All Pymeut had come rushing pell-mell.

The Colonel was gathering himself up and looking round in a dazed kind of way as Nicholas flashed by.  Just beyond, in that yawning hole, fully ten feet wide by fifteen long, the Boy’s head appeared an instant, and then was lost like something seen in a dream.  Some of the Pymeuts with quick knives were cutting the canvas loose.  One end was passed to Nicholas; he knotted it to his belt, and went swiftly, but gingerly, forward nearer the perilous edge.  He had flung himself down on his stomach just as the Boy rose again.  Nicholas lurched his body over the brink, his arms outstretched, straining farther, farther yet, till it seemed as if only the counterweight of the rest of the population at the other end of the canvas prevented his joining the Boy in the hole.  But Nicholas had got a grip of him, and while two of the Pymeuts hung on to the half-stunned Colonel to prevent his adding to the complication, Nicholas, with a good deal of trouble in spite of Yagorsha’s help, hauled the Boy out of the hole and dragged him up on the ice-edge.  The others applied themselves lustily to their end of the canvas, and soon they were all at a safe distance from the yawning danger.

The Boy’s predominant feeling had been one of intense surprise.  He looked round, and a hideous misgiving seized him.

“Anything the matter with you, Colonel?” His tone was so angry that, as they stared at each other, they both fell to laughing.

“Well, I rather thought that was what I was going to say”; and Kentucky heaved a deep sigh of relief.

The Boy’s teeth began to chatter, and his clothes were soon freezing on him.  They got him up off the ice, and Nicholas and the sturdy old Pymeut story-teller, Yagorsha, walked him, or ran him rather, the rest of the way to Pymeut, for they were not so near the village as the travellers had supposed on seeing nearly the whole male population.  The Colonel was not far behind, and several of the bucks were bringing the disabled sled.  Before reaching the Kachime, they were joined by the women and children, Muckluck much concerned at the sight of her friend glazed in ice from head to heel.  Nicholas and Yagorsha half dragged, half pulled him into the Kachime.  The entire escort followed, even two or three very dirty little boys—­everybody, except the handful of women and girls left at the mouth of the underground entrance and the two men who had run on to make a fire.  It was already smoking viciously as though the seal-lamps weren’t doing enough in that line, when Yagorsha and Nicholas laid the half-frozen traveller on the sleeping-bench.

The Pymeuts knew that the great thing was to get the ice-stiffened clothes off as quickly as might be, and that is to be done expeditiously only by cutting them off.  In vain the Boy protested.  Recklessly they sawed and cut and stripped him, rubbed him and wrapped him in a rabbit-blanket, the fur turned inside, and a wolverine skin over that.  The Colonel at intervals poured small doses of O’Flynn’s whisky down the Boy’s throat in spite of his unbecoming behaviour, for he was both belligerent and ungrateful, complaining loudly of the ruin of his clothes with only such intermission as the teeth-chattering, swallowing, and rude handling necessitated.