The boys slept soundly for nearly ten hours, and when they awakened they felt equal to any task that might present itself. First, they visited the bear Dick and Toma had killed the day before, and brought back all the meat they could carry on their backs. Since this left them well supplied with meat for themselves, Dick decided they had better make an effort to procure some seal or walrus meat for the dogs.
Toma once more was elected to remain behind while Dick and Sandy went hunting. The boys found that the seal herd had moved a considerable distance eastward along the coast since they first had seen it. It took them an hour of climbing over rough shore ice before they reached a point opposite the seal herd. Even then, to their disappointment, they found that several large ice floes, jammed together, separated them from the seals.
After some minutes of deliberation, they decided to venture out upon the ice, and get nearer the seals by jumping from one cake of ice to another. Thus they began a dangerous adventure, destined from the beginning to end in ill fortune, for they had not gone a hundred yards across the treacherous ice before both Dick and Sandy had slipped and narrowly saved themselves from a bad ducking, if not drowning, by clutching the edge of the floe which had been their objective when they leaped the open water.
Resting on a large, secure floe, they noticed that the tide was going out and that frequently, from the outer edge of the ice-jam, a large fragment detached itself and floated out to sea.
“I think we ought to go back,” Dick said once, but they did not want to turn back empty handed after having gone so far, so they kept on until they were within fifty feet of the nearest seals.
“How tame they are!” exclaimed Sandy.
“They seem just like dogs,” Dick added. “Probably no one has killed any of this herd for a long time. It seems a shame to shoot such innocent looking creatures.”
“Well, you know we have to have food for the dogs,” Sandy argued with his tender heart. “In this country it’s eat or be eaten, and we need the dogs and not the seals.”
“All right, then, suppose you shoot the first one,” Dick said a little sarcastically.
Sandy tightened his lips, raised his rifle and took aim at the head of a fine young seal. Just then a baby seal flopped away from its mother’s side, directly on a line with Sandy’s sights. The baby seal stood up on its flippers and looked at the boys as cute as could be.
Sandy expelled his breath in a disgusted gasp, and let his rifle fall to his hip.
“Brave boy,” taunted Dick in fun. “If I wanted turkey for Thanksgiving I wouldn’t send you out to chop off its head.”
“I can’t help it,” admitted Sandy. “I’ve felt this way before, but not so much as now. I don’t see how anyone can slaughter these animals by the hundreds even if their skins are so valuable.”
Just then a big bull seal crawled up on the ice out of the water, making an angry noise in his throat. This old fellow was quite fierce looking and did not apparently take kindly to the presence of the boys. He reared up and fixed baleful eyes upon them, opening his huge, whiskered mouth to show his tusks.
Neither of the boys felt the same sympathy for this new and hostile arrival, and Dick quickly raised his rifle and brought down the bull with one shot.
At the sound of the rifle almost all of the seals took to the water hastily, swimming about and watching the man creatures from a distance. But the old bull did not move from where he had fallen.
“The next problem is how are we going to get this big brute ashore.”
“Gee, I never thought of that. I wonder how much he weighs,” said Sandy, going forward and trying to lift the dead animal.
But the combined strength of both Dick and Sandy was only sufficient to drag the heavy body slowly across the ice.
“He must weigh several hundred pounds,” Dick eyed their kill appraisingly. “I don’t think we’ll ever get him ashore, unless we cut him up and carry him in pieces.”
So intent were the boys on the problem at hand that they had for several minutes lost all thought of their rather dangerous situation. It was Sandy who first discovered something wrong. It seemed to him the ice on which they stood was moving.
“Dick, quick!” his voice was hoarse with fear. “This floe has broken away from the shore ice. What shall we do!”
Dick wheeled toward the shore, taking in their predicament at a glance. “Run for it, Sandy. We may reach the gap before it’s too wide to jump!”
When Dick and Sandy ran for the edge of the moving floe which was nearest the shore, they realized what might happen to them should they fail to jump the widening stretch of water between them and safety. With the tide going out, they would be carried out into a sea where no ships sailed, and where they could expect no help from any friendly, inhabited shores.
The floe which was carrying them off was fully three hundred yards across, and since they had been tardy in discovering their peril, they found fate against them. Coming to a sudden stop at the edge of the floe, they saw, with sinking hearts, that more than a hundred yards of icy salt water separated them from the floes that still were clinging to the shore.
“Can’t we swim it?” cried Sandy desperately.
“Never!” Dick returned grimly. “Not with these heavy clothes on. We’d drown or freeze before we’d gone a third of the distance. Sandy, we’re trapped!”
It did not take Sandy long to see that Dick was right. Alone, with a dead seal, upon a large ice floe, each second increased their peril as they floated farther away from shore. Death by freezing might be their lot, for without shelter they could not hope to weather a polar storm. Even if they were fortunate in experiencing mild weather, they would eventually starve.
In a dejected mood the two boys stood watching the bleak shore line that now seemed so warm and friendly since they had been cut off from it.
“Do you notice the current is carrying us westward as well as north?” Dick spoke up presently.
“No, but I can see you’re right,” rejoined Sandy. “But what’s the difference?”
“If we keep drifting at this angle, we’ll sight our camp and maybe we can signal Toma.”
Sandy’s face brightened for an instant, then he gave in again to his former forebodings. “Toma can’t do anything for us,” he said.
“Maybe not right away. At least he’ll know what has happened to us, and can notify the policemen when they return.”
Sandy realized the wisdom in Dick’s words, and sat down to watch for the first sign of their camp.
The floe slowly turned as it was carried along with the ocean current, and the boys were forced to change their position frequently in order to stay on the side nearest the shore. And since their huge raft was floating out to sea as well as westward past the camp site, it became a problem as to whether they would not be too far away to signal Toma when that moment came.
Tensely they waited. For twenty minutes the floe forged along with its human cargo before Dick suddenly gave a glad shout. At a distance of about half a mile, the igloos of their camp appeared, surrounded by the tiny dark dots which represented the sledges and other dunnage. But there was no sign of life.
Dick and Sandy pointed their rifles into the air and emptied the magazines. But the shots brought no figure tumbling out of one of the far away igloos.
“He’s inside and can’t hear us. If he does he’ll probably think we’re shooting seals.”
“Let’s fire more shots,” Sandy suggested.
They reloaded and repeated their first salvo, with no better results. Slowly the igloos grew smaller and smaller as they floated farther out to sea, and at last they sat down and gave up.
“Well, Toma couldn’t have helped us anyway,” Dick said, trying to make the best of their misfortune.
“No, but it would make me feel a lot better if I knew someone knew what had happened to us.”
Dick agreed and fell silent, wracking his brain for a way out. But the more he thought it over, the more certain he became that they were in the hands of fate. Nothing but a miracle could save them.
They had not been at sea an hour until a new peril presented itself. The ice floe upon which they had been marooned was breaking up. Large segments began cracking away from the main body and floating off by themselves.
“We must stay together, Sandy,” Dick said, “Suppose one of those cracks came between us.”
Sandy shivered at the thought and eyed the ice under his feet. Holding hands, the boys walked to the center of the floe where the ice seemed the thickest.
The shore was now only a dim line to the south, while around rose and fell the icy waves of the desolate polar sea. Here and there a berg wallowed along and occasionally they collided with a slower moving body of ice. Dick thought of jumping off the floe to one of the bergs, but changed his mind since the faster moving floe might possibly run into land while the loggy iceberg would float in almost the same place for days.
Adding to the danger of their situation, the sky was becoming overcast by a film of gray clouds and a freezing wind was springing up, heightening the waves and throwing icy cold spray across the floe.
“We’re in for a storm, Sandy,” Dick said, beating his arms against his body to keep warm. “It’s up to us to fix up some sort of wind break or else we can’t stand the cold. Think we can chop some cakes of ice out of this floe?”
“We sure can try,” responded Sandy, drawing out his sheath knife with alacrity.
Both boys then set to work industriously and after considerable hard labor, succeeded in chipping out some good sized chunks of ice. These they built up in a half circle, rounded against the wind. Against the wall they flung water with their mittens. The water quickly froze, cementing the blocks together and forming an effective wind break. Behind this they hovered while the wind increased in velocity and a heavy snow began to fall.
They dared not sleep for fear they would freeze before they awoke, and though the dread drowsiness that is the first symptom of freezing stole over them again and again, they fought it off grimly. Once both fell asleep at the same time in spite of all they could do, but the fast moving floe struck a large berg with a grinding, rending crash and startled them to the temporary safety of wakefulness. Had it not been for the wind break they had erected they would undoubtedly have frozen to death. As it was, they were forced to watch each other, to prevent sleep coming to both at the same time. Sometimes Dick pounded Sandy until his eyes opened, and again Sandy beat and shouted at Dick above the roar of the storm, and the crashing and grinding of ice.
Neither had the least idea where they were being driven to, they had even lost all sense of direction, every effort bent on keeping a spark of life burning in their numb bodies.
It seemed to the boys that the battle with the cold would never end, that they had floated in the storm for hours, when suddenly the floe came to a jarring stop, and a deluge of ice water rolled across it, almost washing Dick and Sandy from their position under the wind break.
“I wonder what we’ve hit!” Dick shouted hoarsely.
“It must be a berg,” Sandy cried in reply.
“But we aren’t moving at all,” Dick shouted back.
Believing they might have been washed ashore on some island, the boys braved the full force of the storm and staggered out of their wind break to investigate. The snow and spray almost blinded them, but at last they made out a huge mass of ice upon which the floe had lodged. It rose up for nearly fifty feet and withstood every charge of the gigantic waves that crashed against it.
Yet, in the brief period when the wind cleared the air of flying snow, they could see the swell of waves beyond the ice which was holding them.
“It’s a grounded berg!” Dick shouted at last, and Sandy and he fought their way back to the welcome shelter of their wind break.
“We must be pretty close to land,” Sandy opined.
“Yes, but there’s no telling how deep the water is here. The berg we’ve lodged on may extend down into the water for a hundred feet. There’s always more of a berg under water than there is above. We’ve got to stick it out until this storm blows over.”
And so they renewed their struggle to fight off the gnawing cold, cheered somewhat by the probabilities that when the storm blew over they would see land.
It was two hours later when the wind slackened perceptibly and the snow ceased to fall. With shouts of joy the boys then saw, about a mile away, across the dashing waves, a line of black cliffs, streaked with snow.
“Now if we could only find some way to float in on those breakers. But I don’t see how we could take a chance on a cake of ice. We couldn’t stick to it a second before we got washed off into the sea.”
“We’ll have to wait till the waves die down,” Sandy said. “If I wasn’t so weak, maybe we could paddle a chunk of ice then.”
Dick shook his head. “That might do in a story book, but even if we weren’t just about ready to drop, we couldn’t do that.”
Glumly, they began the wait for the waves to go down, tightening their belts upon flat and gnawing stomachs. With the ceasing of the storm their hunger became three times as noticeable. Had the dead seal, which had first accompanied them on the floe, still been with them, they might have tackled raw blubber, but the waves had washed the seal into the sea long before.
Though the wind had fallen, the boys found themselves little more comfortable, for the temperature began to fall alarmingly. With the passing of every hour the still air grew colder while the waves quieted under the iron hand of Jack Frost.
The boys chewed ice to cool their thirsting mouths and partially allay the great hunger that was swiftly weakening them. They could not judge the passage of time rationally now, and when Dick awakened from a stupor that had come upon him in spite of all he could do, he found the water around them almost as smooth as glass.
Staggering to his feet Dick pulled Sandy to his feet and together they gazed on a phenomenon of the north that was like a miracle in their eyes.
The open water, or lead, between the land and the berg on which they had lodged, was frozen over, and a level walk of thin ice bridged a way to safety.
“Can we walk on it?” Sandy asked in a hoarse, thick voice.
“I don’t know,” Dick replied through blue lips. “I’ll test it.”
Guiding his weakened legs by force of will alone, Dick cautiously approached the edge of the floe and placed one foot down on the ice. He bore his weight, by degrees, on the one foot. The ice cracked a little and gave downward, then as he placed the last of his weight upon the ice, it broke through. Dick saved himself from a cold bath that might, at that time, have meant the finish of him, by falling face downward on the floe and drawing himself back to safety. He would have given up then, had not a heart-rending groan from Sandy aroused in him a new determination. For he could not bear to see his chum lying there, slowly freezing, when there was an ounce of strength left in him.
Into Dick’s numb senses crept an idea. The snowshoes strapped upon their backs! If the ice would not hold weight upon the narrow surface of a boot sole, might it not support them if their weight were distributed upon the broad rim of snowshoes?
In frantic haste Dick aroused Sandy and shouted his plan into his dazed chum’s ears. Fumbling fingers then began the slow process of attaching snowshoes to tingling feet. At last the task was accomplished, and the boys began shuffling toward the thin ice.
Dick went first, skating as lightly as possible out on the ice. His heart was in his mouth. Would the ice hold?
The ice sprang downward slightly and tiny cracks spread out all around Dick, but the ice held.
“Don’t follow my track,” he cried to Sandy, about to leave the floe. “Start somewhere where the ice hasn’t been strained. We’ve got to hurry. This salt water may melt at any moment.”
Sandy did as he was told and there began a more perilous half mile of snowshoeing than the boys ever before had experienced or ever hoped to experience again.
Faster and faster they skated over the rubbery ice, praying they would strike no weaker spot, every nerve strained to the utmost in their fear-driven flight.
Under any other circumstances the boys would surely have fallen completely exhausted before they finished that terrible half mile of snowshoeing. But it was life or death, and all the reserve energy in their strong, young bodies came to the front to carry them through.
One last spurt of speed and they tumbled onto the heaps of solid ice marking the beach and solid land. Scarcely had they landed when the water broke through the rapidly melting ice.
Sandy could not raise himself and Dick had just enough strength left to drag himself to a standing position. His roving eyes fell upon a flock of eider ducks a little distance away. His stomach crying out for food, Dick reeled toward the wild fowl, scattering them to right and left. He found quickly what he was looking for. Eggs!
Pawing into a nest he rolled out three eggs, and without testing them to see whether they were fresh or not, he cracked the shells and drank down the life-giving nourishment. Hastily picking up two more eggs, he stumbled back to Sandy and forced him to suck the raw whites.
Both boys revived by the duck eggs, they waited for the ducks to settle back to their nests, and shot two of them.
Dick and Sandy ordinarily would have been repelled at the idea of eating raw flesh, but now nothing seemed sweeter than the warm white meat of the eider ducks. They ate their fill, like young savages, and found warmth and strength returning to their half-frozen bodies.
Spirits rising through the effect of the food and their recent deliverance from the drifting ice floe, the boys were about to start further inland, when Sandy pointed to a boulder only a hundred feet away.
“I thought I saw something move over there,” he whispered.
Dick opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. From behind the boulder arose the head and upper body of an Eskimo—and yet, was it an Eskimo?
“His skin is white!” Sandy exclaimed.
“It’s the white Eskimo!” Dick echoed.
So amazed were Dick and Sandy by this sudden and inexplicable reappearance of the white Eskimo that they could not move from their tracks for fully a minute. The half-breed did not move. He stared at them as if he, too, had been surprised, then one of his arms raised in a sort of signal.
Dick and Sandy aroused to their danger too late. From a dozen hiding places as many uncouth brown figures appeared, with spears and rifles leveled at them. Hemmed in and outnumbered, there was but one thing for them to do—surrender.
Sandy’s rifle clattered to the ice, and Dick’s followed quickly, while both raised their hands. The white Eskimo then came forward and picked up their rifles. He addressed them in broken English, which had a French accent mingled with the Eskimo tang:
“I ees pleased ver’ much, boys. While zee poleece chase zee wild goose, I git zere little helpers. Zat not so?”
“You may have the drop on us now,” retorted Dick with more spirit than was really in his half-famished, half-frozen body, “but we have friends nearby and you will wish you never had troubled us.”
The white Eskimo laughed scoffingly. “You think you make zee fool of me. Ha! Zose mounted police long way from here. They look, look everywhere for Fred Mistak, but Mistak like the ghost. He disappear like nossing—quick!”
Dick remained silent at this, thinking it best not to arouse the ill-humor of their savage captor. He was interested, if disappointed to learn that their friends, the policemen, were so far away. He had half-hoped the storm had thrown them back upon land somewhere near the other members of the expedition.
Mistak seemed to have no desire to loiter in the vicinity of the capture and speedily forced the boys to fall in line and start off inland. Tired as they were, the two prisoners assumed a calmness they did not feel as they began the long climb up a steep trail that led to the summit of the cliffs which formed that portion of the coast.
Dick studied the evil faces of his captors and saw that only few of them were Eskimos. The greater number of the gang included renegade Indians, half-breeds, and one who seemed a full blooded white man. Dick did not doubt that every man of them either carried a price on his head or was at least a fugitive from the courts of justice. The white man and two of the Indians had rifles, and Mistak wore a revolver on a belt about his waist.
The sinister company climbed to the top of the cliffs, forcing the boys along at the point of spears, and marched on for about a mile across the snow and ice to what seemed to be a temporary encampment. Six igloos had been built in the shelter of a ridge, and two sledges loaded with frozen seal blubber lay under the watch of an Eskimo.
Mistak gruffly ordered Dick and Sandy into an igloo. As soon as the boys had reached the crude bedding inside the snow house, they gave over to the great weariness that possessed them. Lost to everything but the need of sleep, they fell into a deep unconsciousness regardless of the fact that they were in the hands of enemies from whom they might expect no mercy.
Dick knew not how long he had slept when he aroused to hear someone at the entrance of the igloo. One of the Eskimos crawled half way in with two chunks of seal blubber in his arms. These he tossed at the two recumbent forms with a few guttural and unintelligible words in his native tongue, and crawled out again.
Dick was terribly hungry, and though the seal blubber did not exactly appeal to his appetite, he found, upon tasting the greasy meat, that it was better than nothing. He awakened Sandy, and together they made their first meal upon raw seal blubber, finding that the more they ate of it the better it tasted.
“It’s not bad when a fellow’s half starved,” Sandy remarked as they finished the last of the blubber.
Dick was about to answer when the sound of voices outside interrupted him. He signaled Sandy to remain quiet and together they listened. But they could not distinguish the words through the thick walls of the igloo, though they recognized the voice of Fred Mistak.
Hoping to learn something of what Mistak intended to do with Sandy and him, Dick motioned to his chum to remain where he was and crawled in the hole that served as the entrance of the igloo. A huge cake of snow had been carelessly pushed up against the outside of the hole and placing one ear against this, Dick could hear Mistak’s voice quite plainly. He seemed to be speaking to the white man in the outfit.
“I tell you zat we cannot bozzer wis zee two young ones. It ees best we put them where zay cannot talk. You see?” Mistak was saying.
The other man swore, then replied loudly: “You know we got enough blood on our hands now, Mistak, to send us over the road for life. It’ll be hangin’ for you an’ me if we put these yonkers out of the way right under the noses of the mounted.”
“Well, zen, what you say we put zem wiz Thalman?”
Thalman! That was the name of the lost corporal! Dick electrified with eagerness to hear more, but the two walked off a little way out of earshot. He crawled back to Sandy, confiding what he had heard.
“According to that, Corporal Thalman must be alive alright,” Sandy observed.
“Yes, but the question is, do we want to go where he is as Mistak hinted. It looks like Thalman is in a pretty tight prison or he’d have gotten out by this time. And we can help him more on the outside than on the inside. Besides I don’t trust this Mistak a little bit. He’d cut our throats in a minute if the white man agreed. We’d better see if we can’t escape.”
“If there was any darkness to do it in, we might get away,” Sandy retorted, “but in this never-ending daylight, I don’t see how we can do it.”
“Listen—I’ve a plan,” Dick drew closer to his chum, and began in a whisper. “When we came up I could see that this igloo was built on a long snowdrift that stretches clear to a ravine on the right. We still have our knives and with these we can dig a tunnel under the snow.”
“But suppose they come in while we’re working?”
“I thought of that. We’ll work one at a time, while one keeps watch at the entrance of the igloo. At first we can jump up out of the tunnel, which we’ll start in the floor, and lie down over it with our bedding. If they come clear inside they’ll think we’re sleeping.”
“What about the loose snow?” Sandy asked.
“That we can scatter over the floor and pack it down with our boots. The hardest job will be coming out of the drift at the right place. What we must do is tunnel under the igloo and through the drift to the side hidden from the camp.”
Sandy became enthusiastic over Dick’s daring scheme and without delay they commenced the difficult task. Dick started the digging while Sandy watched. The snow was hard, but by keeping at it he soon was far enough down so that he could change the direction of his digging toward the outside of the snowdrift, which was to furnish the cover for their escape.
They had changed places twice and Sandy was again on watch when the crunch of footfalls sounded approaching the igloo.
“Quick. Someone’s coming!” Sandy whispered down the tunnel.
Dick was only a few seconds backing out of the hole and dropping prone over it, the bedding drawn about him. Sandy also feigned sleep nearby and with bated breath they awaited whoever was coming.
But the Indian who looked in at the igloo entrance did not come in. He seemed satisfied that the two prisoners were asleep and departed to other business.
However, the narrow escape from detection put a scare into them that set them to devising some other means of covering up their work when visited by one of the gang. With chunks of snow from the tunnel they fashioned a form to resemble a body and wrapping this in bedding they placed it in as life-like a sleeping position as possible near the tunnel. If they were visited again the one on watch could lie down over the entrance to the tunnel, while the other could lie still under the snow without leaving the tunnel.
After this ruse was ready for use they felt more confident of success and redoubled their efforts.
It was Dick who first poked a hole through the snow to the light of the outside world. His heart leaping at the thought that they had succeeded, he looked out of the hole, only to receive one of the greatest shocks of his life. Not ten feet away sat an Eskimo, one of Mistak’s band, chewing on a chunk of seal blubber! As Dick watched with terror-widened eyes, the Eskimo looked directly at him, and paused in his eating. Dick could not force himself to move. Every moment he expected some sign from the Eskimo that he had discovered the attempt to escape, yet the native finally resumed his eating without any alarming actions.
Breathing a sigh of relief Dick plugged up the hole and lay on his stomach in the snow tunnel, wondering if there had been some mistake in their calculations which had brought them out on the wrong side of the snowdrift. But no, they were on the right side of the drift. Nothing could have so confused them as to cause any such disastrous error. The Eskimo must have been there by chance. Dick decided that the native had been hiding from the rest of his band, probably because he had stolen more rations of food than was his allotment.
After waiting a reasonable length of time, Dick cleared the peep hole and looked out. The Eskimo was gone.
Hastily Dick wriggled back through the tunnel and reported to Sandy the welcome news that they had reached the surface of the drift and could now leave the igloo.
Hoping they might delay the discovery of their escape until they had a good start, they fashioned a second dummy from rolled bedding and Sandy, the last one into the snow tunnel, drew this over the hole after him.
A few minutes later they had cautiously broken out of the snowdrift and were crawling along the snow bank away from the encampment.
Once in the ravine, into which the drift led, they strapped on their snowshoes, which Mistak had not thought it necessary to take from them, and made good time away from their captors.
“Just give us as much as an hour’s start and I’ll bet they’ll never catch us,” Dick cried exultantly.
“No, you bet they’ll never catch me,” Sandy repeated emphatically. “I think too much of my skin to have it punched full of holes by that gun in Mistak’s belt.”
Settling into a long, swinging, crab-like stride, the boys covered almost four miles on their snowshoes before they felt it necessary to call a halt.
Sandy was about winded, and fell back against a boulder completely relaxed, but Dick still felt fairly spry so he crawled to the top of a nearby hill and looked over the back trail. He was about to call down to Sandy that all was well when, from a narrow defile through which he remembered they had passed, he saw five figures coming fast on snowshoes. Dick felt a chill that was not from the frosty air creep up his spine. He did not doubt that the distant men were Mistak and several of his gang.
“Sandy, they’re after us,” Dick called down in a tense voice.
Sandy got excitedly to his feet and urged Dick to hurry on with him. But the elder lad had something else in mind as he climbed down from the hill.
“Sandy, there are expert snowshoers in that bunch following us,” Dick said coolly. “We don’t stand a show of keeping the lead we have.”
“Well, we can’t stand them off without rifles. All we have left is our hunting knives.”
“But we can still throw them off our track if we use our heads,” said Dick quickly. “Did you notice that long stretch of hard ice and barren rock that we’ve been following for more than half a mile?”
“Yes,” Sandy began to be interested.
“Well, we can go on along the snow until we angle into the ice and rock under that high barren hill in front of us. They’ll think we climbed the hill, and will go on to pick up our tracks in the next patch of snow. There’s where we’ll fool them. We’ll double on our trail where we can’t leave any footprints, and hide somewhere until they give up hunting for us.”
“Sounds pretty good to me,” replied Sandy. “Let’s mush!”
Quickly, then, the boys carried their plan into execution. They ran on to the point where the snow gave way to barren rock and ice, swept clean by high winds. Here they removed their snowshoes and turned almost squarely about. Running lightly across the stones and ice, they covered about a quarter of a mile on the back trail leaving no tracks to show where they had gone. Then they began looking for a hiding place.
It was Dick who spied a hole under the shelf of a cut bank, which led back under ground. There were no signs that the cavern had been inhabited recently by any wild animals, and after calling Sandy to his side, Dick got on hands and knees and crawled into the dark passage.
The hole grew larger as the boys traversed it, and finally they were able to run along at a crouch.
Presently Dick stopped Sandy. “We’d better not go too far,” he cautioned. “Why not go back to a point where the hole is smaller and block it up with stones and ice? Then if they happen to discover the entrance to this cave they’ll run into where we’ve plugged it up and they’ll think that is the end of the cave.”
Sandy agreed that this was an excellent idea and they hurried back to carry it out. Ten minutes later, feeling much more secure with the barrier thrown up in the small end of the passage, the boys decided to follow the underground corridor to its end or to a point where it branched off into a larger cave.
As they advanced, the passage rapidly grew lighter, until finally they came out into broad daylight. Looking around, they saw they had reached a sort of amphitheater formed by walls of ice-covered stone about fifty feet in height. The floor of the place was about a hundred feet in diameter, but what set the hearts of the boys to pounding frantically, was the fact that a man sat with his back to the wall not fifteen yards away, and a little further on, lying with his face against the side of a broken dog sledge, was another man.
Were they friend or foe? The boys did not know. Something in the very stillness of the two figures boded no good. But they were between two fires, and they must take a chance.
“Hello, there,” called Dick, boldly.
There was no answer. Again Dick called out, without getting any reply. His face paled a little at the strange silence of the men and summoning all his courage he stepped up and grasped the one sitting against the wall by the shoulder. With a cry of horror he staggered back. The body was immovable as stone to the touch, and from the depths of the parka stared a pair of glassy, sightless eyes.
Dick and Sandy turned and looked at each other, swallowing lumps in their throats, and experiencing unpleasant goose-flesh.
For what they had stumbled upon, in that secluded nook, was a camp of frozen men!
At the moment Dick and Sandy discovered themselves in the company of men from whom life had long since fled, they would have gladly chosen to face Mistak and his men rather than remain in the strange, canyon-like pit a second longer. But time and the real peril awaiting them, if they were discovered by Mistak, steadied their nerves.
“It’s silly of us to act like a couple of babies when we see two dead men,” Dick found his tongue again.
“Maybe it is,” Sandy rejoined in a shaky voice, “but it was worse than finding a skeleton in a dark clothes closet.”
Dick silently agreed with Sandy, but thought it better not to admit it aloud. Instead, he assumed a calmness he did not feel in order to disperse Sandy’s fears.
“What we must do now,” said Dick, “is try to find out who these men were. They may have been of some importance in the south—engineers, explorers, or scientists.”
“Go ahead if you want to,” Sandy shook his head as he eyed their gruesome find. “I’ll go back into the cave where I can hear any one that may come in on the other side of the barricade.”
Left alone with the dead men, Dick set immediately about what he thought was his duty. Upon closer inspection he found that the men had not really frozen to death as he had at first supposed, but that one, or both, of them had died from injuries received from a bad fall.
The body near the sledge was partially wedged under one of the runners. The sledge itself was crushed and splintered in front beyond repair. Dick gazed up at the edge of the walls forming the amphitheater, picturing in his mind what he thought had happened. This is what he imagined:
Two men, sledging over an uncharted land in the teeth of a blinding blizzard. An ineffectual struggle of dog and man to avoid slipping into an abyss which they sensed. Then the crash of the sledge and bodies at the foot of the bank. One man had died immediately, crushed by the fall and the sledge. The other had lived to crawl away and lean up against the rock wall which he had never quitted. It was one of the countless tragedies of the north, one of the secrets of the mysterious disappearance of men who had braved the Arctic and never returned.
Dick inspected every foot of ground near the sledge and found the remains of their dogs. But nowhere could he find any record or memoranda as to who the men were and what had been their mission.
He was about to examine the ice-crusted dunnage in the wrecked sledge when Sandy came running in calling to him.
“Someone’s in the cave! I believe Mistak has trailed us after all!”
Dick hastily quitted his work at the sledge and ran back into the cave after Sandy. When they reached the point where they had plugged up the passage, their worst fears were realized. Someone was trying to break in, and the mumble of voices came faintly to their ears. The boys had underestimated the trail-craft of the white Eskimo and his men.
“Mistak has discovered our hiding place in spite of all the pains we took to cover our tracks,” Dick spoke disappointedly. “All we can do now is keep them out by adding to this barricade. We can rebuild it faster than they can break it down, because on the other side only one can work at a time. Let’s get to work, Sandy.”
All the loose boulders and fragments of ice the boys could find they brought to the barricade and piled there as fast as possible. But they soon found that their enemies were gaining on them. This was not noticeable until the boys had used up all the boulders near them and were required to run all the way to the amphitheater for more material. Also, as Mistak’s men worked their way further in, the cave became larger and the outlaws could work more freely. Added to this, Dick’s and Sandy’s job of filling the passage became bigger and bigger the further back they retreated.
“We’ll never keep them out!” Sandy panted at last. “I guess this is our last adventure, Dick.”
“Don’t give up yet, Sandy,” Dick strove to encourage his chum.
Grimly, they stuck to the losing fight, determined not to give up until they had carried the last available stone into the passage to impede the progress of Fred Mistak, whose voice they could now plainly hear urging his men on to greater efforts. Like rats excavated by a clawing dog, Dick and Sandy were determined to sell their lives dearly.
Yet, Providence intervened. Suddenly, the work of Mistak’s men ceased, and the echo of running feet sounded in the icy corridor, accompanied by hoarse shouts of anger and dismay.
“What’s happened?” Sandy turned to Dick, hardly able to believe the good fortune that seemed to be coming to them.
Dick did not answer, but stood very still, listening intently. Finally, the last sounds of retreating footsteps died away.
“We’ll wait a little longer, then open up the passage and find out what or who frightened Mistak away,” said Dick.
For what seemed to the boys about a quarter of an hour, they waited in the dark passage. At the end of this time they began cautiously removing the boulders that blocked the passage. A few minutes later they crawled one at a time from the tiny entrance, finding the vicinity deserted.
“Funny,” Dick looked about puzzledly. “What do you suppose frightened them away?”
Sandy was as much at loss as his chum to account for Mistak’s departure, but presently a distant hail electrified them with attention, and the mystery of their rescue was solved.
About three hundred yards across the snow appeared a dog team and two men, the identity of whom the boys were not long in correctly guessing.
“Hurrah! The police! The police!” shouted Dick, leaping down the rocky slope joyously, Sandy close on his heels.
It was not long before Dick and Sandy were eagerly gripping the huge, mittened hands of Corporal McCarthy and Constable Sloan. The story of their adventures since the officers had left the base, bubbled from their lips by fits and starts, the policemen hardly succeeding in getting a word in edgewise.