“Stand by—Renaud on the air! No more word from the dirigible, save that call from the 78th latitude. Still clinging to hope for them. Our needs—everything. Something dry to stand on, medicine for our eyes, and food, FOOD!”
Lee shivered in his soggy furs. It was a marvel to be in touch even by sound. But a nearer touch must come soon, rescue. Their ice island was breaking in long black lanes. Every hour now the encroaching water perilously ensmalled their domain.
Later that day the tapping in the radio box began again. The powerful arm of Canadian radio was reaching out with its vicarious comfort. It was a strange, homely message that traveled over the frozen wastes this time. It had started from somewhere down South. Hundreds of amateur radio operators of the monstrous, friendly Radio Relay Organization of America had kept the word going. A radio “ham” in Hillton, Alabama, had picked it out of the air and had wirelessed it on to Bington. A Bington amateur had put it on to Johnston. By devious, criss-cross routes, a crippled boy’s little message had sped across the length of the United States, across part of Canada, and now had been flung on the air from that greatest of northern stations, the Hudson’s Bay Aerial, to speed on waves of ether till that makeshift aerial near Foyn caught the words: “Lee Renaud, King’s Cove is praying for you. Your true friend, Jimmy Bobb.”
Lee Renaud had need of prayers—adrift as he was on breaking ice, with one companion injured and the other slowly falling a prey to ice-blindness.
Under the pound of the winds and the steady grind of the waves, their piece of ice was steadily diminishing. Where it had once stretched a limitless field, it now lay a mere thousand feet long by some seven hundred wide. Wet winds had turned its cover of snow into a slush two feet deep. Lee and Scotty were continually having to move Van Granger to new ridges to keep him above the slush.
Despite the crude eye-shades that they had whittled out of wood and tied above their brows, the awful ice glare had wrought havoc with Scotty’s eyes, which were blue and seemed far more susceptible to the ice dazzle than did Renaud’s dark eyes.
Twice now, ice breaks had further ensmalled their island. With terrific labor, they had moved their precious pieces of broken planking, their radio, their scanty stores, farther in to the tough heart of the floe. Scotty’s eyes had gotten so bad by this time that he hadn’t even seen a white bear, huge sneak-thief that had crossed from another floe, come creeping, creeping on its broad pads to dig into their pemmican cache. A quick shot from Renaud’s rifle made the dangerous marauder take to water with lightning speed for so lumbering a beast, and soon it disappeared in the maze of floating tablelands. Lee looked regretfully after so many hundred pounds of meat disappearing into the distance. They had need, dire need of that warming, rich bear steak and of the thick fur. A pity his hand had trembled so!
“T-t-tat, t-tat!”
Staccato stutter of radio coming in again! Oslo, Norway, sending the call.
“Courage! Relief operations pushing forward. The Russian boat, Kravassin, most powerful ice-breaker in the world, smashing her way up into the North towards Spitzbergen to act as base ship for the rescue planes. Dog-sledge camps being laid on mainland to act as further supply bases for rescue flight. Advance wedge of three great airplanes winging into the Arctic now.”