Then the dogs in the skiffs were brought ashore and released from their two days' confinement, and Abel's train and Skipper Ed's train, after the manner of Eskimo dogs, immediately engaged in a pitched battle. They began by snarling and snapping at one another with ugly, bared fangs, and then followed a rush toward each other and they became a rolling, tumbling mass of fearsome, fighting creatures, and had to be beaten asunder with stout sticks before they could be induced to settle into their quiet and uneventful summer existence.
When all was arranged Bobby, after his custom, walked quietly back to the cairn which he had built in previous summers to mark the grave of the mysterious man that Abel and Mrs. Abel had buried so many years before, and Jimmy went with him.
"I often wonder," said Bobby, as he replaced some stones that winter storms had loosed, "who the man was and how he came by his death. I remember I called him Uncle Robert, but I can't remember much else about him, and that is like a dream."
"I wonder if he really was your uncle?" suggested Jimmy.
"I don't know," said Bobby. "I try to remember, until my head is spinning with it, and sometimes it seems as though I am going to remember what happened away back there. It's just as though I had lived before, and I think of bright lights, and beautiful things, and wonderful people. I wonder if Father and Mother are right, and what I remember is heaven? Do you think so, Jimmy?"
"I—I wonder, now!" Jimmy's voice was filled with awe. "Maybe you did come from heaven, Bobby!"
"I don't believe so," and Bobby was practical again. "I don't feel as though I'd ever been an angel, and I don't look it, do I?"
And he squared his shoulders and laughed his good-natured, infectious laugh, in which Jimmy joined, and the two returned to camp.
There was no floe ice on the coast now, but the sea was dotted with many icebergs, children of the great northern glaciers, drifting southward on the Arctic current. Some of them were small and insignificant. Others towered in massive majesty and grandeur high above the sea, miniature mountains of ice. Some were of solid white, but the greater part of them reflected marvelous blues and greens and were a riot of beautiful color.
One of the smaller icebergs lying a half mile or so from Itigailit Island attracted Bobby's attention as he and Jimmy walked back from the cairn.