But he wasn’t smiling when he turned back to face them, the morning light on his bearded face. The sight of the North through the open door had sobered and awed him, as it awes all men who know its power. Beyond lay only the edge of the forest and the snow-swept barrens, stretching down to a gray and desolate sea.
“It’s snowing a little, isn’t it?” he said. “Just the North—keeping its tail up and letting us know it’s here. Where, my young friend, do you think of going?”
“It doesn’t matter——”
“There’s snow and cold out there.” His voice was deeply sober. “Death too—sure as you’re standing here. A weakling like you can’t live in that, out there. None of your kind can stand it—they’d die like so many sheep. And as a result you have to bow down and serve the man that can!”
Ned had no answer. The greatest fear of his life was clamping down upon him.
“That’s the law up here—that the weak have to serve the strong. I’ve beat the North at its own game, and it serves me, just as you’re going to serve me now. You’re not accepting any hospitality from me. You’re going to pay for the warmth of this fire I’ve grubbed out of these woods—you’ll pay for the food you eat. You can go out there if you like—if you prefer to die. There’s no boat to carry you off. There never will be a boat to carry you off.”
Ned’s breath caught in a gasp. “My God, you don’t mean you’ll hold us here by force!”
“I mean you’re my prisoners here for the rest of your natural lives. And you can abandon hope just as surely as if this island was the real hell it was named for.”
Quietly, coldly he told them their fate, these three who had been cast up by the sea. He didn’t mince words. And for all the strangeness of the scene—the gray light of the dawn and the snow against the window and the noise of the wind without—they knew it was all true, not merely some shadowed vista of an eerie dream.
“You might as well know how you stand, first as last,” he began. “When you once get everything through your heads, maybe we won’t have any more trouble such as we had just now. You ought to be glad that the seaman—Knutsen, you called him?—is sliding around on the sea bottom instead of being here with you; he’d be a source of trouble from beginning to end. He’d have been hard to teach, hard to master—I saw that in the beginning—and he’d never give in short of a fight every morning and every night. None of you, fortunately, are that way. You’ll see how things stack up, and we’ll all get along nicely together.”