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Strokher was smoking his pipe on the hatch combings. “Rather,” he observed. “An’ I put it to you—we’ve deserved it. ”

In the main, however, the northward flitting was uneventful. Every fifth day Nickerson got drunk—on the Company’s Corean champagne. Now that the weather had sweetened, the Three Black Crows had less to do in the way of handling and nursing the schooner. Their plans when the “Boomskys” should be reached were rehearsed over and over again. Then came spells of card and checker playing, story-telling, or hours of silent inertia when, man fashion, they brooded over pipes in a patch of sun, somnolent, the mind empty of all thought.

But at length the air took on a keener tang; there was a bite to the breeze, the sun lost his savour and the light of him lengthened till Hardenberg could read off logarithms at ten in the evening. Great-coats and sweaters were had from the chests, and it was no man’s work to reef when the wind came down from out the north.

Each day now the schooner was drawing nearer the Arctic Circle. At length snow fell, and two days later they saw their first iceberg.

Hardenberg worked out their position on the chart and bore to the eastward till he made out the Alaskan coast—a smudge on the horizon. For another week he kept this in sight, the schooner dodging the bergs that by now drove by in squadrons, and even bumping and butling through drift and slush ice.

Seals were plentiful, and Hardenberg and Strokher promptly revived the quarrel of their respective nations. Once even they slew a mammoth bull walrus—astray from some northern herd—and played poker for the tusks. Then suddenly they pulled themselves sharply together, and, as it were, stood “attention. ”

For more than a week the schooner, following the trend of the far-distant coast, had headed eastward, and now at length, looming out of the snow and out of the mist, a somber bulwark, black, vast, ominous, rose the scarps and crags of that which they came so far to see—Point Barrow.

Hardenberg rounded the point, ran in under the lee of the land and brought out the chart which Ryder had given him. Then he shortened sail and moved west again till Barrow was “hull down” behind him. To the north was the Arctic, treacherous, nursing hurricanes, ice-sheathed; but close aboard, not a quarter of a mile off his counter, stretched a gray and gloomy land, barren, bleak as a dead planet, inhospitable as the moon.

For three days they crawled along the edge keeping their glasses trained upon every bay, every inlet. Then at length, early one morning, Ally Bazan, who had been posted at the bows, came scrambling aft to Hardenberg at the wheel. He was gasping for breath in his excitement.

“Hi! There we are,” he shouted. “O Lord! Oh, I s’y! Now we’re in fer it. That’s them! That’s them! By the great jumpin’ jimminy Christmas, that’s them fer fair! Strike me blind for a bleedin’ gutter-cat if it eyent. O Lord! S’y, I gotta to get drunk. S’y, what-all’s the first jump in the bally game now?”

“Well, the first thing, little man,” observed Hardenberg, “is for your mother’s son to hang the monkey onto the safety-valve. Keep y’r steam and watch y’r uncle. ”

“Scrag the Boomskys,” said Slick Dick encouragingly.

Strokher pulled the left end of his viking mustache with the fingers of his right hand.

“We must now talk,” he said.

A last conference was held in the cabin, and the various parts of the comedy rehearsed. Also the three looked to their revolvers.

“Not that I expect a rupture of diplomatic relations,” commented Strokher; “but if there’s any shooting done, as between man
and man, I choose to do it. ”