After blundering about in the darkness, which was so thick they could cut it with a knife, they finally located a drift which was solid enough and large enough for the cutting of snow blocks for an igloo. It was a poor snow house they erected largely by their sense of touch, but it served the purpose. Hovering inside their makeshift shelter they waited silently for the clouds to disperse, praying for fair weather to continue.
Yet the supreme power that governed the capricious whims of the mighty ice cap seemed deaf to their supplications for a half hour after the igloo had been completed the temperature began to fall alarmingly. A wind sprang up out of the northeast, just a whisper at first, like the vast, mournful sigh of a melancholy spirit, then rapidly it grew louder, by gusts and fits, until a thirty mile an hour gale was sweeping the snow wastes with the fury of a stampeded lion. The wind sought out every niche and cranny in the hastily erected igloo, and through the heavy garments of the shivering refugees it cut like so many tiny knives. Futilely, they tried to stop up the holes where the wind seeped in while the gale laughed and howled and whistled, as if in mad glee at the discomfiture it was causing the shivering mortals.
In the grip of the terrible cold, the four kept from falling into that dreadful drowsiness which signals death by freezing, by beating themselves and each other with their numbed arms. The fur rims of their parkas became heavy with icicles formed by moisture from their mouth. Their eyelashes froze together from the watering of their eyes. With each breath it seemed red hot irons had been thrust down their throats and liquid fire loosed in their lungs. For extreme cold has much the same sensation of extreme heat.
Two hours they fought a losing fight, then the capricious gods of the north changed their minds and the wind began to lay. Almost imperceptibly at first, each gust a little weaker than the last, until finally, they all crept out of the igloo to find a vast silence pervading the ghostly land. Cold and pale, the Arctic moon now lighted their way, for the clouds had been herded southward by the passing polar wind.
The temperature had risen a little when all four set out on the return trail, now almost blotted out save where the wind had struck it squarely and had blown the loose snow away around the packed snowshoe tracks.
In his weakened condition Sandy had almost succumbed to the cold, and part of the way they had to carry the gritty young Scotchman.
Thus they stumbled into the village of igloos hours later, lungs burning from the frost, bodies numb and prickling in a dozen places.
No more had they arrived than they found their troubles were not over.
Corporal Thalman met them with disturbing news, as soon as they had stumbled into an igloo and lighted an oil heater.
Moonshine Sam had escaped during the storm!