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