"We'll come," the Captain hastened to accept, "Might's well be good friends. Neighbors hain't none too thick in these parts. We'll come, won't we Claw—an' we'll bring the hooch."
Stumbling and mumbling, Brent negotiated the narrow ally and the steep flight of stairs in the wake of Joe Pete. At the head of the ladder that led down the ship's side, he managed to stumble and land harmlessly in a huge pile of snow that had been
shoveled aside to make a path to the igloos, and amid the jibes of the two sailors who were cutting blubber, allowed Joe Pete to help him onto the sled.
The wind had risen to half a gale. Out of the northeast it roared, straight across the frozen gulf from the treeless, snow-buried wastes of Wollaston Land, driving before it flinty particles of snow that hissed earthward in long cutting slants.
Heading the dogs southward, Joe Pete struck into the back-trail and, running behind, with a firm grip on the tail-rope, urged them into a pace that carried the outfit swiftly over the level snow-covered ice.
Upon the sled Brent lay thinking. Now that the necessity for absolute muscle control no longer existed, the condition of cold hate into which he had forced himself gave place to a surge of rage that drove his nails into his palms, and curses from his lips, as he tried in his unreasoning fury to plan extermination of the two fiends who had plotted the soul-murder of his wonder woman. He would tear them to shreds with his two hands. He would shoot them down from ambush without a chance to protect themselves, as they searched for his camp among the rock-ridges of Bloody Falls.
Gradually the fume of fury cooled and he planned more sanely. He was conscious of a torturing thirst. The bottle of hooch pressed against his side, and carefully so as not to disturb the covering robe, he drew it from beneath his parka. He was
cold sober, now. The shock of what he had heard in the cabin of the Belva Lou had completely purged his brain of the effect of the strong liquor. But not so his body. Every nerve and fibre of him called for more liquor. There was a nauseating sickness in his stomach, a gnawing dryness in his throat, and a creeping coldness in his veins that called for the feel of the warm glow of liquor. Never in his life had the physical desire for drink been more acute—but his brain was cold sober.
Nothing of the heart-sickening remorse of his first moments of consciousness assailed him now. What was done was done. He knew that he had yielded to his desire for drink, had weakly succumbed to the first temptation, as he had always weakly succumbed—an act, in itself contemptible. But with an ironical smile he realized that his very weakness had placed him in a position to save from a fate a thousand times more horrible than death, the girl who had become dearer to him than life itself. But, with that realization, came also the realization that only by the merest accident, had the good been born of evil, that the natural and logical result of his act would have had its culmination at Bloody Falls when he and Joe Pete would have sunk down dead upon the snow at the moment he produced the gold to pay for more hooch. Claw had laid his plans along the logical sequence of events. "He played me for a drunkard, as he had a right to," muttered Brent. "And
his scheme would have worked except for one little mistake. He forgot to figure that physically I'm a better man than I was back at Dawson. He thought he had me gauged right, and so he talked. But—he over-played his hand. An hour ago, I was a drunkard. Am I a drunkard now? It is the test," he muttered, "The war is on," and with a grim tightening of the lips, he thrust the bottle back under his parka.