Hildegarde had won her father’s consent, reluctant though it was, that she should go ashore with Cheviot. Gaily she assured him it was little compensation enough to a girl who had foregone the fearful joys of Nome. The visit of inspection to the Polaris claims would not take long. As the old man looked at his “two children,” with the sunshine on their faces, he wondered who would have the heart to steal from them a single one of those early hours of enchantment.
Not Nathaniel Mar.
But neither he nor they had bargained for Reddy’s bearing them company. He announced his intention unmistakably, when Cheviot went over the ship’s side into the small boat that was to take him and Hildegarde through the surf. Mar tried in vain to quiet the beast. So unnerving were Mr. Reddy’s demonstrations, when he saw Hildegarde preparing to follow Cheviot, that Mar called out, Hildegarde must wait till the dog could be shut up; the sailors could hardly hold him. But the men below, bobbing about on the rough water, were with difficulty preventing the boat from being battered against the ship’s side, and Cheviot was shouting, “No time to worry with the dog!”
At the same moment, Hildegarde, hanging suspended between her two counselors on the swinging ladder, saw a big wave sweeping askew the boat beneath her. From above her father, and Cheviot from below, called out “Hold tight,” while Louis supplemented the vain efforts of the two other men, unable by themselves to steady the clumsy craft in such a sea. But Hildegarde, with a conviction that Reddy, escaping out of a sailor’s arms, was in the act of coming down on her head, jumped from the ladder and landed in the boat with the dog and a twisted ankle. Instantly she called up to her horrified father, “I’m all right, and so is Reddy.” Whereupon the boat was swung out into open water. They had gone half a mile before Cheviot discovered something was amiss. “Nothing the least serious,” she said, though it would be serious enough for her if she were cheated of the two or three hours’ wandering at Louis’s side on this heaven-sent morning through the wild, sunshiny land across the surf. Cheviot was for turning round at once and taking her back to the steamer, but that would be to prolong by a mile a sufficiently difficult transit. He would send her back after the boat had landed him.
“No, no,” she pleaded. “If I can’t walk, I’ll wait for you on shore.”
But Cheviot was giving the sailors directions about getting her safely back to the Beluga.
Then, for the first time, the girl spoke of the stark discomfort that reigned aboard the whaler, how she longed for a little respite, and how she longed—But the landward-looking eyes could not, down here in the deep sea furrows, pick out the far-shining tents toward which the lighter was plunging, down the watery dales and up on foamy hills, and down again to shining green deeps that shut out ship and shore—holding the small boat hugged an uneasy instant in the rocking lap of the sea. Yet the girl clung to the memory of that early morning vision from the deck, of violet headlands and snow-filled hollows, and as the boat rode high again on the top of the next big breaker, she drew in rapturous breath, saying softly of the land beckoning her across the furious surf, “The ‘farthest North’ that I shall know!” But in the end she owed it to Reddy’s companionship that Cheviot let her have her way.
“Oh, what an old-fashioned Turk of a man I shall have to spend my life with!” But she laughed for joy at the prospect.
As Cheviot, sharply scrutinizing the harborless shore, directed the boat above the settlement: “Some better landing-place round the point?” she asked.