Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/141

Rh "Now what else?" she cried, hugging the sheets to her when she had finished.

They told her all—of first finding the skeleton of the bear shot through the head, the cairn with the lost message, the cabin with the rude, lonely cross above the grave on the shore of the polar sea.

"You did right not to try to bring back Mr. Thomas' body," Margaret agreed with them. "I know that Mrs. Thomas and his friends and those who were proud of him will like to think of him buried where he left his work."

Koehler told her then of their search after leaving the cabin. The cairn on the south shore, which had contained the destroyed message, probably was built to tell some change in Hedon's plan. They had looked in every probable place for any other cairn that might have preserved a message or for any other trace of Hedon's course after leaving the cabin; but had found nothing. The girl again unfolded the sheets from the report in the cabin.

"But this is perfectly clear," she said. "He went over the ice to the south a year ago last June."