A Mans Woman | Page 8

recovered his health, but the ulcer on McPherson's foot had so eaten the flesh that the muscles were visible. Hawes's monotonous chatter and crazy whimperings filled the tent every night.
The only pleasures left them, the only breaks in the monotony of that life, were to eat, and, when possible, to sleep. Thought, reason, and reflection dwindled in their brains. Instincts--the primitive, elemental impulses of the animal--possessed them instead. To eat, to sleep, to be warm--they asked nothing better. The night's supper was a vision that dwelt in their imaginations hour after hour throughout the entire day. Oh, to sit about the blue flame of alcohol sputtering underneath the old and battered cooker of sheet-iron! To smell the delicious savour of the thick, boiling soup! And then the meal itself--to taste the hot, coarse, meaty food; to feel that unspeakably grateful warmth and glow, that almost divine sensation of satiety spreading through their poor, shivering bodies, and then sleep; sleep, though quivering with cold; sleep, though the wet searched the flesh to the very marrow; sleep, though the feet burned and crisped with torture; sleep, sleep, the dreamless stupefaction of exhaustion, the few hours' oblivion, the day's short armistice from pain!
But stronger, more insistent than even these instincts of the animal was the blind, unreasoned impulse that set their faces to the southward: "To get forward, to get forward." Answering the resistless influence of their leader, that indomitable man of iron whom no fortune could break nor bend, and who imposed his will upon them as it were a yoke of steel--this idea became for them a sort of obsession. Forward, if it were only a yard; if it were only a foot. Forward over the heart-breaking, rubble ice; forward against the biting, shrieking wind; forward in the face of the blinding snow; forward through the brittle crusts and icy water; forward, although every step was an agony, though the haul-rope cut like a dull knife, though their clothes were sheets of ice. Blinded, panting, bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, dogs and men, animals all, the expedition struggled forward.
One day, a little before noon, while lunch was being cooked, the sun broke through the clouds, and for upward of half an hour the ice-pack was one blinding, diamond glitter. Bennett ran for his sextant and got an observation, the first that had been possible for nearly a month. He worked out their latitude that same evening.
The next morning Ferriss was awakened by a touch on his shoulder. Bennett was standing over him.
"Come outside here a moment," said Bennett in a low voice. "Don't wake the men."
"Did you get our latitude?" asked Ferriss as the two came out of the tent.
"Yes, that's what I want to tell you."
"What is it?"
"Seventy-four-nineteen."
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Ferriss quickly.
"Just this: That the ice-pack we're on is drifting faster to the north than we are marching to the south. We are farther north now than we were a month ago for all our marching."

II.
By eleven o'clock at night the gale had increased to such an extent and the sea had begun to build so high that it was a question whether or not the whaleboat would ride the storm. Bennett finally decided that it would be impossible to reach the land--stretching out in a long, dark blur to the southwest--that night, and that the boat must run before the wind if he was to keep her afloat. The number two cutter, with Ferriss in command, was a bad sailer, and had fallen astern. She was already out of hailing distance; but Bennett, who was at the whaleboat's tiller, in the instant's glance that he dared to shoot behind him saw with satisfaction that Ferriss had followed his example.
The whaleboat and the number two cutter were the only boats now left to the expedition. The third boat had been abandoned long before they had reached open water.
An hour later Adler, the sailing-master, who had been bailing, and who sat facing Bennett, looked back through the storm; then, turning to Bennett, said:
"Beg pardon, sir, I think they are signalling us."
Bennett did not answer, but, with his hand gripping the tiller, kept his face to the front, his glance alternating between the heaving prow of the boat and the huge gray billows hissing with froth careering rapidly alongside. To pause for a moment, to vary by ever so little from the course of the storm, might mean the drowning of them all. After a few moments Adler spoke again, touching his cap.
"I'm sure I see a signal, sir."
"No, you don't," answered Bennett.
"Beg pardon, I'm quite sure I do."
Bennett leaned toward him, the cast in his eyes twinkling with a wicked light, the furrow between the eyebrows deepening. "I tell you, you don't see any signal; do you understand? You