CHAPTER XVIII
THE GIANT BERG
The first movement of the big flying boat attracted the attention of the crowd of onlookers as well as the soldiery and the excited civilian that had put in such a ridiculous claim for possession of Tom Swift’s newest invention. Those gathered in the pilot room of the seaplane could see everyone hurrying to get out of the expected course of the Winged Arrow.
“We’ll settle that fellow’s hash when we come back,” declared Tom, shaking his head, as he glanced out at the stranger.
“If we come back, you mean,” replied Ned. “And take it from me, Tom, that chap is linked up with the French fellow that bothered us before we left Shopton.”
“Looks so. But that Polansky, as this chap called him, was no Frenchman, I tell you.”
“Doesn’t matter. He had an awful amount of nerve,” said Ned. “Now we’re rising!”
The seaplane took the air as nicely as she had before. Captain Olaf Karofsen was tracing the course they should follow across Iceland. The place to which he directed Tom for gasoline was a small whaling port facing the stretch of Arctic Ocean called the Greenland Sea.
The long twilight of this northern clime made the journey really a pleasant one. Tom, to avoid air currents caused by the mountains, veered a little and skirted a shoulder of Mount Hekla, from the crater of which a thin column of smoke was rising. The captain told them there had been no eruption of the ancient volcano since he was a child, but it was not entirely cold.
Captain Karofsen was much more interested in the management of the seaplane, however, than he was in the physical wonders of Iceland. The boys were eager to know the particulars of the wreck of the Kalrye and how Mr. Damon and Mr. Nestor had been thrown upon the iceberg.
“I lost das schooner—yes,” said the captain, shaking his head. “Das insurance don’t pay me for all. And if them gentlemen are lost for good, I never get over it.”