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.