CHAPTER XVI

WRECKED

"All aboard! Change here for all way stations; our next stop is the Pole!"

Barney, the daring aviator, sang the words cheerfully, as he settled himself in his place at the wheel. He hardly felt the cheerfulness his tone implied. True, they had spent twelve days repairing the damage done to the plane by the wind and its collision with the white bear, but it was a rather patched-up affair now it was finished--as it needs must be with the few materials and tools at their command. As he had expressed it to Bruce only the night before: they had a crippled wing, and a bird with a broken pinion never soars so high again, even if it is a bird of fabric, wood and steel.

However, he was truly glad to be getting away on what they hoped might be their last lap. The grave-like silence of the Arctic, with its glistening whiteness everywhere, had gripped his nerves.

"Well, here's hoping," he murmured to Bruce, as the plane hopped off.

As for the Major, he sat with face fixed as a bronze statue. His gaze was toward the Pole.

For fourteen hours they soared steadily onward. Only the air, which grew crisper and more stinging as they advanced steadily northward, told them they were nearing the Pole. Observations from the plane were impossible. The sun, which had been appearing less and less each day, was now quite lost to them. Only the moon in all its glory tinted the blue ice-piles with wavering ghost colors. The wind for once was still.

Not a bird appeared in the sky, not an animal met the gaze of their binoculars as they peered below. It was as if the whole Northern realm had become suddenly silent at the magnificent spectacle of three men sailing alone over s.p.a.ces never yet traveled by man, and where dangers lurked at every turn.

The plane, too, was surprising its driver. It answered his least touch on the lever controls. The engines were working perfectly. Only now and again he caught a faint lurch which told his practiced senses that some of the rudely improvised splices were working loose. Even these gave him no great alarm; at least, they did not seem sufficiently serious to warrant an immediate landing.

But suddenly, as they were soaring over the wildest, most treacherous-looking stretch of floe ice that eyes have ever rested upon, the plane gave a lurch. A shudder ran through her from wing to wing, and, with a plunge, she shot side-wise. The outer half of her right wing had doubled up on the inner half, like a blade to a jack-knife.

Bruce took in the situation at a glance. Before a hand could stop him, he had unbuckled his straps, and, creeping to the extremity of the remaining half of the wing, he clung there, thus adding his weight to its balancing power.

Already Barney had shut off the engines. With the added weight to the right the plane became steadier. Danger of a whirling spin to the ice-surface seemed for the time averted.

"What a landing-place!" groaned Barney, almost touching the starting lever in his eagerness to save the plane. But he stayed his hand; to start the engine under such conditions would be madness. Some form of landing they must make, even if it was but to "crash."

So they sped steadily downward, realizing that the goal they sought must now, with the aid of their dog-team, be easily within their grasp; yet realizing also that all means of returning was likely to be denied them, unless, indeed, one were to call five dogs a means of traveling over hundreds of miles of tangled, tumbling mountains of ice.

Suddenly, Barney's heart leaped for joy. Just before them, within possible area of landing, lay a perfectly level stretch of ice. It was not large, was, in fact, perilously small, yet it offered a possible landing.

Tilting the left plane to its utmost, adjusting the tail, Barney glided onward. With bated breath he saw the white plain rise to meet them. With trembling hand he touched a lever here, a b.u.t.ton there. Then--a jar--the landing-wheels had touched. They touched again. The moving plane fairly ate up the scant level s.p.a.ce, yet she slowed and slowed until at last, with hardly a tremor, she rested against the outcropping ridge of ice at the floe's edge.

With a glowing smile the Major unstrapped himself to reach out his hands in thanks and congratulation to his pilots.

But--where were they? They had disappeared. He found them in front of the plane calling to him for a.s.sistance. Then he saw the danger their more practiced eyes had already noticed. The ice at this point was piling. At this moment the very cake against which they had stopped was beginning to rise. Within a s.p.a.ce of moments, the plane, unless turned and thrust backward, would be crushed beneath hundreds of tons of ice.

"If we can get her back we can save her!" panted Bruce.

"Swing her!" shouted Barney, throwing his whole strength against the right wing.

"Now she moves!" yelled Bruce joyously. "Now! Heave ho!"

The great craft turned slowly on her wheels. Now the plane was clearing the ice. Now--now in just a second--she would be safe.

But no--the right wheel caught in an ice-crevice. Three desperate efforts they made to free her, then, just as the giant cake towered, crumbling above them, the Major shouted the word of warning that sent them leaping back to safety but cost them their machine.

True, it stood there, still. The mechanism was perfect, the engines uninjured. But the right wing was completely demolished. Buried beneath tons and tons of ice, the craft that had carried them so far was crushed beyond all hope of repair.

With despair tugging at their hearts, the three stood looking at the wreckage. But they were not of the breed that quits.

"We'd better get our stuff and what's left of the plane out of the way of danger," said Bruce at length.

"The stuff--blankets, grub and the like, yes, but"--Barney smiled in spite of himself--"why the plane? She's done for."

"Because," said Bruce, "you can never tell what will happen."

The pressure which was piling the ice diminished rapidly, and the back edge of the cake proved a safe place to make camp. Soon they were boiling tea over a small oil stove and discussing the future as calmly as they might have done had they been in the old office-shack back on the Hudson Bay Railroad.

"Now to find where we are," exclaimed the Major, knocking the tea leaves from his cup.

The interest in this project was keen. After working out his reckoning, estimating the speed of their flight and counting the hours they had been in the air, the Major laid down his pencil.

"Fifty miles southeast of the Pole," he said at last. "Shall we attempt to go on or turn back?"

The boys looked at one another. Bruce read in his companions' eyes the desire to attempt the return with the dog-team. At the same time, he realized that the real genius of an explorer lay in his desire to push on. The Major had that genius.

"As for me," Bruce said finally, "I never decide anything of great importance until I have slept over it."

Barney smiled in spite of his anxiety and weariness.

But the Major, seeing the strained expression in the boys' faces, realized that the ultimatum of Bruce was a good one.

Soon the three companions were snug in their sleeping-bags, dreaming of a land of gra.s.s and flowers far, far away.

As soon as the submarine was safely on its course after the glacier incident, Dave, who had not slept for many hours, turned in for "three winks." His three winks had stretched on into hours, when he was wakened by a sudden jarring that shook the craft from stem to stern. He was on his feet in the pa.s.sage-way at once.

"What happened?" he demanded of a sailor.

"Blamed if I know," said the other. He was white as a sheet.

One thing Dave made sure of as he hurried toward the wheel-room; they were drifting under the ice-floor of the ocean. Was the motor simply dead, or was the propeller gone? He had but an instant to wait. There came the purr of the motor, then the sudden sound of racing machinery, which told plainer than words that the worst had happened.

"I think it was a walrus, sir," said Rainey, who had been in charge of the wheel-room. "I had just caught sight of a dark blotch gliding by and reached for the power when the racket started."

"What were you making?" asked Dave quietly.

"Our usual ten knots."

The compartment they were in was filled with levers and adjusting wheels of all descriptions. The walls were lined with gauges and dials of many styles and sizes. A person on entering and taking the operator's position, might fancy himself in the center of a circle of gears and driving wheels of many automobiles.

Dave glanced at a gauge, then at another. He touched a wheel, and the hand on the second dial began to drop. They were now rising. As a usual thing, they traveled some forty feet below the surface. Icebergs were scarce in these waters, and the ordinary floe did not lie more than twenty feet below sea-level; still, it was safer lower down. But now--now their safety rested in gliding to a point beneath a water channel or hole, and, once they were under it, they must not fail to rise.

"No, not if it takes our conning-tower to do it!" Dave said savagely, as he finished explaining.