HOPE AND DESPAIR
"Tat! Tat! T-t-tat!" It was working, the radio code was coming in! They
were in touch!
The wonder of it! From this lone camp out here on the drift ice, the
operator with his patched-up radio set was in voice connection with
lands hundreds--yes, thousands of miles away.
Some metal strips wired together, their bases banked in snow, lifted
their slender height above this tiny camp on a drift-island of ice.
Renaud's radio aerial!
Beneath it, a black-haired boy with determination in set of jaw, dark
eyes fever-bright, hands that trembled from hunger weakness in spite of
the grip a fellow kept upon himself! That was Renaud, huddled at patient
work over screws and coils and some solder on a tin box. It took
continual nursing to keep the metal patches and makeshifts in place, to
keep this thing clicking. But he was doing it! Taps--more taps! He was
in touch again with that Hudson Bay operator at a station that was a
whole ocean and half a continent away.
"Renaud--up about Foyn--are you on the air? Keep in touch with us. Your
country is organizing search crews. Airplanes and ice-breaker ships from
other nations joining the search. Give us news of the lost dirigible.
Give us your needs."
Instead of being perched out on a hunk of ice in the vast Arctic, Lee
Renaud, wireless operator, might, for all the precision of the affair,
have been seated in a swivel-chair at the telegraph desk in some
forty-story city skyscraper sending a message over the wires. He was on
the ice--but the messages were going through in great shape.
"Stand by--Renaud on the air! No more word from the dirigible, save that
call from the 78th latitude. Still clinging to hope for them. Our
needs--everything. Something dry to stand on, medicine for our eyes, and
food, FOOD!"
Lee shivered in his soggy furs. It was a marvel to be in touch even by
sound. But a nearer touch must come soon, rescue. Their ice island was
breaking in long black lanes. Every hour now the encroaching water
perilously ensmalled their domain.
Later that day the tapping in the radio box began again. The powerful
arm of Canadian radio was reaching out with its vicarious comfort. It
was a strange, homely message that traveled over the frozen wastes this
time. It had started from somewhere down South. Hundreds of amateur
radio operators of the monstrous, friendly Radio Relay Organization of
America had kept the word going. A radio "ham" in Hillton, Alabama, had
picked it out of the air and had wirelessed it on to Bington. A Bington
amateur had put it on to Johnston. By devious, criss-cross routes, a
crippled boy's little message had sped across the length of the United
States, across part of Canada, and now had been flung on the air from
that greatest of northern stations, the Hudson's Bay Aerial, to speed on
waves of ether till that makeshift aerial near Foyn caught the words:
"Lee Renaud, King's Cove is praying for you. Your true friend, Jimmy
Bobb."
Lee Renaud had need of prayers--adrift as he was on breaking ice, with
one companion injured and the other slowly falling a prey to
ice-blindness.
Under the pound of the winds and the steady grind of the waves, their
piece of ice was steadily diminishing. Where it had once stretched a
limitless field, it now lay a mere thousand feet long by some seven
hundred wide. Wet winds had turned its cover of snow into a slush two
feet deep. Lee and Scotty were continually having to move Van Granger to
new ridges to keep him above the slush.
Despite the crude eye-shades that they had whittled out of wood and tied
above their brows, the awful ice glare had wrought havoc with Scotty's
eyes, which were blue and seemed far more susceptible to the ice dazzle
than did Renaud's dark eyes.
Twice now, ice breaks had further ensmalled their island. With terrific
labor, they had moved their precious pieces of broken planking, their
radio, their scanty stores, farther in to the tough heart of the floe.
Scotty's eyes had gotten so bad by this time that he hadn't even seen a
white bear, huge sneak-thief that had crossed from another floe, come
creeping, creeping on its broad pads to dig into their pemmican cache. A
quick shot from Renaud's rifle made the dangerous marauder take to water
with lightning speed for so lumbering a beast, and soon it disappeared
in the maze of floating tablelands. Lee looked regretfully after so many
hundred pounds of meat disappearing into the distance. They had need,
dire need of that warming, rich bear steak and of the thick fur. A pity
his hand had trembled so!
"T-t-tat, t-tat!"
Staccato stutter of radio coming in again! Oslo, Norway, sending the
call.
"Courage! Relief operations pushing forward. The Russian boat,
Kravassin, most powerful ice-breaker in the world, smashing her way up
into the North towards Spitzbergen to act as base ship for the rescue
planes. Dog-sledge camps being laid on mainland to act as further supply
bases for rescue flight. Advance wedge of three great airplanes winging
into the Arctic now."
Rescue on the way even now! And the metallic click of his tiny radio
bringing the news to the human flotsam out on the drift ice!
"Rescue coming! Wonderful! And yet--" Like some black thread of cloud
that spreads till it darkens a whole horizon, a cloud of premonition, of
anxiety, spread over Lee Renaud's jubilation.
"Scotty," queried Lee, looking out over the limitless stretches of
broken, drifting white, "how big is this sea we are in?"
"Um--let me see!" Scotty, unbelievably darkened by snow glare, black
whiskers standing out fiercely round his emaciated face, kept his hand
to his poor suffering eyes, and answered slowly. "Perhaps it's a
thousand miles one way, by about fifteen hundred the other."
"Thousand--fifteen hundred!" gasped Renaud. "Why, Scotty, we're lost in
a sea as big as the whole United States east of the Mississippi. And
somewhere in that stretch of water are the pin points that are us! A
silver dot further on, maybe, that's the Nardak! However--why, no
lookout in a speeding airship can ever sight us! How can we hope?"
"Miracles. They still happen, sometimes," said the half-blind Scotty.
The next day, when Lee was trying to divide their remnant of provisions,
a little chocolate and a little pemmican, into as small portions as
would sustain life, so that it would last as long as possible, he heard
a sound up in the sky. A zoom, far away yet coming nearer, nearer!
Scotty heard it too, and ran staggering blindly in circles in the snow,
shouting.
A speck in the sky, coming close, closer--a great monoplane with orange
fuselage and silver wing.
In a furor of relief and excitement, Renaud and Scotty shouted, waved,
threw things in the air.
On it came from the south. The pilot must have seen them and was heading
their way--no, no, he was passing too far to the left. He was missing
them!
Like statues, the two on the drift ice stood rooted to their tracks.
From within the cabin, Granger's weak voice called fretfully, wanting to
know what the shouting was, what was happening?
Nothing--nothing was happening.
Ah, yes, it was! The ship of the air was coming back, coursing in the
sky trails like some trusty hunter on the scent. Ola, it must locate
them this time! Wasn't that the engine slowing, the pilot "cutting the
gun" for a swoop to their floe?
But above, and still far away to the left of the three on the great
white waste, the pilot in his silver and orange craft kept on his way,
unseeing.
After him rose hoarse shouts, that the wind whipped to nothing before
they could ever reach him. Somewhere below him, two humans flung up
their arms and dropped in the snow. Hope had gone.