A thrill ran through him as the creature dipped its body down and began to draw in the soil. Laboriously, crudely, he outlined another sea-suit, and on the circle representing the face-shield marked two dots—eyes.
"He's getting it!" Ken cried.
The blubber-man went on drawing. He sketched a second suit, similar in all respects, and looked up at the torpooner, inquiringly, it seemed.
Ken nodded rapidly. He tapped the drawings, then his suit; nodded again. "The idea's over!" he told himself. "Now I'll make a move towards that corridor to show them that I want to go, and if—"
But before he could stir, the leader of the blubber-men, with one quick gesture, summoned two creatures from the innermost circle. Swiftly they placed themselves alongside Kenneth Torrance, lifted him and bore him forward, right across the cavern to another of the passageway-entrances.
It was so sudden that for a moment Ken could not think clearly. What had happened? Were they releasing him? Or was he still to be kept a prisoner? No doubt the latter. And he had been so sure that he was communicating with the blubber-man's brain!
His lips pressed tight in a hard white line. It was a tough blow to take.
"Well, that's that," he said. "It was all imagination."
He did not know that his drawings had signified something to the leader of the herd—that each had mistaken the meaning of the other. Nor did he have any inkling of the greatest surprise of all that now lay just before him.