Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/100

Rh less deadly alternative of being frozen stiff.

Suddenly, he thought of that old coat! There might—there just might be, in one of the pockets, a stray match. He had worn it, he remembered, on the train trip and for the first day on board the ship, and had carried matches in the side pockets. First pounding his hands together to start up some little circulation, he dug, with his great fur gloves still on his hands, under his bunk against the end wall. Out came the old coat at last. He hadn't worn it for months now. Laying it out roughly before him on the edge of the bunk, and again slapping his gloved hands together, he hastily pulled off the right glove with his teeth. Then he thrust into the pockets, first the right one, then the left. What was this? He clawed out the crumbling remains of the old box. Matches? He shook the box close to his ear. Matches! God!—matches!

He spilled them on the bunk in his agitation and relief, which shook him from head to foot with a violent trembling. He wept uncontrollably and started to pick them up carefully. There were three, all good, sound matches.

He slapped his hands together again, pulled off his other glove, and rubbed his hands briskly up and down on the heavy fur of his parka. Then he took his rifle, and laid it, ready loaded, beside him on the bunk. The scratching of the lynx seemed to him louder and bolder; more imminent and menacing. The great beast, it would seem, could not dislodge the heavy, flat stones with which the cache was overlaid. There was not room enough for that—too little purchase to be obtained. He looked around. The lynx had abandoned its old purpose, and was coming through into the hut. It was working on the wood now. That was what had made the change in the sound of the scratching. Already a huge, wicked paw appeared, a paw armed with chisels! The lynx snuffled. If not pemmican, then Man!

, gingerly, Pete drew the first match along the side of the box. But the oily side caused it to slip without igniting. At the second trial the head crumbled off the stick. He threw away the useless stick and took the second. It broke off, close to the head. He fumbled after the head on the floor, his hands like lumps of lead. At last he got it between his thumb and the side of the box. It would burn him, he knew; but what was a burn? He rubbed it against the box. It flared suddenly, died at once, giving him a vicious burn in the process, and smoked out to a tiny, inconsiderable cinder.

Pete turned pale under the dirt of his unshaven cheeks, and reached for his last match. He struck it, with infinite care, seven times, drawing it along different portions of the better preserved box-side. It fizzled at last, but that was all. The head crumbled off as the first had done.

Pete sat there looking at the fragments of the broken box and the useless sticks in a dumb frenzy of despair. He was done—at the end of his rope. Then, suddenly animated, he seized the useless wreck of the empty box and threw it on the hard earthen floor, and ground it with his heel. He sat and stared at it. The lynx broke off a great splinter of wood, but Pete did not notice the lynx. What was that? It looked like a good match-head, there under the edge of the flimsy match box now ground and crushed flat.

Almost perishing now with the bitter cold in his ungloved hands, which made them feel like useless lumps of lead, Pete groped for it. He got it at last in his numb fingers, and carefully gathered up a bit of the box-side, a mere splinter. He carried the find