The instant the door was shut, the priest set down the lamp, and laid his hands on the young man’s shoulders.

“My son, you must not go on this mad journey.”

“I must, you know.”

“You must not.  Sit there.”  He pushed him into a chair.  “Let me tell you.  I do not speak as the ignorant.  I have in my day travelled many hundreds of miles on the ice; but I’ve done it in the season when the trail’s at its best, with dogs, my son, and with tried native servants.”

“I know it is pleasanter that way, but—­”

“Pleasanter?  It is the way to keep alive.”

“But the Indians travel with hand-sleds.”

“For short distances, yes, and they are inured to the climate.  You?  You know nothing of what lies before you.”

“But we’ll find out as other people have.”  The Boy smiled confidently.

“I assure you, my son, it is madness, this thing you are trying to do.  The chances of either of you coming out alive, are one in fifty.  In fifty, did I say?  In five hundred.”

“I don’t think so, Father.  We don’t mean to travel when—­”

“But you’ll have to travel.  To stay in such places as you’ll find yourself in will be to starve.  Or if by any miracle you escape the worst effects of cold and hunger, you’ll get caught in the ice in the spring break-up, and go down to destruction on a floe.  You’ve no conception what it’s like.  If you were six weeks earlier, or six weeks later, I would hold my peace.”

The Boy looked at the priest and then away. Was it going to be so bad?  Would they leave their bones on the ice?  Would they go washing by the mission in the great spring flood, that all men spoke of with the same grave look?  He had a sudden vision of the torrent as it would be in June.  Among the whirling ice-masses that swept by—­two bodies, swollen, unrecognisable.  One gigantic, one dressed gaily in chaparejos.  And neither would lift his head, but, like men bent grimly upon some great errand, they would hurry on, past the tall white cross with never a sign—­on, on to the sea.

“Be persuaded, my son.”

Dimly the Boy knew he was even now borne along upon a current equally irresistible, this one setting northward, as that other back to the south.  He found himself shaking his head under the Jesuit’s remonstrant eyes.

“We’ve lost so much time already.  We couldn’t possibly turn back—­now.”

“Then here’s my Grammar.”  With an almost comic change of tone and manner the priest turned to the table where the lamp stood, among piles of neatly tied-up and docketed papers.

He undid one of the packets, with an ear on the sudden sounds outside in the passage.

“Brother Paul’s got it in the schoolhouse.”

Brother Paul!  He hadn’t been at the entertainment, and no one seemed to have missed him.

“How did Sister Winifred know?” asked another voice.