All three looked inquiringly to Jacob Welse.

He shrugged his shoulders.  “How should I know?  A white man or an Indian; starvation most likely, or else he is injured.”

“But he may be dying,” Frona pleaded, as though her father, who had done most things, could do all things.

“We can do nothing.”

“Ah!  Terrible! terrible!” The baron wrung his hands.  “Before our very eyes, and we can do nothing!  No!” he exclaimed, with swift resolution, “it shall not be!  I will cross the ice!”

He would have started precipitately down the bank had not Jacob Welse caught his arm.

“Not such a rush, baron.  Keep your head.”

“But—­”

“But nothing.  Does the man want food, or medicine, or what?  Wait a moment.  We will try it together.”

“Count me in,” St. Vincent volunteered promptly, and Frona’s eyes sparkled.

While she made up a bundle of food in the tent, the men provided and rigged themselves with sixty or seventy feet of light rope.  Jacob Welse and St. Vincent made themselves fast to it at either end, and the baron in the middle.  He claimed the food as his portion, and strapped it to his broad shoulders.  Frona watched their progress from the bank.  The first hundred yards were easy going, but she noticed at once the change when they had passed the limit of the fairly solid shore-ice.  Her father led sturdily, feeling ahead and to the side with his staff and changing direction continually.

St. Vincent, at the rear of the extended line, was the first to go through, but he fell with the pole thrust deftly across the opening and resting on the ice.  His head did not go under, though the current sucked powerfully, and the two men dragged him out after a sharp pull.  Frona saw them consult together for a minute, with much pointing and gesticulating on the part of the baron, and then St. Vincent detach himself and turn shoreward.

“Br-r-r-r,” he shivered, coming up the bank to her.  “It’s impossible.”

“But why didn’t they come in?” she asked, a slight note of displeasure manifest in her voice.

“Said they were going to make one more try, first.  That Courbertin is hot-headed, you know.”

“And my father just as bull-headed,” she smiled.  “But hadn’t you better change?  There are spare things in the tent.”

“Oh, no.”  He threw himself down beside her.  “It’s warm in the sun.”

For an hour they watched the two men, who had become mere specks of black in the distance; for they had managed to gain the middle of the river and at the same time had worked nearly a mile up-stream.  Frona followed them closely with the glasses, though often they were lost to sight behind the ice-ridges.

“It was unfair of them,” she heard St. Vincent complain, “to say they were only going to have one more try.  Otherwise I should not have turned back.  Yet they can’t make it—­absolutely impossible.”