One more resolve came to him in this hour of stress. “If that gray phantom of the air outrides the storm, and if it is my lot to sight her once more I shall give chase just as I did this day.”
At that he thought of the small square of white cloth with the name D’Arcy Arden etched in one corner.
“Who can that person be? And why a captive?”
But again the storm claimed his attention. It had now taken the form of a gray ghost of the night. Slowly, but surely, it was wrapping its mantle about him.
“Nothing to do but fly into the south,” he told himself as grim determination took possession of his soul.
This, he found soon enough, was to prove a difficult task. The glass before him clouded. The gray ghost’s mantle was hiding him from earth and sky. His going grew heavy. Sleet was piling, fold over fold, upon his plane.
“It won’t be long now,” he thought to himself with a groan.
Then, with a suddenness that was startling, the gray ghost’s mantle slipped away, leaving before him a gorgeous moon riding high over an earth that seemed to sleep.
“Peace!” he said. “This is a place of peace.” Then realizing how strange that remark would seem to one who heard it, he laughed aloud.
To one who first flies over the Arctic wastes of the far Northwest, the landscape seems as unmarked as the sweeping blue of a landless sea. No cities, no villages, no roads, no railways, no farmhouses, not so much as a cabin is there to guide him in his skyway wanderings. As time passes, as he flies the same route again and again, that which lies beneath him becomes familiar. There is the river. Here it forms as an S. There it winds like a serpent. Here it is thickly bordered by trees, there lined only by low-growing willows. There are the lakes. Here four of them form the eyes, nose and mouth of a human face. Here a single large lake with a broad river entering at a narrow end resembles an elephant with a prodigiously long trunk. A hundred forms two thousand feet below mark the lone birdman’s way until at last he knows his route as the plowman knows his homeward road, the seaman his shore or the Red Man his trail.