"Ask me no more to-night," said the boy, whose powers of self-control, were only less marvellous than the innate force of his intense nature. "We have none too much light for our homeward way, and to-morrow's sun may help us to learn more of the cause of his death, and our own duty in the premises. We will say nothing to our friends of this dreadful matter, and at early dawn we will set off alone to return here;" and taking the boat-hook and his weapons, Orloff set off with his usual firm step and tireless energy.
It was nearly dusk when they reached the floe, and saw at some hundreds of feet distant the moving lantern that told that Peter and Waring were anxious about the safety of their friends. La Salle hardly dared trust his voice, but Orloff uttered his well-known halloo; and of the four who were gathered in that dwelling of ice, the most cheerful and kindly, was he whose dead enemy lay gazing with stony eyeballs at the wintry skies, amid a golgotha of animal butchery, with the dark impress of a rifle-bullet in the centre of his forehead.
That night the cold north-wester died away, and a gentle breeze began to blow from the south. The tired Indian and the delicately-nurtured merchant's son slept side by side on their leaf-strewn floor, and even La Salle, excited and surprised as he had been, at last fell into a broken slumber. But when all were asleep, and no human eye could pry into his secret sorrows, Regnar seated himself by the flaring lamp, and drawing from his breast a locket, took from it a small folded paper, and a closely-curled ringlet of yellow hair, such as St. Olave, the warrior saint of Norway, laid in the lap of the fair Geyra, princess of Vendland.
With many a kiss, passionate and sorrowful, he greeted the hidden love-treasures, and many a falling tear dimmed the bold eyes, and wet the ruddy cheeks of the youthful watcher, as late into the night he sat gazing into the flaring flame of that element, in which many a sorrowful heart, in its agony, seems to find a parallel of the torture it endures, and to find a saddened pleasure in the contemplation. But at last the watcher turned to his rude couch, and only the radiance of the lamp, diffused through the opaline walls of the hut, gave evidence of the presence of human beings in that desolate, wave-borne, wind-driven, desert of ice.
