FINDING THE TREASURE
For a moment the boys thought they must have misunderstood him. Lost—on an ocean filled with menacing blocks of ice! Lost—in a storm like this!
To the chorus of frantic questions flung at him the Eskimo merely replied over and over again with stoic patience:
“We lost. Maybe find way again—maybe not. Bad storm. No can tell.”
Seeing that there was nothing to be gotten from their guide, the boys finally relapsed into an anxious silence, their eyes straining to pierce the curtain of snow that fell so thickly about them.
“Well, I’ve had enough snow in the last few days to last me the rest of my life,” said Mouser, breaking a gloomy silence. “I’ll say this is the limit!”
No one contradicted him and again they fell into a miserable silence.
The snow continued to fall, heavy, thick, smothering. The boys noticed, too, that the ice that blocked the water was becoming more formidable.
They met with larger masses, and sometimes sinister shapes of baby icebergs slipped by them, looming bulkily through the falling snow.
Once they became so tightly wedged between blocks of ice that it was only by all working together with the spears, pushing at the surrounding ice with all their might, that they succeeded in dragging the sturdy little craft free of her prison, out into the more open waters.