“Putting through to F-O-Y-N—clear the air, all else—courage to the marooned—help coming—the planes and ice-breakers of five nations to the rescue!”
“Rescue! Rescue!” shouted Lee Renaud, then his fingers fell to tapping again.
“Stand by—the Arctic on the air—F-O-Y-N heard the message—we live—” Lee Renaud slid to his knees, a prayer of thankfulness in his heart, then fainted dead away in the snow.
CHAPTER XXII
HOPE AND DESPAIR
“Tat! Tat! T-t-tat!” It was working, the radio code was coming in! They were in touch!
The wonder of it! From this lone camp out here on the drift ice, the operator with his patched-up radio set was in voice connection with lands hundreds—yes, thousands of miles away.
Some metal strips wired together, their bases banked in snow, lifted their slender height above this tiny camp on a drift-island of ice. Renaud’s radio aerial!
Beneath it, a black-haired boy with determination in set of jaw, dark eyes fever-bright, hands that trembled from hunger weakness in spite of the grip a fellow kept upon himself! That was Renaud, huddled at patient work over screws and coils and some solder on a tin box. It took continual nursing to keep the metal patches and makeshifts in place, to keep this thing clicking. But he was doing it! Taps—more taps! He was in touch again with that Hudson Bay operator at a station that was a whole ocean and half a continent away.
“Renaud—up about Foyn—are you on the air? Keep in touch with us. Your country is organizing search crews. Airplanes and ice-breaker ships from other nations joining the search. Give us news of the lost dirigible. Give us your needs.”
Instead of being perched out on a hunk of ice in the vast Arctic, Lee Renaud, wireless operator, might, for all the precision of the affair, have been seated in a swivel-chair at the telegraph desk in some forty-story city skyscraper sending a message over the wires. He was on the ice—but the messages were going through in great shape.