For some time they listened. When at last they prepared to resume their journey, Lucile glanced upward again. Then a cry of consternation escaped her lips; the fog had thickened; the stars were lost to them. They were again adrift on the trackless floe without compass or guide.
At the moment when Phi sat down to think, they were just coming in sight of that same break in the floe, on the side of which he sat. They were not a mile apart, but the distance had as well been a hundred miles as, in this labyrinth of ice-floes, no person finds another, and, as it turned out later, Phi took the trail to the left and they the one to the right.
Why the two girls chose to travel to the right along the break, they could not have told, nor why they traveled at all, unless because motion quieted their nerves and served to allay their fears. Perhaps there was something of Providence in it. Certainly it did bring them a bit of good fortune.
Lucile had rounded a gigantic ice-pile when suddenly she gripped
Marian's arm.
"What's this?" she exclaimed.
A brown object lay some distance ahead of them. With bated breaths they crept cautiously forward; it might be a white bear or walrus.
Suddenly Marian threw up her head and laughed. "It's only a kiak.
Some Eskimo has left it on the ice and the floe has carried it away."
"May be a valuable find. Let's hurry," exclaimed Lucile.
Breaking into a run, they soon reached its side.
"Let's explore it!" whispered Marian. "You take the forecastle and I'll take the after-cabin," she laughed, as she thrust her arm into the open space toward the stern of the kiak.