The closing hour of the day, scarcely separable now from the night, with the sun always above the horizon, found us ready. The dogs were an anxiety. We hoped to feed them on fresh meat in a large measure. Seals, the flipper, the bearded, and the hooded, were common. Goritz and I were good hunters, and a better shot than Hopkins never lived. Our formal relations and duties were pretty quickly arranged. Goritz was commander, with especial charge of the dogs, Hopkins was engineer, I was steward, and the Professor combined, very happily, the services of cook and scientific observer. We started with one hundred dogs, double perhaps our actual needs, but the sometimes sudden and unaccountable mortality among these animals justified our precaution.
Then came the leave taking and, for the first time, an explicit avowal of our intentions, with Krocker Land pictured as our destination, and also with the renewed stipulation, enforced by a signed agreement and the additional security of prepayment, that Coogan should return the following year and look for us. I have said we did not intend to return. We did not, but then that reservation was a hidden, peculiarly communal feeling, unspoken and realized between ourselves, as a psychological dithyramb which we didn’t confess or particularize, but which coerced us insensibly, as a mission does a prophet, an ambition a conqueror, or a dream a poet. Externally our demeanor was of the ordinary rational type. Coogan should come back for us—OF COURSE.
It was picturesque and unprecedented, that leave taking. The Arctic scene, the outlandish and piled up “Pluto,” the waiting, serviceable dogs, alert and incredulous, the swarthy, grimy, wrinkled, heterogeneous natives, ourselves on one side of the pictorial composition, Coogan, Stanwix, Phillips, Spent on the other, with the crew in an amazement of disgust hanging over the steamer’s taffrail, perched in the rigging, or sauntering near us, and that illimitable ice-packed sea, imperturbably plotting our destruction. Hopkins delivered the valedictory.
“My friends,” he said with a profound sweep of his cap, and a big obeisance that made the Eskimos shout with glee, “we’re off for parts unknown. You probably entertain a rather hopeful feeling that we’ll never come back. May be. You never can tell. At this end of the earth the unusual usually happens. However, we’re not worrying. Not in the least. To miss the resumption of your acquaintance would distress us, and might hurt your feelings, but it’s a case of taking what comes, and kicking don’t go up here. You’re all aware of that. No, you mustn’t put us in a class by ourselves. We are just part of the bunch, that for the last one hundred years or more has been leaving cards at the door of Our Lady of Snows, with an occasional intimation on the part of her ladyship that the visitors were welcome, but generally with a bolted and barred entrance, and an upset of snow, ice, wind and zeros from the upper stories of her palatial residence, that compelled an inglorious departure, or left the gentlemen in question dead on the doorstep. Well, we’re ready to join the previous company.
“Only I don’t think so. I’m not in the least nutty—I hope you catch me—and there are scientific reasons—” Hopkins patted the back of the Professor—“scientific reasons for banking on a safe return, with the goods, for all of us. When that happens, my friends, you’ll be very glad to see us. Nothing will be too good for us, nothing too handsome. The ordinary brand of explorer won’t be in it with us, for if that kind gets back with his clothes on, and the breath in his body, he gets in the picture supplements, is put up for sale to the highest bidder for receptions, cornerstone laying, and memorial exercises; he can put the whole country to sleep listening to his talk at one hundred per—minute!—and is never known to disappear from the public eye until he crosses the Styx on another kind of expedition from which there certainly is no ‘come back.’
“That won’t be our way. When next we reach New York, and the land of the free and the home of the brave, our suit cases will be so full of boodle that you won’t be able to shut them with a steam compressor, and we can give you cross references to all the original sources of all the gold that the world ever had or can have. The trusts won’t be in it, John Rockefeller will dwindle into invisibility, and the bunko lords and potentates on the other side of the big pond, always fishing for big money will just scramble to get in first to sell their junk crowns to us. JUST WAIT. If there’s an income tax on our return, we’ll undertake single handed to run the government and, what’s more expensive, buy up the politicians. Fact, Captain Coogan; fact, Mate Stanwix; fact, Engineer Phillips; fact, Jack Spent; fact, all of you!” And Hopkins executed another inclusive gyration, “And now, Good-bye.”
I don’t think his audience took him in, or else their previous convictions were only somewhat strengthened by this nondescript allocution. The Professor smiled benignly. Goritz grunted approval, I felt queerly elated. Coogan came forward, hoped it would all turn out right, promised to look for us next summer, told us to stack up all the spare meat we could when the winter set in and shook hands. There was no more speech making; the rest came forward and shook hands too, as did all the Eskimos. Jack Spent, the carpenter, with his spectacles on his nose, and his brushy whiskers stiffened out like a privet hedge, tried to sing a song, which by reason of its quavering falsetto brought howls from the Nuwukmeun. Its import ran:
“Good Luck to you my trusty mates,
Good Luck and Fortune brave,
May God and all the kindly Fates