All trace of the sun was obliterated, and for the first time since the big blizzard, the Arctic sky was overcast with clouds.
Waseche Bill took the lead with McDougall's big ten-team, Connie followed with his own three dogs, while O'Brien, with Waseche's team, brought up the rear. The sleds slipped smoothly over the dry frost spicules, and the eyes of the three adventurers eagerly sought the edges of the high cliffs for signs of the White Indians. But no living, moving thing was visible, and, save for the occasional creak of runners, the white, frozen world was a world of silence.
A half-hour later the malamutes headed up the ravine and humped to the pull of the long ascent. Rapidly, the weather thickened, and when, at last, they gained the bench, it was to gaze out upon an eerie, flat, white world of fore-shortened horizon. The sleds were halted while the three took their bearings. O'Brien pointed unhesitatingly toward the opaque west, and Waseche swung McDougall's leaders.
"Mush yo'! Mush yo'!" he yelled. "Hooray fo' Alaska!"
"An' Flor-ridy, too!" yelled O'Brien, and then a puff of wind—chill wind, that felt strangely clammy and damp in the intense cold, came out of the North. The long, serpentine bank of frozen fog that marked the course of the Ignatook, shuddered and writhed and eddied, while ragged patches of frozen rack detached themselves and flew swiftly southward. The air was filled with a dull roar, and a scattering of steel-like pellets hissed earthward. A loud cry pierced the roar of the approaching storm, and before them stood a solitary White Indian, immovable as a statue, with one arm pointing into the North. For a long moment he stood and then, in a whirl of flying spume, disappeared in the direction of the village.
"Come on, boys!" cried Connie, and his voice sounded far and thin. "Dig in! 'Cause we're right now fighting the North!"
CHAPTER XVII
THE SNOW TRAIL
The situation faced by Connie Morgan, Waseche Bill, and O'Brien when they headed westward across the snow-ridden bench of the Lillimuit, was anything but encouraging. Before them, they knew, lay Alaska. But how many unmapped miles, and what barriers of frozen desert and insurmountable mountains interposed, they did not know; nor did they know the location of the Kandik, the river by which Carlson had returned to the land of men. For Carlson's trail map lay hidden in the pocket of O'Brien's discarded trousers in an igloo in the village of the White Indians, and upon their own worth must the three win—or die.