“Alwin!” he shouted.  The yellow face was close to the thrall’s unconscious shoulder; one evil claw-like hand was almost at his cheek.  What she would have done, she alone knew.

While his cry was still in the air, Sigurd pulled his companion away and through the door.  Up the steep they went like cats.  Near the top, Alwin tripped, and his knife slipped from his belt and fell against a boulder.  It lay there shining, but neither of them noticed it.  Into their skees, and over the crusted plains they went,—­reindeer could not have caught them.

CHAPTER XIX

TALES OF THE UNKNOWN WEST

Fire is needful
To him who is come in,
And whose knees are frozen;
Food and raiment
A man requires
Who o’er the fell has travelled. 

          Ha’vama’l

“I tell you I must go over the track once more.  It may have slipped out of my girdle at some of the places where I tripped.”

Alwin’s words rose in frosty cloud; for he was Leif’s unheated sleeping-room, drawing on an extra pair of thick woollen stockings in preparation for his customary outing.

“It is foolishness.  Four times already have you been over the ground without finding it.  A long brass-halted knife could not have been overlooked if it had been there.  I tell you that you lost it among the rocks of the hollow, and that you would be wise to give it up.”

Sigurd’s answer came in muffled though emphatic tones, for he was huddled almost out of sight among the furs on the chest, as he waited for his companion to complete his dressing.  Now that genuine winter weather was upon them, the loft was necessarily abandoned as a sleeping apartment; but it still served as a dressing-room for such slight and speedy alterations as were attempted.

As he pulled on the big heelless skeeing-shoes, Alwin sighed anxiously.  “I must find it.  Any day Leif may miss it and ask.”

“He is not likely to, since he has already gone a week without noticing its absence.  And if he should, you have only to say that you borrowed it to protect yourself from wolves.  That will not be much of a lie, Skroppa being nearer wolf than human.  He will feel that he was wrong to have denied you a weapon, and he will only scold a little.”

“It is true that he is in a good temper again,” Alwin admitted.  “Yesterday I heard Tyrker tell Valbrand that many more chiefs had asked concerning Christianity; and last night, after Eric had gone to sleep in his seat, I heard Leif say to Thorhild that if now he could only do some great deed to prove the power of his God, it was his opinion that half of Greenland would be ready to believe.”

Sigurd crept out of the bearskins with a shiver.  “I say nothing against that.  But let us end this talk.  My blood-drops are so frozen they rattle in my body.”

He thumped down the steps as though rigid with cold, and jumped and danced and beat his breast before he could bring himself to stand still long enough to fasten on his skees.