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the Mounted Police over at Herschel only knew," he chuckled.
"Uppy, if they did, they'd have an outfit after us in twenty-four hours."
Oopi, his Eskimo right-hand man, had learned to understand English,
and he nodded, his moon-face split by a wide and enigmatic grin. In his
way, "Uppy" was as clever as Shan Tung had been in his.
And Blake added, "We've sold every fur and every pound of bone and
oil, and we've forty Upisk wives to our credit at fifty dollars apiece."

Uppy's grin became larger, and his throat was filled with an exultant
rattle. In the matter of the Upisk wives he knew that he stood ace-high.
"Never," said Blake, "has our wife-by-the-month business been so good.
If it wasn't for Captain Rydal and his love-affair, we'd take a vacation
and go hunting."
He turned, facing the Eskimo, and the yellow flame of the lamp lit up
his face. It was the face of a remarkable man. A black beard concealed
much of its cruelty and its cunning, a beard as carefully Van-dycked as
though Blake sat in a professional chair two thousand miles south, but
the beard could not hide the almost inhuman hardness of the eyes.
There was a glittering light in them as he looked at the Eskimo. "Did
you see her today, Uppy? Of course you did. My Gawd, if a woman
could ever tempt me, she could! And Rydal is going to have her.
Unless I miss my guess, there's going to be money in it for us--a lot of
it. The funny part of it is, Rydal's got to get rid of her husband. And
how's he going to do it, Uppy? Eh? Answer me that. How's he going to
do it?"
In a hole he had dug for himself in the drifted snow under a huge scarp
of ice a hundred yards from the igloo cabin lay Wapi. His bed was red
with the stain of blood, and a trail of blood led from the cabin to the
place where he had hidden himself. Not many hours ago, when by
God's sun it should have been day, he had turned at last on a teasing,
snarling, back-biting little kiskanuk of a dog and had killed it. And
Blake and Uppy had beaten him until he was almost dead.
It was not of the beating that Wapi was thinking as he lay in his wallow.
He was thinking of the fur-clad figure that had come between Blake's
club and his body, of the moment when for the first time in his life he
had seen the face of a white woman. She had stopped Blake's club. He
had heard her voice. She had bent over him, and she would have put
her hand on him if his master had not dragged her back with a cry of
warning. She had gone into the cabin then, and he had dragged himself
away.
Since then a new and thrilling flame had burned in him. For a time his

senses had been dazed by his punishment, but now every instinct in
him was like a living wire. Slowly he pulled himself from his retreat
and sat down on his haunches. His gray muzzle was pointed to the sky.
The same stars were there, burning in cold, white points of flame as
they had burned week after week in the maddening monotony of the
long nights near the pole. They were like a million pitiless eyes, never
blinking, always watching, things of life and fire, and yet dead. And at
those eyes, the little white foxes yapped so incessantly that the sound of
it drove men mad. They were yapping now. They were never still. And
with their yapping came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora,
like the song of a vast piece of mechanism in the still farther north.
Toward this Wapi turned his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just
beyond the ghostly pale of vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had
slunk out and around it, cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had
caught its smells and its sounds; he had come near enough to hear the
voices of men, and those voices were like the voice of Blake, his master.
Therefore, he had never gone nearer.
There was a change in him now. His big pads fell noiselessly as he
slunk back to the cabin and sniffed for a scent in the snow. He found it.
It was the trail of the white woman. His blood tingled again, as it had
tingled when her face bent over him and her hand reached out, and in
his soul there rose up the ghost of Tao to whip him on. He followed the
woman's footprints slowly, stopping now and then to listen,