“Oui, mon garçon! What ees mattaire?” came Joe’s voice.
“Come here, quick. It’s Jack!”
“Wha’s happen heem?” cried old Joe, dropping what he was doing and running through the snow toward the boys.
“His foot. It’s—it’s caught in an old trap, and—and, Joe, I’m afraid that it has bitten to the bone!”
“Sacre nom!”
But of all this Jack heard nothing. He had fainted under the excruciating pain of the pressure of the steel jaws that gripped him fast like a helpless animal.
CHAPTER XXIX—SANDY HAS A NIGHTMARE.
As the ruddy glow of the flames lighted up the rift in Sandy’s rock castle, the boy looked about him curiously before he began work on his scant stock of food. The place was about forty feet in length and not more than five in height, sloping down at each end like the roof in an old-fashioned farm bedroom.
He noted with some satisfaction that near the entrance there were masses of dead and dried up bushes, from which he thought he could contrive a mattress later on. But for the present he devoted himself to his meal.
Luckily, he had brought along a pannikin, and in this, when he had melted some snow for water, he made tea, without a small package of which the true adventurer of the northern wilds never travels. The hot liquid did him almost as much good as the food, and, as Sandy remarked as he gulped it down, it was “main filling.”