THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 645 



might be in direct line, one hiding the other, although it did not 

 appear so, for I took the view to be slightly on the quarter. 



The added excitement of such unexpected conditions made me 

 walk faster and part of the time I ran. It was just twenty-eight 

 hours from the time I had left my party that I got down to the 

 little lagoon half a mile east of our winter quarters. The distance, 

 according to our astronomical observations, was about sixty-seven 

 miles in a direct line, but the actual walking was probably ten or 

 fifteen miles more than that, what with my confusion among the 

 lakes with the fog and the detour to the coast east of Kellett. 



I thought then that it was a pity Robert Louis Stevenson had 

 the bother of inventing a plot for his "Treasure Island." I found 

 an equally good one ready for me here, all but the murders and 

 the wooden leg, and even tragedy was not lacking. I shall tell 

 the story not entirely as I understood it then but with certain side 

 lights of later information. Part of it consists not of actual facts 

 but of my interpretation of them, but it is the interpretation which 

 I still retain after all the available evidence has been gathered. 

 Probably no two men on the entire expedition would agree with 

 me throughout, but there is no point on which several of them do 

 not agree with me, nor are there any two others who agree en- 

 tirely with each other. 



I came first to what proved to be the Sachs. She was lying broad- 

 side on the beach, her foremast gone and the yards of the mainmast 

 nowhere to be seen, nor her sails. Her high wheelhouse had been 

 torn off and was a hundred yards up on the land where it was 

 evidently being made into part of a dwelling. Captain Bernard 

 could never have been guilty of such vandalism. He was too fond 

 of his ship. I could have conceived of him going out in the night 

 and setting fire to her, but his tearing her to pieces was unthinkable. 

 Clearly whoever was in control was not Captain Bernard. 



Our old house was standing farther to the west and evidently 

 uninhabited. But there was some one working at turning the wheel- 

 house into a building. When I went up I found two men whom 

 I had never seen before. They were Otto Binder, an American, 

 and August Masik, a Russian, both from Nome. They had come 

 east the previous year on the Challenge, and it was they about 

 whom Captain Gonzales had told me as having a hunting camp on 

 De Salis Bay on the southeast coast of Banks Island. Binder 

 was the man who had gone to Kellett in the fall with the Kilian 

 brothers and Masik had followed later. 



There are many branches to this story. I must tell first about 

 the tragic death of Peter Bernard and Charles Thomsen. 



