With a joy they could not express, Dick and Sandy embraced, whereupon Sandy’s story came tumbling from his lips by fits and starts.
Briefly, it was this: About half way to Moonshine Sam’s igloo, following the beaten path, he had heard stealthy footsteps coming toward him. In the gloom he could see nothing, and so he had stopped, waiting for some sign that the person was a friend or an enemy. Then, without warning, a smothering fur robe had been thrown over him and he was lifted up in strong arms and carried away. At a distance from the igloos far enough so that his cries for help would not bring his friends, Sandy’s captors had put him on his feet, and taken off the robe. They then had taken his knife away from him and had thrown it away. Sandy had then been compelled to accompany the men on foot. When his eyes had grown accustomed to the dimly starlit night, he had managed to recognize Mistak among the three, and had found out that they were leaving bits of fur behind them to mark their trail. Sandy had not been able to fathom their purpose in leaving such a plain trail, nor had he been fully aware of the nature of the cunning trap laid by Mistak when the outlaw had left him bound and gagged against a snowdrift, after a long roundabout journey among a network of deep gorges.
“I didn’t know what it was all about till I saw you three stop out there in front of me, and throw that stone,” Sandy concluded. “I guess I made a pretty good bait for that trap.”
“I pretty near went right on after you, too,” shivered Dick, recalling their narrow escape, “but Corporal McCarthy was wise enough to see through it.”
“Well, let’s be getting back to camp,” the policeman interrupted them. “We’re a lot farther from home than we ought to be. If a storm catches us before we get in there’s no telling whether we’ll ever get back.”
“I’m sure beginning to wish it really was home we were going back to,” groaned Sandy. “In two days I’ve only had one chunk of walrus meat to eat.”
“Buck up, Sandy,” Dick replied cheerfully, as they set out on the back trail. “We’ll be back at camp before you know it.”
But Dick was wrong. Before they were on the trail an hour, a bank of clouds that had been hovering in the north, spread out fan-like across the stars and presently the moon was blotted out as if some giant hand had taken it from the sky.
With not even the stars to light their way, the four travelers stumbled blindly along, until Corporal McCarthy ordered them to halt.
“We can’t keep on like this,” said the Corporal grimly. “We’ll get so far off the back trail that we’ll never find our way back. The only thing we can do is build an igloo and wait for the moon to come out again. Let’s hope a storm don’t come up.”