Blanket slings hoisted up Van Granger and Scotty.
Lee Renaud had the strength to go up and over by himself, though the feel of solid ship beneath him took the last of his fighting spirit out of him. Safe! He didn’t have to be strong for himself and for the sick and injured men longer. He was going to make a fool of himself—going to faint. He fought off blackness in vain. He felt kind hands catch him, lower him. The last he heard was Ravoia calling out, “Hey, get this up—Renaud’s wireless. It’s made history, linked the world.”
When Renaud came to, he had the feeling that he was still on a bit of drift ice, that it must all be a marvelous dream—the great ship, comforts, warmth, the crew calling him a hero.
With the picking up of these first refugees, the Kravassin’s work had just begun. On into the frozen north she pushed, following that one clue of the lost dirigible, that faint wireless call Renaud’s radio had picked up—“Adrift on ice. Latitude 78.”
Life aboard the Kravassin was one steady round of excitement. Food and comforts soon brought Lee’s strong young body back to normal. Snug in furs, from hooded parka to boot tip, he took his part in the work as the steel-clad ram bucked the floes, deeper and deeper into the frozen ocean of the Arctic.
Never was there such a ship as the Kravassin, never such a method of fighting the power of ice. With metal ram to crack the ice, with keel built to ride the floe in slide movement, with ten thousand horsepower engines to push her, the Kravassin fought her fight. Huge water tanks, fore and aft, were filled or emptied at the rate of hundreds of tons an hour, so the weight could be increased enormously to crush the ice or so the ship could roll to smash itself free.
For a week the Kravassin pushed on, pathmaking through the frozen pack, heading north, trailing the faint clue—“Lost at 78.”
It was hopeless. The Arctic summer light was merging into the twilight that meant the beginning of the long night of the Arctic winter. Man must flee before that long period of darkness descended. Part of the crew were ready to turn back. They had done their duty, had crossed 78,—no lost dirigible was in these parts. Perhaps it was all a hallucination of young Renaud’s fevered mind—that radio call from the north. So the talk went.
They must push on, farther still; it was drift ice the call had come from; the dirigible may have been swept on and on. Renaud pleaded and begged for a longer search. He reinforced his pleading with promise of rich pay out of the golden treasure that had crashed with the gondola on the ice.
Because of Renaud’s intense belief in that faint call, the mighty search went on yet a little longer. Steel prow crashing tons of ice to the sky and back—airship flotilla searching from the upper strata—men’s eyes strained ahead for glint of lost silver hulk!