By degrees, the apathy of exhaustion passed from the crew. Battered and bruised, with strained, white faces, the men rallied from their terrifying experience and began to take up their tasks.
With apparent serenity, the Nardak went on her way. But in many and varied places, men labored to repair the damages of the storm. The thrashings of a broken strut had ripped the tough cloth-and-membrane lining of one gas bag. It was a total loss—a loss that reduced the lifting power of the dirigible, but did not cripple the ship to any appreciable extent. The builders had allowed an overplus of helium to meet such an emergency. Much more alarming was the discovery of a defect in the propeller shaft and the flapping of wind-torn fabric on the port stabilizer fin.
Because Lee Renaud was cool-headed, as well as young and active, he took his part in the emergency repair work that now must be done.
There was no halting of the great dirigible on her flight. She simply went into reverse, pointed her nose to the northwest, and took up her storm-broken course once more. If possible, she must keep to her scheduled time of going into the Arctic. For the Arctic summer might last two months, and it might last only a week or so. Arctic summer means a slight melting of snow in wind-swept valleys, means black up-thrust of rock and cliff here and there where the snow-cap has slipped. It is in this brief period, the only time when the contour of the terrain of this ice-locked land is even slightly exposed, that geologist and scientist and gold prospector must make their swift search for the treasure held in Arctic rocks.
So without ever slowing down, much less landing, the Nardak held to her course, while men, like tiny midgets, crawled perilously over her hull, within and without. In the crowded quarters of a motor gondola, mechanics repaired and replaced a propeller, all in the space of four hours. That was a hot and heavy task. But the real danger came to those workers suspended in a sort of harness against the outside of the great dirigible to repair its dismantled fin, while the giant ship held to her speed and to her height of a thousand meters in the air.
Young Renaud was one of those who let themselves be swung in a net of ropes between heaven and earth, while they plied great needles in the latest thing in “dressmaking,” seamstering for a new garment for the stabilizer fin. The tattered condition of the fabric of the port fin was evidence of the suck and pull of the storm she had grazed. More than a third of it hung in shreds. Armed with a huge needle and a cord thread that billowed in the wind, Lee did his share of sewing blankets into place as patching material on the exposed framework. This would have to do till the dirigible made her landing at that last outpost of civilization, Shagun Post on Hudson Bay.
As the repair crew made its way up dizzy aerial ladders, back to the safety of the interior of the hull, and walked down the long catwalk that led between rows of fuel tanks, Lee ran his hand through his upstanding black hair and laughingly remarked, “Whew! I’m hunting a mirror. Want to see how many gray hairs I got, swinging out there in that hundred-mile breeze. From the way my knees still tremble, bet it’s all—”
“Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo!” A strange pitiful wail changed Lee’s joking into an astonished gasp.
It was a wail that came up from the dim, lattice-work shadows of the ship’s bottom, some sixty-odd feet below.
“Man overboard—I mean, lost in-board!” someone shouted.