him what he wanted. They had been too cold, too pure for him; and in a savage revulsion of feeling the whole of him cried out for something which cared for him, for his own self, past all laws and creeds and scruples and calculations; something which would love him whether he were good or evil, whether he were cruel or kind; something which just gave, demanding none of those self-torturing struggles from him.
This mood held him doggedly through the next morning, when the grey bay tossed restlessly under the clear sky and Baxter went out in the whaleboat with Selkirk and a couple of Esquimaux to the 'Rocket.' Dick helped Brayne wash up and fill the stoves with wood. Then he put on the close-sewn fur coat bought from an old Kogmollock woman and went down to the shore.
The smite of the wind tingled his blood at once and reddened his eyes. He opened his chest to it, walking fast, and glancing round him with those keen eyes which missed so little.
Outside their low banked-up huts a few Esquimaux were moving with the fur-lined head-covering thrown back from their coarse black hair, tonsured like a monk's, and their good-natured flat greasy faces. They had gone into their winter clothes since he saw them last evening, for their outer coats had the long hair blowing in the wind. On the inner suit the hair was turned next the skin. In the store of the Pacific Steam Whaling Navigation Company some hands off one of the whalers were bringing out beams and joists and planed timber for the roofing-in of their vessel. Dick stopped a little while to watch them. Hard-sinewed men, the most of them, with their loose clothes flapping, and their untamed faces ruddy, and their bright eyes with that far-seeing wildness in them as though they listened still to the call of their lover at sea. They spoke little and sullenly, and he guessed them to be from the 'Fanny'; foremast hands who had " signed on bone," and who, because there were no whales and consequently no bone, were going deeper in debt to the steamer every day. Dick remembered Baxter's suspicion that some of them would try to desert. And, looking at them, he believed it.
In the harbour the boats still rocked and groaned at
