Marian, thoughtfully, "it is. I wonder if we couldn't
make a sleeping-bag?"

At once needles and some sinew thread found in the native's hunting bag
were gotten out, the four deerskins were spread out, two on the bottom
and two on top, with the fur side inside, and they went to work with a
will to fashion a rude sleeping-bag.

Their fingers shook with the chill wind that swept across the ice and
their eyelids drooped often in sleep, yet they persevered and at last
the thing was complete.

"Are you sure it won't be cold?" said Lucile, who had never slept in a
sleeping-bag.

"Oh, no, I know it won't," Marian assured her. "I've heard my father
tell of spreading his on the frozen ground when it was thirty below
zero, and sleeping snug as a 'possum in a hollow tree."

"All right; let's try it," and Lucile spread the bag on the sealskin
square.

After removing their skirts and rolling them up for pillows, together
they slid down into the soft, warm depths of their Arctic bed.

"Um-m," whispered Marian.

"Um-m," Lucile answered back. And the next moment they were both fast
asleep.

All through the night they slept there with the Great Dipper circling
around the North Star above them, and with the ice-floe carrying them,
who could tell where?

The two following days were spent in fruitless hunting for wild duck
and in making trips to the rubbish pile. These trips netted nothing of
use save armfuls of wood which helped to add a cheery tone to their
camp. Though the fog held on, the nights grew bitterly cold. They
were glad enough to creep into their sleeping-bag as soon as it grew
dark. There for hours they lay and talked of many things: Of the land
to which the ice-floe might eventually bring them, the people who would
be living there, and the things they would have to eat. Then, again,
they would talk of school days, and the glad, good times that now
seemed so far away. Of one subject they never spoke; never once did
one wonder to the other what their families were doing in their
far-away homes. They did not dare. It would have been like singing
"Home Sweet Home" to the American soldiers on the fields of France.

The second day's tramp to the rubbish pile brought them a great
surprise. They were busily searching through the piles of cans for a
possible one that had not been opened, when Lucile, happening to hear a
noise behind her, looked up. The next instant, with a startled
whisper, which was alm