“Not return!” exclaimed the doctor; “surely you don’t mean to winter here.”
“No, not here, but further north,” replied the Captain, with a smile which most of the party returned, for they thought he was jesting.
Benjy Vane, however, did not think so. A gleeful look of triumph caused his face, as it were, to sparkle, and he said, eagerly—
“We’ll winter at the North Pole, father, eh?”
This was greeted with a general laugh.
“But seriously, uncle, what do you mean to do?” asked Leonard Vandervell, who, with his brother, was not unhopeful that the Captain meditated something desperate.
“Benjy is not far off the mark. I intend to winter at the Pole, or as near to it as I can manage to get.”
“My dear Captain Vane,” said the doctor, with an anxious look, “you cannot really mean what you say. You must be jesting, or mad.”
“Well, as to madness,” returned the Captain with a peculiar smile, “you ought to know best, for it’s a perquisite of your cloth to pronounce people mad or sane, though some of yourselves are as mad as the worst of us; but in regard to jesting, nothing, I assure you, is further from my mind. Listen!”
He rose from the box which had formed his seat, and looked earnestly round on his men. As he stood there, erect, tall, square, powerful, with legs firmly planted, and apart, as if to guard against a lurch of his ship, with his bronzed face flushed, and his dark eye flashing, they all understood that their leader’s mind was made up, and that what he had resolved upon, he would certainly attempt to carry out.