Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 69).djvu/166

 kashim. Men, women, and children chewed desperately on dry walrus hide and clung together to keep from freezing. The little ones whimpered in misery. At last the wretched company, weary from many wakeful nights, jerked and flung their arms about in troubled sleep.

When morning broke Milli-ru-ak's child was dead.

The wailing of the mothers mingled with the roar of the blizzard and the increased fervour of the medicine-man's incantations, but before the day was done two more little ones died.

It was then that Milli-ru-ak, with three of the council-men, appeared in the igloo of the white man.

"We will pray to your God," said the hunter, wearily.

peals of the bell that summoned the people to the prayer-meeting were freighted with the little missionary's joy in the fulfilment of his mission. He had wrested a whole village from the dominance of the medicine-man!

The sunken eyes in his gaunt, unshaved face glowed with fanatic happiness as he looked down on the crowded room. Eskimos filled the benches, stood about the walls, and squatted on the floor about the last of his oil burning in the stone lamp below the pulpit. Of all the village only Ah-king-ah was absent. The people sat silent, grave, attentive, their eyes fixed on the Bible lying open on the pulpit.

The missionary began his exhortation, raising his voice above the raging of the blizzard and the rending of the ice-pack. Thrilled by a sense of achievement and inspired by faith, he spoke with a confidence and an eloquence he had never known before. Within him woke the spirit of the evangelist. So exalted was he that his preaching aroused a measure of faith in the starving Eskimos, even as the incantations of Ah-king-ah had done.

"Such is the might and goodness of our God!" he shouted, after he had combed the Bible for incidents showing the stilling of storms, the feeding of the hungry, the raising of the dead. "And He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever! Oh, down on your knees, my friends!" he cried, with sudden vehemence. "Down on your knees and prove him now—now!"

His impassioned utterance swept his listeners to their knees, shouting, praying, pleading, in long fragmentary prayers for food, for life, for a change of wind. The fervid little white man leading them felt the whole room to be charged with power—an invincible power that flowed from him and from each one and definitely made its connection with the Infinite Mind that rules creation.

When he sprang to his feet at the end of the supplication his thin face was alight. "Go home, my people!" his voice rang out with confidence. "Go home and wait on the salvation of our Lord. Sharpen your spears; put an edge on your skinning-knives. Make ready your gears—for the day of hunting is near!"

"If the white man's God answers we will all become Christians!" cried Milli-ru-ak, rising and bringing the others with him.

"Yea! Yea!" came the chorus of assent. Miak, the witch-woman, sidled close to the pulpit, putting out a curious but cautious finger to feel the Bible.

"If the white man's God changes the wind," she croaked, slanting a wise, bleary eye up at the missionary, "the people of In-ga-lee-nay will come when the bell calls and listen again to the words in the black medicine-book."

From the supreme heights of his faith the missionary watched his fur-clad congregation depart, seeing in them brands he had plucked from the burning, souls he had saved from destruction. Finally, in his cold living-room, he staggered toward his bunk and in sudden exhaustion sank upon it. He had scarcely drawn the fur robes about him when he was plunged into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

awoke to a hush so intense that his soul ached with it. It was as if the world had died, leaving him the only living thing upon it. After a moment's bewilderment he realized that the wind was still and there was no sound of grinding ice! His nerves, for ten weeks made taut by the continuous shriek of the blizzard, relaxed with a suddenness that was like a fall from a great height. Like a man swimming in a sea of silence he raised his hands, groping for the luminous-faced watch by his bunk. He saw, with a gasp of incredulity, that he had slept eighteen hours!

Still dazed with sleep and hunger, he crawled from his robes and hurried out into the glimmering twilight of the Arctic day. Great as was his faith in the power of prayer, he was astonished at the sight that met his eyes.

Under dark moving clouds strangely shot with silver the ice-pack lay quiet and grey. A quarter of a mile away an inky, jagged line marked a lead of open water among the bergs. Every hunter in the village was squatted along the lead, and, as he looked, a sudden fusillade of rifle-shots registered the death of seals coming up to breathe.

Along the shores women and children and old men swarmed, laughing, shouting,