There was a bustling in the little knot of men surrounding them, and Collins suddenly pushed through to confront De Long.
“I’m the New York Herald correspondent with this expedition,” he said bruskly. “As James Gordon Bennett’s representative, I demand the right to go with these men!”
De Long, surprised at the interruption, flushed slightly, then answered evenly,
“Mr. Collins, we’ll settle that question with Mr. Bennett in New York. At present, getting you or anybody through as a newspaper correspondent interests me very little. And in any other capacity, just now you’re only a hindrance to this expedition; you’re much too weak to keep up with Nindemann. You wouldn’t last five miles!” and turning his back on Collins, he gripped Noros’ hand, shook it warmly, and repeated,
“Remember, Noros. Keep out of the water! That’s all. Shove off now, men!”
Bending forward against the wind, Noros and Nindemann staggered away toward the south, the last forlorn hope of the eleven emaciated castaways standing in the frozen drifts behind them, cheering them as they vanished in the blinding snow.
CHAPTER XXXVII
“And that was on October 9th, Mr. Melville,” sobbed Nindemann. “But Ku Mark Surk wasn’t twelve miles away like the captain thought; it was over seventy miles! His chart was bad, and besides before, every day he hadn’t traveled so far as he guessed maybe. For ten whole days after that, Noros and me went south over terrible country, and we found to eat only one ptarmigan I shot with the rifle, and we ate up first our boot soles and then most of our sealskin pants and we froze and kept on going till even the sealskin pants was all gone and we had traveled over forty miles and still we had not come to Ku Mark Surk. And all the while we dragged ourselves along because we knew our shipmates could get no food in that country we had gone over and they were starving and the captain trusted Noros and me to get help for them.
“But after ten days we were freezing in only our underwear for clothes and we were so weak without food that we could not go on and when we saw at last an empty hut, we crawled inside there to die but we found in it a little rotten dried fish that looked like sawdust and tasted like it too and we ate that, thinking maybe then we could keep on again but the mouldy fish made us so sick with dysentery we could not even any more crawl, and we lay there three days expecting only to die soon, when at last some natives looked in that hut and found us! We would be dead there in that hut long ago if not for them!” Nindemann choked back a bitter sob and gripped my hand feebly. “We couldn’t make them natives understand they had to go back north for the captain and they brought us first to Ku Mark Surk and then here to Bulun. And now it is November 2nd, eleven more days even since they found us, and there is no hope for anybody any more! The captain and our shipmates must now all be dead in that snow!” And racked with sobs at the idea that somehow he had failed in the captain’s trust, Nindemann wept hysterically.
“Perhaps they found shelter in a hut,” I suggested, trying to calm him. “I’ll start back right now to look anyway.”