“Her heart is in the south,” Ootah sadly moaned.

“The heart of woman changes always,” cried Maisanguaq.  “The heart of woman always yields to force. Pst?”

Seeing Ootah turn slightly toward Annadoah, Maisanguaq sprang at his throat.  Their arms closed about one another.  Maisanguaq breathed the wrath of the spirits upon Ootah.  He fought with the fierce strength of one insane with jealous, murderous rage.  The icy floe rocked beneath them.  They slipped to and fro on the treacherous ice.  The sharp snow beat their faces.  Water washed under their feet.  At times they reached, in their frightful struggle, the very edge of the floe, and seemed about to tumble into the seething sea.  Ootah felt Maisanguaq trying to force him into the watery abyss—­but he fought backward . . . time and time again . . .  They constantly fell over the unconscious woman on the sledge.  About them the darkness roared; they felt the heaving sea beneath them.  And while they struggled, in their brief terrible death-to-the-death fight, the floe was tossed steadily onward.  Ootah felt his breath giving out.  Maisanguaq felt Ootah’s hands closing about his throat.  He felt the blood pound in his temples.  Desperation filled him—­he determined to kill Ootah by any means.  A grim suggestion came to him.  He endeavored to release himself.

In a lull of the wind both heard something that made them start.  Aroused from her feverish coma by the two men falling against her, Annadoah suddenly cried aloud.  The two men stood stone-still, locked in a deadly grip.  At that moment Annadoah felt the warmth of their panting breath as they paused near her.  Where she was at first she did not realize.  She heard a clamor of wind and breaking waters.  She imagined herself being tossed through the air in the arms of the tornarssuit.  At the same time she became vividly aware of the desperate struggle nearby.  Subconsciously she realized Maisanguaq and Ootah were engaged in a fight to the death.  In the darkness she sensed them moving away from her.  Straining her eyes she began, very dimly—­as Eskimos can even in pitch darkness—­to descry the black outlines of the two men wrestling as they shifted nearer and nearer the edge of the ice.  Then it dawned upon Annadoah’s mind that they were being carried, in the jeopardy of an awful storm, on a floe that was tossed hither and thither in a maelstrom of angry waters.  A frantic desire to save Ootah surged up within her.  Behind him she saw the swimming blackness of the heaving waves.  She attempted to rise.  Her head swam; there was loud ringing in her ears.  Her hands were not free, her ankles were bound—­she struggled to release herself.  Twisting her wrists and ankles in the tight lashings until they bled, it suddenly flashed upon her that she was lashed to the sled.  She knew that at any moment the floe might crash into a glacier and be crushed to atoms.  She knew that Maisanguaq and Ootah were fighting for the possession of her—­that both might perish, or, what was worse, that Maisanguaq might win.  Chaotic terror filled her.  Struggling frantically but ineffectually, she uttered a maniacal scream.