d bothered him, and he
had made a pair of Arctic snow-glasses, mere circles of wood with slits
in them. But under these the sweat gathered, and he discarded them,
resorting to the primitive device of smearing soot all about his eyes.
This, he said, gave him relief, but it made him a weird sort of Caliban
in his labors.

On the fifteenth day, with the work better than half done, with more
than a ton of actual gold in colors, that ranged from flour dust to
nuggets, in the strong-room, the weather began to change. It misted
continually, and Lund, rejoicing, prophesied the breaking up of the cold
snap.

By the eighteenth day a regular Chinook was blowing, melting the sharper
outlines of the icy crags and pinnacles, and providing streams of
moisture that, in the nights now gradually growing longer, glazed every
yard of rock with peril.

The men worked in a muck with their rubber sea-boots worn out by
constant chafing, sweaters torn, the blades of their shovels reduced by
the work demanded of them, the drills, shortened by steady sharpening,
gone like the spare flesh of the laborers, who, at last, began to show
signs of quicker and quicker exhaustion with occasional mutterings of
discontent, while Lund, intent only upon cleaning off the rock as a
dentist cleans a crumbling tooth, coaxed and cursed, blamed and praised
and bullied, and did the actual work of three of them.

Dead with fatigue, filled with food, drowsy from the liberal grog
allowance at the end of the day, the men slept in a torpor every night
and showed less and less inclination to respond, though the end of their
labors was almost in sight.

"What's the use, we got enough," was the comment beginning to be heard
more and more frequently. "Lund, he's got more'n he can spend in a
lifetime!"

Rainey could not trace these mutterings to Deming's instigation, but he
suspected the hunter. There was no poker; all hands were too tired for
play.

The ice in which the schooner was packed began to show signs of
disintegration. The surface rotted by day and froze again by night and
this destroyed its compactness. If the sun's arc above the horizon had
been longer, its rays more vertical, the ice must infallibly have melted
and freed the _Karluk_, for it was salt-water ice, and there were times
when the thermometer stayed above its freezing point for two or three
hours around noon.

Lund gave the holding floe scant attention. So long as the present
weather kept up