Who was the Whisperer? Or was there no Whisperer? If there was such a person, was that person a girl and was she with the outlaw at the present time? If he succeeded in outwitting the outlaw, would he at last meet the Whisperer face to face?
All these and many more questions seething through his brain, kept him for a long time awake. But at last weariness conquered and he fell asleep.
When, only a few hours later, he awoke, it was with a feeling of impending danger. Before he opened his eyes, he could hear the reindeer thrashing about among the willows to which he was tied in a vain attempt to break away. When he opened his eyes it was to stare up at a broad dome of sky which appeared to be all on fire.
“The food depot!” he groaned, leaping to his feet. “It was closer than I thought. It’s gone. Burned!”
“No!” he exclaimed, a second later. “No, it’s worse than that!” He put his hand to his forehead. The next instant, reeling like a drunken man in a delirious dream, he stumbled toward his reindeer.
CHAPTER XXIII
“A BEAR! A BEAR!”
In the meantime Joe Marion and Jennings were making their way over the treacherous ice floe toward the party of explorers who were battling for their lives against cold, hunger and ever perilous floes.
They had crossed a broad expanse of ice which, level as a floor, lay between the shore and a series of low, barren, sandy islands. Then for three miles farther they had traveled over ice which was frozen to the shore. This ice, piled as it had been by storms of early winter into fantastic heaps, here and there mixed with flat cakes and with narrow, tombstone-like fragments set on end, was nevertheless firmly united to the shore. Over this, winding back and forth on flat cakes and over tumbled piles of ice, they traveled without fear.
When they came to what lay beyond this, all was changed. They entered upon a new life with fear and trembling. True, the ice, pressed hard on shore by a north wind, was not at this moment moving, yet the slow rising and falling of a broad cake of ice here, the crumbling of a pile there, told them that they were now far out over the fathomless ocean; told them too that should the wind shift to south, east or west they might at any moment be carried out to sea, never to be heard of again.
“Can’t be helped,” Jennings said grimly, as Joe spoke of this. “When the lives of thirty of Uncle Sam’s brave citizens are at stake one does not think of personal danger. He goes straight ahead and does his duty. Our duty lies out there.” He pointed straight over the ice floes which lay far as eye could scan, out to sea.