Stirling moved the wheel a spoke and blocked it with his knee, pointing toward the shores of Baffin Land.
The girl cried aloud as she saw the reason for the Ice Pilot's course. Ice backed by more ice was rushing northward; winter had arrived, and new floes and bergs were forming in the west. There was no route to the southward, and the ship held the only open lane.
"Greenland," she said with hesitancy. "But Greenland is as wild as that coast." She pointed over the Pole Star's quarter.
Stirling smiled and removed his knee from the wheel. He changed the course more to the true north, and the ship plunged on as Slim and the Russians realized that they had escaped from the white jaws of an icy death.
"Greenland," said Stirling, "is Heaven compared to Baffin Land. You shall see."
The girl hesitated and glanced at Stirling, who was consulting the binnacle, reaching an arm through the spokes of the wheel and wiping the glass with his bare fingers. A tiny light showed over the compass as the wheel moved with a slow lifting of the starboard rope.
The ship steadied, a halo of smoke and flame crowning the single funnel. Slim, the Frisco dock rat, was redeeming himself, and his voice rolled up through the ventilators as he urged the Russians in the stokehold to renewed efforts.
Stirling partly turned his face and watched the girl, who soon was gone over the quarter-deck with a faint nod backward. The closing companion slide told Stirling that she had been slightly offended by his preoccupied manner, and wondered at this as he stared with unseeing eyes out over the waters of Baffin Bay.
Hour after hour he guided the ship, a lone figure wrapped in thought and retrospection. He knew nothing of women; he felt that Helen Marr was as remote as the stars above him, and he had grown to look upon her as a companion—that was all. He feared to trust his mind to go more deeply into the matter.
The course he had chosen revealed the hand of a super-pilot. The grinding floes to leeward were blown by the wind in such a manner as to leave an open lane between them and the pack which was rushing to fill the Bay. The last days of the open season had arrived; a week, at the most, would see the water frozen over and cemented into an icy lock which would hold until the next July.