.

Then he scampered away, but paused to call back gravely, "Remember
Sergeant Black, mother."

"Yes, Grahamie, I'll try to," she replied brightly. At that moment
he was the lesser child of the two.

And so the winter crept slowly on, and the brief, brilliant summer
flitted in, then out, like a golden dream. The second snows were
upon the little fort, the second Christmas, the second long, long
weeks and months of the new year. An unspoken horror was staring
them all in the face: navigation did not open when expected, and
supplies were running low, pitifully low. The smoked and dried
meats, the canned things, flour, sealed lard, oatmeal, hard-tack,
dried fruits--_everything_ was slowly but inevitably giving out day
upon day. Before and behind them stretched hummocks of trailless
snow. Not an Indian, not a dog train, not even a wild animal, had
set foot in that waste for weeks. In early March the major's wife
had hidden a single package of gelatine, a single tin of dried
beef, and a single half pound of cornstarch. "If sickness comes
to my boys" (she did not say boy), "I shall at least have saved
these," she told herself, in justification of her act. "A sick man
cannot live on beans." But now they were down to beans--just beans
and lard boiled together. Then a day dawned when there was not even
a spoonful of lard left. "Beans straight!"--it was the death knell,
for beans straight--beans without grease--kill the strongest man in
a brief span of days. Oh, that the ice bridges would melt, the seas
open, the ships come!

But that night the men at mess had beans with unlimited grease, its
peculiar flavor peppered and spiced out of it. Life, life was to be
theirs even yet! What had renewed it?

But one of the men had caught something on his fork and extracted
it from the food on his plate. It was an overlooked _wick_. The
major's wife had begun to boil up the tallow candles. [Fact.] But
the cheer that shook that rough log roof came right from hearts
that blessed her, and brought her to the door of the men's
mess-room. The men were on their feet instantly. "A light has
broken upon us, or rather _within_ us, Mrs. Lysle!" cried a
self-selected spokesman.

"Illuminating, isn't it, boys?" She laughed, then turned away, for
the cheers and tears were very close together.

Then one day when even starving stomachs almost revolted at the
continued coarse mixture, a ribbon of blue proclaimed the open sea,
and into those waters