Dick and Sandy could not forbear a cheer as Corporal McCarthy called for full speed ahead and they drove the dogs yelping down the slope toward the fugitives from justice. At that moment it looked very much as if Fred Mistak’s career of outlawry were doomed already, and the boys prepared themselves for a battle.
CHAPTER V
AT SEA IN KAYACKS
When Dick and Sandy sighted the dog team of what they believed to be the “white Eskimo,” it could not have been more than a half a mile away, though distances in the north are deceptive.
“We ought to catch up with them in twenty minutes,” Constable Sloan had said.
But they were not so fortunate. Either the “white Eskimo” had seen his pursuers and was therefore driving faster, or his dogs were faster at a normal pace of travel than the police dogs. At any rate, after thirty minutes, fast driving they were bumping along over a rough ice floor, the team ahead nowhere in sight.
“It can’t be far to the sea shore now, can it?” panted Sandy.
“No,” Dick replied, “we are probably traveling across a frozen bay now. The ice may be hundreds of feet thick here, you know, and the sun never gets warm enough to melt that much ice.”
“It takes awfully cold weather to freeze salt water,” Sandy opined.
“I should say it does!” agreed Dick emphatically, “but you know most of the ice around here is from old glaciers, and is fresh water ice. The glaciers slide down to the sea shore and break off, making ice-bergs and huge ice floes.”
“Hey! Look out!” Sandy’s cry of warning came too late. Dick had been so interested in his explanation of the ice formations that he had not noticed how close he was to a treacherous slope of glassy ice. He slipped, and before he could catch himself he had whizzed down, flat on his back, to come up with a bump in a hard snowdrift at the bottom of the slope.