as well as his own.
Experience had taught him the power and the significance of firearms,
just as it had made him understand the uses for which spears, and
harpoons, and whips were made. He had seen the woman shoot Blake, and
he had seen her ready to shoot at Uppy. Therefore he understood that
they were enemies and that all associated with them were enemies. At a
word from her he was ready to spring ahead and tear the life out of the
Eskimo driver and even out of the dogs that were pulling the sledge. It
did not take him long to comprehend that the man on the sledge was a
part of the woman.

He hung well back, twenty or thirty paces behind the sledge, and unless
Peter or the woman called to him, or the sledge stopped for some
reason, he seldom came nearer.

It took only a word from Dolores to bring him to her side.

Hour after hour the journey continued. The plain was level as a floor,
and at intervals Dolores would run in the trail that the load might be
lightened and the dogs might make better time. It was then that Peter
watched Uppy with the revolver, and it was also in these
intervals--running close beside the woman--that the blood in Wapi's
veins was fired with a riotous joy.

For three hours there was almost no slackening in Uppy's speed. The
fourth and fifth were slower. In the sixth and seventh the pace began
to tell. And the plain was no longer hard and level, swept like a floor
by the polar winds. Rolling undulations grew into ridges of snow and
ice; in places the dogs dragged the sledge over thin crusts that broke
under the runners; fields of drift snow, fine as shot, lay in their
way; and in the eighth hour Uppy stopped the lagging dogs and held up
his two hands in the mute signal of the Eskimo that they could go no
farther without a rest.

Wapi dropped on his belly and watched. His eyes followed Uppy
suspiciously as he strung up the tent on its whalebone supports to keep
the bite of the wind from the sledge on which Dolores sat at Peter's
feet. Then Uppy built a fire of kindlings, and scraped up a pot of ice
for tea-water. After that, while the water was heating, he gave each of
the trace dogs a frozen fish. Dolores herself picked out one of the
largest and tossed it to Wapi. Then she sat down again and began to
talk to Peter, bundled up in his furs. After a time they ate, and drank
hot tea, and after he had devoured a chunk of raw meat the size of his
two fists, Uppy rolled himself in his sleeping