day in this new region, Ally Bazan gazed open-mouthed. Then: "I s'y!" he
yelled. "Hey! By crickey! Look!" He slapped his thighs. "S'trewth! This
is 'eavenly."

Strokher was smoking his pipe on the hatch combings. "Rather," he
observed. "An' I put it to you--we've deserved it."

In the main, however, the northward flitting was uneventful. Every fifth
day Nickerson got drunk--on the Company's Corean champagne. Now that the
weather had sweetened, the Three Black Crows had less to do in the way
of handling and nursing the schooner. Their plans when the "Boomskys"
should be reached were rehearsed over and over again. Then came spells
of card and checker playing, story-telling, or hours of silent inertia
when, man fashion, they brooded over pipes in a patch of sun, somnolent,
the mind empty of all thought.

But at length the air took on a keener tang; there was a bite to the
breeze, the sun lost his savour and the light of him lengthened till
Hardenberg could read off logarithms at ten in the evening. Great-coats
and sweaters were had from the chests, and it was no man's work to reef
when the wind came down from out the north.

Each day now the schooner was drawing nearer the Arctic Circle. At
length snow fell, and two days later they saw their first iceberg.

Hardenberg worked out their position on the chart and bore to the
eastward till he made out the Alaskan coast--a smudge on the horizon.
For another week he kept this in sight, the schooner dodging the bergs
that by now drove by in squadrons, and even bumping and butling through
drift and slush ice.