La Bijou darted across the narrower channel to the sand-spit and slipped up a little ice ravine, where the walls were less precipitous.  They landed on an out-jutting cake, which, without support, overhung the water for sheer thirty feet.  How far its other end could be buried in the mass was matter for conjecture.  They climbed to the summit, dragging the canoe after them, and looked out over the dazzle.  Floe was piled on floe in titanic confusion.  Huge blocks topped and overtopped one another, only to serve as pedestals for great white masses, which blazed and scintillated in the sun like monstrous jewels.

“A bonny place for a bit walk,” Tommy sneered, “wi’ the next jam fair to come ony time.”  He sat down resolutely.  “No, thank ye kindly, I’ll no try it.”

Frona and Corliss clambered on, the canoe between them.

“The Persians lashed their slaves into battle,” she remarked, looking back.  “I never understood before.  Hadn’t you better go back after him?”

Corliss kicked him up, whimpering, and forced him to go on in advance.  The canoe was an affair of little weight, but its bulk, on the steep rises and sharp turns, taxed their strength.  The sun burned down upon them.  Its white glare hurt their eyes, the sweat oozed out from every pore, and they panted for breath.

“Oh, Vance, do you know . . .”

“What?” He swept the perspiration from his forehead and flung it from him with a quick flirt of the hand.

“I wish I had eaten more breakfast.”

He grunted sympathetically.  They had reached the midmost ridge and could see the open river, and beyond, quite clearly, the man and his signal of distress.  Below, pastoral in its green quiet, lay Split-up Island.  They looked up to the broad bend of the Yukon, smiling lazily, as though it were not capable at any moment of spewing forth a flood of death.  At their feet the ice sloped down into a miniature gorge, across which the sun cast a broad shadow.

“Go on, Tommy,” Frona bade.  “We’re half-way over, and there’s water down there.”

“It’s water ye’d be thinkin’ on, is it?” he snarled, “and you a-leadin’ a buddie to his death!”

“I fear you have done some great sin, Tommy,” she said, with a reproving shake of the head, “or else you would not be so afraid of death.”  She sighed and picked up her end of the canoe.  “Well, I suppose it is natural.  You do not know how to die—­”

“No more do I want to die,” he broke in fiercely.

“But there come times for all men to die,—­times when to die is the only thing to do.  Perhaps this is such a time.”

Tommy slid carefully over a glistening ledge and dropped his height to a broad foothold.  “It’s a’ vera guid,” he grinned up; “but dinna ye think a’ve suffeecient discreemeenation to judge for mysel’?  Why should I no sing my ain sang?”

“Because you do not know how.  The strong have ever pitched the key for such as you.  It is they that have taught your kind when and how to die, and led you to die, and lashed you to die.”