Lost in the Air

by Roy J. Snell

But what was this? He found the machine shooting through space with greater freedom. One answer there was: a storm. They had been caught in the advance of a blizzard; how great and terrible, none could tell.

"Going to storm. Better land," telephoned the Major.

Obeying his orders, the boy dropped to a lower level. Here the wind was more intense and the air was filled with fine particles of snow which raced with them, only to glide away into the background. The whole ice-floe was already gray and indistinct from the drift. To pick a landing-place seemed impossible. For several moments of agonizing suspense they sped on; then, just as they were about to despair, there appeared before them a long expanse of white. Wide as three city boulevards, endless in extent, it appeared to offer just the opportunity they were seeking.

With a sign Barney shut off his engine, and, sailing on the wind, waited for a lull to give him a safe landing.

The lull came, then with a swoop, like a wild duck seeking water, they hovered, settled, then touched the surface.

The landing-wheels were shooting along over the snow with Barney's keen eyes strained ahead that he might avoid possible rough spots, when there came a cry of dismay from Bruce. With one startled glance about, Barney saw all. To the right and left of them the ice seemed to rise like the walls of an inverted tent. "Rubber-ice," his mind told him like a flash. They had attempted to land where the water had but recently frozen over, and was covered with a deceptive coating of snow. Only one hope remained: to rise again. Once the weak rubber-ice—thin, elastic salt-water ice—gave way, nothing could save them.

Tilting the planes and tail to their utmost capacity, Barney set first one engine in motion and then the other. But the yielding ice gave them no purchase. At the same time, it impeded their progress by offering them the slope of a mountain side to climb. One thing favored them. The peril of a moment before became a blessing. The wind freshened at every blast. At last, with a terrific swoop, it seized them and sent them whirling upward. In the down-swoop, they were all but crashed on a towering pile of ice, but escaping this fate, once more they were away.

Despite this near-catastrophe, Barney was determined to make a landing. The chill of the storm was so benumbing to muscles and senses that further flying could only result in stupor, then death.

Again he sank low and scudded along on the wings of the wind. To his great joy, he soon saw that they were passing over flat stretches of white. There could be no mistake this time; they were ice-pans, perhaps a quarter-mile across, such pans as form in quiet bays, to float away and drift north in the spring. Again he stopped his engines, determined, if he must, to circle and return to the flats he had passed. This did not prove necessary, however, and, to their great relief, the three were soon threshing their arms and stamping their feet on a solid cake of ice, and so vast that it seemed they must be on land, not hundreds of miles from shore on the bosom of a great ocean, which might, at the very point they stood, be a half-mile in depth.

Their first concern was to make camp. This storm might rage for days, and already they saw white spots forming on one another's cheeks, telling of frost-bites.