"When they were in the thick of their troubles they hove her to not far off the beach with ice about, and a Husky came down on them in some kind of boat."
"A Husky?" said Wyllard, who knew he meant an Esquimaux.
"That's what Dunton called him, but I guess he must have been a Kamtchadale or a Koriak. Anyway, he brought this strip of willow, and he had Tom Lewson's watch. Dunton traded him something for it. They couldn't make much of what he said except that he'd got the message from three white men somewhere along the beach. They couldn't make out how long ago."
"Dunton tried for them?"
"How could he? She'd hardly look at the wind, and the ice was piling up on the coast close to lee of him. He hung on a week or two with the floes driving in all the while, and then it freshened hard and blew him out."
He had told his story, and Wyllard, who rose, stood leaning on his chair-back very grim in face.
"That," he said, "must have been eight or nine months ago."
"It was. They've been up there since the night we couldn't pick up the boat."
"It's unthinkable," said Wyllard. "The thing can't be true."
His companion gravely produced a little common metal watch made in Connecticut, and worth some five or six dollars. Opening it he pointed to a name scratched inside it.