His eyes went past the girl, went straining after the dog, as though Ky were in truth as dim to-day as on that gray morning when he saw her first, standing in front of the pack, wrapped in mist, nose to the north, waiting for him “up yonder” by the Kara shore.
Out there, on the tundra edge again, the great explorer, Ky, stood like some old coastguard reading the signs of the sea.
Behind, at the door of the hut, Hildegarde Mar. But though the girl, too, looked straight across the surf, toward the islands named for those in the Adriatic after the Argive king, what she saw was not the nearer Diomede and not the little boat fighting its way through the surf; not even her lover running along the shore and looking among the high-piled rocks; not John Galbraith, dying behind her there in the shadow. Clearer than if she’d held it in her hand, she saw the colored crayon sketch that lay charred among the ashes. So it was like that!—the terrible, beautiful place that would still go luring men with its lying legend on all the maps, crying out in every tongue in Europe—
UNEXPLORED REGION!
COME AND FIND ME!
CHAPTER XXVI
At last! After fruitless, heart-sickening search among the boulders, Cheviot had caught sight of Hildegarde breasting easily the risen wind, stepping lightly and without the least inconvenience down from the tundra to the beach. Over the rocks he came running, making signals for haste. Red, too, a long way behind, went racing along the shore, back and forth, barely out of the spray; running seaward when the breakers retreated, fleeing from them on their return, howling at the sailors as they bent over their oars, hardly fifty yards from the foam-line.