WRECKED
"All aboard! Change here for all way stations; our next stop is
the Pole!"
Barney, the daring aviator, sang the words cheerfully, as he settled
himself in his place at the wheel. He hardly felt the cheerfulness his
tone implied. True, they had spent twelve days repairing the damage done
to the plane by the wind and its collision with the white bear, but it
was a rather patched-up affair now it was finished--as it needs must be
with the few materials and tools at their command. As he had expressed it
to Bruce only the night before: they had a crippled wing, and a bird with
a broken pinion never soars so high again, even if it is a bird of
fabric, wood and steel.
However, he was truly glad to be getting away on what they hoped might be
their last lap. The grave-like silence of the Arctic, with its
glistening whiteness everywhere, had gripped his nerves.
"Well, here's hoping," he murmured to Bruce, as the plane hopped off.
As for the Major, he sat with face fixed as a bronze statue. His gaze was
toward the Pole.
For fourteen hours they soared steadily onward. Only the air, which
grew crisper and more stinging as they advanced steadily northward,
told them they were nearing the Pole. Observations from the plane were
impossible. The sun, which had been appearing less and less each day,
was now quite lost to them. Only the moon in all its glory tinted the
blue ice-piles with wavering ghost colors. The wind for once was still.
Not a bird appeared in the sky, not an animal met the gaze of their
binoculars as they peered below. It was as if the whole Northern realm
had become suddenly silent at the magnificent spectacle of three men
sailing alone over spaces never yet traveled by man, and where dangers
lurked at every turn.
The plane, too, was surprising its driver. It answered his least touch
on the lever controls. The engines were working perfectly. Only now and
again he caught a faint lurch which told his practiced senses that some
of the rudely improvised splices were working loose. Even these gave him
no great alarm; at least, they did not seem sufficiently serious to
warrant an immediate landing.
But suddenly, as they were soaring over the wildest, most
treacherous-looking stretch of floe ice that eyes have ever rested upon,
the plane gave a lurch. A shudder ran through her from wing to wing, and,
with a plunge, she shot side-wise. The outer half of her right wing had
doubled up on the inner half, like a blade to a jack-knife.
Bruce took in the situation at a glance. Before a hand could stop him,
he had unbuckled his straps, and, creeping to the extremity of the
remaining half of the wing, he clung there, thus adding his weight to
its balancing power.
Already Barney had shut off the engines. With the added weight to the
right the plane became steadier. Danger of a whirling spin to the
ice-surface seemed for the time averted.
"What a landing-place!" groaned Barney, almost touching the starting
lever in his eagerness to save the plane. But he stayed his hand; to
start the engine under such conditions would be madness. Some form of
landing they must make, even if it was but to "crash."
So they sped steadily downward, realizing that the goal they sought must
now, with the aid of their dog-team, be easily within their grasp; yet
realizing also that all means of returning was likely to be denied them,
unless, indeed, one were to call five dogs a means of traveling over
hundreds of miles of tangled, tumbling mountains of ice.
Suddenly, Barney's heart leaped for joy. Just before them, within
possible area of landing, lay a perfectly level stretch of ice. It
was not large, was, in fact, perilously small, yet it offered a
possible landing.
Tilting the left plane to its utmost, adjusting the tail, Barney glided
onward. With bated breath he saw the white plain rise to meet them. With
trembling hand he touched a lever here, a button there. Then--a jar--the
landing-wheels had touched. They touched again. The moving plane fairly
ate up the scant level space, yet she slowed and slowed until at last,
with hardly a tremor, she rested against the outcropping ridge of ice at
the floe's edge.
With a glowing smile the Major unstrapped himself to reach out his hands
in thanks and congratulation to his pilots.
But--where were they? They had disappeared. He found them in front of the
plane calling to him for assistance. Then he saw the danger their more
practiced eyes had already noticed. The ice at this point was piling. At
this moment the very cake against which they had stopped was beginning to
rise. Within a space of moments, the plane, unless turned and thrust
backward, would be crushed beneath hundreds of tons of ice.
"If we can get her back we can save her!" panted Bruce.
"Swing her!" shouted Barney, throwing his whole strength against the
right wing.
"Now she moves!" yelled Bruce joyously. "Now! Heave ho!"
The great craft turned slowly on her wheels. Now the plane was clearing
the ice. Now--now in just a second--she would be safe.
But no--the right wheel caught in an ice-crevice. Three desperate efforts
they made to free her, then, just as the giant cake towered, crumbling
above them, the Major shouted the word of warning that sent them leaping
back to safety but cost them their machine.
True, it stood there, still. The mechanism was perfect, the engines
uninjured. But the right wing was completely demolished. Buried beneath
tons and tons of ice, the craft that had carried them so far was crushed
beyond all hope of repair.
With despair tugging at their hearts, the three stood looking at the
wreckage. But they were not of the breed that quits.
"We'd better get our stuff and what's left of the plane out of the way
of danger," said Bruce at length.
"The stuff--blankets, grub and the like, yes, but"--Barney smiled in
spite of himself--"why the plane? She's done for."
"Because," said Bruce, "you can never tell what will happen."
The pressure which was piling the ice diminished rapidly, and the back
edge of the cake proved a safe place to make camp. Soon they were boiling
tea over a small oil stove and discussing the future as calmly as they
might have done had they been in the old office-shack back on the Hudson
Bay Railroad.
"Now to find where we are," exclaimed the Major, knocking the tea leaves
from his cup.
The interest in this project was keen. After working out his reckoning,
estimating the speed of their flight and counting the hours they had been
in the air, the Major laid down his pencil.
"Fifty miles southeast of the Pole," he said at last. "Shall we attempt
to go on or turn back?"
The boys looked at one another. Bruce read in his companions' eyes the
desire to attempt the return with the dog-team. At the same time, he
realized that the real genius of an explorer lay in his desire to push
on. The Major had that genius.
"As for me," Bruce said finally, "I never decide anything of great
importance until I have slept over it."
Barney smiled in spite of his anxiety and weariness.
But the Major, seeing the strained expression in the boys' faces,
realized that the ultimatum of Bruce was a good one.
Soon the three companions were snug in their sleeping-bags, dreaming of a
land of grass and flowers far, far away.
* * * * *
As soon as the submarine was safely on its course after the glacier
incident, Dave, who had not slept for many hours, turned in for "three
winks." His three winks had stretched on into hours, when he was wakened
by a sudden jarring that shook the craft from stem to stern. He was on
his feet in the passage-way at once.
"What happened?" he demanded of a sailor.
"Blamed if I know," said the other. He was white as a sheet.
One thing Dave made sure of as he hurried toward the wheel-room; they
were drifting under the ice-floor of the ocean. Was the motor simply
dead, or was the propeller gone? He had but an instant to wait. There
came the purr of the motor, then the sudden sound of racing machinery,
which told plainer than words that the worst had happened.
"I think it was a walrus, sir," said Rainey, who had been in charge of
the wheel-room. "I had just caught sight of a dark blotch gliding by and
reached for the power when the racket started."
"What were you making?" asked Dave quietly.
"Our usual ten knots."
The compartment they were in was filled with levers and adjusting wheels
of all descriptions. The walls were lined with gauges and dials of many
styles and sizes. A person on entering and taking the operator's
position, might fancy himself in the center of a circle of gears and
driving wheels of many automobiles.
Dave glanced at a gauge, then at another. He touched a wheel, and the
hand on the second dial began to drop. They were now rising. As a usual
thing, they traveled some forty feet below the surface. Icebergs were
scarce in these waters, and the ordinary floe did not lie more than
twenty feet below sea-level; still, it was safer lower down. But now--now
their safety rested in gliding to a point beneath a water channel or
hole, and, once they were under it, they must not fail to rise.
"No, not if it takes our conning-tower to do it!" Dave said savagely, as
he finished explaining.
They were still drifting through the water at a rather rapid rate, but
little by little a speed gauge was falling. Soon they would be lying
motionless beneath the Arctic floe, as helpless as a dead whale; and
should no dark water-hole appear before that time came, they were doomed.
Dave wiped the cold perspiration from his brow, as the hand on the dial
dropped lower and lower. He touched a wheel again, and they rose another
ten feet. "Must be nearly bumping the ice by now; but at such a time as
this one takes risks," he muttered.
What was that? Did he sense the dark shadow which always presaged open
water? Surely, if walrus were about, there must be open water to give
them air. And, yes--there it was; a hole in the floe!
His trembling hand again touched the wheel. The hand on the dial had
dropped to nearly nothing. If the water-hole was narrow; if they
missed it!
But no--up--up they shot, and in just another moment men were swarming
from the conning-tower.
"Say!" exclaimed Dave, wiping his forehead. "Do you remember the
obstacle-races they used to have at county fairs when you were a boy?"
The jackie he spoke to grinned and nodded.
"Well, this is an obstacle-race, and the worst I ever saw. The worst of
it is, there are two prizes--one's the Pole and the other our own lives!"
The open water they had reached at so fortunate a moment proved to be a
channel between floes. They were in no immediate danger now, but to
repair the damage done to the shaft and adjust a new propeller, it was
necessary that they drag the submarine to the surface of a broad
ice-cake. This task was not as difficult as one might imagine. With the
aid of ice-anchors, iron pulleys and cables, they without much delay
harnessed their engine and finished the job all ship shape.
"Look!" said one of the seamen, pointing at the narrow stretch of water.
"She's closin' in!"
As the men looked they knew it to be true; the channel was certainly
narrower than when they first rose upon its surface.
Securing a light line, the Doctor attached it to a plummet. Throwing the
plummet across the space, he drew the line taut. He then marked the
point where the ice-line crossed it. Then for five minutes he divided his
attention between the line and his watch. As he rose he muttered;
"Two hours! Two hours! How long will it take to complete the repairs?"
"Four hours, at least," Dave replied calmly.
"Then we're defeated!" The Doctor began pacing the surface of the ice.
"We're stuck--beaten! In two hours the channel will be closed, and there
is not another patch of open water within five miles!"
If Dave seemed unnaturally calm on receipt of such news, it was because
he had in his "bag of tricks" one of which the Doctor was not aware.
While in Nome he had made the acquaintance of a former British seaman,
who had cruised Arctic waters in the late eighties, when Japan was
disputing the rights of Great Britain and the United States to close the
seal fisheries. This man had told him how the gunboats had opened their
way through the ice-floes. The idea had appealed to the young skipper.
Consequently, on boarding the submarine, he had carried under his arm a
package which he handled very carefully, and finally deposited in the
very center of a great bale of fur clothing. There it still remained.
"I suppose I might tell him," he said to himself. "But I guess I won't.
'Blessed is he that expecteth nothing,' The trick might not work. I'll
wait." He turned to where the mechanics were hard at work adjusting the
new propeller.
The repairing had gone on for something over two hours. The water-channel
had completely closed. The Doctor was pacing the ice, lost in reflection.
Like a flash, there came into Dave's mind a new problem: would the
current be content merely to close the channel, or would the ice soon
begin to buckle and pile? With an uneasy mind, he urged the workmen to
hasten, at the same time keeping an eye on the line of ice where the
channel had so lately been.