The Magnetic North. Elizabeth Robins

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      "Protected!" snapped out an anxious, cast-iron-looking man at the rudder.

      "Yes, protected. How's water to get through the ice-coat that's over everything?"

      The cast-iron steersman set his jaw grimly. They seemed to be comparatively safe now, with half a mile of open water between them and the western shore.

      But they sat as before, stiff, alert, each man in his ice jacket that cracked and crunched as he bent to his oar. Now right, now left, again they eyed the shore.

      Would it be—could it be there they would have to land? And if they did … ?

      Lord, how it blew!

      "Hard a-port!" called out the steersman. There, just ahead, was a great white-capped "roller" coming—coming, the biggest wave they had encountered since leaving open sea.

      But MacCann, the steersman, swung the boat straight into the crested roller, and the Tulare took it gamely, "bow on." All was going well when, just in the boiling middle of what they had thought was foaming "white-cap," the boat struck something solid, shivered, and went shooting down, half under water; recovered, up again, and seemed to pause in a second's doubt on the very top of the great wave. In that second that seemed an eternity one man's courage snapped.

      Potts threw down his oar and swore by——and by——he wouldn't pull another——stroke on the——Yukon.

      While he was pouring out the words, the steersman sprang from the tiller, and seized Potts' oar just in time to save the boat from capsizing. Then he and the big Kentuckian both turned on the distracted Potts.

      "You infernal quitter!" shouted the steersman, and choked with fury. But even under the insult of that "meanest word in the language," Potts sat glaring defiantly, with his half-frozen hands in his pockets.

      "It ain't a river, anyhow, this ain't," he said. "It's plain, simple Hell and water."

      The others had no time to realise that Potts was clean out of his senses for the moment, and the Kentuckian, still pulling like mad, faced the "quitter" with a determination born of terror.

      "If you can't row, take the rudder! Damnation! Take that rudder! Quick, or we'll kill you!" And he half rose up, never dropping his oar.

      Blindly, Potts obeyed.

      The Tulare was free now from the clinging mass at the bow, but they knew they had struck their first floe.

      Farther on they could see other white-caps bringing other ice masses down. But there was no time for terrors ahead. The gale was steadily driving them in shore again. Boat and oars alike were growing unwieldy with their coating of ever-increasing ice, and human strength was no match for the storm that was sweeping down from the Pole.

      Lord, how it blew!

      "There's a cove!" called out the Kentuckian. "Throw her in!" he shouted to Potts. Sullenly the new steersman obeyed.

      Rolling in on a great surge, the boat suddenly turned in a boiling eddy, and the first thing anybody knew was that the Tulare was on her side and her crew in the water. Potts was hanging on to the gunwale and damning the others for not helping him to save the boat.

      She wasn't much of a boat when finally they got her into quiet water; but the main thing was they had escaped with their lives and rescued a good proportion of their winter provisions. All the while they were doing this last, the Kentuckian kept turning to look anxiously for any sign of the others, in his heart bitterly blaming himself for having agreed to Potts' coming into the Tulare that day in place of the Kentuckian's own "pardner." When they had piled the rescued provisions up on the bank, and just as they were covering the heap of bacon, flour, and bean-bags, boxes, tools, and utensils with a tarpaulin, up went a shout, and the two missing men appeared tramping along the ice-encrusted shore.

      Where was the Mary C.? Well, she was at the bottom of the Yukon, and her crew would like some supper.

      They set up a tent, and went to bed that first night extremely well pleased at being alive on any terms.

      But people get over being glad about almost anything, unless misfortune again puts an edge on the circumstance. The next day, not being in any immediate danger, the boon of mere life seemed less satisfying.

      In detachments they went up the river several miles, and down about as far. They looked in vain for any sign of the Mary C.. They prospected the hills. From the heights behind the camp they got a pretty fair idea of the surrounding country. It was not reassuring.

      "As to products, there seems to be plenty of undersized timber, plenty of snow and plenty of river, and, as far as I can see, just nothing else."

      "Well, there's oodles o' blueberries," said the Boy, his inky-looking mouth bearing witness to veracity; "and there are black and red currants in the snow, and rose-apples—"

      "Oh, yes," returned the other, "it's a sort of garden of Eden!"

      A little below here it was four miles from bank to bank of the main channel, but at this point the river was only about two miles wide, and white already with floating masses of floe-ice going on a swift current down towards the sea, four hundred miles away.

      The right bank presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills, fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with new-fallen snow.

      But if their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank? A swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy flood as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional ice-rimmed tarn.

      "We've been travelling just eight weeks to arrive at this," said the Kentuckian, looking at the desolate scene with a homesick eye.

      "We're not only pretty far from home," grumbled another, "we're still thirteen hundred miles away from the Klondyke."

      These unenlivening calculations were catching.

      "We're just about twenty-five hundred miles from the nearest railroad or telegraph, and, now that winter's down on us, exactly eight months from anywhere in the civilised world."

      They had seen no sign of even savage life, no white trader, nothing to show that any human foot had ever passed that way before.

      In that stillness that was like the stillness of death, they went up the hillside, with footsteps muffled in the clinging snow; and sixty feet above the great river, in a part of the wood where the timber was least unpromising, they marked out a site for their winter quarters.

      Then this queer little company—a Denver bank-clerk, an ex-schoolmaster from Nova Scotia, an Irish-American lawyer from San Francisco, a Kentucky "Colonel" who had never smelt powder, and "the Boy" (who was no boy at all, but a man of twenty-two)—these five set to work felling trees, clearing away the snow, and digging foundations for a couple of log-cabins—one for the Trio, as they called themselves, the other for the Colonel and the Boy.

      These two had chummed from the hour they met on the steamer that carried them through the Golden Gate of the Pacific till—well, till the end of my story.

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