For a long time they searched the bluff without finding anything. The disintegrating forces of frost and thaw each spring change the face of all Arctic cliffs. Crumbled by the frost and torn off by the water, the warm weather often brings the fronts down in little landslides. The streams gully through them and cut them away so that the face of nature often changes greatly in a single year. The low bluffs along the inlet showed many marks of this violence. By and by Joe, scrambling along the débris at the foot of the bluff, gave a shout to Harry, farther on. “Here’s a wolf’s den, or a cave, or something,” he said. “Come and see it.”
The wolf’s den was a hole in the bluff, half smothered in the débris which had fallen and obscured it. There was hardly room to crawl in, but Joe managed it, while Harry waited outside in some excitement. In a moment Joe called out:—
“Here,” he said in a smothered voice; “take this.”
A splendid slab of whalebone was passed up through the hole. After a time Joe followed it, much besmeared with dirt, but with a radiant face.
“I think we’ve made a find, this time,” he said excitedly. “That is one of the ‘kitekooks,’ and it is chock-a-block with the finest bone you ever saw.”
The slab which he had passed out was, indeed, a beauty, and was worth many dollars. They proceeded with the hunt with great enthusiasm and found several other “kitekooks” well stored with bone. Joe’s eyes snapped with excitement.
“There’s fifty thousand dollars’ worth of splendid bone stowed right in this cliff,” he said, “and it has been waiting for us for twenty-five years. The people who came here that summer after cleaned up what was in the other igloos, but they never found this. Probably there had been a landslide that spring and blocked the caves. The Eskimos could not be hired to come here, and only they knew about it. It’s a bonanza! Hurrah! this will pay for the loss of the Bowhead, twice over.”
Harry examined the five caves that they found, and decided that Joe’s estimate of the value of their find was a very conservative one. To him it seemed nearly double that, and after excitedly figuring the probable value, Joe was inclined to agree with him. It was certain that they had found a fortune, and the only question was as to how they might realize on it. The bone was worth that in San Francisco, to be sure, but they were a long way from San Francisco, and the problem of getting there themselves was still a great one. Their great hope was that Captain Nickerson would be on the coast again with a vessel and would find them that summer. They decided to keep the presence of the bone a profound secret even from Harluk and his fellows. They returned to the camp and said very little about what they had seen. Harluk thought this reasonable.
“None but wizards,” he declared solemnly, “might unharmed visit a place of ghosts, and he saw that they even were wise enough not to talk about it.”
This find in the Village where No One Lives kept the boys chained to the locality, much to the sorrow of the Eskimos, who wished to get farther away from it. There were plenty of fish in the inlet, and wild ducks were tame and present in great flocks. They lived well, but they did not like to be so near the place of ghosts. But the boys were firm. It was midsummer, and just about the right time of year for ships to be off that coast, and they did not wish to leave their find. They decided that the bone must stay where it was until they could take it out and place it on a ship of their own, and they would better wait right there on the chance of such a ship. Thus they lingered on, week after week, in a vain hope. No ship came. As a matter of fact, it was one of those seasons that Harluk and Kroo had predicted, when the Arctic pack hugs the coast and it is difficult and often impossible for ships to get beyond Blossom Shoals.