"Like a Japanese doll, isn't she?" he said. "Or one of Moosta's babies."
"Ah!" cried Andree in sharp passion. "Do not say to me of Moosta's babies."
She was out of the igloo and across the beach before Dick could follow her, and in the barrack-kitchen he found her quarrelling heatedly with Brayne. But that incident in Mrs. Ek-ki-do's igloo haunted him for some days. For many years he had tried to teach himself Nietszche's new commandment, "Be hard;" but, because of the irrationalism which he recognised, his strength there was always likely to be shaken at the unexpected call on it.
Ten days later came Dick's last night at Herschel, and he felt a curious and uneasy reluctance at leaving it. All the afternoon he had been on the wind-swept plateau with Brayne and Selkirk, sawing out the great blocks of ice from the fresh-water lake for storage in the ice-house until summer came, and his last sight of the dead white Polar sea from it had brought him down shivering with more than cold. For the first time he had a distinct dread of this long journey which was surely likely to be no worse than many which he had taken before.
By the stove in Baxter's little room Andree was putting floats on a small net with which she intended to catch fish in the Mackenzie. She sang as she worked, and her face was lit with anticipation. Dick knew that on himself only, the product of a refined civilisation, lay the horrors of that anticipation. Andree never attempted to realise a thing until she came to it, and seldom then. She would never have run from justice if the breed who had brought her word of something Ducane had once said had not urged it, for she had quite forgotten the fear which possessed her at the time of the trial. She forgot quickly as an animal does, and far more completely, because her eager ignorant mind always flung itself fully on the next new thing. This long mush through the half-dark of an Arctic winter, with only Dick beside her for the most part, would be something new and strange and altogether delightful.
"Bec-a-bec; et toi, et moi,"
she hummed. Then she glanced up.
