st continually worked among the stranded
masses with groaning thunders and shrill grindings, while the surf ever
boomed on the resonant sheets of ice.

The place held a strange mystery. On top of the main cone the volcanic
glow hung above the crater chimney, reflected waveringly on the rolling
clouds of smoke that blotted out the stars. There were no tremors, no
rumblings from the hidden furnace, only the flare of its stoking. The
stars that were visible were intensely brilliant points, and, when the
moon rose, it was accompanied by four mock moons bound in a halo that
widely encircled the true orb. The moon-dogs shone intermittently with
prismatic colors, like disks of mother-of-pearl, and the moon itself was
four-rayed.

Under moon and stars the coast snaked away to end in a deceptive glimmer
that persisted beyond the eye-range of definite dimensions. And, despite
all the sound, muffled and sharp, of splinterings and explosions, of
the reverberation of the swell, outside all this clamor, silence seemed
to gather and to wait. Silence and loneliness. It awed the crew, it
invested the spirits of Peggy Simms and Rainey, gazing at the mystic
beauty of the Arctic landscape.

The walls of forced-up ice shifted about them and came clattering down,
booming on their floe as if it had been a drum, and threatening to tilt
it by sheer weight had they not been fairly grounded forward. Other
floes came from seaward to batter at the cliffs, but the eddy that had
brought them to their resting-place seemed to have been dissolved in the
main current and, save for an occasional alarm, their stern was not
seriously invaded.

Only, as the night wore on, the floating masses became cemented to one
another and the shore. The _Karluk_ was hard and fast within two hundred
yards of her Tom Tiddler's ground, just over the promontory. If a thaw
came, all should go well. If Lund had been deceived, and the true
winter was setting in early, the prospects were far from cheerful,
though no one seemed to think of that possibility.

Beneath the glamour of the magic night, the weird paraselene of the
moon's phenomenon, the glow of the volcano, the noises, the men
whispered of one thing only--Gold!

Dawn came before they were aware of it, a sudden rush of light that dyed
the ice in every hue of red and orange, that tipped the frozen coast
with bursts of ruby flame that flared like beacons and gilded the crests
of the long swells, tinging all their w