“I wish I were going as far as Polaris.”
“Why, come right along.”
She laughed. “I only wish I could. I’d like to know a man who’d lived in the farthest north camp of all—the farthest on our side. What’s that?”
“Where?”
“Out there.” She pointed to a ghostly something, faint as smoke against the high light of the ice rim on the far horizon.
Blumpitty stared. “Reckon it’s a cloud. They’s two more! And another. No, by gum, it’s ships!”
And ships they were, five of them, the first seen since leaving Vancouver!—spectacle to stir the chilled blood of watchers on the Los Angeles. For these dreamlike apparitions were vessels such as theirs, threatened like them with ice-pack and with storm. A detachment of the Nome fleet! None came any nearer, except the Ohio and the little Charles Nelson. They spoke and passed, the Ohio speedily to vanish; Charles Nelson to tack about, hunting an outlet, and then, discouraged, turn south as the bigger Los Angeles pushed valiantly through the ice to the North. “Turn back! No use!” Charles Nelson warned, and then, quicker than ever you saw in your life, the fog swooped down and wiped everything off the ocean except the nearer ice. The Los Angeles turned and tacked about to the tune of the fog-horn, trying to find a way through the heavier floe, only to be headed off by bigger masses looming through the haze, majestic slow-sailing ice-ships, some like white gondolas, some like sturdy, low-built castles set fantastically on a field of fleece, for the exposed parts of the berg had rotted in the sun, and in the wind been rippled, so that a nearer sight showed the surfaces honeycombed, disintegrate. And again to Hildegarde Mar came that sense of its all being familiar, as though she had been here before. So she had, in spirit. With a thrilling sense of recognition she discovered the original of more than one picture in that book of Galbraith’s that she and Bella had pored over in their school-days.
When, early in the afternoon, the fog lifted a little, a message came from the captain inviting Miss Mar to the bridge that she might have a better view. By the time she had obeyed the summons the wind had risen. The captain was looking through his glass, and Mrs. Locke was at his side. He left both visitors with harassed face and called down to Cheviot walking below with O’Gorman. And now Louis stood beside the captain on the bridge, looking to the northeast, and talking in an undertone.
“What does he know,” said Mrs. Locke, referring to Cheviot for the first time, “about navigation?”