The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE POLICE FOLLOW RIDDLE’S CUE

THE NEW
NORTHLAND

BY

L. P. GRATACAP

WITH 16 DESIGNS

BY

ALBERT OPERTI

NEW YORK

THOMAS BENTON

1915

COPYRIGHT 1915

BY

L. P. GRATACAP

PRINTED BY

THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION, CUMBERLAND, MD.

KROCKER LAND

A ROMANCE OF

DISCOVERY

BY

ALFRED ERICKSON

PROF. HLMATH BJORNSEN

ANTOINE GORITZ

SPRUCE HOPKINS

THE NARRATIVE BY

ALFRED ERICKSON

EDITED BY

AZAZIEL LINK

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

EDITORIAL NOTE

This remarkable narrative of Arctic exploration is itself a remarkable confirmation of the wisdom of that tireless hunt for NEWS which has become second nature to the newspaper man, and while distinctively a mark of his calling, has attached to his profession the opprobrium of “yellowness.” The appropriation of this color—so intimately associated in nature with the golden illumination of the noon, the royal charm of lilies, and the enduring lure of gold—to designate an irresponsible and shameless sensationalism has never been adequately explained. The “yellowness” of the live journalist, turning with an instinctive scent to follow to its end every new trail of incident, sniffing in each passing rumor the presence of hidden and serviceable scandal, and ruthlessly breaking through the sham obstruction of modesty to snatch the culprit or to free the victim, cannot certainly be referred to the torpor marked by the jaundice of the invalid, nor to the weakness of the last stages of an emaciating fever. Perhaps if the reproach is to be made, or can be made, intelligible, the yellow color finds its subtle analogue in a mustard plaster.

That popular cataplasm has a dignified and ancient history, and is gratefully recorded in literature for nearly two thousand years as a contrarient of value, allaying hidden aches through the excoriation of the uninjured and painless surfaces. The process seems to involve an injustice in principle, but it is, in spite of abstractions, a beneficent practice. The “yellowness” of newspapers may amaze modesty, startle discretion, and afflict innocence, but it cures interior disorders, and the unpleasantness of an ulcerated or inflamed skin should be condoned or forgotten for the benefit of a regulated stomach or a renovated joint.

However, this all en passant, as only remotely, and yet diffidently, related to the manner of my obtaining the circumstances and facts of the following adventure. I have attributed my success to the pertinacity of instinct and the olfactory sense of mischief. It is true. Without one or the other—though the combination of both rendered failure impossible—I might not now be in the enviable position of proclaiming a “beat” on my professional rivals which no amount of editorial venom, aspersion, contempt and innuendo will ever obliterate from the annals of journalism, as unprecedented.

I am indeed afflicted at moments with a sort of discomfiture over my own modesty in not having ransacked to better advantage the commercial possibilities of my tenacity and acumen. Incredible and hypnotizing as is this story of Mr. Alfred Erickson, as a foil to its romantic daring and its transcendent interest, the brief relation of the episode—and its development—that led to its publication, has a delightful thrill of excitement, and an up-to-date volubility, so to speak, of incident, that frames the story in the most exhilarating contrasts.

An office boy, a temporary expedient for a messenger and page, Jack Riddles, mercurial, vagarious, and quick-witted, a sandy haired, long-limbed, peaked-nosed and weazel-eyed creation, with flattened cheeks, whose jackets were always short, and whose trousers despised any intimacy with the tops of his shoes, got me the story.

Jack is destined for great things in our metropolitan annals. In the mission of the Progressive party, with its millennial attachments, Jack and his sort would be progressively eliminated. Crime exists for detection, and detection is Life at its nth power for such as he. Jack is endowed with a rare intuition of ways and means when the center of a reportorial mystery is to be perforated, and the process of “getting there” to him is as inevitable as the first half of the alphabet. Riddle’s only counterpart was Octavius Guy, alias Gooseberry, Lawyer Bruff’s boy in Wilkie Collin’s story of the Moonstone.

He began his exploit on the top of a Fifth Avenue ’bus, and it was about the middle of September, 1912. Jack has a Hogarthian sense for the multitudinous, the psychological, the junction of circumstance and expression in revealing a plot or betraying a criminal. To hang over the railing of a Fifth Avenue ’bus and watch the crowds, the motor cars, each vibratory shock, as the behemoth shivers and plunges, bringing your interpretative eye unexpectedly into a new relation with the faces of that ceremonious throng, was intoxication for Jack. It evoked exuberantly the passion of espionage. There was indeed concealment here, in the packed and methodical progression of people and people, and yet more people. Yet with an average dumbness or dullness, or just the homogeneous stare of business, or the vapid contentment of contiguity to riches and fashion, Jack caught glimpses, direct, profound, of dismay or discontent; of the pallid, revolting grimace of suffering, the snarl of envy, or the deeper placidity of crime.

They were rare, but Jack watched for them; his precocity ran that way and he was rewarded. It used up his dimes, it widened the solutions of continuity in his nether garments and brought his feet more familiarly in contact with the hard flagging. Some supersensual instinct urged him. The succeeding story attests the splendor of the revelation he uncovered. Jack may have been about eighteen years of age.

It was opposite the Public Library, just below Forty-second Street on Fifth Avenue and on the west side of that thoroughfare that Jack’s eyes, after a long stop which held up an endless phalanx of automobiles, fell upon a man and woman who conveyed to his thought a hint of crime. The woman was beautiful too, a Spanish siren, full in form, with developed curves that yielded so slightly to the sway of her tight fitting mauve dress as to start the conjecture that she did not belong to the more rarified types of Venuses. A light feather boa, deliciously pearly gray in tone, heightened the carnation of her cheeks. These in turn yielded to the orbed splendor of her eyes, and that to the wealth of black hair darkly globed underneath a maroon velvet turban-like cap, in whose folds twinkled a firmament of greenish stars. Jack literally devoured her radiance, so near was he to her as she descended with her companion the last terrace to the sidewalk between the amorphous lions of the Public Library.

The man with her was inordinately, insolently handsome, dark and tall, dressed a little beyond the form of reticence, as was the woman. Herein perhaps lurked the confession of their mutual depravity to Jack, an untutored psychologist; to all besides it appealed as a momentary sensation, to some as barely an infringement of good taste.

The man wore a light fedora hat that suited the bravado of his curled and graceful moustache, the ovate outlines of his face, his liquid, voluptuous eyes, the sensuous thickness of his lips. Observation stopped short at his face where he intended it should. Its arrest was made imperative by a blue and ormolu tie, relieved against a softly-tinted yellow shirt, carrying a horseshoe of demantoid garnets in a wreath of little diamonds. His feet were encased in tan gaiters, a permissible distraction. For an instant only the spectator was rewarded with an appreciation of their admirable tournure. Otherwise he was in black, relieved by the white lining at the lapels of his coat, and he carried a cane in his gloved hand.

It was a few instants after Jack’s ravished eyes had fastened on this entrancing couple, that the cane was raised sharply in the air to descend abruptly on the woman’s head. The attack involved the man’s slight retreat—a backward gesture—and his turning aside, whereby his profile cut keenly across the sunlit stone behind him, and Jack was shocked into a delighted recognition of the same profile in a print in the show window of Krauschaar’s gallery. He remembered the title; it was “Mephistopheles, A Modern Guise of an Old Offender”; a smiling, swarthy beau at the feet of a remonstrating and beautiful ingenue.

The explosion was evidently the climax of an altercation. Jack recalled the previous animated demeanor of the couple. Explanatory reflections were cut short by the velocity of the woman’s defense. She flung herself on the man, caught his arms with her outstretched hands, and kicked him viciously. Infuriated, he tore himself away, raised the cane and the next moment would have inflicted a harsher insult on the defiant Amazon, into whose face, so Jack thought, had sprung a tigerish fury, when, from the stupified and expectant crowd before them, half shrinking and half jubilant, shot a tall figure, whose interposition transfixed both contestants.

This meteoric stranger was remarkable for his broad shoulders, and a peculiar taper in his frame downward to his feet, that made him figuratively a human top, the impression of any actual deformity arising from his immense chest, on which, by a connection scarcely deserving consideration as a neck, sat his squat, contracted head. Prodigious whiskers covered his face, invading his high cheeks almost to the outer limits of his sunken eyes.

This hirsute prodigality contrasted with his cropped cranium and his closely shaven lips. The latter were long and thin-compressed, they seemed to separate his chin from the rest of his face by a red seam. His forehead was low and his head was covered with a steamer-tourist’s cap. His clothes were of plaid.

As he rushed between the wranglers he caught each by the shoulder, and he pushed them apart. He had turned toward the avenue, facing the wondering throng, and Jack heard him speak quickly and sharply, but in a guttural, obscured way that suggested something that was not English or, if it was, it was hopelessly incoherent to Jack’s ears from its imperfect articulation.

The man and woman seemed stunned into immobility, and then obeying his gesture, followed him on the sidewalk, jostled and pressed by the crowd which at first, inquisitive but timorous, had recoiled a little from the enigmatical encounter and then, almost obstreperous and decidedly interested engulfed the trio, who however pushed their way through, energetically piloted by the stranger. How quickly a drama evolves!

All three had almost simultaneously stepped into the little scenario, and yet by the illusion of an assumed sequence the last actor seemed a novelty, related as unexpected, to the other two, as more familiar and apparent. None of the three spoke, nor did they heed the interruption of the spectators who tardily parted to let them pass. The moment Forty-second Street was reached the leader turned toward Sixth Avenue. Jack standing on the roof of the ’bus, which slowly swung off into the restored movement northward as the obstruction somewhere ahead disappeared, saw them enter an automobile opposite the northern entrance to the library and dash westward.

Jack did not argue the matter with himself. He had no compunctions. He jumped straight for the to him (as perhaps to anyone) tangible certainty that he had struck a trail of iniquity. But how to follow it? His ruminations were cut short by the loud honk of an automobile and there, returning to Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street, he saw the yellow limousine which contained the suspects wheeling into the procession and, forced by the unrelieved pressure to relax its impatience, moving with the limping concourse at the same pace.

Jack watched it eagerly. His eyes never left it. It swayed a little to the right and to the left as the driver, probably under threats or persuasion, endeavored to insert his vehicle into the chance spaces that opened before him. This irregular and tentative progress brought the automobile at length directly alongside of the ’bus which had on it the Nemesis of its (the automobile’s) occupants. It was underneath Jack’s very eyes; he could have dropped on its roof almost unnoticed. Jack’s heart beat with trip-hammer throbs, and his mind rehearsed the possibilities of murder, arson, burglary, brigandage, kidnapping, etc., gathering headway in that uncanny conference going on there below under that burnished but impenetrable roof. But he was exulting too with the steel-clad certainty of having a “case,” and that a little intensive use of his wits would promote him from the office floor to a reserved seat in the Reporters’ Sanctum.

A jolt, a lurching swing, the vituperative shriek of an ungreased axle, and the ’bus followed a meandering lane that brought it into an unimpeded headway. Jack sprang to his feet and watched behind him the still imprisoned limousine—it too shot ahead; noiselessly as a speeding bird it overtook the ’bus and then with a graceful curve, almost as if in mockery of his impotence, it vanished into east Fifty-eighth Street.

Jack had a message for the Director of the Metropolitan Art Museum. It was from myself in response to an inquiry as to what space we could afford for a description of a new Morgan exhibit. Jack was a safe messenger, unmistakably accurate, but we always discounted his celerity, because of his preferences for a ride on a Fifth avenue ’bus and the little delinquencies of delay his observational powers tempted him to perpetrate. He was an hour later than the most generous allowance of time would justify. Jack was to bring back “copy” for the next day’s issue. I lectured him. He was sullenly respectful, indifferently contrite, and showed a taciturn preoccupation that impressed my reportorial instinct as significant.

As a matter of fact the missing hour was used in traversing Fifty-eighth Street. The fruit of Jack’s search was diminutive but it was conclusive. On the pavement in front of No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, Jack picked up a microscopic green glass star. He knew where it belonged—the spangled turban on top of the massed hair of that afternoon’s debutante; debutante to Jack’s official criticism.

This minute betrayal had dropped from her hat, from nowhere else, and the belligerent cane of her escort had dislodged it. It had lain somewhere in the folds and creases of the soft velvet, to fall just there, unsuspectedly at the entrance of her retreat—a frail enamel bead releasing to the world a marvelous secret. For Jack Riddles intended to watch that house; he would enter it; if it concealed some half consummated plot of SIN, if indeed the plot was over, its victims disposed of, and the conspirators were there enjoying the harvest of their guilt, he would know it, and—the eventuality of failure never entered his head. He felt, in every fibre, a certainty of wrong-doing, something shadowy, perhaps darkly cruel in these people. His prescience was involuntary; he never explained it, he never himself understood it.

Jack lived in Brooklyn, with his wifeless father. That night as he left the office he dropped a postal at a lamp post and took a car north. He was following the trail. A little transposed I submit Jack’s story as he gave it to me the next morning.

He came to the office a little late, and knocked at my door. On entering I saw instantly that he was in an advanced stage of nervous excitement. He was pale, and a fluttering involuntary movement of his hands, one over the other, as he stood before me, with a glitter in his peculiarly shaped and small eyes betrayed his mental agitation. He was quite wet, had probably been drenched, and the first symptoms of a chill showed that precautions were necessary to avert a possible collapse. I told him to sit down, opened a cellarette, which had its professional and commercial uses, and poured out a rather stiff jorum of the best whisky I owned.

As he swallowed in a gulping manner the proffered contents of the glass, he was rather a ludicrous and yet pitiful and heart-moving object. His disordered hair, shabby clothes and a certain forlorn wistfulness in his glance upward to me, combined with his lean and disjointed anatomy gave him an expression that was at once tender and laughable. Only a Cruikshank could have done it justice. His spirits revived, animal heat reasserted itself, and back with it, as if it had stood somewhere aside until invited to return, came boastingly his invincible pugnacity and confidence.

“Mr. Link,” his speech was customarily hesitating with a deprecatory manner as if forestalling interruption or correction, and impeded by a slight stutter, but now, in the tide and torrent of his thoughts, under the sway of the elation over his first bit of detective work, it was rapid but coherent, and oddly picturesque. “Mr. Link, I’ve nipped a pretty piece of mischief in the bud—seems so to me. Of course I’m just on the trail, and fetching up to the big game that I think is in sight, barring the trees—may take more work than I think. But the proposition is as clear as glass that there’s a crooked game being pulled off at — east Fifty-eighth Street, and I’m convinced that ‘the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil,’ as it goes in the prayer book, are behind it. Now here’s the evidence—not much you may say, but I’ll hang up my reputation on it—you know, Mr. Link, I have a little hereabouts at finding out things, and I’m just convinced it—won’t drop.

“I was on the ’bus, stalled just below Forty-second Street, opposite the Library. I saw a couple of people, a man and a woman, coming down the steps to the street. The woman—Well, I couldn’t begin to tell you how stunning she was. Beauty was just all over her, thick too, from her feet to her head. I remember now the thought struck me as I looked at her that she’d make a brass man turn round to see her when she’d passed. And the goods on her were as sweet and gay as herself—a picture, Mr. Link, a real picture, if ever a woman made one. The man was with her, good-looking and cruel; neat, too, and Hell painted on him so plain it would make an angel throw a fit—if an angel could, supposin’.

“Now Mr. Link I hadn’t looked that long,” Jack snapped his fingers, “before I felt, sir, that they were rotten, not four flushers, but the real bad, like those the Sunday School man told us of, who ‘build a town with blood, and establish a city by iniquity.’” The pause Jack interpolated here was as oracular as the quotation. I did him a great injustice to seem indifferent and impatient. Really I felt the thrill of an inevitable sensation approaching, and—I saw beyond it hypnotizing copy. Jack desiderated encouragement, approval—I looked at the clock over my desk and yawned. Surely it was deliberate malice.

“Like that, sir!” Jack clapped his hands loudly; the ruse broke through my affectation, and startled me into attention that he was keen enough to see was as intense as he wished it to be.

“Like that, sir, they hit out at each other, and there was a fight on! Then a husky— Well, a—white-hope you might have called him—bounced in; they knew him, he knew them, and the three chased off in an automobile. I lost ’em, found ’em, and tracked ’em down east Fifty-eighth Street. She had green stars in her hat—things you could hardly see—but they shone! I found one on a doorstep—and last night I watched the house!”

The typical story teller who at such a juncture lights a cigar, finishes an unsmoked pipe, empties a glass of grog, or rises with unconcealed surprise over his neglect to fulfill an engagement elsewhere, could not have surpassed the self-control with which Jack, for the same purpose, intimated his own retirement. He rose, crushing in his thin fingers his poor bleached blue cap, his small sparkling eyes raised to the clock, which a moment before I had invoked so heartlessly to aid the hypocrisy of my assumed exemption from common weaknesses.

“I think, Mr. Link, it’s time for me to see Mr. Force.” Mr. Force was an assistant in the press-room.

The rebellious spirit of honesty which I had shamelessly essayed to crush, got decidedly the best of the situation now; behind it was the pressure of my own exorbitant curiosity.

“I think Jack, you’ll sit down and finish your story.”

Jack sat down.

“There was a vacant or closed house opposite. I perched on the top step of the porch and glued my eyes on No. —. I think, sir, that if any man or woman inside had winked an eye at me from across the street, I’d have seen it. But it wasn’t light enough for long to watch trifles, and I just kept looking at the front door and the windows. It was right funny how the lights changed. They broke out first on the second floor, then they dropped to the basement, then they climbed to the third story, down again to the first, but they ended in the attic windows and they stayed there. Everything else was as black as the tomb.

“The wind hustled about a little, splashes of rain hurried along with it, and it grew dark in the street. Once or twice the shades lifted and, Mr. Link”—Jack was a picture of poignant eagerness—“I saw the big peach and her man, the two of the Library steps, just the same as I see you. They’d open the window too and look out together down into the street. I knew why, sir. They expected that limousine—and it came.”

The constraint of any position more repressive than sitting to Jack, now on the edge of his exposure could not be imagined. He stood up, moved towards me, the color mounting in his pale cheeks, his body bent a little forward, and his eyes lighting up with an interior brilliancy that suddenly made me realize Jack might become a good-looking man.

“After that they’d go away from the window farther back; I think they carried a lamp with them for the light would fade away, or else they turned the gas off. At eleven o’clock—I could hear the clock bells from the steeples—the wind was racing and it began to rain hard. I got some shelter under the doorway; the light never left the attic across the street. I felt it all over me, sir, that IT was coming. I’m not sure, I may have fallen asleep, but I came to with a bounce. Lightning was chasing through the sky and the thunder was booming and—the door of No. — was open; the light from the hall flickered over the wet sidewalk, but the shower had passed. The man and the woman both stood there for an instant, then they went in and the door shut with a slam. I thought, sir, I had lost the trail. I never felt worse. I hated them, Mr. Link. Good reason, too.” His hands suddenly searched his vest, they were unrewarded; his face grew blank and he dropped his hands helplessly, while a piteous look of consternation and utter despondency shot from his eyes to mine, by this time fully sympathetic and as lustrous as his own.

His glance fell on his hat that lay at his feet on the floor, a flood of revived remembrances followed; he snatched it up, fumbled in its lining and pulled out a scrap of wrinkled paper. The returning sunshine of confidence renewed again the handsome look I had noticed before. He certainly was working up his effects with a remarkable melodramatic insight that was captivating.

“I ran down the steps into the street, I had heard a distant croak of an auto-horn, and on top of it came the toll of one o’clock from a tower. I had been asleep over an hour. There was no light in No. — except upstairs, as before, in the attic. Then the croak seemed to come from towards the East River, and I saw two balls of light rushing at me. IT WAS THE LIMOUSINE. I started back, and stumbled over a small cobble stone. It looked like an intervention—a message, Mr. Link—who knows? I picked it up, and I pulled out a jack knife I had in my pants. Why? I didn’t know, but, sir, they both came in handy.

“The auto sneaked up quiet enough, wheeled round facing East River, and crept in a little to one side of No. —. Mine wasn’t the only pair of eyes watching for it. It had hardly grazed the curb when the front door opened and there stood Mephistopheles, behind the beautiful woman, both in the half dark. I knew them, alright. The man came down the steps bareheaded, he carried a short something in his right hand. The sprinkle started again, and a smash of thunder roared overhead, and a clot-like gloom came out of it. Under that cover I dashed over the street like a hare, and crept tight up to the back of the car. In it sat Husky—the peg-top fellow that met ’em in Fifth Avenue—and another man, smaller, and sort of muffled up. The chauffeur in front never stirred from first to last.

“Meph. opened the door; Husky stepped out; he shook the little man. I heard him mutter ‘Come out here. Be fly, but quiet, or by God, I’ll stick yer through and no compunctions, mind yer.’ The bundle inside stirred; I peeped in from behind, a little higher; he was in a black bag or something like it, and as he stooped under the door and stumbled out, the two caught him, lifted him and started up the steps, where the woman leaned forward—it seemed to me she kept clapping her hands together softly as if she couldn’t hold in for delight. Then, sir—”

Jack straightened himself, bent back, relaxed, pitched forward with one outstretched arm, projected like a catapult, in front of him, “then, sir, I let fly—not at them—I didn’t know who I might hit and anyhow, hit or miss, they’d slipped off through that door quicker’n snakes. That was no use. The cobble stone slammed through the glass side of the limousine, it went through that and split the window opposite. I haven’t pitched for the Bogotas for nothing, sir. Before they had time to think, I jabbed my jack knife through the tire and off it went like a mortar. Everything was quiet then up above and the crash and the explosion had the center of the stage, as you people say. I guess it made their hearts jump. They looked around, the woman screamed, and—I screamed—and that chauffeur didn’t even turn about. For nerve or sheer fright he had the record. Perhaps at such times, sir, you can’t distinguish. Eh?

“Well, they lost their grip on the bundle, for it was a pretty uneasy load to carry now; the interruption perhaps gave the fellow inside some hope. He rolled down the steps onto the pavement like a bag of beans, moving slightly like a strangled dog. I heard Husky’s voice, ‘Inside, inside with him! Don’t stop, swat him,’ and then the black scoundrel raised his cudgel and beat the poor creature insensible. I heard him groan where I stood. I was crazy with rage; I felt myself suffocating. I had been shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ but my voice left me; I discovered that I was very wet, and then a strange vertigo came over me, a pain crossed my chest, and a fire seemed to rage in my throat. I was sick, sir. I am—”

Jack tottered. I caught him, poor fellow; exposure and overstrained emotions had prostrated him. And he was still damp; perhaps breakfast-less. I had been thoughtless, but no time was to be lost. There was an emergency room in the building, and there Jack was hurried. Strengthened with nourishment, and warmed again into animation with stimulants, revived by sleep—he hardly stirred for sixteen hours, so deathlike was his slumber—he just escaped a serious illness. Recuperation was instantaneous; his own mental energy worked wonders and when two days later he returned to the theme of his story hardly a trace of his weakness was betrayed. He was keen to engage in the solution of the midnight mystery and he implored me not to share his discovery with anyone else except the police to whom indeed I had already related Jack’s experience. Jack realized that their co-operation was indispensable. It was then he showed me the wrinkled scrap of paper which he had secreted in the lining of his cap, and afterwards stuck in his trousers’ pocket, and which I had forgotten.

There was printed on it in pencil, “I am a prisoner. My life is in danger. A. E.”

The paper was of the thin and excellent quality used in engineers’ pocket tables and handbooks.

It appeared that Jack upon feeling the sudden desertion of his strength had stolen again to the doorway of the empty house opposite No. — and must have drowsed away there the rest of the night, urged apparently by his ineradicable hope of further disclosures. His persistency was rewarded by finding this puzzling and startling bit of evidence. He found it, most remarkably, on the floor of the abandoned limousine.

The car had remained undisturbed all night in the street, and this strange neglect on the part of its previous users could only be explained by the supposition that they feared some unpleasant complications, involving disagreeable explanations with its actual owners, unless they were the owners of it themselves. Jack crawled over to the car in the earliest hour of the morning before the dawn had yet grown strong enough to make its outlines visible, while night practically covered the street. No. — was dark from basement to attic, not a light shone in it anywhere. He remembered that very distinctly.

He had had an indefinite premonition or fancy that something left behind in the car might be found; clues like that figured in all the romances of detection. He explored with his hands the corners, the cushions, and the floor, when, passing his hand along the edge of the carpet mat covering the floor, it encountered a bit of paper rolled up into a pellet. After the discovery of the writing he went to an owl wagon restaurant, and then hastened to the newspaper office.

But two hours later, when the daylight swept through the city, he returned to Fifty-eighth Street, from a restless feeling of suspicion, and agonized too with the thought of the abused and helpless prisoner. The auto was gone, and the mysterious house revealed nothing, with its shades drawn down and its immobile identity with the other sandstone fronts hopelessly complete. If murder dwelt behind its expressionless stories, or some dastardly drama of persecution, extortion, torture, effrontery and crime had been enacted there, no telltale signal betrayed it. And yet to Jack’s inflamed imagination it confessed its guilt; somehow to his obsessed eye he saw the meanness of its degradation, as if it shrank away from its orderly and decent neighbors; as if indeed its neighbors frowned upon it. He returned to the office and told me his story.

A newspaper man has the keenest sort of scent for sensation—especially the yellow newspaper man, and I fail to recoil from making the confession of my personal yellowness in that respect. He is seldom bewildered by scruples, seldom daunted by danger; he doesn’t think of them. He starts the engines of exposure and arrest, and records the result. Half an hour after Jack’s story was told Captain B— of the — precinct was closeted with me, and I repeated Jack’s adventure.

Jack’s description of the three principals in this suspicious criminal alliance was insufficient or inadequate to enable Captain B. to recognize them among the notables of both the under and the upper worlds with whom he was acquainted. I had not then seen the paper Jack found.

“Mr. Link,” Captain B. finally said, after a short silence following my communication, “you feel pretty sure of this young fellow, Jack Riddles? The name suggests an equivocal character.”

“I feel a good deal surer of him, perhaps, than I do of myself—if you can understand.”

“Oh I catch that. Well No. — will be watched night and day for a short time. Your young friend’s rather violent exploit may have scared its tenants off. The auto went. Perhaps they went with it. It won’t do to break in at once. We must have some evidence of occupation and a line on the occupants that runs straight with Riddles’ description.”

“But that wretched man? Suppose they kill him. A little less carefulness, Captain, might save him and, under the circumstances, I don’t think I’d be squeamish over precedents.”

“Oh, that team isn’t ready for murder yet—they’re not thinking of it. They’ve kidnapped someone for one reason or another. Bagging him that way showed they wanted something out of him. I’ll place them in twelve hours or so, and if they cover the same size Riddles gave I’ll take the risk and search the house.”

“Of course you’ll let us in, Captain, on the ground floor so to speak?”

“Sure! I’ll tip you on the first peep we hear. But get that boy on his legs; we’ll need him.”

It was just a day and a half later that a policeman brought me a sealed envelope. Of course I knew who had sent it. There was no answer the policeman said, and left. I opened the missive expectantly. I was not disappointed. Its contents were more rapturously thrilling to my journalistic hunger for marvels and mysteries, and those labyrinthine prodigies of subterranean deviltry that Cobb, or Ainsworth, or George Sand revelled in, than any mess of crime I had tumbled on or in, since Joe Horner, our chief city reporter, went through a hatchway in the Bronx and dropped into a hogshead of claret (Zinfandel) with two dead bodies in it!

Captain B.’s note ran: “Riddles corroborated. They’re there; three of them and a squeegee. Up to mischief—perhaps forgery—something like it. Pounce on them tomorrow. We’ve moved like mice, and the trap has been set quietly. Nothing more simple. Guess you might like to be in at the death. Bring Riddles. We break cover at 11 p.m. Meet at the police station * * *”

Riddles was then on the mend, and when I told him how matters stood, the boy smiled grimly, caught my hand and exclaimed: “Good medicine for me, Mr. Link. I feel it to the end of my toes. That’s the tonic I need. Trust me, I’ll be with you, strong and hearty.” He was.

Captain B. had arranged the affair tactfully. He had conveyed his suspicions to the householder on the west side of No. — and had secured his permission to admit three plain-clothes men through his backyard to the backyard of No. —; also his own party of six, with Riddles and myself as press agents, onto the roof, whence we expected to effect an entrance through the roof door or skylight, while a few men on the street would intercept flight in that direction. Riddles was radiant; it was a beautiful tribute to his sagacity; all this had come about through his quick insight, his instantaneous sense of obliquity, alias crookedness, when he saw the quarreling pair on the Public Library steps. As we cautiously climbed over the low parapet separating the two roofs, with only the light of the stars to guide us, not altogether appropriately I recalled Jonathan Wild’s chase of Thomas Dauell over the housetops, and also the burglary at Dollis Hill in Jack Shepard. There were more apposite occurrences in fiction to compare our maneuvers with, but I thought of these.

I had shown to the Captain the pathetic call for rescue scrawled on the paper scrap. It was palpably written by a foreigner, perhaps a German, certainly someone of Teutonic origin, and the paper had been torn from a book, some such technical guide for engineers as I had suggested. It did not interest Captain B. greatly. He told me, before we started out, that the “peg-top” man—a Hercules—the beautiful woman and “Mephistopheles” had all been seen, and no one else, but that dark ruby glass, identical he thought with that used by photographers, had been inserted in the front attic windows, where he suspected the imprisoned man was kept at work in some nefarious trade, from which the trio derived support or profit. As to the criminal character of “the bunch” he had no doubts. The two men almost invariably carried bundles into the house, but none out.

We were at the doorway of a little triangular erection which covered the stairway leading from the roof to the attic and our approach, in rubbers, had been almost noiseless. The door was shut, but only locked; the precautions against invasion had been forgotten or overlooked. It was not even bolted. Evidently the conspirators or counterfeiters, or whatever they were, apprehended nothing; we might catch them red handed. A stout chisel enabled us to force the door inward, and a dark lantern revealed a dilapidated stairway below, ending in a kind of storage room, cluttered up with the refuse of successive occupancies, a dangerously inflammable chaos of rubbish, in which a feebly sputtering match could create a conflagration before it was suspected. It required some discrimination to cross this debris without starting some crumbling avalanche of fragments in the boxes, baby carriages, stoves, chairs, trunks, picture frames, racks and easels. As it was, with our best efforts slides occurred, and the mastodon-like tread of the detectives sank noisily through an occasional bandbox. We paused anxiously—I did, at least—at such moments, but the crash, so it sounded to me, brought no response. I reasoned the house must be vacant, and that our quarry had escaped.

We found that a closed door opened upon a narrow hallway, and as we softly drew it back loud voices most unexpectedly became audible, certainly proceeding from the front rooms of that very floor; from that front room wherein Jack had noticed the light, and where the detectives reported the insertion of the ruby panes. A hoarse dominant swelled up in the excited conversation. Jack leaned towards me and whispered “That’s Husky”; Captain raised a warning finger, and we filed out, one by one, gingerly tiptoeing toward the room which now unquestionably contained the objects of our search. The familiar scare or thrill which submerges all lesser emotions, as the danger point in an encounter is approached, decidedly manifested itself somewhere in my anatomy, or probably all over it.

Any mental analysis of my feelings was abruptly halted by the threats or altercation now heard very clearly in the room before us.

We had reached the door, beneath which a streak of light gave a penumbral illumination to the end of the little hallway. Below, in the house itself, absolute silence reigned, and apparently as complete darkness. Our approach was unnoticed. The excitement or rage that overpowered the speaker, breaking out in threats that now became intelligible and startled us into a fierce impatience to interfere, had certainly stopped his ears. The suffocation of anger had made him deaf.

“Damn you—you’ll show us the trick, or else your starved and scorched body will take the consequences. We know well enough you can do it. You’ve led us on with blind promises, but now we’ve got you where we want you. You can’t get out of this, remember, until we get what we want. Can you understand?”

“And then you’ll kill, I suppose?” The voice was strained, thick, foreign in accent, and low.

Riddles stretched himself up to my ear again and whispered “A. E.?” I nodded assent.

“No! No! Oh, no; but—you must not stay here.” The voice was a woman’s. “We’ll take care of you. Nicely too, Diaz, I guess. We’ll keep you where you won’t tell tales.” A mean, cynical laugh followed, a muttered corroboration from a third person, who had evidently crossed the room. It was this last voice that continued the harangue of the prisoner in a smooth, polished, plausible manner that thinly veiled its heartlessness; its crafty insinuation betrayed a designing selfishness, but it seemed welcome after the barking hoarseness and ferocity of its predecessor, and the cruelty of that feminine sneer. Its climax came at the close with a threat of fiendish wickedness that broke the tension of our restraint.

“Alfred Erickson, perhaps you can understand your predicament a little better, if you will stop to think it over. You are a stranger here, and you are in our power. That, you probably realize pretty well by this time. There is something else you may not so clearly comprehend, and that is, we are not afraid of consequences, because in your case, so far as we are concerned, there will be no consequences! You can extricate yourself easily enough if you will be sensible. Obstinacy has its merits under some circumstances; your perseverance in your Arctic experiences was rewarded—and we know exactly how—but obstinacy is of no avail just now, and no rescuing party from Norway, or even from the New York police will save you from, perhaps, an unfortunate calamity.”

This allusion appealed facetiously to the others, and there arose a musical outburst of laughter from the lady, with an accompaniment of harsh bass grunts from the first speaker. The voice continued:

“You possess a secret that the whole world has been hunting for, and we propose that the world will go on hunting for it before you will ever be able to tell it. Share with us and, under reservations, you will be well cared for. Refuse and, as we have gone so far, we will find—and you too—the rest of the way very simple. You’re not at this moment likely to be able to help yourself. That little incident outside,” Riddles nudged me again, “meant nothing. You’re as much buried alive in this attic in the first city of the world, as if you occupied a tomb of the Pharaohs. We’re not as self-controlled as you seem to be. We may get restless. Then, sir”—we heard him step forward; I imagined him leaning close to his victim, for it was evident the man was in some way confined—“then, sir, up you go—you and your secret—in smoke.”

His smothered rage broke out then, and we heard him strike the man and curse him. There was the remonstrance of a cry—that was all. The next instant we would have forced our way through a stone wall had we been against it, but Captain B. raised his hand. His trained endurance amazed me. The voice resumed:

“Now what do you propose to do?”

“Yes, what?” from the first ruffian.

We held our breaths and listened with all our ears.

“Let me get up. Let me talk this over with you. You are driving me crazy! I can’t think. I will forget what you say I know. You—”

“Hell with your parleying. I’ll untie your tongue. I guess your memory will work quick enough after this”; it was Husky threatening.

Then succeeded the jeering encouragement of the woman and, strange paradox, the voice was rich, enticing, but mocking.

“Oh, yes; just a little stimulation will hurry up matters. Diaz we can’t wait much longer and,” the menad fury broke loose, “if this miserable creature holds out much longer we shall be ruined. Burn him—burn him—scald it out of him, Huerta; the dolt, simpleton, idiot—”

There was a shuffling movement inside, the sudden bristling, rushing sound of an airblast (Could it be a naphtha lamp?) and then a raving, rending, terrifying cry, something that meant fear and rage and madness, the awful, marrow-chilling shriek of insanity.

Quicker than thought a man behind me shoved us aside. He raised an iron mallet; it struck the door with a splintering crash—another and another—the door burst inwards, torn from its lock, torn from its hinges, and we all rushed forward. I heard a shot, then another; the group in front of me parted and an extraordinary scene was revealed, one I can never forget. A huge broad-shouldered man was crumpled upon the floor. There had fallen from his hand a thick, long soldering iron; it had been red or white hot; fallen on the floor it was burning into the boards, and little swinging flames encircled it. Near at hand was the large form of a plumber’s furnace with the blue whistling flame still shooting from it. Huddled in a corner, cowering behind a menacing man—quickly subdued, however, by a pointed revolver—was the beautiful woman, a half dishevelled creature in a deep yellow wrap, fastened a little distance below her peerless throat by a big turquoise brooch. Her abundant hair had become loosened, and it poured over her shoulders in a raven tide.

The man in front of her was Riddles’ Mephistopheles. He was pale, and the pallor hardly became him. Although strikingly handsome it gave a peculiar expression to his face, of craven hate and sinister fear, if that can be understood. In both his and the woman’s eyes shone a horrible surprise. But the overpowering object in the room was the half-naked figure of a man with extended arms and divergent legs, strapped to a narrow table by iron bands. These latter passed over his wrists and ankles, and were actually screwed to the table. His face was not readily deciphered; whiskers covered his chin, a high forehead beneath overhanging light hair and a large mouth formed together the suggestion of a very dignified and intelligent face. His condition was heart-rending; bruises covered his body, one eye seemed swollen and shut, and scars—I shuddered at the thought of their having been caused by the iron in the hands of the prostrate fiend—marked the white but defaced skin of his shoulders and arms.

There was little furniture in the room—the tortured man had probably been kept on the table at night—a few chairs, a second table, and towards the front of the room a long table covered with a confusion of physical apparatus. It was the work of a minute to search the criminals, and to handcuff them; though the woman cried bitterly at the degradation Captain B. was taking no chances, and then the liberation of the pitiable victim of these inhuman miscreants was effected. The stiffness of his limbs almost forbade movement, and he cried with pain—and for that matter I am sure with joy too—as we tenderly raised him, lifted him into a chair, and tried to relax the rigid muscles. His agony, crucified so on his back, must have been incalculable; evidently his resolute refusal had driven his tormentors furious, and made them incarnate demons. But what was it—the SECRET? Reader, you are not to know, except as you find it out yourself, by reading this almost incredible story.

With our prisoners—the Hercules was carried out; his femur had been split by the Captain’s bullet and he was in desperate pain—we made our way down through the house. There seemed to be only two rooms showing any signs of habitation, two rooms on the second floor used as bedrooms, and their furnishment was a droll mixture of bareness and luxury. Shreddy and hanging wallpaper, a superb rug or so, a sumptuous easy chair, and then wooden kitchen chairs, plain bedsteads, but a bureau or toilet table covered with jewel boxes, and in a corner odds and ends of silver utensils, heaped up into quite a noticeable hillock. Was it these that the men had been seen carrying so constantly into the house? Our prying about uncovered some decanters of wine incongruously stowed away in a pantry below a washbasin. Their contents helped Erickson, and some of the rest helped themselves.

Riddles had been gloating over the capture of his game; his eyes never left the sullen, downcast face of Mephistopheles, distorted too at moments with angry scowls, nor the disturbed shadowed splendor of the woman’s countenance. At an unguarded instant Mephistopheles sprang out of the hold of his captors, and brought his clenched, handcuffed wrists down on the head of Jack, who promptly dropped.

“You dirty little fox, you did this. I know now. I’ve seen you hanging about here. I’ll mark you! I’ll mark you! I’ll tear your liver and heart out yet. Oh, I don’t forget. Diaz never forgets.”

He was jerked back into decorum and silence, and somewhat injuriously rebuked as well, but a little scar, bare of hair, was to remain as a memento of his regard for Jack Riddles for many a long year afterwards.

I bargained successfully with Captain B. for the possession of Erickson, and I took him home in a taxi, greatly to my journalistic bliss. He was pretty dangerously ill for days; the nervous breakdown was dreadful. He raved and shouted and was almost maniacal in his outbreaks. It was the natural reaction of a powerful mind and nature against the circumstances of his degradation and insult. But he finally came round all right, the glow of health covered his cheeks, and his earnest eyes welcomed me with sanity and gratitude. Then he told me his story, in two parts. The first part explained the predicament in which we found him here in New York, the second— Well, the reader has it before him in this volume, exactly as it appeared in the daily issue of the New York Truth Getter.

A few words more to explain Mr. Erickson’s equivocal, abject position in New York, as we found him, and this Editorial Note will no longer restrain the puzzled and vexed subscriber. These words will be very few indeed, and may indeed prove very unsatisfactory. Yet they will conveniently make a skeleton framework or outline for deductions, with which the reader may fill its expressionless and yawning blanks, after the gift of his imagination or the bias of his temperament, upon reading the ensuing narrative.

Alfred Erickson reached San Francisco from the Arctic Exploration, herein circumstantially described. In San Francisco he formed, rather rapidly, the acquaintance of Angelica Sigurda Tabasco, and Diaz Ilario Aguadiente. There were mutual prepossessions. Mr. Erickson also fascinated his new friends by certain wonderful claims, which were however partially supported by ocular demonstration. They all came to New York. In New York Mr. Erickson came to grief. He had come too far from the base of his operations, and he suffered from a complicated treatment. We rescued him from its worst effects. I think that is all. I will not trust myself to say more for fear of my own remorse over misleading statements. Angelica and Diaz were never prosecuted. Erickson was afraid to tell his story before he wrote his book (this book), and we all agreed he acted wisely from a commercial standpoint, and the police so impressed Angelica and Diaz with their—the police’s—contiguity under any and all circumstances, in this country anywhere, anyhow, that they left it. And Jack’s “Husky” turned out to be a hardened photographed and historic criminal, who had played the heavy villain in the little mystery under the same impelling motive that animated the minds and tongues of Angelica and Diaz. He had also captivated this captivating pair by blandishments less peculiar than beauty, and he had wound up Alfred Erickson into the tightest kind of a knot of physical embarrassments, from whose Gordian embrace Erickson had been delivered through the intervention of the very humble instrument of Fate, Jack Riddles.

“Husky’s” name eluded determination for a while, but was revived through his own inadvertence in talking in his sleep, wherein the confession transpired of his having “done up” Blue Brigsy at a time when he himself carried the soubriquet of “Monitor Dick.” The clue was slight; it proved sufficient, and landed him in Sing Sing for a quarter of a century.

Jack Riddles was “lifted.” He was taken out of the proletariat, the pages, office boys and messengers, and placed among the police reporters, where he was duly taken in hand under instruction to acquire the current cursorial gait and speed of the slam-bang reportorial style. He will get it. This relieves the situation created by Riddles’ opportune circumspection from the top of the Fifth Avenue ’bus.

The reader, albeit he may demur at the jejune skipping around the explanation of the mystery at No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, has hereby had the situation sufficiently cleared to feel himself ready to enjoy Erickson’s story, and I assure him, he may look forward with expectancy to find the residue, or the heart, of that mystery resolved at, let me say, page 400 or thereabouts, assuming that by that time he cares any more about it. So that, pleasantly impelled by the spur of curiosity, as regards a secret yet undivulged, let him accept our editorial invitation— Does he not see our obeisance, and the sweep of our hand pointing to a door opening upon unimaginable wonders?—to peruse the history of a voyage more marvelous than that of Marco Polo, of Father Huc, of Mandeville, of Munchausen, of Sinbad, the Aethiopics of Heliodorus, of Ariosto, of Gulliver, of Ulysses, of Peter Wilkins, of Camoens, of Pomponius Mela.

Sive per Syrtes iter aestuosas,

Sive facturus per inhospitalem

Caucasum, vel quae loca fabulosa

Lambit Hydaspes

His unappeased wonder over a bit of unraveled criminality will vanish in the excitement of discovery, of adventure, of revelation, but at the other end, as the book drops from his hand, finished and admired, he will approve our reticence at this end, for then he will know HOW Erickson got into his difficulty, and WHY.

Erickson’s story was published in the New York Truth Getter—of course the reader never saw it there—prepared from his verbal narrative, his notes, and memoranda, and so expressed in English as to retain the glow, enthusiasm, amazement, and graphic delineation of the original. It was told to me in my library overlooking the sunlit tides around Throg’s Neck; in the short winter afternoons at times, at times through the long winter evenings, with Erickson hanging over the hearth where, as Max Beerbohm puts it, “gradually the red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost recesses of white heat.” Past all dreams of wizardry, more remote from thought than any visions of magic, stranger than the hallucinations of invention, was this picture of the unreal and terraced world descending in titanic steps to the heated regions of the earth’s mass, peopled with an impossible people, alive with animal abundance and clothed in the vestal glory of innumerable plants. In it were enacted those transmutations which Science predicts as the last triumph of human knowledge, and in it a wealth transcending the maddest hopes of Avarice had accumulated in an Acropolis of SOLID GOLD!

There in the frozen north, walled in by ice, hidden in fogs, almost impenetrably concealed or protected by storm, lay this incredible continent of wonders, unsuspected by the world of one thousand million people around it, the goal of whose ambition it had already reached, the course of whose evolution it illustrates, and who had, in these latest years, begun to grope blindly for its guessed at shores.

Azaziel Link.

THE FIORD

CHAPTER I
The Fiord

How well I remember it! The solemn, beautiful fiord, framed within the pine tressed walls, flecked with patches of sunlight, where its waters glistened with beryl hues. Shaded in the recesses of the cliffs where the lustreless flood softly murmured with the faintest rhythmic cadence against the rocky rims, immobile and caressed as they had been for hundreds of thousands of years, and in a few places yielding slowly to decay in shingled beaches. And the music of nature united with the appeal to the eyes of color and form, to entrance the visitor.

A rushing brook singing like a girl hurrying to some holiday joy, broke from the highlands, a silvery thread, then a braid of pearls, then a sloping cataract of splintered and rainbowed waves, then in silence for a while, catching its breath, as the girl might catch it, for a new descent, and then the renewed song, through a tiny gorge, its jubilation softened to a murmur, and then the flash and chorus of its outspread ripples as it leaped into the fiord. And that was the light soprano of the music around us, and under it rolled the bass notes, muted and sfuggendo, of the distant waterfall—foss—at the inland head of the fiord, and towards which were even then starting the pleasure boats, launches and steam yachts of the tourists.

The sense of smell contributed its intoxication to the charmed surrender of eye and ear, for there was flung down from the tree-crowned cliffs the scent of wild flowers and the clean, resinous odors of the spruce. The wind singing, too, like a chord accompaniment to the cheerful ballad of the brook, and the heavy recitative of the waterfall, brought this fragrance to us, even as it swept in capricious rushes outward over the fiord to its gateway, through which the distant sea lay motionless like a blazoned shield, beyond the Skargaard.

A shelf of land, dropping off in a slope to the waters of the fiord and pierced by a roadway whose climbing curves led at last to the summit of the cliffs, and which ended on the shore in a dock, then gay with the summer glories of young girls and men, held the picturesque red houses of a few farmers, and the wandering walls of the comfortable hotel. The brilliant green of the cut lawn, like an enameled sheath, covered the little tableland, and venturesome tongues and ribbons ran flame-wise up crannies, ledges and narrow glades, to be lost in the shadows of the firs and the sprayed and silken birches high above.

Round a table on the broad piazza of the hotel, in an angle where we looked straight through the eyelet of the rocks to the sleeping ocean, a gold-backed monster like a leviathan covering the earth, slumberously heaving in the sun, I was sitting with three companions.

There was my best friend, Antoine Goritz, a man thickly bearded, with a broad, unwrinkled brow sparingly topped by light wisps of straggling hair, with a straight Teutonic nose, deep-set blue eyes under carven ivory lids, beneath eyebrows deeper tinted than his hair, and with a physical frame, strong, massive, large, effective, perhaps a trifle overdrawn in its suggestion of muscular power.

It was a titan mould, but the face above it was humorously still and observant. I often compared him to Sverdrup, Nansen’s captain, but he was a bigger man. Like him he possessed the docility of a child, the energy of a giant. Slow of speech ordinarily, as he was slow of movement, but in stress and excitement convulsed with his rapid, headlong utterance, and rising to a momentum of action that was irresistible and swift. He sat upright in a thick brown plaid with a blue sailor’s scarf around his broad neck and a straw hat like a coracle on his head.

Next to him sat Professor Hlmath Bjornsen, a very tidy man of ordinary build and stature, but oddly distinguishable by his abundant red hair, the crab-like protuberance of his eyes (he wore no glasses), his indented lips, which looked as if stitched up in sections, also undisguised by any covering of hair, his patulous, projecting ears. His homeliness was saved by the merit of cheerfulness at least, by a pug nose, a rosy complexion and a demure, winning sort of smile that was generally a propos of nothing, but was retained habitually as nature’s protective grace against the premature prejudices of first acquaintances. Professor Bjornsen was a man learned in rocks, minerals, mines, geology, the hard and motionless properties of the earth. He was scrupulously neat, and his frequent inspection of himself, especially his hands, was equally disconcerting and amusing.

Spruce Hopkins was the next man, alongside of myself, and probably he would have been the first man whom an approaching stranger would have looked at the longest, and concerned himself with knowing the most. He was a Yankee, an American of Americans, but of that Grecian phase which rejects toto-coelo, the newspaper type, the Brother Jonathan caricature, the cheap idiosyncracies of the paragraph writer, unassimilable even with the more credible picture,

of one who wisely schemed

And hostage from the future took,

In trained thought and lore of book.

Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as he

Shall Freedom’s young apostles be.

Spruce Hopkins boasted no particular thrills. His thoughts followed really a rather narrow gauge, and he could weigh with premature or precocious carefulness the two sides of a practical question when his decision would have halted perhaps at alternatives involving the emotions.

He had a superb figure, graceful, plastic, and eloquent of strength. His face leaned, so to speak, a little to the Brahmin type, but any introspection it might have accompanied or suggested was lost in the radiance of the eyes, the tempting sweetness of his smile, the full-blown glory of his infectious laughter, the spiced offerings of his genial tongue, the crisp charm of his wavy, glossy, chestnut-tinted hair, and that slight but irreducible soupcon of swagger which gave him distinction.

And then there was myself; you see me, a hardy man (a blush rose to Erickson’s cheeks; he could not overcome some apprehension of my recalling his recent humiliation), a sailor man with a little land schooling, loving yarns, telling yarns, and—believing ’em.

“Why, yes, Erickson,” I interrupted, “I suppose you have been quite willing to believe some gilded tales that those friends, your late companions here in New York, told you, but even a captivating gullibility hardly explains how a young giant like you were found on your back, strapped to a table, and about to be skewered like a spitted pig.”

“Ah, sir, patience. You shall know all, but—at the end, at the end; even if I could resist a plausible story, I could not always resist what goes with a good story.”

“SCHNAPPS?” I interjected.

“Please, sir, patience. It is worth while. I have seen what no living man— Perhaps I shall never see again my fellow travelers, the three who sat with me on the hotel porch three years ago.” He bent his head, his bruised, rough hand was passed over his face, and I thought a flare of flame, shot from a cleaving coal, showed on it the glistening trail of moisture. “—what no living man has ever seen, a country more wonderful than dreams or legends or fairy stories have described or painted. Oh, sir, in that new world in the north, something of the imagery of the mythology of my forefathers seems repeated; very vaguely indeed. There I have seen Nilfheim, I have seen Hwergelmer and Muspelheim, the world of fire and light, but different, yes very different, and perhaps— Well, no, not Valhalla, but something like Yggdrasill, and if it was not Gladsheim, what was it?”

He resumed.

It was Professor Bjornsen speaking, with his big hands clutching his head on either side, buried indeed in the luxuriant wealth of his ruddy hair, with his staring eyes fixed on the table as if he saw through it, looking at the land of his prophecies, while we all listened, with our eyes measuring the cliffs up to the green fringes that ran, a dark zone against the sky, on their sun-blazed peaks.

“Signs, signals, came to the explorers of Europe long before Columbus set his face westward; long before, standing at the peak of his little caravel, he dared the perils and the powers of the bewitched western ocean, the woods and weeds of Cipango floated to the shores of Europe. There are signs and signals now, gentlemen”; the Professor brought his long fingers down with a smart, startling slap on the table that brought our own hands nervously to the sides of the unsupported glasses, lest they capsize in his assault of enthusiasm, while his disordered hair flamed aureole-like over his bulging forehead, beneath which smiled exultantly his piercing green eyes.

“Signs that an untouched continent is hidden in the uncharted wastes of the western Arctic Sea. A vast area of waters, a blank space on the map lies there, but that is simply the refuge, for cartographic lucidity, of our ignorance. What really lies there is reciprocal on the west of Greenland on the east, of the Franz Josef Archipelago and Spitzbergen north of us. There is there another large fragment of that original circumpolar continent that Science, in a moment of intuitional certainty, points to as the source of the world’s animal and vegetable life. And the signs? You ask me, your faces do, what they are. They are negative indeed but they are convincing. Payer reached 82°5´ North Latitude, on an island, Crown Prince Rudolf’s Land, and still further north he thought he could see an extensive tract of land in 83°. He called it Petermann’s Land. Driftwood on the east of Greenland comes from Siberia, circuitously perhaps around the pole, not across it, since the ‘Fram’ drifted from the north of Cape Chelyuskin in 1893 to north of Spitzbergen in 1896. The wood is Siberian larch and alder and poplar. Articles from the American ship ‘Jeannette,’ which foundered near Bennett Island, had taken the same course, being picked up on the east coast of Greenland. Professor Mohr held that they drifted over the pole. Why did not the ‘Fram’ drift over the pole? The set of the waters that way is obstructed, and that obstruction is a continental mass. Nothing surer.

“Dr. Rink has reported a throwing stick, used by the Eskimos in hurling their bird darts, not like those used by the Eskimos of Greenland, and attributed by him to the natives of Alaska. The path traversed by this erratic could not have been directly eastward from Alaska, threading an impenetrable and devious outlet in the Canadian archipelago, neither was it over the pole, as any pathway there would, constructively, have reached northern and not eastern Greenland. Again that invisible obstruction, as patent, as real, as the influence of the undiscovered Neptune in the perturbations of Uranus, which led Leverrier and Adams to make their prophetic directions for its detection.

“Sir Allen Young, appreciating the nucleal density of the land towards the pole, and speaking of Nansen’s promised attempt to drift over it, said, ‘I think the great danger to contend with will be the land in nearly every direction near the pole. Most previous navigators seem to have continued to see land, again and again farther and farther north.’

“Peary has seen Krocker Land. Over the western verge of the horizon its peaks rose temptingly to invite him to new conquests. That was a segment, a tiny fraction, a mere hint of the unknown vastnesses beyond. But the most convincing symptoms—Ah, a feeble word to designate a fact—of this continent are the observations of the United States’ meteorologists. Dr. R. A. Harris, a competent authority, has shown that the tides, mute but eloquent witnesses, testify to its existence. The diurnal tides along the Asiatic and North American coasts are not what they would be if an uninterrupted sweep over the Arctic Sea prevailed. Their progress is delayed and along narrow channels is accelerated or heightened, as past the shores of Grant Land. Why? Again that undiscovered country.”

“Harris, a clever fellow. Met him in Washington just two years ago this autumn—a crackerjack at mathematical guessing. The way he can figure and run off a reel of equations on anything from the rate sawdust makes in a wood mill to a mensuration of the average dimensions of turnips is surprising. If he says Krocker Land is there—why, then I guess IT IS,” was Spruce Hopkins’ comment, while we all turned our eyes from the cliffs to catch the Professor’s rejoinder, and Goritz leaned towards him, fixing him with those luminous orbs of his that betrayed his suppressed excitement.

“What does this man Harris say?” asked Goritz.

“He says,” answered Bjornsen, thrusting his hands in his pockets after he had looked them over in his habitual manner of inspection, “he says this. The diurnal tide occurs earlier at Point Barrow than at Flaxman Island; the diurnal tide or wave does not have approximately its theoretical value; at Bennett Island, north of Siberia, and at Teplitz Bay, Franz Josef Land, the range of the diurnal wave has about one-half of the magnitude which the tidal forces acting over an uninterrupted Arctic basin would produce; the average rise and fall at Bennett Island is 2.5 feet, but the rise and fall of the semi-daily tide is 0.4 at Point Barrow, and 0.5 feet at Flaxman Island. And he makes this point.” The Professor drew a red chalk from his vest pocket, stood up, and pushing our glasses aside, drew a squarish outline, broader on one side, with a tail standing out at its lower right-hand corner. He drew a circle a little above its long side, and scribbled Pole within it, then a jagged scrawl to either side, representing the coasts of Asia and America, with an indentation like a funnel for Behring Straits.

“He points out that the ‘Jeannette’, an American ship sent out by the proprietors of the New York Herald, stuck in the ice here”, he jabbed his crayon, which crumbled into grains under his pressure, to one side of a projecting point of the outline, “and that the ice drift carried her eastward”; he made a flourish under the fascinating trapezoid that we now understood embodied the suggested continent; “while the ‘Fram’ stuck here,” again a red splotch above the diagram, “and was carried westward toward Greenland. Again why? Because at a critical point between their two positions the ice current is divided by the influence of a terminal promontory of Krocker Land. It splits, so to speak, the trend over the pole of the ice drift, turning one arm of it eastward, the other westward. His creative vision goes farther. A point of this new land lies just north of Point Barrow in Alaska, that causes the westward tide at the point; and he thinks it is distant from Point Barrow five or six degrees of latitude, 350 to 420 miles. Harris claims the ice in Beaufort Sea, north of Canada, here—” Another flaming signal was scrawled on the white tablecloth below the right-hand corner of the fascinating outline that now, assuming a magical premonition of some great geographical reality, kept our eyes fastened on it almost as if it might sprout before us with mimic mountains and ice fields.

“Harris says that the ice in Beaufort Sea does not drift freely northward, and is remarkable for its thickness and its age. He says the ice does not move eastward, for you see,” the Professor flung his hands over the cryptogram on the tablecloth like an exorcising magician, “you see Beaufort Sea is a sea, land-locked by Krocker Land, that here approaches Banks Island. Are you convinced?”

We looked at each other a trifle slyly and disconcertedly, and Goritz laughed, but it was Spruce Hopkins who suddenly turned to the Professor, caught his arm and held him for a moment without speaking but with his face yielding slowly to some growing impression of wonder within him until he became quite grave.

“You see, Professor, I feel about this thing this way. I guess you’re not far wrong about this new land; it’s exciting enough to think of it. I calculated there was room up there for a little more glory after I heard your lecture before the Philosophical Society at Christiania last November; glory for some of us, such as Peary and Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Nansen, Stefansson, have won, and I thought it over. I fell in with Erickson and Goritz at Stockholm and we canvassed the matter, sort o’ stuck our heads together and thought it out; then we sent for you, and the demonstration seems straight enough. Some rigmarole! Don’t get angry Professor, that’s my way and, anyhow, I’m not going back on you, not so much as the thickness of a flea’s ear, and I think you’ll allow that can’t count; but the more I looked at the matter the more I wondered if there was anything about it the least bit more substantial than glory.

“And that wasn’t all, either. I think I’d like to get back again.”

“Yes, Professor,” it was Goritz speaking, with his head tilted back, as he followed the scurrying flight of sparrows amid the tasseled larches of the opposite gaard, “dead bodies are rather indifferent to glory. If we are great enough to get there, we must be great enough to get back. It would be no consolation for us to have our relatives and friends sing;

‘Sa vandra vara stora man

Fran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”[^[1]]

[1]. Thus our great men wander from the light down into the shades.

Hopkins smiled; he was neither hurt nor confused. He shook his head assentingly, and his faint drawl prolonged itself somewhat in his mocking rejoinder:

“That’s all right, Goritz. As a corpse you probably would attract a little more notice than either Erickson or myself, but buried fathoms deep in an Arctic sea, or just rolled over by a nameless glacier in this nameless land, your own chances for a newspaper obituary might shrink to very small proportions. You might not even have your dimensions mentioned.”

Goritz looked approvingly at the American, and benignantly raised his hat and bowed.

But the impatient Professor was in his chair, his hands spread out before him; his smile had vanished, his encroaching eyes had retreated, his serrated lips were puckered, his eyebrows frowned, and altogether he assumed such a sudden portentousness of suppressed eagerness and concealed thought that we rocked with delight and the momentary restraint was forgotten. And with our laughter there stole back into the Professor’s face its usual smile, but it had enigmatically deepened into a sort of mute expostulation.

“Listen,” he said, and he waved his hands, inviting us to a closer attention; his voice fell; I thought his peering eyes glanced to either side to avert the proximity of eavesdroppers. “There is good reason to believe that this new world of the north is neither inclement nor barren. I believe it is a place of wonders; in it rest secrets, REVELATIONS.” There was now a sorcery in the Professor’s voice that made us lean toward him, drawing the circle a little closer, like conspirators over an incantation. “What they are no once can tell. You ask, Why? I believe this. I can hardly explain; my faith in this is a growth, a coalescence of many strands of feeling and many lines of study. My conviction is complete. I admit that extrinsically, as I may say, it is unreasonable; intrinsically it is now as inexpugnable as a theorem from Euclid, or the evidence of my own senses.

“That there is a new world south of the pole is maintained by Science; it is the unalterable belief of the explorers, the hydrographers, the geographers. But what may that world be like? What was it like? Long millions and millions of years before our time the Arctic north was the procreant cradle of ALL LIFE! From it streamed the currents of animal and vegetable creation; it was warm; forests of palms flourished along river and lake-side, and within them roamed the creatures of tropical or semi-tropical climates. Paleontologists from Saporta to Wieland, from Keerl to Heer have pointed this out, with an emphasis that has varied with temperament or knowledge, from conviction to surmise. G. Hilton Scribner, a clever American litterateur says”—the Professor ludicrously grasped for something in an inner coat pocket and revealed a little book, exquisitely bound, of scraps and extracts, and read from a page whose smoothness he had marred by folding a leaf—“he says, ‘thus the Arctic zone, which was earliest in cooling down to the first and highest heat degree in the great life-gamut was also the first to become fertile, first to bear life, and first to send forth her progeny over the earth.’

“And Wieland, a remarkable Yale scholar, an authority on fossil cycads and Chelonia, the latest to speculate authoritatively along this line, writes”—another creased page was turned to—“‘in a word, that the great evolutionary Schauplatz was boreal is possible from the astronomical relations, probable from physical facts, and rendered an established certainty by the unheralded synchronous appearance of the main groups of animals and plants on both sides of the great oceans throughout post-Paleozoic time.’”

“But Professor,” it was my remonstrance that now interrupted him, “that was millions of years ago. It’s a dead world up there. Surely you don’t think—”

The Professor broke in with a deprecatory gesture of regret at his own impatience. “I know. True, true, for the most part, but perhaps not for all—not for all. It’s a deep matter.”

Professor Bjornsen’s eyes were glistening with enthusiasm; his manner became extravagantly mysterious, and his words boiled out feverishly from his scarred lips. “The north, to whose enchantment the whole world bows; a strange, magical region, lit by the supernal splendors of heavenly lights, and wrapped in eternal snows, was the Eden of our race. It was that navel of the world related in all mythologies from India to Greece, from Japan to Scandinavia; it was the Paradisaic earth center, the fecund source of every manner of life, endowed by the Creator with original unrestrained powers of exuberance. Here man originated; here was his primal home, here his first estate, dressed as he was in every faculty of mind, and enriched by all the gifts of nature. As President Warren, another American, eloquently wrote twenty-six years ago—”

Again the Professor dove into his pocket, produced his amazing little scrapbook, while we all gazed at the excited gentleman with a new fascination and astonishment. Here was the man of crystals and mensuration, of ores, adits, drifts and strata, riding the high horse of mystical and religious analogy, and somehow we felt ourselves drawn into the vortex of his cerebral excitement! We were quite dazed in a way, and yet felt an elation that kept us spellbound.

“Ah, here it is. He wrote, President Warren, ‘the pole symbolizes Cardo, Atlas, Meru, Hara-berezaiti, Kharsak-Kurra, every fabulous mountain on whose top the sky pivots itself, and around which all the heavenly bodies ceaselessly revolve.’

“Assume this; assume that here the finger of God first impressed this insensate whirling globe of unconscious matter with the touch and promise of life and Mind. Is it likely that all vestiges, all signs, all remainders of that consecrated first endowment should have quite disappeared, succumbed ingloriously to the stiffening embrace of cold, congealed in an eternal sleep beneath the glaciers and the snows? I think not, my friends, I think not.”

“But,” it was the protesting voice of Goritz who now voiced our incredulity, “haven’t the expeditionists, the geographers, the explorers—hasn’t everything we have been told, everything we have read, all we know about it, and that’s a good deal, from Franklin to Peary made it clear that at the pole there is nothing but death, desolation, and ice?”

“Antoine!” Here the Professor turned abruptly to the big Dane, thrusting his umbrageous crown of red hair almost into the thin locks of his friend, and whispered hoarsely, “Ah! Antoine, the secrets are hidden in that uncharted land beyond the ice packs north of Point Barrow. The reservations of life are there. You have all heard,” the rufous glory now moved towards Hopkins and myself, “of Symmes Hole? Of course you shrug your shoulders; it was preternatural simplicity you say, the mad dream of a fool, uproariously derided. Yes! Symmes was not a fool; he was a brave man, a soldier, chasing a reality through the distortions of an hallucination. There is no hole; the earth is not hollow, but—there is a depression; there must be. The depression is at the North Pole somewhere. It has not been found, and the Arctic seas have been parcourired by explorers, as you notice, Goritz. The depression is Krocker Land. If profound its climate is temperate. Life, the remnants of its first evolutionary phases, may be there—but mark me!” The Professor positively dilated, everything in him enlarged as if his bounding heart sent fuller currents of blood to all its outposts; his eyes were refulgent; I thought they were an emerald green; his hair rose in the thrill of his vaticination and his mouth opened into a vast exclamatory rictus, in which flashed his big white incisors like diminutive tusks. “Mark me, there too will be found the last evolutionary phases of the human race!”

Here was a climax, and the mental stupefaction of the Professor’s audience was exactly reflected in the prolonged silence that ensued. It was entertaining, however, to watch Spruce Hopkins’ fixed, expressionless perusal of the Professor’s face, and the immobile glory in the Professor’s answering stare. Hopkins spoke first:

“Well! I like your certainty about that depression, Prof. Can’t see it noway. You’re making things interesting enough, but surely that depression isn’t the gospel truth. Is it?”

The Professor relaxed; he laughed, and his laugh was the most curious blend of a chuckle and a whistle, utterly impossible to describe except by reproduction. It always affected Hopkins hilariously; he said the two elements in the Professor’s laugh were satisfaction and astonishment; the chuckle meant the first, the whistle the second, and the state of the Professor’s mind could be well gauged from the predominance of one or the other. Just then the chuckle had the best of it.

“Mr. Hopkins,” he said, “you are a very intelligent man. Don’t you see that a rotating and solidifying viscosity cannot become solid without forming a pitted polar extremity?”

Hopkins withstood this assault with admirable stolidity; he even looked injured.

“My dear Professor; really your statement is too simply put to appeal to the complicated convolutions of my gray matter. Your manner is juvenile. Such a subject should be treated in a becoming obscurity of terms.”

After our amusement had subsided, Bjornsen explained his view. It was easily understood. The earth had cooled down from some initial gaseous or lava-like stage, and, if the congelation had not progressed far or fast enough at the poles, centrifugal force at the equator would have withdrawn enough matter to effect a depletion at one pole or the other, with the consequent result (I recall how particular the Professor was over this point) of forming a graduated, evenly rounded and smoothish concavity, if the polar areas were not too rigidly fixed; or a broken, step-like succession of terraces if they were. Later we were triumphantly reminded by the Professor of this prediction. Then too he involved his theory with demonstrations of the vertical effect of rotation, producing inverted cones or funnels in liquids, as is familiarly seen in the discharging contents of a washbasin. We were not convinced, and our evident apathy or dissidence chilled the Professor into a taciturnity from which he was scarcely aroused when cries from the water’s edge of the fiord announced the return of a fishing fleet, a phalanx of jaegts, the single masted, square sailed, sturdy boats familiar to tourists in sea journeys along the fair Norwegian shores. It was welcomed with shouts and salutations, and the waving of flags and handkerchiefs, in which we joined.

But the hidden springs of wonderment, the latent impulse in young, strong men for adventure, discovery, perhaps some marvelous realization of the unknown, had been stirred within us. The Professor would have been gratified if he had known how restlessly Goritz and myself rolled about in our beds that night, or how with sleepless eyes, flat on our backs, we rehearsed his strange statements, or in dreams encountered polar bears, threading our way through devious leads to the wintry coasts of a NEW CONTINENT. The imagery of the north was familiar to us. We had both visited Spitzbergen and the Franz Josef Archipelago. As Hopkins had said, we had met him at Stockholm and discussed together the sensation of the hour, Bjornsen’s lecture at Christiania. We were all three of us idlers—I by compulsion—but firm in body, ambitious in spirit, and half exasperated at our uselessness in the world’s affairs. Goritz was a rich man, an only son, heir to the fortune of a successful fish merchant in Stockholm; I had a bare competency, and Spruce Hopkins, a vagabond American, seeing the world but yearning for sterner work, had already gained in Europe an unenviable reputation for reckless extravagance. It was at Hopkins’ suggestion that we had invited the Professor to meet us at the fiord, and we were all wondering how far we might go in this strange experiment of finding Krocker Land. Should we go at all?

Whatever satisfaction the Professor might have felt over Goritz’s and my own agitation, his most sanguine hopes of producing an impression would have been inflamed to exultation had he known that the Yankee had not slept a wink, had not taken off his clothes, but had just, as he characterized it, “stalled on everything,” until he got his bearings on this “new stunt.”

The Professor’s equanimity was restored when we met him in the diningroom at breakfast the following morning, and he most good-naturedly accepted professions of contrition at our mental obduracy. But it was the American who confounded him by his sudden determination and a precipitant proposition to “get away on the first tide.”

“Prof.,” he exclaimed clapping the smaller man on the shoulder with a cordial gaiety that shocked Goritz, “I’m willing to take the chance. It’s a big stake to win, though,” his whimsical smile propitiated the Professor completely. “I’m not buffaloed on all your talk about the tropical climate we’re likely to meet. Of course, I’ve looked into the matter a little, on my own hook, and just now the plan of action is something like this. These two good friends,” he waved his hands genially toward Goritz and myself, “know a good deal about zero temperatures, polar bears, walrus, starvation and ice floes; you have surveyed Spitzbergen, and as for myself—Well, honestly, I’m a tenderfoot but young, hardy, sound as a steel rail, a good shot, a prize rower, and once Prof., take it from me, I strangled a mad dog with these hands.”

Hopkins never looked handsomer than at that moment, his face burning with an expectant eagerness, the color rising to his temples beneath the waves of chestnut hair, his frame and figure like an Achilles.

The Professor nodded his approval and assent.

“We’ll make a strong quartette; quite enough for the jaunt. These big outfits are a blunder. I’ve always thought that was the mistake the English made. Plenty of dogs, rations and a few mouths go farther, with less strain and less risk. And another thing, friends,” he wheeled round from the Professor, and addressed us, “no big ship, no ‘Fram’, no ‘Roosevelt.’ We’ll get the stiffest and most flexible and biggest wooden naphtha launch that can be made; stock her; carry her up on a hired whaler from San Francisco, bunk at Point Barrow, pick our best chance through the leads in the open weather, and then with dogs, sleds, and kayaks, take to the main ice and scoot for the happy land of—Krocker! Eh?”

Goritz and I heard the extraordinary daredevil plan with consternation. It seemed the limit of foolishness, and absurdly ignorant. We waited for the inevitable crushing denunciation of such folly from the informed lips of the Professor. To our amazement the Professor grew radiant, seized Hopkins’ hands, shaking them vigorously, his pop-eyes starting out with the most amiable encouragement, while his beaming smile endorsed Hopkins’ lunacy with mad enthusiasm.

“Right, Mr. Hopkins! Right—the very thing. No reserve, no retreat, no store ship is necessary. I had convinced myself of the absolute propriety of just such a course of action, but I expected to find it a hopeless task to persuade anyone to believe me. Krocker Land will supply us with everything, and the ice course will be far more simple and easy than Nansen’s trip from 86° to Franz Josef Land, or Peary’s over North Greenland; a straight-away run with a few water breaks. No great hardships. At least,” and the Professor in a burst of audacious nonchalance knocked over a few glasses and a water carafe in his swinging ambulations, “none greater than the ordinary experiences of an Arctic traveler. I congratulate you, Mr. Hopkins, on your perspicacity—American shrewdness. Ah! American—what you call GAMENESS. Eh? Let me assure you that had you been a hardened, experienced North Pole explorer you would never have hit on this; NEVER. You’d have stuck to the old plans. And the only reason you are right now is that Krocker Land is an exceptional proposition, to be negotiated by exceptional methods. I promise you exceptional results.”

For a few moments Goritz and I were dumb with astonishment, and I think Goritz was almost choking with indignation. Somehow he suppressed his threatening outbreak and only muttered, “I suppose we will never want to come back—never need to?”

A ripple of comic commiseration crossed Hopkins’ face:

“Come now, Goritz. WHERE I COME BACK is just here,

‘Sa vandra vara stora man

Fran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”

The situation was so funny, with that tantalizingly humorous face of the Professor looking on in perplexity, that Goritz burst into laughter, in which I joined, and his evanescent rage was swept away.

But the Professor answered his implied sarcasm quite literally.

“Antoine,” he said, both hands raised imploringly, “trust me; we shall find food in Krocker Land, an abundance; the launch can return to Point Barrow with a small crew, and when we want it on our return—why—”

His indecision or uncertainty or the blankness of his mind about it was quickly relieved by Goritz.

“We’ll send a telegram ordering it over, and wait—for it?”

“Oh it’s no joke Goritz”—Goritz admitted sotto voce that it certainly was not. “We can get back without it, our kayaks will answer. And you forget the People of Krocker Land.”

“Why Professor,” I protested, “we haven’t heard of them before.”

The Professor assumed a surprised air, became portentously solemn, and then—I never felt quite certain whether he actually winked at Hopkins or not—gravely answered.

“The people of Krocker Land, Erickson, are an assured certainty. An unpeopled continent is as much a lusus naturae as an unfilled vacuum.”

“Certainly, Erickson. Didn’t you know that? Somebody must be provided to pocket the revenues from whale blubber and walrus ivory, not to mention the conservation bureau for glaciers, the output of icebergs, and the meteorological corps for the standardization of blizzards,” and Hopkins hid his face in his hands to stifle his screaming mirth.

But the Professor was neither ruffled nor amused; he went on oracularly:

“Erickson, the expectation is a little discouraging. Well I’ll say from your point of view it is almost impossible of belief that an unknown people exists in an unknown land near the North Pole. Now Stefansson’s discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos has nothing to do with my confidence in this matter. It rests upon a broad deduction, an a priori necessary assumption. If the original Eden, the primitive center of dispersion, on the basis of the unity of the human race—if—”

Behind the Professor, whose labyrinthine locution, sounding higher and higher, was attracting some general attention among the guests of the hotel, stood Hopkins with two tumblers of water in his hands. He raised them suddenly above his head and dropped them. The crash was startling, and it was followed by an equally unexpected yell of pain from Hopkins, who apparently slipped, fell, seized the tablecloth and dragged to the floor a varied array of glassware and cutlery in a clatter that was deafening.

Confusion, explanations, reparation and a tumult of amusement followed, and in it disappeared the Professor’s voluminous harangue. It was never resumed.

Hopkins recovered his seriousness, and we attacked the novel project he had suggested, critically. All that next day we argued over it, thrashing it out with the illuminative references Goritz, the Professor and myself could make to our own experiences, Hopkins listening and pertinaciously sticking to his original suggestions. His plan grew more and more attractive; its reasonableness developed more and more under examination. Of course all four of us were now thoroughly excited; the lure of discovery almost maddened us, and the necromantic charm of the Professor’s amazing predictions, which we actually were unwilling to resist, instilled in us the wayward and fantastic hope that we were on the verge of a world-convulsing disclosure. We have not been disappointed.

The project finally took this shape: Hopkins and Goritz volunteered to bear all the expenses connected with the expedition; Hopkins would go to America, consult naval architects, and have a naphtha-propelled launch devised, combining, as to its hull, features of the “Fram” and “Roosevelt” in a diminutive way. Goritz would follow and buy the supplies, clothing and equipment. Then would come the Professor with instruments and books, and finally myself with three chosen men—Hopkins demanded they should be selected in America—who would be the captain, engineer and crew of the launch on its return to Point Barrow, and who would look for us the next summer. How preposterously sure we were that we would find land and game! But how ineffectually paltry after all were our expectations compared to the reality.

When everything was ready—the end of a year’s time was fixed for the date of our departure—we would have the launch set amidships on a whaler, and sail for Point Barrow, our prospective headquarters on the North American continent.

The last question Hopkins put to the Professor before we parted was about the mineral wealth of the new land, which had now incorporated its actuality with every sleeping and waking moment, seeming as certain as any other unvisited realm of Earth which we had seen on maps, but never visited.

Of course the Professor was quite equal to this demand upon his imagination.

“Mineral wealth? Probably immense. The mother lodes of the gold of Alaska have never been found. They lie north of Alaska; the geological extension of the mineral deposits of Alaska is naturally in that direction, and the enrichment of the primary crystallines with the precious metals can be reasonably asserted to surpass the mythical values of Golconda or California.”

“That suits me,” was Hopkins’ laconic comment.

At last the whole scheme was pretty thoroughly worked out, down to its details. Correspondence would be maintained during the summer. The Professor left for Christiania, Goritz and myself for Stockholm, and Hopkins steamed away to Hull on the English ship “North Cape.” Our conference had lasted just a week.

How wonderfully lovely was the day and scene when he left us that June morning three years ago. If portents of our success could be discerned in its delicious, enveloping glory of light and beauty, then surely we might be hopeful. The great gulls were sweeping with deep undulations through the upper sky, exulting in their splendid power, the summer wind faintly stirred the dark spruces, whose gentle expostulation at its intrusion reached us with a sound like the washing of waves on a faraway shore. The granite rocks of peak and cliff flashed back the unchecked sunlight; the road, like a white ribbon, spun its loops to and fro over the hillside, through meads where the glistening red farm houses stood, that seemed like rubies set in an emerald shield while the waters of the fiord slumbered at our feet, a liquid mass of beryl.

It now seems to me as if a quarter of a century had passed since then. And, if events are the measure of duration to the subjective sense, it might seem even farther away. I recall Spruce Hopkins, radiant and handsome, amid a throng of new acquaintances—he gathered friends about him as frankly and quickly as roses attract bees—among whom not a few young women offered him their mute but eloquent admiration; I remember him leaning over the rail of the steamer’s deck and reciting in a rollicking drawl:

“When the sea rolled its fathomless billows

Across the broad plains of Nebraska;

When around the North Pole grew bananas and willows,

And mastodons fought with the great armadillos,

For the pine-apples grown in Alaska.”

(Editorial Apology. The foregoing chapter in its diction and in certain studied phases of construction will disturb the reader’s sense of congruity, perhaps. He will be inclined to doubt its authenticity as the exact narrative of Alfred Erickson. The suspicion is partly creditable to his literary acumen. The editor admits substantial emendations useful for the purpose of imparting a literary atmosphere.)

CHAPTER II
Point Barrow

We were all aboard the steam whaler “Astrum” in the spring of the next year, and with us a marvel of compact maritime construction, our naphtha launch “Pluto”. Hopkins suggested the name on the satisfactory ground that we were likely to have “a hell of a time.” We had worked ourselves up to the most supreme height of confidence and enthusiasm. The Professor was in a sort of demented state of expectation; Hopkins furiously asserted the name of Christopher Columbus would now be forgotten in the new fame to be allotted to us, “the Arctic Argonauts,” and finally Goritz and myself succumbed to a peculiar feeling of predestination.

Captain Coogan of the “Astrum” knew nothing of our proposed destination. It was a stipulation made by Hopkins that nothing on that point was to be discussed, until we reached Point Barrow—if we were to reach it—and the services of Captain Coogan and his selected crew—not the usual polyglot assemblage of ethnic odds and ends—were unconditionally ours up to that moment. The temptations of whaling were to be absolutely eschewed until we had vanished into the fogs and wilderness of the ice pack, beyond whose trackless waste lay Krocker Land. Of course a sea dog like Captain Coogan, a clever and hardy mate like Isaac Stanwix, a pertinacious thinker like the engineer Bell Phillips, and such an experienced and avaricious reader as the carpenter Jack Spent (he had made ten trips to Point Barrow) could make pretty shrewd guesses as to our intentions. The stores and supplies, the sledges and kayaks, splendid vehicles of travel made under Goritz’s supervision, were informing enough, had it not been for the disconcerting secrecy of the actors in this strange new ice-drama. I think we were regarded as a “parcel of wild devils or fools,” though I think too, with the exception of perhaps the Professor, our physical constants were impressive.

Our departure did not escape public notice. We were besieged by reporters, but we were impenetrable, and yet we were genially communicative too. It was the Arctic or bowhead whale we were interested in; we were naturalists, the Professor was hoping to introduce the bowhead whale into European waters; just now a preliminary study of its habits, habitat, food, breeding grounds, and commercial availability was indispensable. That fiction sufficed. The remarkable launch prepared for us was made into a skillful adjunct to our investigations. We were honored by several columns of interviews in the dailies, and the splash of our adventure spread its circle of disturbance even to Washington, whence official offers of assistance and participation were received which—were never answered. Among our visitors, for we did not escape the invasion of sightseers, was that Goliah, Carlos Huerta, from whose branding iron you saved me.

(Erickson spoke this measuredly and calmly to be sure, but his hands covered his face, and I saw his body sway, convulsed by his emotion.)

“This man somehow appealed to me; perhaps it was his herculean dimensions. He was familiar with launches and machinery, and was very intelligent; forceful, too. His suavity disarmed suspicion, and his robust, seemingly ingenuous interest pleased me. Almost his last words, before we sailed, invited me to come to see him—he handed me his card—and to tell him “all about it.” It was a curious, inexplicable divination on his part that I should have much to tell. That man, Mr. Link, was the most ruthless scoundrel I ever met; he was my first scoundrel; because I had never met a scoundrel before I fell into his net.

(Again a pause. It lasted so long that I feared some complication of feeling had robbed him of his memory. I said “And Mr. Erickson, you left San Francisco?” His consciousness returned, and he turned to me smiling.)

Yes, we left San Francisco about the end of April, a dull day with fog banks lifting and falling over the Golden Gate, while a rising storm outside was turning the ocean into water alps, smiting the clouds. Our course was almost a direct line to Behring Straits; we were to pass through the channel between Unalaska and Uninak Islands, then coast the Pribylof Islands for the benefit of the Professor, reach Indian Point, on the Siberian side of the strait where some of the natives, Masinkers (Tchouktchis), could be seen, then cross to Port Clarence on the Alaskan shore for an inspection of the Nakooruks (Innuits); then two stops for the benefit of Hopkins and Goritz. We also intended to secure at the latter place dogs for our dash over the ice to the Krocker Land shore from Point Barrow. Captain Coogan recommended a stop at Cape Prince of Wales where further ethnological notes might be gathered, but this was overruled as both the Professor and Hopkins expected to visit the coal beds beyond Point Hope, and Cape Lisburne in the Arctic Ocean.

We came abreast of Pribylof about May sixth, stalled off St. Paul’s Island in a still sea, light southwest winds and rising tide. The Professor was pulled off to the island in the morning; his eagerness to visit these famous fur-seal rookeries being irrepressible. He had talked of little else, in the intervals when we were not discussing our momentous enterprise, but the marvelous stories which old navigators, Captain Scammon and Captain Bryant had told, and the fascinating studies of Elliot. He told us that formerly, in the middle of the nineteenth century and later, these pelagic mammals had swarmed in millions up to these islands, rising from the ocean like a veritable mammal inundation. He told us about the bull seals, how they fought, their tenacity, their endurance, how a bull will fight fifty or sixty battles for the possession of his ample harem of twelve or fifteen cows, and last out to the end of the season, three months perhaps without food, living on his own fat, covered with scars, eyes gouged out, striped with blood; and how the jovial bachelors, not so disconsolate as might be imagined, the “hollus-chickies,” congregate to one side. He said the noise from these monstrous breeding grounds, where thousands of seals are roaring, bleating, calling—mothers, fathers and pups—could be heard, with the wind right, five or six miles to sea. He didn’t expect to see the households developed then—it was too early—but he might have an opportunity to find a few advance bulls on their stations. He found the bulls, and he found an adventure, and we found him.

It was almost four or five hours after the Professor had left the ship in a yawl rowed by two sailors, that Hopkins, Goritz, and myself followed him in another boat. We saw the yawl on a short beach of sand, with the men sunning themselves and asleep on the black rocks which hemmed in the little cove. We ran our boat on the sands, the men came strolling toward us, rubbing their eyes and recovering from the inertia of what had been an uninterrupted snooze. When we asked for the Professor they told us he had disappeared, and had ordered them to stay where they were while he pursued his investigations. He certainly was nowhere in sight and a little anxious over his long absence we moved up to the broken rim of rocks which probably separated this retreat from some similar beach on either side.

The elevated cones and ridges of the island could be seen towering up toward the interior in gaunt gray surfaces, on which rested extensive patches of snow. We surmounted the inconsiderable elevation and found it was a broader barrier than we had anticipated, a platform of jagged projecting crests with intervening rocky basins or tables, the whole an extended spur from a black wall of rock, on whose summit were the clustering huts of a native village. On the edges of the rocks hung a few large cakes of ice, and the receding tide had left broken, hummocky masses tilted at various angles over the inclined faces of stone. The scene was chilly and desolate and to add to its lugubrious desolation a fog had slowly drifted in from the sea and was now tortuously rolling down from the highland on the opposite shore to the island. Our search for the missing Professor would have to be hastened.

“The Professor must be found,” said Hopkins. “We shan’t know how to deal with the native Krockerans when we meet ’em, without the Professor. At present he is the only man alive who understands their peculiarities, and as an interpreter he’s bound to prove useful.”

“Of course,” said Goritz, “you don’t think the seals can eat him?”

“They might,” answered Hopkins, “but they could never digest him. It would certainly be a death potion to the venturesome bull who mistook him for food. Likely as not he is now engaged in explaining to an interesting family his plans for the preservation and increase of them and their kindred.”

During this irrelevant badinage I had crossed the rocky flat and reached another cove or gully, headed towards the land by a slope of broken boulders, and floored with sand. We had as yet encountered no seals. Looking beyond this bay I saw on a promontory bounding the distant edge of the beach what seemed like a human figure, or indeed like a group of figures. Watching the objects for a short time I could more clearly distinguish them, and to my astonishment determined that one was a man and the rest some erect animal forms, doubtless seals. The group was at an extreme point on the rocks, and, if the solitary human was the Professor, his only possible retreat from the beleaguering seals would be the water.

I hallooed to my companions, pointing to the distant objects, and hastened forward onto the rock-strewn beach. Goritz and Hopkins struggled over the rough patch of rocks and overtook me.

“Yes, by the lives of all the saints!” cried Hopkins, who had stopped a moment and with shaded eyes was studying the enigmatical figures silhouetted against sea and sky. “It’s the Professor and three beachmasters apparently bent on his capture, or else drinking in wisdom from his lips. It might just be they’re competing for his services in teaching their prospective families.”

“I can see him waving his hands, it seems to me, and now he’s shooing them with his hat,” exclaimed Goritz. “He’s in something of a fix. Hurry.”

THE PROFESSOR AND THE PRIBYLOF SEALS

We bounded forward, and over the beaten sand raced together, taking quick glances ahead at the now certain embarrassment of our friend. It was indeed the Professor, and his predicament was unmistakable. Amusement however mingled with our anxiety, for as we drew near we could plainly make out that he had taken his hat between his teeth and was violently wagging his head, the absurd appendage of his cap flying up and down producing a very ludicrous effect. It was a serviceable device, however, for the amazed seals had stopped their approaches; their barking or snarling, at first quite audible, had ceased, and they were now attentively regarding the Professor with almost immobile heads.

“Guess,” called out Hopkins between breaths, “they think the Professor is a little dippy, and are reconsidering his engagement as a domestic instructor.”

We were now near enough to attract the Professor’s sight; he hailed us with swinging arms but did not venture to desist from his mandarin-like wig-wagging. The approach to his position was a little difficult, and we suffered some falls. Our advent had attracted the notice of the bulls and they swerved about to receive us, humping their backs, leaping forward on their flippers, and renewing their truculent miauling or barking. We attacked them with stones but their defiance was unchanged, and they lunged and rushed, quite unappalled by our onset. They would retreat almost immediately to their former positions, holding the poor Professor in chancery with an apparent unanimity that kept Goritz laughing, for with every retreat, the Professor would renew his violent gesticulations.

At length Goritz and Hopkins armed with an armful of stones drove in on the biggest of the bulls, and assailed him with such a shower of missiles that his reserve was overcome, and he plunged forward, following them for twenty feet or more. I ran to the Professor and caught his arm, and we got out of the zone of danger, while the momentarily allied beachmasters, frustrated from their imprisonment of him, suddenly resented each other’s proximity and after a miscellaneous “mix-up,” as Hopkins called it, shuffled and loped away to their former stations, the chosen spots for their future seraglios.

With the liberated Professor we sat down on some stool-like fragments inserted in the sand of the beach and heard his story. It was laughable enough and added an unusual trait to the recorded conduct of the big bull seals, usually indifferent to the approach of men. These three indolent, unoccupied forerunners of the great herds that might soon be expected, had actually chased the Professor and, having cornered him on the promontory, had hopelessly besieged him. The Professor had been too much interested or too imprudent. His amiability perhaps had brought him into this unexpected dilemma, for he had gathered up seaweed from the rocks at the edge of the water, and attempted to feed the bulls. They followed him, and their disappointed expectations developed later into the pugnacity that had made him a prisoner.

While he was talking a few more seals emerged from the ocean, lazily hauling themselves on the rocks with that ill-assured clumsiness of motion so strikingly replaced in the water by the greatest grace, agility and speed.

“But Professor,” interrupted Goritz, “what were you doing with your hat?”

The Professor, who had been much ruffled and excited over his encounter, welcomed this inquiry with a restored equanimity.

“Ah! Goritz, that is a contribution to science. On our return I shall call the attention of Lloyd Morgan and other animal psychologists to this novel observation. Antoine, it has long been known that the rhythmical oscillation of a flexible substance, a rag, hat, towel, banner, exercises a peculiar influence on animals. It will allay the ferocity of a mad dog or alarm him. Color has something to do with it, as instance the red rag which irritates the bull. Now—” here the Professor looked critically at his steamer cap, and may have mentally noted that it was a green and brown Scotch plaid. “Now this influence seems curiously reinforced if the substance or garment is taken in the mouth and shaken.”

The incorrigible Hopkins had again buried his face in his cupped palms.

“No reason that is incontrovertible has been assigned for this, but I assume that it is an appeal to a latent demonism in animals, which in its later evolution appears as devil-worship in aboriginal people. I most fortunately recalled this, and at a critical moment, when I was threatened with the necessity of retreating into the sea—” The poorly repressed vibrations in Hopkins’ body might have been referred to sympathy or—something else. “A quite unnecessary ablution, let us say,” and the Professor smiled benignantly at me, as perhaps the one most gravely interested in his narrative. “I thought of this remarkable device, which I believe has something of the nature of an incantation. The effect was miraculous. This simple gesture held the seals at bay; I think it is quite demonstrable also that there is a physiological basis for their evident stupefaction—the optic nerve. These animals you know have very poor sight—the optic nerve is disturbed and a cerebral vertigo is induced which, like—”

“That settles it,” cried Hopkins, stumbling to his feet with a very red face and hurrying across the sands. “Professor, there’s something worse than seals on this island; there are the U. S. officials, and—I guess they are charmproof.”

“Exactly,” assented the Professor in an absent-minded way, “exactly, but had you gentlemen restrained yourselves a little, I believe I could have advanced an interesting corroboration to a hitherto dimly—”

A gun shot was heard. It evidently came from our men in the adjoining cove and we smothered the Professor’s scientific homily with a shout, and accelerated our departure.

When we reached the boat we found some natives and two resident officials surrounding our men, the former somewhat excited and demonstrative. The officials questioned us and were informed of our purely accidental visit, and with that explanation, as the fog had increased and there were threatening symptoms of a blow, we manned our boats and got away.

Captain Coogan resumed our course, making northwest for Indian Point, amid heavy ice, whose leads were carefully followed until they liberated us in open water, and the immediate danger of being nipped was past. The next morning I was awakened—my room adjoined Hopkins’—by hearing the American reciting in a voice loud enough to justify forcible remonstrance:

“I met my mates in the morning (and Oh, but I am old),