“Must you heed the call?” asked Agatha, who was puzzled by his steady gaze.
“Yes,” he said with gravity, “the call will come from the icy North if it ever comes at all.”
There was another brief silence. Agatha wondered what he was thinking of, but he soon told her.
“I remember how I came back from there last time,” he said. “We were rather late that season, and out of our usual beat when the gale broke upon us in the gateway of the Pole, between Alaska and Asia. We ran before it with a strip of the boom-foresail on one vessel and a jib that blew to ribands every now and then. The schooner was small, ninety tons or so, and for a week she scudded with the gray seas tumbling after her, white-topped, out of the snow and spume. The waves ranged high above her taffrail, curling horribly, but one did not want to look at them. The one man on deck had a line about him, and he looked ahead, watching the vessel screwing round with hove-up bows as she climbed the seas. If he’d let her fall off or claw up, the next wave would have made an end of her. He was knee-deep half the time in icy brine, and his hands had split and opened with the frost, but the sweat dripped from him as he clung to the jarring wheel. The helmsmen had another trouble which preyed on them. They were thinking of the three men they had left behind.
“Well,” he added, “we ran out of the gale, and I had bitter words to face when we reached Vancouver. As one result of the trouble I walked out of the city with four or five dollars in my pocket—though there was a share due to me. Then in an open car I rode up into the ranges to mend railroad bridges in the frost and snow. It was not the kind of home-coming one would care to look forward to.”
“Ah!” Agatha cried with a shudder, “it must have been horribly dreary.”
The man met her eyes. “Yes,” he said, “you—know. You came here from far away, I think a little weary, too, and something failed you. Then you felt yourself adrift. There were—it seemed—only strangers around you, but you were wrong in one respect; you were by no means a stranger to me.”
He had been leaning against a birch trunk, but now he moved a little nearer, and stood gravely looking down on her.
“You have sent Gregory away?” he questioned.
“Yes,” answered Agatha, and, startled, as she was, it did not occur to her that the mere admission was misleading.