From the wheelhouse another man came onto the bridge. He was tall, lean and weather-beaten with close-set eyes above high cheekbones, and the alert and upright carriage of a soldier. For a moment the three conferred, the newcomer tugging impatiently at his sparse, black mustache, while he took in the scene around him with sharp glances.
"Speed, and speed, and more speed, Scoland," said the old scientist.
"Aye, speed," echoed the young giant, "all the speed in your good ship, Captain, while yet there is open water. Yonder, ahead, the ice gathers for the drive, and there we must needs go slowly. So speed while speed we may."
Scoland nodded shortly and strode back to the wheelhouse. Down the speaking-tube to the engine-room went his call:
"Crowd her, Mac, crowd her!"
"Aye, Meester Scoland, aye! But, mon, is she no doin' beautifully the noo?" The grizzled MacKechnie turned from the tube in the bowels of the cruiser, to bellow his orders among cursing, panting stokers and sweating coal-passers.
For this was a race with death; not the death of one man, or of a ship's crew, but the extinction of a nation.
Down this swirling pathway one of the men on the ship had passed once before. No stout ship swam under his feet on that journey. He rode on a careening iceberg. He was the fur-clad young viking on the bridge. His name was Polaris Janess.
Born in the wilderness of the Antarctic by one of the strangest freaks of circumstances, Polaris had reached manhood seeing no human being besides the father who had reared him. When that father died the young man started to break his way to civilization.