Rescue on the way even now! And the metallic click of his tiny radio bringing the news to the human flotsam out on the drift ice!
“Rescue coming! Wonderful! And yet—” Like some black thread of cloud that spreads till it darkens a whole horizon, a cloud of premonition, of anxiety, spread over Lee Renaud’s jubilation.
“Scotty,” queried Lee, looking out over the limitless stretches of broken, drifting white, “how big is this sea we are in?”
“Um—let me see!” Scotty, unbelievably darkened by snow glare, black whiskers standing out fiercely round his emaciated face, kept his hand to his poor suffering eyes, and answered slowly. “Perhaps it’s a thousand miles one way, by about fifteen hundred the other.”
“Thousand—fifteen hundred!” gasped Renaud. “Why, Scotty, we’re lost in a sea as big as the whole United States east of the Mississippi. And somewhere in that stretch of water are the pin points that are us! A silver dot further on, maybe, that’s the Nardak! However—why, no lookout in a speeding airship can ever sight us! How can we hope?”
“Miracles. They still happen, sometimes,” said the half-blind Scotty.
The next day, when Lee was trying to divide their remnant of provisions, a little chocolate and a little pemmican, into as small portions as would sustain life, so that it would last as long as possible, he heard a sound up in the sky. A zoom, far away yet coming nearer, nearer!
Scotty heard it too, and ran staggering blindly in circles in the snow, shouting.
A speck in the sky, coming close, closer—a great monoplane with orange fuselage and silver wing.
In a furor of relief and excitement, Renaud and Scotty shouted, waved, threw things in the air.