"I'm all right, Partner!" Jimmy declared.
"Well, you've got to demonstrate it. We don't want any pneumonia cases on our hands. Just draw some long breaths, and punch yourself, and see how you feel."
"I feel fine," insisted Jimmy, after some deep breaths and several self-inflicted punches. "It doesn't hurt a bit to breathe, and I don't feel lame anywhere. The only place I feel bad is in my stomach, and that's just shouting for grub."
"Very well," laughed Skipper Ed, "that kind of an ache we can cure with boiled seal and hardtack."
And so, indeed, it proved. Their hardihood, brought about by a life of exposure to the elements, and their constitutions, made strong as iron by life and experience in the open, withstood the shock, and, none the worse for their experience, and passing it by as an incident of the day's work, they resumed the hunt with Skipper Ed.
All of that day and the next, which was Thursday, they hunted with great success, and when Thursday night came more than half a hundred fat seals, among which were three great bearded seals—"square flippers," they called them—lay upon the ice as their reward. They were well pleased. Indeed, they could scarcely have done better had Abel Zachariah been with them.
"Tomorrow will be Friday, and we had better haul our seals to Itigailit Island to the cache," Skipper Ed suggested that evening as they sat snug in the igloo, eating their supper. "We have all we can care for."
"I hate to leave with all these seals about, but I suppose we'll have to go some time," said Bobby regretfully.
"Yes, and I'm wondering what I'll find in my traps when we get home," said Jimmy.
"You may have a silver fox, Partner," laughed Skipper Ed.