  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! |
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