As the port gondola crashed, Renaud had a fleeting sense of being violently projected into space, then smashing heavily into the snow. Black mist swept through his brain, cleared. He lay, a mass of aches. Then his eyelids flicked open. He tried to scream as he gazed upward.
The dirigible, freed of the weight of one engine cabin, had shot high in the air again!
In that moment, Renaud saw Harrison, the meteorologist, and Captain Bartlot standing at an observation opening and looking down in distress. Their eyes, wide with apprehension, seemed fixed on him until the huge balloon disappeared in the mist. From somewhere on high, a piece or two more of ballast crashed down and fell far out on the ice. A little later a thin streak of smoke showed up against the northern sky. Had the dirigible caught fire, or was this merely a smoke signal?
More terrible than the bitter cold creeping into Renaud’s body was the desolation creeping into his heart.
CHAPTER XX
F-O-Y-N
Renaud lay where he had been flung, in a narrow trough of snow that was almost like a coffin. He scarce knew whether he was alive or dead. At first the bitter cold had pierced him sharply. Now his arms felt nerveless, like some leaden weights. All sense of touch seemed to have left his hands. He hardly knew whether they were still attached to his wrists or not.
Suppose he were dead? Suppose he were in his coffin? A pleasant stupor was creeping, creeping over him.
He was dying. He was freezing to death.
Through his stupefied brain a tiny thought kept hammering desperately. Rouse—move—stir! So the tiny impulse kept throbbing, but slower, and slower now. It was the impulse of life resisting death to the very end.
The storm gale had spent itself, but a tag end of wind fluttered across the wastes and hurled snow with a sudden vicious sting into Renaud’s face. Its cold slap roused the boy momentarily. He stirred. His circulation set up its throb again. Life was calling. Lee forced himself to a sitting posture. He must not give up. He must fight this temptation to abandon himself to this numbing, creeping cold. In slow movements, he freed himself of the drift snow, forced himself to stand, began to put one numb foot before the other in shaky progress across the ice sheet and its swathing of snow.