high-brow stuff.” “Say if I had a brain like yourn I wouldn’t be up here seekin’ moosehide sacks o’ gold, I’d be back there in little ole Noo York on Wall Street shovelin’ it into vaults; that’s what I’d be doin’.”
Having disposed of the vexatious problem of the North Pole Bill again took an interest in his compass and began figuring out how many points this way or that way they would have to go to get so many points the other side of somewhere else. Bill didn’t know it but up there in the cold, cold North he was developing his gray matter, for he was thinking and this is the only process by which it can be done.
And so for the next three days they kept steadily onward over tundras, on streams, through wooded lands, up hills and down dales and always north by east. Nor did the boys feel a bit lonesome here in these vast stretches of the sub-Arctic ice and snow and the great, grim solitude of nature but this may be accounted for in virtue of there being hardly ever a minute but that they were kept on the jump doing something for either themselves or the dogs.
Neither were they without companions for the dogs were the most wonderful company ever. They showed the most amazing intelligence, particularly ’Frisco and Sate, and Bill was not far from the truth when he said “they’re human and that’s all there is to it.” And in very truth so it seemed, for whatever they wanted to do or say, they knew precisely how to go about it, or to make themselves understood.
“We still have another day’s journey before us,” Jack announced as they made their last temporary camp, and they were, indeed, getting pretty close to the end of the rainbow, for they were even then in the land of the Yeehats, which was the land of their golden hopes.
But to Bill, instead of there being more gold the farther north they went, the snowscape grew more desolate and forbidding, for he was better acquainted with a semi-torrid climate than he was with a wholly frigid one, and to him the outlook was far from alluring. Jack who had spent nine months in the Arctic didn’t mind it a little bit. He had the makings in him of a polar explorer.
Harking back to that July morning when Jack had unfolded the fascinating story of gold in moosehide sacks to him in his apartment, and now looking out upon the snow-veiled land as far as his eye could reach Bill again began to wonder if, after all, it wasn’t a fairy tale told by a writer of fiction, or, more likely, a hoax perpetrated by the early miners on the tenderfeet who pestered them with questions.