A careful examination showed that the spear wound in Toma’s leg was slight, the bearskin trousers having protected him, and aside from a lump on his head, the hardy young aborigine would soon be well again.
But there was no sleep after that. Dick and Sandy sat up with Toma, drinking hot tea and listening to the mutter of voices from the policemen’s tent. Evidently, action could not be long off, since a council of war was underway.
CHAPTER II
THE FACE IN THE ICE WINDOW
It was four o’clock next morning when Constable McCarthy ordered the tents struck, the sledges packed and the dogs harnessed. The wind, during the sunlit night, had covered up all the tracks made by the men who had freed the Eskimo captive, and little time was spent trying to trace them.
“Only Eskimos could have done anything in that blizzard,” Dick remarked to Sandy, while he tightened sledge lashing.
Sandy did not reply, for at the moment Constable McCarthy gave orders to mush on, and across the icy drifts the dogs scampered northward.
All day the dog team labored on, stopped only now and then to breathe. Dick and Sandy were thankful for these short halts, for hardy as they were, the slippery going was exhausting. Toma was not troubled, however. The young Indian probably could have out-traveled even the veteran northman, Jim Sloan, who had once trekked the ice floes of the frozen Polar Sea, six hundred miles from the north pole.
Toward evening the deep blue of the open sea could be seen far ahead, marking the fiord or bay that was their destination. Sloan did a lot of reconnoitering from various high hills, but they had reached the ragged coastline before the Eskimo village was sighted.
Constable Sloan, who was to act as interpreter, advised them to make a halt while he went forward alone and talked with the heads of the families.
Dick and Sandy watched the big policeman make off toward the strange dwellings upon the shore of the fiord.