loser, Ken sensed the nearness of the charge that
would finish him. All this in deep silence, there in the gloomy
quarter-light. He could not yell and brandish his fists at them as the
trapper by the fire might have done to win a few extra minutes. The
only cards he had to play were two shells--and one was needed now!

He fired it with deliberate, sure aim, and grunted as he saw its
victim convulse and die, with dark blood streaming. Again the swarm
hesitated.

Ken risked a glance above. Only three men left, he saw; and one was
pulled through the hole as he watched. Below, in one place, several
seal-creatures surged upward.

"Get back, damn you!" he cursed harshly. "All right--take it! That's
the last!"

And the last shell hissed out from the gun even as the last man,
above, was pulled through up into the air and safety.

Ken felt that he had given half his life with that final shell.
Completely surrounded by a hundred or more of the sealmen, he could
not possibly hope to maneuver the torpoon up to the hole in the ice
and leave it, without being overwhelmed. He had held off the swarm
long enough for the others to escape, but for himself it was the end.

So he thought, and wondered just when that end would come. Soon, he
knew. It would not take them long to overcome their fear when they saw
that he no longer reached out and struck them down in sudden bloody
death. Now it was their turn.

"Anyway," the torpooner murmured, "I got 'em out. I saved them."

But had he? Suddenly his mind turned up a dreadful thought. He had
saved them from the sealmen, but they were up on the ice without food.
There had been no time to apportion rations in the submarine; all the
supplies were stacked around him in the torpoon!

Searching planes would eventually appear overhead, but if he could not
get the food up to the men it meant their death as surely as if they
had stayed locked in the _Peary_!

But how could he do it without shells, and with that living wall
edging inch by inch upon him, visibly on the brink of rushing him.
Some carried ropes with which they would lash the torpoon down as they
had the others. Must all he and those men had gone through, be in
vain? Must he die--and the others? For certainly without food, those
men above on the lonely ice fields, all of them weakened by the long
siege in the submarine, would perish quickly....

And then a faintly possible plan came to him. It involved an attempt
to bluff the s