ey felt himself thrust to one side as the blind man straddled across
the bottom of the companionway, towering in the cabin while he thrust
his stick with a thump on the floor and thundered, in a bellow that
seemed to fill the place and come tumbling back in deafening echo:

"_Karluk_ ahoy!"

The face of Captain Simms paled, the tan turned to a sickly gray, and
his jaw dropped. Rainey saw fear come into his eyes. His companion did
not stir a muscle except for the quick shift of his glance, but went on
sitting at the table, the gold in one palm, the fingers of his other
hand resting on the grains.

"Jim Lund!" gasped the captain hoarsely.

"That's me, you skulking sculpin? Thought I was bear meat by this,
didn't you, blast yore rotten soul to hell! But I'm back, Bill Simms.
Back, an' this time you don't slip me!"

Jim Lund's face was purple-red with rage, great veins standing out upon
it so swollen that it seemed they must surely burst and discharge their
congested contents. Out of the purpling flesh his scarlet hair curled in
diabolical effect. His teeth gleamed through his beard, strong, yellow,
far apart. He looked, Rainey thought, like a blind Berserker, restrained
only by his affliction.

"You left me blind on the floe, Bill Simms!" he roared. "Blind, in a
drivin' blizzard with the ice breakin' up! If I didn't have use for
yore carcass I'd twist yore head from yore scaly body like I'd pull up a
carrot."

Lund's fingers opened and closed convulsively. Before Rainey the vision
of the threatened crime rose clear.

"I looked for you, Jim," pleaded the captain, and to Rainey his words
lacked conviction. "I didn't know you were blind. I heard you shout just
before the blizzard broke loose."

Lund answered with an inarticulate roar.

"And there's others present, Jim. I can explain it to you when we're by
ourselves. When you're a mite calmer, Jim."

Lund banged his stick down on the table with a smashing blow that made
the man with the Vandyke beard, still silent, keenly observant, draw
back his arm with a catlike swiftness that only just evaded the stroke.
The heavy wood landed fairly on the filled half of the poke and caused
some of the gold to leap out of the mouth.

[Illustration: "What's that I hit?" asked Lund]

"What's that I hit?" asked Lund. "Soft, like a rat." He lunged forward,
felt for the poke, and found it, lifted it, hefted it, his forehead
puckered with deep seams, discovered the open end,