Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/97

Rh in the North. No danger of the seas or ice, of cold or starvation ever had affected him. Geoff remembered him at the time he came to Chicago to report to Margaret his belief of the loss of Hedon. The skipper who had led his party on less than an inch of new ice, crackling at every step, over two miles of the Arctic Ocean, held back before plunging into the traffic on the city streets. He was miserable in the crowds of civilised places.

Cabined with him was Dr. Otto Koehler, a Bavarian and McNeal's best friend. Koehler was a year or two younger than McNeal, but with Arctic experience scarcely shorter. The men had met when the Scotchman, as master of the whaler Cabot, had rescued the survivors of a lost German expedition from the ice near Franz Josef Land. McNeal had taken Koehler to his cabin, and cursed him while he cared for him because the doctor was nearly dead from having given his ration of food to another.

Koehler, in contrast to McNeal, was tall, thin, almost gaunt, taciturn but always cheerful. His few words invariably expressed optimism. Besides being surgeon and