“Good boy! He’ll make it!” Speed exclaimed.
Calmly they awaited the coming of the plane as it bumped, bumped again, then taxied slowly forward.
“Mary! Look at that plane!” Speed became greatly excited. “Did you ever see it before?”
Mary made no answer. Perhaps she was too excited to hear. One thing was sure, her heart gave a great leap when, as the plane came to a standstill, a large girl dressed in a fur parka jumped from the plane.
“Florence!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Mary!” Florence stood staring at her as if she were a ghost.
“To tell the truth,” Dave Breen, the pilot, who now climbed from his place, said, “we don’t quite know why we’re here. We don’t know where we are, but we’re mighty glad we have arrived.” At this they all laughed.
The story of Florence and her party was soon told. After completing their work at the mine, they had packed their belongings, including three moose-hide sacks of gold, in the plane and had sailed away.
“We got caught in a snow-fog,” Dave Breen concluded. “We flew for hours looking for a landing. At last, in desperation, we took a chance and here we are. But tell me, where are we?”
“Cape Prince of Wales, the very heart of Eskimo-land,” was Mary’s happy reply. “And this is Christmas Eve. What could be finer?”