Polaris of the Snows

by Charles B. Stilson

These questions remained unanswered. He could not know that he had lain heavy and inert on a sledge for days, with only the thickness of their fur parkas separating him from Rose Emer, while Scoland's men, abandoning all that did not make for speed, had driven dogs to death in their wild dash back to the Felix.

He could not know that he had been given up for dead by the men, and that, even then, that conclusion brought little of regret to the heart of the American commander. Nor could he know that Rose Emer would not have it so, and that, under her entreaties, the supposed corpse had been carried on to the ship, and to the good medical man on it, who found that somewhere in the fastnesses of the silent form stretched before him a tiny flicker of life still abode, and would respond to care.

That care he had received, and in good measure. To Dr. Clawson he most certainly owed his life—twice over. Having saved it once, the integrity of the physician withstood the hint, almost brutally direct, from Scoland, that the man would be better off if he were let to die quietly.

Polaris was the one fly in the ointment of the daring captain of the Felix. His vague suspicions concerning the origin of the stranger and his business in the snow land had become an obsession. From the girl he could obtain no satisfaction, and only food for more suspicion. She would say little of her rescue, and less of her rescuer, taking refuge from anything like investigation in the declaration that the stirring of the memory of those days in the wilderness was too much for her already overwrought nervous system.

Scoland was a man greatly daring; he also was a man who would scruple little to remove, by any means that seemed safe to himself, any obstacle which stood between him and that which he desired. He had striven for a great prize and won. Another prize lay almost within his grasp. Should an obstacle to either intervene, he would do his utmost to sweep it aside.

Was this strange wanderer an obstacle? Could he be one of a party who had penetrated the fastnesses of the snows, to wrest from jaws of berg and glacier the secret of the pole?

Captain Scoland had heard of no such party. When he thought of how the man came, proofless, he smiled at his own suspicions. And yet—might not others have waited for the return of this man, as the crew of the Felix had waited for himself?

Then there was the strange demeanor of the girl, her reticence and her almost rapt interest in the man. Even now she might have been haunting the sick man's cabin, but that Scoland had persuaded her that his mind was gone, and that he was well enough off as far as the needs of the body were concerned.

To do the captain justice, the attitude of the girl, her interest in the strange man, were the minor considerations. Everything must step aside for his glory as the discoverer of the pole. Already the press of two hemispheres was heralding his successful return, and the savants of the nations were awaiting his proofs. There must be no cloud on his title, no question of his right. He would make that sure.

An unsuspected cunning in dealings with other men had been awakened in the breast of Polaris. Suddenly awake to the full consciousness of his mental powers, he was swayed by his suspicion, by the warnings his father had given him long ago, his oft-repeated advice as to the intentions and possible actions of the first white men he was apt to meet.