"However," said Professor Henderson, "I have kept a careful account of the fluctuations of temperature since the catastrophe, and I find that the mercury does not descend into the bulb so far now as it did at first. We are circling the earth, as the earth circles the sun. At present we are turning more toward the sun. It is coming summer. The sun will more and more heat this torn-away world. I do not believe that vegetation will start, and I look for nothing but frost during the hours of the sun's absence. But the cold night is not so intense as it was at first."
"It's quite cold enough, just the same," Phineas Roebach grunted. "It was summer a few days ago—the best summer this part of Alaska ever has. And to jump right into cold weather—midwinter, as ye might say—is enough to kill us all."
The oil man simply ignored the professor's scientific explanations of their situation and the changes in their environment. He absolutely would not believe that they were floating in the air above the earth's surface.
The trail down the valley of the Anakturuk was fairly smooth and well defined; when they struck the Coleville—a much wider stream—the shore was very rugged, and the dogs could scarcely drag the sleds over some stretches of the route.
The traders who had gone before them were certainly having a hard time. Our friends traveled very slowly for two days, walking most of the time. Then they found that the veil of ice that had formed on the wide stream since the region had become a torn-away world, would bear both men and dogs; the sun merely made it spongy for a few hours each day, but did not destroy the ice, which was now three or four inches thick.
Each night when the sun set and the air cooled the water on the surface of this sheet of smooth ice congealed again, making a splendid course for skating—had they only possessed the skates. But the sleds slipped more easily over the ice and the dogs were saved for two or three days longer. The brutes were almost starved, however, and one of them going lame, when they were released at a certain stopping place, the others pitched upon their wounded comrade and like wolves tore the unfortunate dog to pieces before Roebach could beat them into submission.
Andy Sudds chopped through the ice and set lines for fish; but the catch was so small that the party could not spare more than the bones for the dogs. Starvation faced them. Mark was miserably despondent, and Wash was so lugubrious all the time that he seldom exploded in his usual pyrotechnical displays of big words. His grain supply for the Shanghai had completely run out, too, and the colored man divided his own poor rations with his pet.
"And the rooster's that lean he wouldn't be anything but skin and bone if we killed and cooked him," Jack wickedly proposed.
Wash looked upon his young friend in extreme horror.
"Eat Buttsy?" he finally gasped. "Why Massa Jack! I'd jest as lief eat a baby—dat I would!"