“No hurry. He’s dead, or I’m a liar!”
Cursing the bitter chill, Crawford climbed up beside this tall and saturnine comrade and friend, this Frontin of the cynical air and the warm heart. Reaching the ridge, he found himself looking down at a hollow, an icepan closed in all around by crushed pinnacles, like an open glade in a forest. Below the two men, at the near side of this hollow, lay the outstretched shape of a huge white bear, the top of its head blown away—and beside this, the motionless figure of a man, apparently an Eskimo, lying across a gun.
“These Eskimos have no fusils and don’t use powder,” said Crawford, for despite his astonishment, his brain was quickly at work. “Yet—where could he have come from? Certainly no ship has come ahead of us—the Eskimos told us that much. One might have followed us into the straits——”
Frontin waved his hand at the ice around.
“One or a dozen. We ha’ been carried in the ice for weeks, up one channel and down another—ah! I see that heaven has declared me a liar.” He moved suddenly. “The man’s not dead after all.”
The two clambered down, leaping and sliding into the hollow where the ice was pooled with blood. Frontin turned the man over, lifted head to lap, tenderly soothed the poor hurt and disemboweled thing that had been human before the claws of the bear ripped so deep and far. The man’s eyelids fluttered open, and his vacant gaze fell upon Crawford. He spoke feebly in English.
“The smoke—the smoke! It is a sure sign; I tell you, haste and slay them—no parley, no hesitation! No quarter to man or woman. English or French, slay them or they will kill us all. That smoke means a ship. I—I—ah! You—you are not Moses Deakin! Who are you?”
Intelligence leaped into those eyes, a last flicker of fast-dying fires.
“Where are you from?” demanded Crawford imperatively. “Your ship? Where is she?”
“Blast you to hell and sink you lower!” was the response. “Ho, Moses—Moses Deakin! No quarter to them—no quarter——”