ained the top of the slope and turned in the direction she had gone;
assured then, apparently, that she had fled in fear of him, he started
back more swiftly toward the beach. She followed, keeping out of his
sight among the trees.

To twenty-six, he had counted--to twenty-six, each time! That told
that he knew one was living among those who had been upon the ferry!
The Drum--it was not easy to count with exactness those wild,
irregularly leaping sounds; one might make of them almost what one
wished--or feared! And if, in his terror here, Henry made the count
twenty-six, it was because he knew--he knew that one was living! What
one? It could only be one of two to dismay him so; there had been only
two on the ferry whose rescue he had feared; only two who, living, he
would have let lie upon this beach which he had chosen and set aside
for his patrol, while he waited for him to die!

She forced herself on, unsparingly, as she saw Henry gain the shore and
as, believing himself alone, he hurried northward. She went with him,
paralleling his course among the trees. On the wind-swept ridges of
the ice, where there was little snow, he could travel for long
stretches faster than she; she struggled to keep even with him, her
lungs seared by the cold air as she gasped for breath. But she could
not rest; she could not let herself be exhausted. Merciless minute
after minute she raced him thus-- A dark shape--a figure lay stretched
upon the ice ahead! Beyond and still farther out, something which
seemed the fragments of a lifeboat tossed up and down where the waves
thundered and gleamed at the edge of the floe.

Henry's pace quickened; hers quickened desperately too. She left the
shelter of the trees and scrambled down the steep pitch of the bluff,
shouting, crying aloud. Henry turned about and saw her; he halted, and
she passed him with a rush and got between him and the form upon the
ice, before she turned and faced him.

Defeat--defeat of whatever frightful purpose he had had--was his now
that she was there to witness what he might do; and in his realization
of that, he burst out in oaths against her-- He advanced; she stood,
confronting--he swayed slightly in his walk and swung past her and
away; he went past those things on the beach and kept on along the ice
hummocks toward the north.

She ran to the huddled figure of the man in mackinaw and cap; his face
was hidden partly by the position in which he lay and