Both boys revived by the duck eggs, they waited for the ducks to settle back to their nests, and shot two of them.
Dick and Sandy ordinarily would have been repelled at the idea of eating raw flesh, but now nothing seemed sweeter than the warm white meat of the eider ducks. They ate their fill, like young savages, and found warmth and strength returning to their half-frozen bodies.
Spirits rising through the effect of the food and their recent deliverance from the drifting ice floe, the boys were about to start further inland, when Sandy pointed to a boulder only a hundred feet away.
“I thought I saw something move over there,” he whispered.
Dick opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. From behind the boulder arose the head and upper body of an Eskimo—and yet, was it an Eskimo?
“His skin is white!” Sandy exclaimed.
“It’s the white Eskimo!” Dick echoed.
CHAPTER XI
THE CAMP OF FROZEN MEN
So amazed were Dick and Sandy by this sudden and inexplicable reappearance of the white Eskimo that they could not move from their tracks for fully a minute. The half-breed did not move. He stared at them as if he, too, had been surprised, then one of his arms raised in a sort of signal.
Dick and Sandy aroused to their danger too late. From a dozen hiding places as many uncouth brown figures appeared, with spears and rifles leveled at them. Hemmed in and outnumbered, there was but one thing for them to do—surrender.