Then he stepped back with an exclamation, and the packer, dropping on his knees, groped in the snow until he brought out the compass with its case badly bent.
"You've fixed her for good this time; there's an old log where she fell," he said; and he and his comrade waited in gloomy silence while Gerald watched them.
They did not suspect him: the thing had passed for an accident; but Gerald felt daunted by the deadly cold and silence of the bush. His companions' faces were indistinct and their figures had lost their sharpness; they looked shaggy and scarcely human in their ragged skin-coats.
One of the packers suddenly threw down his load.
"We're going to camp right here and talk this thing out," he said, and taking off his net shoe began to scrape up the snow.
Half an hour later they sat beside a snapping fire, eating morsels of salt pork and flinty bannocks out of a frying-pan, with a black pannikin of tea between them. The smoke went straight up; now and then a mass of snow fell from the bending needles with a soft thud, though there was scarcely a breath of wind.
"I reckon we've been going about west-northwest since we left the settlement," one of the men said to Gerald. "Where does that put you?"
"Some way to the south of where I meant to be. Twenty degrees off our line is a big angle; you can see how it lengthens the base we've been working along while McCarthy makes his two sides. That means we've lost most of our advantage in cutting across the corner. Then we were held up once or twice, and we'll probably be behind instead of ahead of him at the intersection of the lines. Tell me the distances you think we have made."
After some argument, they agreed upon them, and Gerald drew a rude triangle in the snow, though its base stopped short of joining one side.
"If you're right about course and distance, our position's somewhere here," he said, indicating the end of the broken line.