Then he shouted again and listened intently, and again and again, but only the roar and boom of sea and pounding ice and the shrieking and weird moaning of the wind gave answer.

“Well, I’ve lost Jimmy, sure enough,” he acknowledged to himself at last, after much futile shouting, “and I’m lost myself, too!  I don’t know north from south, and I couldn’t hit in ten guesses in which direction the komatik is!  This is a pretty mess!”

Dusk was not far off, and there was no time to be lost, and without further parley or useless waste of breath and strength Bobby set bravely to work with his snow knife, as any wilderness dweller in similar case would have done, and in a little while had prepared for himself a grave-shaped cavern in the drift, with a stout roof of snow blocks, and when it was finished he crawled in and closed the entrance with a huge block.

This emergency shelter was, of course, not to be compared with a properly built igloo, but an igloo he could scarcely have built in the face of the storm without assistance.  It was, however, much more comfortable than a burrow in the drift, such as Jimmy had made, for it gave him an opportunity to turn over and stretch his limbs, and it afforded him, also, a considerable breathing space.

“’Twould be fine, now, if I only had my sleeping bag,” he soliloquized, when he had at last composed himself in his improvised shelter.  “I hope Jimmy’s just as snug.  I told him about getting in the snow like the dogs do, and he’ll do it and be all right, and he’s got his sleeping bag, too.”

Bobby was not given to vain regrets and needless worry, as we have seen, but nevertheless he could not keep his mind from the possible fate of himself and Jimmy, and think as he would he could conceive of no possible means of their escape, save in the possibility of the floe coming again in contact with land.  Then his thoughts ran to Abel and Mrs. Abel, and before he was aware of it he was crying bitterly.

“If I’d only hurried on, as Skipper Ed told me to!” he moaned.  “I’m always doing something!  And there’s Jimmy in the—­in the fix too!  And it was all my fault!”

And then he remembered the evening devotions that Abel and Mrs. Abel were doubtless then holding in the cabin.  He could see Abel taking the old worn Eskimo Bible and hymnal from the shelf, and Abel reading and the two good folks singing a hymn, and then kneeling in praise and thanks to God for his mercies.  And joining them in spirit he sang the Eskimo version of “Nearer My God to Thee,” and then he knelt and prayed, and felt the better for it.

For a long while he lay, after his devotions were ended, recalling the kindness of his beloved foster parents.  But at last he, too, like Jimmy, fell asleep to the tune of the booming ice and howling wind, and, exhausted with his day’s work, he slept long and heavily.

When Bobby awoke at last he perceived that it was twilight in his snow cavern, and, listening for the wind, discovered to his satisfaction that it had ceased to blow.