Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial321dodg).pdf/580

426 nearing the turn. Ah, now he was at the end of the peninsula. A few hundred yards more and then the great mouth and the black water.

“Father!” cried Swedie with all the strength of love and despair. “Father, father, father!”

The song was hushed. For a second all was still, and then, thank God! a cheery voice in reply:

“Eric, ohé, Eric, where are you?”

“The river is open, father,” louder still the boy called, for the ice was carrying him farther away. Take the trail on the shore till you get to Mellin’s cabin. It is safe bbeyond.”

“All right. Where are you, Eric?”

Summoning all the courage his brave heart possessed, the lad shouted almost gaily:

“Waiting over here for you, father,” and then, in the thick blackness, he sat down upon the little sled and, holding his mother’s old shawl tightly in his arms, quietly waited. Presently, with a great shock, the end came. He shut his eyes, bent his head, and knew no more.

It was very wonderful, and it made almost as much talk as the great strike had made. The moon sailed out a few minutes later and showed the ice island wedged firmly against the solid bed of river ice piled up where the join was, but over beyond everything was smooth and unbroken. And just off the bit of road marked by the fir-trees a little boy was lying with his head on an old shaw) and a sled beside him. Two policemen, who had left their team at the cabin, sprang across the ridge, and running over, knelt by the boy. The moon was bright and fair now over everything.

“It’s Kalmar’s son,” said one. “Swedie, the lads call him. He heard us talking this afternoon and must have started off at once. Is he dead?”

The other was fumbling about under the worn overcoat. The police had heard the calling and understood what it meant. The man addressed looked at the other; both pairs of stern, steely eyes were wet. “Nearly frozen, but not dead, thank God,” he answered.

So Swedie and his father went to Dawson at Christmas after all, and one of the boy's presents was a beautiful pair of silver-mounted skates with his name “Eric Gustavus Kalmar,” and underneath “ From his friends the N. W. M. P.,” engraved upon them. These skates he wore in the great carnival at Dawson and with them he won the prize of a silver medal. If the Northwest Mounted Police and the Yukon people could have spoiled as manly a boy as Eric with praises and presents and kindness, he would have been spoiled indeed. But it was not so; perhaps because he did net quite understand, or perhaps because he was a little like a long-ago ancestor after whom Viking was named, “great in temptation and impervious to vanity.” At all events, the night he saved his father’s life was the beginning of a new life to Eric himself. When, next summer, he and his father and the dogs went home to Norway, all the lads of the town agreed that they had never missed a comrade as much as they missed Swedie.