One look at last, then a drop to her knees as she murmured:
“Thank God.” The planes were safe.
Next instant she was on her feet and racing to camp ready to serve hot coffee and sourdough pancakes to the battlers of the night.
“Boo! How gloriously cold!” exclaimed the older of the two pilots. “A day and a night of this and we shall be away.”
There was still some work to be done on the plane. The storm had strained at every strut and guy. It was necessary to test all these and to tighten some. That night, after a hasty supper, the men made their way back to the frozen surface of the lake.
With Bill snugly tucked away in the tent at her back, Mary sat before a glowing fire of spruce logs. How grand was the night, after that storm! Not a cloud was in the sky. Not soon would she forget it, dark spruce trees towering toward the sky, gray walls of rocks like grim fortresses of some mythical giant, the cold, still white of snow and above it all, a great, golden moon.
“The North!” she murmured. “Ah, the North!”
And yet, as she thought of it now, they were not so very far north. She looked up and away at the north star and wondered vaguely about Florence’s grandfather, Tom Kennedy, way up there almost beneath that star. Tom Kennedy was not her grandfather, he was on the other side of Florence’s family, yet, so intimate had the relations between herself and her big cousin become, she felt a sudden, burning desire to accompany her on her quest for her grandfather, if indeed the quest was ever begun.
Had she but known it, Florence was at that very moment in Anchorage making inquiries regarding transportation to Nome. Only a few days before, Mark, having received his last payment for the summer’s crop, had pressed a crisp new fifty-dollar bill into her reluctant hand.
“You earned it and much more,” had been his husky reply to her protest. “You’ve been a regular farm hand and—and a brick.”