“Going to be a bad one!” Johnny threw a fleeting glance at the girl before him. Like her grandfather, she performed wonders. She had kept up the steady, monotonous swing of paddle until Johnny thought she must be working in her sleep. The muscles of her arms had grown hard as a man’s.
They had found the Corporal’s cottonwood dugout a good one. For three days it had carried them straight on into the great unknown.
“After all, she’s only a girl,” he told himself, thinking once more of the girl. “This storm will be a bad one. Wish we’d come to shelter. The map shows a cabin or something down here somewhere. Be easy enough to pass it in the storm. Map don’t show which bank. Wish—”
Just then the advance guard of the storm struck. A rattling drive of cutting snow, a sudden gust that set their canoe on side, and it was gone.
“But there will be other blasts and worse ones,” he told himself.
In this he was right. A half hour had not passed before they were shooting along through a veritable wall of driving white. One of those sudden and terrible storms that haunt the Arctic had come driving down from the North.
“Have to go ashore and try to get up something of a camp,” said the old Scot, as with the greatest difficulty he unbent his benumbed fingers. “Can’t stand this. Cold and damp will get us. Wind off that ice water is terrible.”
Once more Johnny looked at the girl. Gripping her paddle, she still swung her arms in rhythmic motion.
“Half froze,” he thought, with a tightening of the throat. “She’s doing and enduring all for the good of people she has not seen.”
Just then there was a stir in the prow of the canoe. Tico, the dog given to Faye by the Corporal, had crept from his snug corner to lift his nose to the air, point toward the farther shore, and let out an unhappy wail.
“Something over there.” The girl spoke now for the first time in a half hour. “Maybe game. That’s something. Our food supply is very low. Better go over.”
Neither the old Scot nor Johnny questioned her judgment. Turning the canoe half about, they struck for that distant shore.
It was a perilous journey. The moment they left the sheltering bank, waves began crashing over the gunwale.
The boat was half filled when the girl, dropping her paddle, began to bale. The men toiled unremittingly at the oars.