To Wapi there had come at last a response to the great yearning that was in him.  Instinct, summer and winter, had drawn him south, had turned him always in that direction, filled with the uneasiness of the mysterious something that was calling to him through the years of forty generations of his kind.  And now he was going south.  He sensed the fact that this journey would not end at the edge of the Arctic plain and that he was not to hunt caribou or bear.  His mental formulae necessitated no process of reasoning.  They were simple and to the point His world had suddenly divided itself into two parts; one contained the woman, and the other his old masters and slavery.  And the woman stood against these masters.  They were her enemies as well as his own.  Experience had taught him the power and the significance of firearms, just as it had made him understand the uses for which spears, and harpoons, and whips were made.  He had seen the woman shoot Blake, and he had seen her ready to shoot at Uppy.  Therefore he understood that they were enemies and that all associated with them were enemies.  At a word from her he was ready to spring ahead and tear the life out of the Eskimo driver and even out of the dogs that were pulling the sledge.  It did not take him long to comprehend that the man on the sledge was a part of the woman.

He hung well back, twenty or thirty paces behind the sledge, and unless Peter or the woman called to him, or the sledge stopped for some reason, he seldom came nearer.

It took only a word from Dolores to bring him to her side.

Hour after hour the journey continued.  The plain was level as a floor, and at intervals Dolores would run in the trail that the load might be lightened and the dogs might make better time.  It was then that Peter watched Uppy with the revolver, and it was also in these intervals—­running close beside the woman—­that the blood in Wapi’s veins was fired with a riotous joy.

For three hours there was almost no slackening in Uppy’s speed.  The fourth and fifth were slower.  In the sixth and seventh the pace began to tell.  And the plain was no longer hard and level, swept like a floor by the polar winds.  Rolling undulations grew into ridges of snow and ice; in places the dogs dragged the sledge over thin crusts that broke under the runners; fields of drift snow, fine as shot, lay in their way; and in the eighth hour Uppy stopped the lagging dogs and held up his two hands in the mute signal of the Eskimo that they could go no farther without a rest.

Wapi dropped on his belly and watched.  His eyes followed Uppy suspiciously as he strung up the tent on its whalebone supports to keep the bite of the wind from the sledge on which Dolores sat at Peter’s feet.  Then Uppy built a fire of kindlings, and scraped up a pot of ice for tea-water.  After that, while the water was heating, he gave each of the trace dogs a frozen fish.  Dolores herself picked out one of the largest and tossed it to Wapi.