, strange voice that was so unlike the old
Peter:

"Don't be long, Dolores."

She stood silently for a few moments to make sure that no one would see
her. Then she moved swiftly to the ice bridge and out into the
star-lighted ghostliness of the night. Wapi followed close behind her,
and dropping a hand to her side she called softly to him. In an instant
Wapi's muzzle was against her mitten, and his great body quivered with
joy at her direct speech to him. She saw the response in his red eyes
and stopped to stroke him with both mittened hands, and over and over
again she spoke his name. "Wapi--Wapi--Wapi." He whined. She could feel
him under her touch as if alive with an electrical force. Her eyes
shone. In the white starlight there was a new emotion in her face. She
had found a friend, the one friend she and Peter had, and it made her
braver.

At no time had she actually been afraid--for herself. It was for Peter.
And she was not afraid now. Her cheeks flushed with exertion and her
breath came quickly as she neared Blake's cabin. Twice she had made
excuses to go ashore--just because she was curious, she had said--and
she believed that she had measured up Blake pretty well. It was a case
in which her woman's intuition had failed her miserably. She was amazed
that such a man had marooned himself voluntarily on the arctic coast.
She did not, of course, understand his business--entirely. She thought
him simply a trader. And he was unlike any man aboard ship. By his
carefully clipped beard, his calm, cold manner of speech, and the
unusual correctness with which he used his words she was convinced that
at some time or another he had been part of what she mentally thought
of as "an entirely different environment."

She was right. There was a time when London and New York would have
given much to lay their hands on the man who now called himself Blake.

Dolores, excited by the conviction that Blake would help her when he
heard her story, still did not lose her caution. Rydal had given her
another twenty-four hours, and that was all. In those twenty-four hours
she must fight out their salvation, her own and Peter's. If Blake
should fail--

Fifty paces from his cabin she stopped, slipped the big fur mitten from
her right hand and unbuttoned her coat so that she could quickly and
easily reach an inside pocket in which was Peter's revolver. She smiled
just a bit grimly, as her fingers touched the cold steel. It was to be
he