“There—there it is, lad, again! sure enough. There, where that small mass of ice sticks out like a knot from the side of the berg, right ahead of us!”
“I see it!” cried Harry, darting forward, and, in a few moments, he would have seized it, had not the little bauble suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from his view!
He carefully scanned the projecting mass of ice, but he saw nothing to explain the singular phenomenon that had just occurred.
“It’s a queer bit of gold—my eyes, if it isn’t!” cried Stump, “to run away from its friends in that style, seeing as it isn’t through miserliness that we are after it. There’s a miracle about it, sure enough!”
As the shipkeeper concluded, he chanced to direct his eyes toward a hole in that part of the ice near his feet, and he then beheld two little twinkling orbs looking up at him from the cavity. He started back, with a cry of surprise, but, the next moment, he condemned himself for this unnecessary display of emotion.
“To think that I should be startled by a seal a-looking up at me from his hole!” he exclaimed, as the inquiring eyes of Marline were bent upon his face; “for that was all, lad—I’m ashamed to own it—that was all that made me cry out.”
He stamped upon the ice, impatiently, as he spoke, and, probably alarmed by the noise thus made, the seal crawled from the cavity, and dove into a narrow channel of water that extended along the base of the berg; but, before it had accomplished this feat, the two men, to their surprise and unbounded joy, had caught sight of the golden harpoon, which was suspended to the neck of the little creature by means of a strip of blue ribbon!
“Ay, ay; I told you so,” exclaimed Stump, gleefully rubbing his hands. “The gal is still alive; for who but herself could have tied that bit of gold to the neck of the seal!”
“Certainly!” responded Marline, with gleaming eyes; “and, without doubt, we can find the whereabouts of Alice by closely tracking this creature, which will probably go to the point from which it first started. It has been hurt by a blow from a boat-hook, or some other implement. I know that by the way it moved.”
“And that’s why it takes to the water,” replied his companion; “for the creatur’ knows that salts is good for its wound, and it’s only by cruising along the edge of the channel that we’ll sight it again.”