“What’s the matter with him, anyhow?” Dan inquired.  “He was boiling over with enthusiasm all day, but now—­Why, he’s asleep sitting up!  He hasn’t moved for twenty minutes.”

Tom shook his head, dislodging a swarm of mosquitoes.

“Walk on your toes, my boy!  Walk on your toes!  I smell something cooking—­and it ain’t supper.”

When food was served O’Neil made a pretense of eating, but rose suddenly in the midst of it, with the words: 

“I’ll stretch my legs a bit.”  His voice was strangely listless; in his eyes was the same abstraction which had troubled Appleton during the afternoon.  He left the camp and disappeared up the bank of the stream.

“Nice place to take a walk!” the engineer observed.  “He’ll bog down in half a mile or get lost among the sloughs.”

“Not him!” said Slater.  Nevertheless, his worried eyes followed the figure of his chief as long as it was in sight.  After a time he announced:  “Something is coming, but what it is or where it’s going to hit us I don’t know.”

Their meal over, the boatmen made down their beds, rolled up in their blankets, and were soon asleep.  Appleton and Tom sat in the smoke of a smudge, gossiping idly as the twilight approached.  From the south came the distant voice of the sea, out of the north rolled the intermittent thunder of those falling bergs, from every side sounded a harsh chorus of water-fowl.  Ducks whirred past in bullet-like flight, honkers flapped heavily overhead, a pair of magnificent snow-white swans soared within easy gunshot of the camp.  An hour passed, another, and another; the arctic night descended.  And through it all the mosquitoes sang their blood song and stabbed the watchers with tongues of flame.

“Happy Tom” sang his song, too, for it was not often that he obtained a listener, and it proved to be a song of infinite hard luck.  Mr. Slater, it seemed, was a creature of many ills, the wretched abiding-place of aches and pains, of colics, cramps, and rheumatism.  He was the target of misfortune and the sport of fate.  His body was the galloping-ground of strange disorders which baffled diagnosis; his financial affairs were dominated by an evil genius which betrayed him at every turn.  To top it all, he suffered at the moment a violent attack of indigestion.

“Ain’t that just my luck?” he lamented.  “Old ’Indy’s got me good, and there ain’t a bit of soda in the outfit.”

Appleton, who was growing more and more uneasy at the absence of his leader, replied with some asperity: 

“Instead of dramatizing your own discomforts you’d better be thinking of the boss.  I’m going out to look for him.”

“Now don’t be a dam’ fool,” Slater advised.  “It would be worth a broken leg to annoy him when he’s in one of these fits.  You’d make yourself as popular as a smallpox patient at a picnic.  When he’s dreamed his dream he’ll be back.”

“When will that be?”