The Mena weekly star., 1911-01-26

ward. The milling pressure of great masses of ice crushed in her stout hull, so that the open water they had been hoping for, became, at once. their deadliest peril. The moment the ice broke away, she would go to the bottom like a plummet.
 But still the slow, irresistible drift of the ice-pack carried them north and west into a latitude and longitude which, so far as they knew, no human travellers had ever crossed before. And then in the depth of the arctic night, bereft of hope, and half mutin- ous, they found land that never had been charted, and, most marvellous of all, human welcome For here on the shore were Captain Fielding and the two other survivors of his ill., fated expedition
 The fate of the explorers ship had been. it seemed precisely that of Inc Walrus. She had been caught in inc pack, crushed in it and carried against this coast Before the coming of spring. and with it the breaking of the ice, Fielding and his men had been able to carry their stores ashore, and of these. the greater part still re- mained
 Of the Warus people, in all. there were II. and these, with the three original castaways, settled down to the prospect of an indefinite number of years upon that nameless coast. HNp tain Fielding had said, and we can always hope"
 His superior knowledge of arctic conditions made him, rather than Cap tain Planck, naturally commander ot the little company. He established the regimen of their life doled out the store from day to day, and, as best he could, through that long win ter night, provided entertainment for the forlorn little group. He told them of his explorations on the coast. of the lay of the land, of what they might hope to see when the sun should come back to them, marking the be- ginning of another long arctic day.
 Among other things. quite casually he told them of ledge in the hills, across the glacier, which contained, he believed, the most extraordinary deposit of gold in the world. So in- credibly rich was it, that the rock itself had almost been replaced by solid metal. The Alaska gold he said, was only the sweepings, in his cpin- ion, of this immense store.
 At the sound of the word gold" the eyes of the man named Roscoe had frightened for the first time since they had taken him, shivering from his long immersion in the cold water, aboard the Walrus He drew into the circle that sat about the reading lamp, and began asking questions. Gold was something he knew about. He had mined it in Australia, in California, and in the Klondike He questioned Captain Fielding about the exact whereabouts of the ledge, about the sort of ore it occurred in, and about the best means of cutting it out.
 To some extent his own excitement infected the others. Even Captain Planck, whose only well-understood form of wealth was whale blubber, be- gan to take an interest in Roscoe's questions and in the explorers an swers to them
 It was strange and rather pathetic sort of excitement Captain Fielding thought. To them, in their practical ly hopeless plight, gold was about the least useful thing they could find: not hard enough to tip lances or arrows with, too heavy and too easily melted for domestic purposes. However. it gave them something to think about, and he without a suspicion of the sinister direction In which these thoughts might turn. went on and told them all he knew.
 When, after a period of tantalizing twilight, the sun again came fairly over the horizon, they besought their commander, with savage sort of sagerness from which he might have augured i'll. that he take them at once to the ledge. They had caught sight of it from a distance, even as Cayley had done, hung in the air above the valley, and had run reck- lessly on ahead of their leader When ne came up to them, he found them dangerously excited, the man Roscoe fairly dazed and drunken with it.
 Finally Fielding had left them to their own devices and came away with his two companions And until the light of that short day had begun to fail, they-the Walrus people stayed, gloating over this strangely useless treasure.
 For three days after that the man Roscoe never spoke a word. On the fourth day. when the little party as- sembled for their midday meal, the II men Of the Walrus were the only ones to answer the summons. Cap tain Fielding and his two companions had disappeared
 Captain Planck could not recall that meal now without shuddering. for there at the foot of the table. opDo- site to him. had sat the man Roscoe, Tith murder written plain in every inc of his facc He had looked a beast, rather than a man, that day. fhe safed blood Inst in his eyes made them positively terrifying. so that the others shrank away from him. He had st emed rot to notice it, at least not Q take ofYense at it. He was in hilarious spirits for the first time since they had known him: seemed