“Yes,” said Mrs. Locke.
Hildegarde flushed faintly. “For trying, I don’t mean by preaching, but trying to help him to see—well, some of the things you’ve given me an inkling of.” She laid her hand gently on the older woman’s. Mrs. Locke’s fingers closed round the girl’s, but she said nothing. “So, though he nearly broke your arm, you will have done him a service.”
The white face smiled its enigmatic little smile. But presently, “I’m glad I know you,” she said.
“Are you? Then let’s be friends!”
As though some tangible barrier had been beaten down they went nearer the two men. The captain was ending, “—and if the ice closes in behind us we’ll be trapped.”
“Oh, is that all!” said Cheviot, glancing toward Hildegarde.
“No, it isn’t all. We’d be carried wherever the floe goes—and that’s not Nome.” Gillies lowered the glass, and his strained-looking eyes fell on the two he had forgotten. “Sorry, ladies, you must go below.”
Not only rather snubbed, but feeling now the gravity of affairs, Hildegarde and her companion departed with some precipitation, while the captain’s hoarse shout rang out in an indistinguishable order to some invisible officer.
A few minutes later, standing on bales of merchandise for’ard on the upper deck, they watched the altering of the course and the race for that single opening, narrow and ever narrower in the close-packed ice. It was exciting enough, for they got out just in time. Thirty-four hours afterward the Los Angeles was still beating about on the edge of the pack, looking for another break in the long white line.
The spirits of the passengers steadily sank. To their jealous imagining all those phantom ships, and the score unseen, were now forging ahead. Only the Los Angeles besieged the ice in vain. Men stood in knots discussing the captain’s mistakes and airing their own knowledge. They had expected this state of things if he persisted in keeping so far to the east. Hour by hour Gillies’s credit fell.