"You? You have had your share—your chance. Now you can afford to stay home and finish your book—and—well, you might deliver lectures."
"What rot, Lloyd! Can you see me posing on a lecture platform?"
"I would rather see you doing that than trying to beat Duane, than getting into the ice again. I would rather see you doing that than to know that you were away up there—in the north, in the ice, at your work again, fighting your way toward the Pole, leading your men and overcoming every obstacle that stood in your way, never giving up, never losing heart, trying to do the great, splendid, impossible thing; risking your life to reach merely a point on a chart. Yes, I would rather see you on a lecture platform than on the deck of an arctic steamship. You know that, Ward."
He shot a glance at her.
"I would like to know what you mean," he muttered.
The winter went by, then the spring, and by June all the country around Medford was royal with summer. During the last days of May, Bennett practically had completed the body of his book and now occupied himself with its appendix. There was little variation in their daily life. Adler became more and more of a fixture about the place. In the first week of June, Lloyd and Bennett had a visitor, a guest; this was Hattie Campbell. Mr. Campbell was away upon a business trip, and Lloyd had arranged to have the little girl spend the fortnight of his absence with her at Medford.
The summer was delightful. A vast, pervading warmth lay close over all the world. The trees, the orchards, the rose-bushes in the garden about the house, all the teeming life of trees and plants hung motionless and poised in the still, tideless ocean of the air. It was very quiet; all distant noises, the crowing of cocks, the persistent calling of robins and jays, the sound of wheels upon the road, the rumble of the trains passing the station down in the town, seemed muffled and subdued. The long, calm summer days succeeded one another in an unbroken, glimmering procession. From dawn to twilight one heard the faint, innumerable murmurs of the summer, the dull bourdon of bees in the rose and lilac bushes, the prolonged, strident buzzing of blue-bottle-flies, the harsh, dry scrape of grasshoppers, the stridulating of an occasional cricket. In the twilight and all through the night itself the frogs shrilled from the hedgerows and in the damp, north corners of the fields, while from the direction of the hills toward the east the whippoorwills called incessantly. During the day the air was full of odours, distilled as it were by the heat of high noon—the sweet smell of ripening apples, the fragrance of warm sap and leaves and growing grass, the smell of cows from the nearby pastures, the pungent, ammoniacal suggestion of the stable back of the house, and the odour of scorching paint blistering on the southern walls.
July was very hot. No breath of wind stirred the vast, invisible sea of air, quivering and oily under the vertical sun. The landscape was deserted of animated life; there was little stirring abroad. In the house one kept within the cool, darkened rooms with matting on the floors and comfortable, deep wicker chairs, the windows wide to the least stirring of the breeze. Adler dozed in his canvas hammock slung between a hitching-post and a crab-apple tree in the shade behind the stable. Kamiska sprawled at full length underneath the water-trough, her tongue lolling, panting incessantly. An immeasurable Sunday stillness seemed to hang suspended in the atmosphere—a drowsy, numbing hush. There was no thought of the passing of time. The day of the week was always a matter of conjecture. It seemed as though this life of heat and quiet and unbroken silence was to last forever.
Then suddenly there was an alerte. One morning, a day or so after Hattie Campbell had returned to the City, just as Lloyd and Bennett were finishing their breakfast in the now heavily awninged glass-room, they were surprised to see Adler running down the road toward the house, Kamiska racing on ahead, barking excitedly. Adler had gone into the town for the mail and morning's paper. This latter he held wide open in his hand, and as soon as he caught sight of Lloyd and Bennett waved it about him, shouting as he ran.
Lloyd's heart began to beat. There was only one thing that could excite Adler to this degree—the English expedition; Adler had news of it; it was in the paper. Duane had succeeded; had been working steadily northward during all these past months, while Bennett—