“Hurrah! The police! The police!” shouted Dick, leaping down the rocky slope joyously, Sandy close on his heels.
It was not long before Dick and Sandy were eagerly gripping the huge, mittened hands of Corporal McCarthy and Constable Sloan. The story of their adventures since the officers had left the base, bubbled from their lips by fits and starts, the policemen hardly succeeding in getting a word in edgewise.
“Mistak pulled up stakes and mushed on when we made it too hot for him on the glacier,” Corporal McCarthy finally managed to explain. “We picked up his trail again three days ago and have been traveling fast ever since.”
“Well, his camp can’t be more than five miles from here,” Dick hastened to say. “But Mistak won’t stay there now, Corporal. He’s a mighty clever criminal, and now he knows you’re this close he’ll work a trick to get you off the trail.”
“Well, we can’t let him get away if there’s half a chance nabbing him,” Corporal McCarthy replied determinedly. “But Sloan and I need a few hours’ rest, and we might as well look over those bodies you boys say you found.”
The dogs were unharnessed outside the cavern entrance, and left in charge of Constable Sloan, while Corporal McCarthy crawled into the cave after Dick and Sandy. The officer was as amazed as the boys had been when he first laid eyes upon the frozen figures. His opinion was that of Dick—that the men had slid or stepped over the precipitous wall of the amphitheater while blinded by a snow storm. Though the policeman searched fully an hour for something by which to identify the bodies, he had no luck, and at last gave up after making a brief entry in a small notebook he carried.
“The best we can do is give them an Eskimo burial,” the Corporal concluded his inspection. “If you fellows will help me gather a few stones we’ll soon have the sad business over with.”
A few minutes later, as gently as possible, they deposited the bodies in their last resting place, and built over each a substantial cairn of stones.
From the wrecked sledge, Corporal McCarthy then tore some strips of wood, and lashing two together with leather thongs, he fashioned a cross for each. On the horizontal cross-pieces he carved this inscription:
“Found Sept. 19, 1925.
Identity Unknown.
Corporal Lake McCarthy, R.N.W.M.P.”