“It’s a message from Corporal Thalman!” exclaimed Dick, deciphering the initials, “C. T.” and the abbreviation for “Royal Northwest Mounted Police.”
“And that map shows where he is!” Sandy cried.
“Right now it looks the same as Greek to me,” Dick admitted, frowning over the wandering lines, crosses and data. “Let’s read the script and see if that will help.”
The following is what the boys read from the strange manuscript:
“If Fate is kind and this bottle and message fall into friendly hands, I desire the nearest post of the R.N.W. M.P. be notified that the undersigned is now being unlawfully held a prisoner on a glacial island several miles off the northern coast of Grant Land, about half way between Cape Columbia and Cape Richards.
“Detailed to apprehend a half-breed Eskimo murderer, I picked up his trail on the barrens and followed him to this island where a band of outlaws, led by Mistak, surprised and captured me.
“I calculate I have been imprisoned about six months in an ice-sealed pit at the bottom of a glacier, which seems to have been formed by an eruption ages ago. The pit has an outlet above my head into one of the large fissures in the top strata of the glacier, which I have tried to locate by means of the accompanying map. One side of the pit is formed of ice many feet thick. By weeks of work I cut my way through this into a series of grottoes or caverns lined with crystallized ice. However, I have so far been unable to find any outlet to the surface of the glacier and the caverns are so cold that I cannot spend much time in them.
“The pit is warmer due to what I believe to be hot springs miles beneath me. A small underground stream of tepid, fresh water, tasting slightly of sulphur, runs across the floor of the pit, out of one wall into another, and upon this I shall set this canteen afloat, hoping by some miracle of good fortune that it will reach the sea and there be discovered.
“Mistak furnishes me every so often with a supply of seal blubber which he drops down from the top of the pit. I do not know why he keeps me alive, except out of fiendish desire to see me suffer.
“Anyone attempting to locate me may do so in two ways—by means of the fissure into which this pit opens, or from the crystal grottoes. Since I have been unable to find an outlet to the grottoes, that method of reaching the pit seems impractical, and I have directed all my efforts on this map toward guiding a rescuing party to the fissure.