Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1910-07-22
CHAPTER X-Continued.

partly right. | didn't want revenge
wouldn't have stopped to take it if 1
had.-And, yet-weli. | didn't stoop to
save him. either, and | might have done
that; at least it would have come about
that way if ! hadn't checked my human
instinct to go down among them; hadn t
stayed aloft too long, watching them as
though they were picture
He went back to the foot of the bunk
and picked up the big morocco bound
book which he had laid down. That
narrative has humbTed me some way
he said. You were quite right. 1t has
made me retract the thing | said, in my
ignorance, about the men who risk and
lose their lives trying to reach the pole.
Whatever his measure of success or fail
ure was-the man who lived that story
setting it down on these pages as he
lived twas worth--was worth a whole
paradise of angels-You were right, too,
though l didn't know you were until you
said it, in telling me that L had con-
tempt for the world. l did have. i be-
trayed it this morning, there on the deck
of the yacht, with the ignorance and We
nal of your fathers, and your-your
beautiful faith in me have shown me
what base metal it was made Of
He pulled himself up sharply there and
looked at his watch. 1t will be daylight
in two hours now" he said. When ii
comes ven signal to the yacht, and
they'll send for you and take you away
you and this precious find you've made.
In the meantime you must go to sleep.
You hardly slept at all while l was
reading"
Il hardly dare go to sleep-not really
deep asleep. If l did I'm afraid you'd
turn out to be all a dream. and I'd find
myself back in my stateroom on the
yacht She was speaking half in mock
cry, but there was an undertone of seri-
BUSINESS in her voice. Think how un-
likely it is that all this can have hap
pened," she went on. You said this
morning you were going to leave us, and
l watched you go. How can it be any
thing but dream that you We're hang
ing aloft there in the sky, above the fog.
ready to come plunging down when
cried out for help?''
Il told you once" he said not very
steadily, that one of us might be
dreaming, but that one was not YOU,
that if l go to sleep, I'll wake up here
and not on the yacht, and that you
won't have disappeared"
Il promise he said seriously.
He seated himself once more at her
feet, switched off the fading light from
the bulls eye and drew the sleeves of
her coat across his shoulders. Good
night he said.
She answered drOwsily.
He had meant to indulge in the luxury
of doze himself, for he had not slept
since the first light of the day before.
and then for only two or three hours.
But the train of thought which her last
words had set going in his mind were
quite enough to Danish sleep.
How nearly those wings of his had
betrayed him again. How narrowly had
he missed throwing away this second OPP
portunity.
When he had taken wing from the ice
foe that morning it had been with the
perfectly definite intention of making the
long straight flights of five hundred
miles to Point Barrow. He remembered
now how he had phrased the thought.
He wanted to blow the last contamina-
ton of humanity out of himself. He
was done with men. Even the girls de-
tanning touch he had brushed off almost
fearfuly. The feeling he found slipping
into his mind regarding her, the force
of her challenge to return to the world
again drove him by revulsion. farther
than the credulOuS, unfOunded suspicion
of the two men.
He meant to go. He would have gone
at any rate have started, had not a
small thing checked him,-the most va
grant of natures caprices.-a shift in the
direction of the wind.
In order to steer the course he wanted,
he must fly higher, and In gaining that
necessary altitude, up a long, easy grad
lent, he cut great circle INLAND.
Circling thus he found himself, presently.
looking straight down upon the shore
party from the yacht.
BY that time the exercise of his power
of flight had steadied him, as it always
did. He was so far above them there.
so completely detached from them, that
there could be no harm in soaring for a
while and watching them. That was the
way, at least, that he had explained his
having done SO at the time. He would
not have admitted then that the touch
of the girls hand upon his arm had any
thing to do with it.
He went on watching them with a
quickly enlivened curiosity, when he saw
that the man who acted as guide to the
score of people from the yacht was clad
in skins, as the party of men had been
who had murdered Hunter. OF that muir
der. these people who were following him,
of course knew nothing.
Where in the world, Cayley wondered,
could he be guiding them. Well, there
was no hrrry. He would stay and see.
So he hung there, laZily. for two or
three hours, in the bright, capricious air.
His mind was only about half occupied
with the toiling little clump of men be-
low him, who struggled on so slowly, so
ludicrously slowly, from one ridge S
crest to the next.
OF those other men. his two accusers-
the two Fanshaws-he thought very lit
tie, either. The Importance Of their
charges and their insults faded out.
But the girl kept her place. She
would always keep her place, he i'm
agined, in his memories. He went over.
in minute detail the hour he had had
with her upon the ice-foe; smiled over
the effort he had had to make to con-
vince her that she was not dreaming:
remembered how she had commented
upon the contempt he must have for
the world
Then, more reluctantly, he summoned
back the scene just enacted upon the
deck: recalled the touch upon
his arm, and the challenge which he had
Just fled from: recalled. last of all, her
declaration of faith in him. ''Sodden,
stupid, cruel. blind'-Those words did
not apply to her. at any rate. He wish
ed that she had wings. And then abrupt
ly dismissed the wish. or tried to.
He had sighted the cup-shaped valley
which Roscoe called Fog lake when the
little party, who were making their I'M
conscious way toward 1t, were still a
mile or two away. He himself was slow
He did not fully realize it, in fact until
he saw them disappear at the edge Of it,
Even then he waited a while. in eX
pectation of seing them emerge along
another of the slanting ridges which
seemed to offer a practicable trail
When it became evident at last that
they were not coming out that way. he
wheeled about and set out in the direc-
ton of the yacht. He was flying across
the glacier on his way seaward when
headed by old Mr.. Fanshaw and Scales,
the first officer. The reflection that in
order to send out so numerous a party
they must have left the yacht almost de-
serted gave him his first intuitive per-
ception of Roscoe's design.
He hung suspended above their heads
for moment or two. in the grip of
painful conflict of emotion. ''Sodden,