“Not a bit of help, that fellow,” he added after a moment’s silence. “Grumbles about everything, always demanding that we get going at once, insists he is losing a chance at big money by the delay. Then, when we give him an opportunity to help he bungles everything. I never saw such a fellow.”
“Big money,” Mary thought to herself. “Wonder if that has anything to do with Mr. Il-ay-ok, the Eskimo, and that far north country?” She was to know.
Daily, under her nursing, Bill improved. Nightly, but oh, so slowly, the ice on the lake thickened.
Each day the men labored at the task of making the planes fit for travel. Mark’s genius for fixing things at last won over the sulky motor. Once again it purred sweetly or thundered wildly at man’s will.
Slowly, painstakingly, the men hewed from solid logs, skis for the smaller plane. Would these, cut from green wood, as they must be, stand the strain of taking off? They must wait and see.
To escape haunting, unnamed fears, Mary began exploring the mountain ledges. First she sought out a wild animal trail leading down, down, down, over tumbled rocks, through aisles of trees, over the frozen bed of a narrow stream to a spot where the land appeared to drop from beneath her. Creeping out on a flat rock, she gazed in awed silence down a sheer four hundred feet or more to the treetops of one more forest. Was the trail she found, made by wild sheep and goats, safe for men? She doubted it, yet the time might come when they must follow that trail or starve. She returned silent and thoughtful.
That night a storm swept up from the valley. All night her small tent bulged, flapped and cracked. All night she shuddered beneath her blankets, as she listened to the men shouting to one another down there on the frozen lake. They were, she knew, battling the storm, straining at guy ropes to save the planes.
At dawn the wind died away. The temperature dropped. As she drew her feet from the blankets she found the air unbelievably cold.
“Freezing fast,” she thought. “Just what we want if only—”
She did not finish. Instead, she hurried into her clothes and then, after racing to a rocky ledge, found to her consternation that, for a space of seconds, she did not have the courage to look down at the lake. That one look would be the answer to a question that meant great hope or near despair.