Boom, crash, boom! It was a titanic sight, ice ripped and torn by terrific power.
Then behind the ice, through the ice, there came a strange sight. Not the tornado whirl Lee Renaud was expecting, but the great prow of a vessel. The most powerful ice-breaker of the North, the Kravassin, fighting through to the rescue!
Renaud’s heart stood still. Relief at the reprieve from death itself rushed through him in a revulsion of feeling that left him weak. His limbs were as water, his bones were as sand. He crumpled to his knees.
It was a stupendous spectacle that Renaud was given to watch—a gigantic battle between the vessel’s ten thousand horsepower engines and the frozen clutch of the North.
How could the great ship smash through to the tiny island without sinking it?
In anguish, Renaud watched the oncoming, triple-sheathed ram of the Kravassin cut her terrible path.
The refugees would be submerged, swept off their ice. How could the monster heave in to them without drowning them?
But with a sure hand, Markovitch, captain of the mighty ice-breaker, sent his crashing, metal-clad monster in a great circle about the marooners’ piece of floe. Then cutting in, he made a smaller circle, and a still smaller circle—eased his huge vessel close. Movement was slow. The great ram of the prow, instead of smashing, was nosing in, creeping in now.
With a shudder of steam exhaust, she came to rest, her bulk pushing together the ice drift before her to make a white bridge to the marooners’ island. Over her side swarmed a rescue crew, Ravoia of the SD-55 leading on foot now to the little ice island he had located from the air days ago. The castaways were rushed back, sped across rocking floe, lifted across little chasms that in another moment would be great chasms. At the ship itself, ladders and hawsers and scores of willing hands waited to draw them up to safety.
“Easy now! He’s injured! That one’s not seeing much. Easy, easy!” rose calls from the ice.