But as the engineer rounded a point, he suddenly exclaimed;

“There!  Ain’t h’I been sayin’ hit!  I ’ates to think ’ow jolly stupit som’ums of ye are.”

He was pointing to the banks which overhung the sea.  The men, who were looking only for driftwood, did not at first see the cause of his exclamation.

“Coal, my lads!” Jarvis exclaimed, half beside himself.  “Coal cropping from the bank!”

It was true.  A careful examination showed a four-foot vein of soft coal.  It was not long until reindeer sleds, secured from the natives, were drawing quantities of the fuel to a point beneath a cliff, where a crude forge had been made out of granite rock.

While this work was going on, the engineer disappeared in the direction of the village.  In a half-hour he came tearing back, his face red with rage.

“They’re h’out!” he sputtered.  “The bally, blithering unnatural ’eathen hev flew the h’ivory coops.  T’was to be expected.  I ‘ates t’ think what h’I’d a-done, ’ad h’I ’ad the say of it.”

“Oh, well,” said the Doctor, who was inclined to take Jarvis’ quarrel with the natives rather lightly, “in twenty-four hours we’ll be away from these shores never to return.”

“Return?” exclaimed Jarvis.  “H’I’ll return, an’ Dave ’ere’ll return.  We’ll be rich men, we’ll be.  I ‘ates t’ think ’ow rich ‘im an’ me’ll be!”

But the Doctor was too busy hurrying the mechanics in their repairs to heed the words of the excited engineer.

Finally the forge was ready and as by the Arctic moonlight a black smoke rose higher and higher above the cliffs, and a fire blazed a thousand times larger and hotter than that black shore had ever known, the natives appeared to grow more and more certain that these men who came up from the depths of the sea were, indeed, the spirits of all the dead whales that they and their forefathers before them had killed.  They looked on in silent awe.

It was with the greatest difficulty that Jarvis succeeded in finding one of them who was able to speak the Chukche language of Behring Strait, a language that was understood by Azazruk, the Eskimo.  When, at last, he did find a man who knew Chukche and who was not too frightened to talk, he plied him with many questions.

“Who were the three strange-appearing natives who had attacked him and his companion in the jail?  Where did they come from?  What were they doing here?  How did they happen to have such a strange jail?  How did they chance to have a jail at all?  Where did the gold come from that had been used to inlay the ivory?  Was there much of it to be found?”

These, and many other questions, the engineer put to the trembling native, while, with one eye, he watched the operations of the mechanics who labored by the fire.