Within an hour dog and man had partaken of an early breakfast and were mushing grimly along a fresh trail under the midnight sun.
“This was a wise move on our part,” Dick told Sandy as they woddled along on their snowshoes. “Mistak won’t expect us to start out so soon and we’ve a good chance to overtake him.”
“I get the creeps whenever I think of that Eskimo stealing into camp that way,” rejoined Sandy. “Suppose he is a kind of a devil.”
“Nonsense,” replied Dick, “just because these poor, superstitious Eskimos are frightened is no sign you should be. I’ll admit he’s a dangerous character, but he’s no more than a human being, and the mounted will get him in the end.”
Sandy was about to reply when an exclamation from one of the policemen silenced him.
They had come out on the rim of an ice-bound ridge and below them stretched a vast valley bounded by the sea on the north and filled with age-old ice formations.
Directly below them were two dog teams, the drivers of which had apparently not yet detected the mounted police.
Dick and Sandy could not forbear a cheer as Corporal McCarthy called for full speed ahead and they drove the dogs yelping down the slope toward the fugitives from justice. At that moment it looked very much as if Fred Mistak’s career of outlawry were doomed already, and the boys prepared themselves for a battle.
When Dick and Sandy sighted the dog team of what they believed to be the “white Eskimo,” it could not have been more than a half a mile away, though distances in the north are deceptive.
“We ought to catch up with them in twenty minutes,” Constable Sloan had said.
But they were not so fortunate. Either the “white Eskimo” had seen his pursuers and was therefore driving faster, or his dogs were faster at a normal pace of travel than the police dogs. At any rate, after thirty minutes, fast driving they were bumping along over a rough ice floor, the team ahead nowhere in sight.
“It can’t be far to the sea shore now, can it?” panted Sandy.
“No,” Dick replied, “we are probably traveling across a frozen bay now. The ice may be hundreds of feet thick here, you know, and the sun never gets warm enough to melt that much ice.”
“It takes awfully cold weather to freeze salt water,” Sandy opined.