“If we don’t get a move on we’ll get more darkness than we want,” said Dick, referring to the approach of the Arctic’s long night.
But when the boys started up the gorge again it was no darker. So far, all the night they were to experience for a few weeks was to be several hours of twilight.
Not far up the gorge, beyond the point where the avalanche had narrowly missed destroying them, Dick called the attention of his chum to three tiny figures walking along the rim of the gorge above them.
“I wonder if those men could be Moonshine Sam and his two companions,” said Dick. “They’ve had just about time to come this far if they had headed this way shortly after we stopped trailing them.”
“Well, I hope they won’t try any monkeyshines like starting another avalanche,” Sandy shivered. “When I die I don’t want to get that kind of a sendoff for the Happy Hunting Grounds. What do you say, Toma?”
The young Indian grunted his emphatic sanction of Sandy’s preferences, while all three watched the men on the cliff. The men they thought might be Moonshine Sam and the two half-breeds from Mistak’s band, kept abreast of the boys for nearly a half hour, then as the gorge began to grow shallower upon nearing the plateau down from which it led, they disappeared.
“If they ever get wind of the fact that we know Corporal Thalman is still alive, our lives won’t be worth a cent,” Dick expressed his thoughts aloud. “They’ll put an end to Corporal Thalman right away, too, if they think for a minute we have a chance to rescue him—if they haven’t done that already.”
The boys hurried on, and soon came out of the gorge upon what they were quite sure was the top of the glacier. An icy wind, that cut to the very marrow of their bones, blew across the vast, white field of ice. But they struck out bravely across the lonely forbidding desert of the north, hoping soon to locate the first of the three main fissures marked on the map.
They were now traveling southwest with the sun in their eyes, and for the first time since they saw genuine “sun-dogs.” The phenomenon was intensely interesting and for a time attracted almost all their attention. The sun-dogs were in the form of four miniature suns situated one above, one below, and one on either side of the big disc of light that was the source of them. They were not really suns, however, but reflections of the sun upon the countless particles of frost in the air. One of the “dogs” was somewhat like the rainbow, for it seemed to hang just a few feet ahead of the dog team, dancing just out of reach, like a will-o’-the-wisp, as they plodded along.
Then they came upon a deep fissure in the glacier which temporarily crowded the sun-dogs out of their minds. The crack was not an exceptionally large one in comparison to other glacial fissures they had seen, being only about four feet across at the widest points. Several smaller fissures were indicated on the map as preceding the first main fissure, so the boys crossed the gap by jumping, improvising a bridge with the sledge for those dogs to cross over which were too stubborn to make the leap.