Never a talkative man, the tall captain had grown, in the latter days of their voyaging, more taciturn than ever. Morose and moody, for hours at a time he never opened his lips except for the giving of orders, and they were more sharp and stern than even was his wont. His associates had been quick to notice those things, but laid them to the cares and dangers of their enterprise. In one thing the captain was not lacking. That was a great capacity for work. Scarcely a detail of the work on board the cruiser or ashore went forward without his personal supervision.
Seeing that the heart of Zenas Wright was firm set on making the trip inland to Sardanes, Polaris, with inward impatience, was forced to delay the immediate start he had premeditated. Once started, the going would be swift as they were capable of, and it would be a cruelty to expect the older man, unused for years to snow travel, to keep up the pace on snowshoes.
While others of the party were busy with the camp building, Polaris and the scientist spent hours on the snow slopes, and made a number of short trips over the ridge to the east. As the young man had foreseen, Wright's first experience with the shoes nearly crippled him. In the course of a couple of days, however, his joints and muscles were limbered to the labor, and he was able to make surprising progress, proving his boast that he was an adept snow runner.
Scoland, whom previous years in both Arctic and Antarctic regions had made expert in the management of dogs, selected himself a team from the huskies, and took a sudden interest in snow journeying, an activity that nearly cost the expedition dearly.
On the second day after their arrival at the cove, a man came ashore from the Minnetonka with a message for the captain from Aronson on the Felix. The message bearer failed to find Scoland at the shacks. When Polaris and Zenas Wright came in later, at the end of their day's exercise, the captain was still missing. They had not seen him. Dogs and sledge which the captain had been using were missing also.
"Either he is strayed and lost in the snow, or some manner of mishap has befallen," said Polaris. "I will go and find him."
Turning his own beasts, he set out at once to study the tangle of snow trails that led inland from the camp. There had been no snow and little wind for a number of days, so it was an easy matter for him to read the paths. Starting from the ridge at the back of the cove, he swung out in a long loop, whose farther curve took him five miles or more from the camp. Four trails he crossed that were plainly back-trailed. The fifth snow path that he came to led on into the wilderness, with no evidence of a return, and he followed that.
Along the foothill slopes of the icy barrier mountains the land lay comparatively level, except for the rocky hummocks that were everywhere sprinkled. A few miles to the south of the range, low rolling hills began again, extending as far as eye might see. Into the hills Scoland's trail lay. Some six miles from where Polaris first picked up the path, he found the captain.
Where a deep and jagged crevasse yawned beneath its treacherous coverlet of snow crust, the trail ended. Where the crust had broken under their weight, men and dogs and sledge had disappeared into the depths.