He was still watchful, still guarding against a further attack, and suddenly he whirled to face a figure that brought from him a cry of astonishment and alarm.  It was Celie.  She was standing ten paces from him, and in the wild terror that had brought her to him she had left the bearskin behind.  Her naked feet were buried in the snow.  Her arms, partly bared, were reaching out to him in the gray Arctic dawn, and then wildly and moaningly there came to him—­

“Philip—­Philip—­”

He sprang to her, a choking cry on his own lips.  This, after all, was the last proof—­when she had thought that their enemies were killing him she had come to him.  He was sobbing her name like a boy as he ran back with her in his arms.  Almost fiercely he wrapped the bearskin about her again, and then crushed her so closely in his arms that he could hear her gasping faintly for breath.  In that wild and glorious moment he listened.  A cold and leaden day was breaking over the world and as they listened their hearts throbbing against each other, the same sound came to them both.

It was the sakootwow—­the savage, shrieking blood-cry of the Kogmollocks, a scream that demanded an answer of the three hooded creatures who, a few minutes before, had attacked Philip in the edge of the open.  The cry came from perhaps a mile away.  And then, faintly, it was answered far to the west.  For a moment Philip pressed his face down to Celie’s.  In his heart was a prayer, for he knew that the fight had only begun.

CHAPTER XVIII

That the Eskimos both to the east and the west were more than likely to come their way, converging toward the central cry that was now silent, Philip was sure.  In the brief interval in which he had to act he determined to make use of his fallen enemies.  This he impressed on Celie’s alert mind before he ran back to the scene of the fight.  He made no more than a swift observation of the field in these first moments—­did not even look for weapons.  His thought was entirely of Celie.  The smallest of the three forms on the snow was the Kogmollock he had struck down with his club.  He dropped on his knees and took off first the sealskin bashlyk, or hood.  Then he began stripping the dead man of his other garments.  From the fur coat to the caribou-skin moccasins they were comparatively new.  With them in his arms he hurried back to the girl.

It was not a time for fine distinctions.  The clothes were a godsend, though they had come from a dead man’s back, and an Eskimo’s at that.  Celie’s eyes shone with joy.  It amazed him more than ever to see how unafraid she was in this hour of great danger.  She was busy with the clothes almost before his back was turned.

He returned to the Eskimos.  The three were dead.  It made him shudder—­one with a tiny bullet hole squarely between the eyes, and the others crushed by the blows of the club.  His hand fondled Celie’s little revolver—­the pea-shooter he had laughed at.  After all it had saved his life.  And the club—­