So he mused till the boat drove in, ice-rimed and battered, against the edge of the rim-ice.  The one white man aboard sprang:  out, painter in hand, to slow it down and work into the channel.  But the rim-ice was formed of the night, and the front of it shelved off with him into the current.  The nose of the boat sheered out under the pressure of a heavy cake, so that he came up at the stern.  The woman’s arm flashed over the side to his collar, and at the same instant, sharp and authoritative, her voice rang out to the Indian oarsmen to back water.  Still holding the man’s head above water, she threw her body against the sweep and guided the boat stern-foremost into the opening.  A few more strokes and it grounded at the foot of the bank.  She passed the collar of the chattering man to Dave Harney, who dragged him out and started him off on the trail of the mail-carriers.

Frona stood up, her cheeks glowing from the quick work.  Jacob Welse hesitated.  Though he stood within reach of the gunwale, a gulf of three years was between.  The womanhood of twenty, added unto the girl of seventeen, made a sum more prodigious than he had imagined.  He did not know whether to bear-hug the radiant young creature or to take her hand and help her ashore.  But there was no apparent hitch, for she leaped beside him and was into his arms.  Those above looked away to a man till the two came up the bank hand in hand.

“Gentlemen, my daughter.”  There was a great pride in his face.

Frona embraced them all with a comrade smile, and each man felt that for an instant her eyes had looked straight into his.

CHAPTER VII

That Vance Corliss wanted to see more of the girl he had divided blankets with, goes with the saying.  He had not been wise enough to lug a camera into the country, but none the less, by a yet subtler process, a sun-picture had been recorded somewhere on his cerebral tissues.  In the flash of an instant it had been done.  A wave message of light and color, a molecular agitation and integration, a certain minute though definite corrugation in a brain recess,—­and there it was, a picture complete!  The blazing sunlight on the beetling black; a slender gray form, radiant, starting forward to the vision from the marge where light and darkness met; a fresh young morning smile wreathed in a flame of burning gold.

It was a picture he looked at often, and the more he looked the greater was his desire, to see Frona Welse again.  This event he anticipated with a thrill, with the exultancy over change which is common of all life.  She was something new, a fresh type, a woman unrelated to all women he had met.  Out of the fascinating unknown a pair of hazel eyes smiled into his, and a hand, soft of touch and strong of grip, beckoned him.  And there was an allurement about it which was as the allurement of sin.