A glance backward came near convulsing him with laughter. One of the Russians had succeeded in thrusting his head through the narrow opening at the top of the inverted hopper. Here he stuck. To the boy, he resembled a backwoodsman encircled by a barber’s huge apron.
But there was little time for mirth; business was at hand. New problems confronted him. Were other Bolsheviki near the shed? If so, then all was lost.
Poking his head out of the door, he peered about carefully. There was not a person in sight. The wind had risen.
“Good!” he muttered, “it will hide my tracks!”
He was soon speeding across the snow. In another five minutes he was peering like a woodchuck from his hole in the snowbank. His batteries were already inside. If he had not been observed, he had only to block his entrance and leave the wind to plaster it over with drifting snow.
As he looked his brow wrinkled. Then he dodged back, drawing the snow-cake door after him. The two Russians had emerged from the shed.
For hours on end the balloon, with Dave Tower, Jarvis and the stranger on board, now hundreds of miles from the mines, swept over the barren whiteness of unexplored lands. The sun went down and the moon shone in all its glory. The fleeting panorama below turned to triangles great and small—triangles of pale yellow and midnight blue. Now and again the earth seemed to rise up toward them. By this Dave and Jarvis knew that they were drifting over snow-capped hills. When it receded, they knew they were over the tundra. Sometimes they caught the silver flash and gleam of a river the ice of which had been kept clear of snow by the incessant sweep of the wind.
As Dave crouched by the plate-glass window staring down at that wonderful and terrible spectacle of an unknown land, he asked himself the question: “Was this land ever viewed by mortal man?”
The answer could be only a surmise. Perhaps some struggling band of political exiles, fighting their way through summer’s tundra swamps and over winter’s blizzard-swept hills, had passed this way, or lingered to die here. Who could tell? Surely nothing was known of the mineral wealth, the fish, the game, the timber of this unexplored inland empire. What a field to dream of!