“Captain! Hey, captain! Come back!” but so far off were all hands now that no one turned. Leaving his silent shipmate in the drift, the quartermaster, going as fast as the broken path allowed, hurried after them, shouting occasionally, till half a mile along he finally attracted De Long’s attention and stopped him till he could catch up, when he told the captain of Erichsen’s plight.
De Long gritted his teeth.
“Keep ahead, Nindemann, till you come to driftwood, then build a fire quick and camp,” ordered De Long briefly. “Come on, doctor; we’ll go back for Erichsen!”
Back rushed De Long and Ambler till buried in the snow as Nindemann had left him, they found the prostrate Erichsen. With some difficulty, Ambler turned him over, while De Long pulled his crutches out from the deep snow alongside. The doctor took the broken seaman by both shoulders and started to lift him.
“Let go me, doc,” begged Erichsen, “it ban no use any more to help. My legs ban killing me. Ay vant now only to die qvick! Go avay!”
“Get up, Erichsen!” ordered De Long in a voice cold as steel. “Here’s your crutches; take ’em and get going down that road! Do you think I’m going to leave you now? Get underway! And when you can’t hobble, I’ll drag you! Up now, before I jerk you up!”
For a moment, Erichsen, lying in the snow, stared dumbly into the captain’s inflexible eyes, then his habit of obedience conquered his suffering. Slowly he pushed himself into a sitting position and without another word reached for the crutches. With Ambler’s assistance, he rose to his feet and then with both De Long and the doctor behind him to see that he did not again lie down, he hobbled off down the path, each step undoubtedly an agony to him as his bleeding and tortured feet came down in the snow. And so, slowly and painfully they covered the last mile into the camp, where a roaring driftwood fire and a scanty supper of cold pemmican and tea awaited them.
Before the fire, all hands steamed in front while they froze behind, and then stretched out on driftwood logs for a bed, hauled their sole remaining tent flat over the fourteen of them and turned in. But between sharp winds, bitter cold, and falling snow, it was a fearful night for the fourteen sufferers, shaking and shivering beneath the thin canvas, and no one slept.
Through snow and fog again the party struggled southward along the river bank next day, with Boyd and Ah Sam both improved, and even Erichsen, the captain’s stern voice still ringing in his ears, doing a little better on his crutches. But with only two days’ slim rations of pemmican left, and with each day’s progress hardly a scant five miles over the snowy tundra, the chances of making the remaining eighty miles to Ku Mark Surk began to fade.
In the middle of the third afternoon, the party came to two abandoned wood huts by the river side, the first evidence of habitation they had met in the Lena Delta, and gladly all hands entered. Inside the huts, reasonably sheltered for the first time in weeks from cold, from wind, and from snow, and with plenty of driftwood about so they could warm themselves at last, the men stripped off their soaked and ragged furs and stood about naked while their clothes dried before the hurriedly built fires.