'But,' began Alick wonderingly, after a long pause, 'how on earth did you find your way back, you two, through all that frozen white country with no landmarks?'
'How? Why, I s'pose you don't know the watchword of all Arctic expeditions, young master? 'Tain't likely as you should, so I'll tell you. The law out yonder is: keep your line of retreat open; and a better rule couldn't be. It so be as you take heed to it keerful, you can't be cut off from the world. So Pierre an' me, in due time, found our way back to the ship, which was stationed in the Spitzbergen Sea.'
'And what about t'others, the rest of the expedition? They pushed on, didn't they?' asked Ned eagerly.
'Ah! that's the queer thing that I be a-comin' to,' said Jerry, speaking solemnly. 'In course they pushed on. But never a man of the lot came back to tell the story of what they'd seen. They was too venturesome; they went too far ahead, and must have perished of sheer cold; leastways that's what I've heard. If you don't see a meanin' under that, well, I do! And real grateful I feel to the Almighty. I lost an arm, but them poor lads they lost their lives.'
There was another silence. Jerry industriously puffed away; Alick stared up unblinkingly into a chink of blue between the tree-tops; and Ned gravely whittled away at a tiny boat of wood, one of a fleet with which he kept Miss Queenie so numerously supplied that it bade fair to develop into a Lilliputian navy in time.
'Did you ever use any dogs on the expedition, Jerry?' asked Alick, whose thoughts had been travelling along the silent white expanse of the far-away North.
'Dogs? No, muster, we didn't in them days. But Frenchy used to talk away, I remember, o' nights round the camp-fires, about the proper use dogs would be on an expedition. There was one breed in pertikler he spoke well off—the West Siberian, I think he called 'em.'
'Yes,' eagerly put in Alick, 'they're the ones, the West Siberian. Father was speaking about them. They're considered to be awfully useful.'
'I dessay!' assented Jerry, knocking the ashes out of his pipe before carefully stowing it away in one of his many pockets. 'But 'pears to me we've got to be thinking of going home. The trunks o' the trees are reddening, which tells us the sun's slantin'; and these little shavers must be fed and bedded before sundown. Come, musters, rouse yourselves; we must be steppin' Northbourne way!'
Picking up the shivering, quaking mites in their cotton-wool wrappings, Jerry lodged them in his several pockets and even in his cap. But he firmly refused to suffer the two boys to share his burdens.