Stirling nodded and swung the spokes a quarter turn. They came back against the palm of his hand, and he peered through the snow. The moon had a double ring, and it awoke a verse from the girl who stood wrapped in her furs:

"That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-lined floor, By midnight breezes strewn."

Stirling turned his head slightly and smiled with the snow dripping from his lips. The girl glanced ahead and shuddered as a drifting cloud obscured the moon. The way was mantled with falling ice particles, and the ship's rigging showed up ghostlike. The m.u.f.fled Russians on the forepeak moved about in the gloom like walruses that had climbed aboard.

The _Pole Star_ hurtled on. Stirling sensed the true direction with the skill of a master pilot and dodged looming ice floes by fathoms. He swung the ship toward the magnetic west and reached for the high land which towered there, then sheered from this into the channel made by the inky waters. The _Pole Star_ glided eastward along the meridian, and thrust her sharp stem through a lane of seething waves which marked the open reaches of Lancaster Sound.

The way to the south-north by the magnetic compa.s.s-was also open.

Stirling sensed that it would be possible to drive through the Gulf of Boothia, and this route might take him to Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait.

He chose the easterly pa.s.sage and set his feet wide apart as the floes dashed down upon the staunch ship.

Helen Marr leaned over the wheel and watched the binnacle. The compa.s.s whirled and was never still. They were over the true magnetic pole, and north was south; only the sense of direction told Stirling the course to steer, but he held on grimly, with his jaw set to a block. The Russians on the forepeak shouted warnings, waves came over the jib boom and the forecastle, and the churning vortex of cross currents and storm dashed the ship like a chip in a whirlpool, while the snow fell in circling clouds.

The pa.s.sage led to the lee of North Somerset Island, and a towering headland of basalt protected the ship from the fury of the south wind. A calm spot showed ahead, through which moonbeams shone.

Stirling released one hand from the wheel and pointed. "See," he said.

"See, that is Somerset! We're heading for North Devon Island and Lancaster Sound. We are already in the Strait. I never knew it was open!"

Open it was, as the girl saw. The moon revealed the serrated outlines of the land to the southward, where the sharp teeth of the coast range, which b.u.t.tressed the sh.o.r.e, stood out bare of ice or snow. It seemed a huge saw cutting across the top of the world.

Stirling breathed deeply and studied the compa.s.s, then sheered to the true north, crashed through a ledge of locked ice, and won the way to an open lane which led toward the east and Baffin Bay.

The girl turned as a light struck across the churning waters, and cried out as she saw the orange disk of the sun rising in the south. It had broken through the snow flurry. It revealed the land and Sound, which were coated in places with the recent snow, and brought out the flying clouds as they scudded before the south wind.

She reached and clasped Stirling's arm. "The sun!" she exclaimed. "See, our beacon! We shall win through to open sea!"

Stirling brought the wheel up and steadied it, smiling down into the girl's glowing face. She watched him as he braced his legs and threw back his head, then he turned away from her with a regretful jerk and leaned down over the binnacle. He straightened up again as she quoted:

"The sanguine sunrise with his meteor eyes And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack When the morning star shines dead."

"The morning star," Stirling said. "It's up there!" He pointed toward the zenith, and Helen Marr followed the direction of his steady arm, widening her eyes in amazement as she noted the lodestar almost overhead. She waited for a cloud to pa.s.s and traced out the light points of the Great Dipper. She saw then that what she had taken for overhead was fourteen or fifteen degrees from the true vertical line.

"We're in about seventy-six degrees," she said, with certainty. "Almost to the Pole!"

Stirling unclasped one hand from the spokes of the wheel and touched the frosted gla.s.s over the binnacle compa.s.s. "Run your eyes along the south line and you'll be looking toward the Pole. It's a long way down there, Miss Marr. We're trying to work in the other direction."

The ship had covered the worst of the pa.s.sage and the parting floes showed the road to open sea. Stirling had made no mark of time, but he realized dimly that Slim and the others who had gone below were getting the utmost out of the boilers. The screw thrashed at its best speed, and the smudge of smoke which drifted toward the north blotted out the view of North Devon Island along which the course had led them.

Stirling breathed for the first time, sure of himself. He turned and smiled at Helen Marr. "Cape Hay," he said, "is somewhere over there!"

The girl had never heard of Cape Hay, but shielding herself by the ice-coated shrouds of the mizzen rigging, she strained her eyes toward the south and east. Clouds showed beneath the silver reflection of the moon, and a darker line was below the clouds. It rose in one point to a headland.

She came back across the slippery deck and nodded. "I see it," she said into his ear. "It's a long way off, Mr. Stirling."

Stirling smiled and nodded toward the binnacle. "We're on the course,"

he said. "How about a little coffee, Miss Marr?"

She was gone across the quarter-deck and down the cabin companion in an instant.

Stirling opened two b.u.t.tons of his pea-jacket and drew forth his great silver watch. It was running, but the hours which had pa.s.sed were effaced from his memory. He had stood at the wheel for seven tricks, but the distant Cape was thirty miles away through the driving snow. The wind was shifting toward the west and abeam, and he knew that it would be nip and tuck if he were to gain the open waters of Baffin Bay.

CHAPTER x.x.xV-A MATTER OF MINUTES

The floes through which Stirling guided the ship became larger and higher. Old "grandpas" drifted by-their sides honeycombed by the action of the water. These floes had broken from the true pack and had come south through Smith Sound. Icebergs were to be expected, since the coast of Greenland was filled with glaciers. Stirling peered forward and searched the sea, momentarily expecting to glimpse a white barrier beyond which he could not go, but none showed as the watch lengthened.

The girl appeared with a steaming can of black coffee, and also biscuits and bread. Stirling set the can on the top of the bra.s.s binnacle hood and munched a biscuit, eying Helen Marr with concern. Dark circles showed upon her face, her lips had lost some of their blood, and tiny puckers ran from the corners of her mouth.

He moved the wheel and said to her, "Please get some sleep. You look tired, Miss Marr. I'll hold on!"

She laughed, drawing close her deerskin jacket, and reaching for the spokes. "Let me steer?" she asked. "It isn't so bad now. I can hold the course."

"Keep her steady, then!" said Stirling with a smile, releasing the spokes and staring at the compa.s.s. "Steady, she is, while I go forward.

There's a lane of open water ahead somewhere. We must find it."

She nodded, stared at the binnacle, and the spokes moved slowly and in the right direction as Stirling crossed the deck and descended to the waist of the ship. He paused a moment at the galley house and glanced in. Two Russians stood by the stove, cooking a mess for the engine-room crew.

Stirling nodded and worked his way forward over the icy deck. He climbed up the weather shrouds and out and over the cross jack, dropping into the crow's-nest.

Floes were scattered over the waters of Lancaster Sound near where it reached Baffin Bay. The wind had driven a ma.s.s of ice up through Prince Regent Inlet, and its reaching fangs threatened to dash the ship ash.o.r.e on North Devon Island.

Stirling with his binoculars swept the entire horizon. The wind had shifted a point over the hour, and now came from over the high plateau of Baffin Land, as it circled to the magnetic north and the true west.

This would close Lancaster Sound so that no ship could drive a pa.s.sage through.

Reaching forward, Stirling rested his elbows upon the edge of the crow's-nest and strained his eyes toward the opening which showed in the direction of Cape Hay and Baffin Bay. It was partly choked with ice, and a low berg loomed in the haze.

Turning, Stirling called down to Helen Marr, and the order he gave was to put the wheel up and then steady it. The new course was more toward the true south than the east, and was calculated to head off the reaching arm of ice which threatened to close Lancaster Sound.

After a last glance over the wild waste of waters and snow-mantled lands, Stirling swung out of the crow's-nest and started toward the deck. Icicles and frozen patches of snow fell from the shrouds as the ship swerved and steadied on the given course. Stirling saw that the girl had avoided a floe by a skillful lift of the wheel.

This fact cheered him. He had a companion who was doing her best, a true friend to a sailorman who had broken through to a desperate sea. He went down the remainder of the shrouds and over the deck with his head lowered in thought. The chance to save the ship was slight, and it would call for all his cunning in ice work. The fangs were being bared for the final nip. Already the floes had thickened ahead.

"I'll take the wheel," he said as he stepped to her side. "You go below for an hour. Then I shall call you."

"Is there any danger?"

"We'll either be nipped within two hours, or we will gain the Northeast Pa.s.sage. Baffin Bay lies ahead!"

"Then I'll stay on deck!" declared the girl. "I'll stay right by your side!"

Stirling took the wheel and set the course a point more toward the south. He was between the alternative of striking directly toward the swinging arm of ice which was closing the sound like a door, or seeking a narrow pa.s.sage between the giant field and the forbidding coast near Cape Hay. He chose the latter.

The hour that followed drove the spike of fear into the Russians'

hearts. The engine-room crew, led by Slim, left the fires in order to peer through the companion, and were forced back by the menace in Stirling's voice.

The ship met the giant floes, backed, reeled, and drove on, threading through the new ice and gaining open patches of water which closed behind. Bergs drifted down upon them, but Stirling avoided the shelving spires and worked toward the south and east.