The Blue Envelope Part 9

CHAPTER VI

THE DREAD WHITE LINE

Three days the blizzard raged about the cabin where Lucile and Marian had found shelter. Such a storm at this season of the year had not been known on the Arctic for more than twenty years.

For three days the girls shivered by the galley range, husbanding their little supply of food, and hoping for something to turn up when the storm was over. Just what that something might be neither of them could have told.

The third day broke clear and cold with the wind still blowing a gale.

Lucile was the first to throw open the door. As it came back with a bang, something fell from the beam above and rattled to the floor.

She stooped to pick it up.

"Look, Marian!" she exclaimed. "A key! A big bra.s.s key!"

Marian examined it closely.

"What can it belong to?"

"The wreck, perhaps."

"Probably."

"Looks like a steward's pa.s.s-key."

"But what would they save it for? You don't think--"

"If we could get out to the wreck we'd see."

"Yes, but we can't. There--"

"Look, Marian!" Lucile's eyes were large and wild.

"The white line!" gasped Marian, gripping her arm.

It was true. Before them lay the dark ocean still flecked with foam, but at the horizon gleaming whiter than burnished silver, straight, distinct, unmistakable, was a white line.

"And that means--"

"We're trapped!"

Lucile sank weakly into a chair. Marian began pacing the floor.

"Anyway," she exclaimed at last, "I can paint it. It will make a wonderful study."

Suiting action to words, she sought out her paint-box and was soon busy with a sketch, which, developing bit by bit, or rather, seeming to evolve out of nothing, showed a native dressed in furs, shading his eyes to scan the dark, tossing ocean. And beyond, the object of his gaze, was the silvery line. When she had finished, she playfully inscribed a t.i.tle at the bottom:

"The Coming of the White Line."

As she put her paints away, something caught her eye. It was one corner of the blue envelope with the strange address upon it.

"Ah, there you are still," she sighed. "And there you will remain for nine months unless I miss my guess. I wish I hadn't kept my promise to the college boy; wish I'd left you in the pigeon-hole at Cape Prince of Wales."

Since the air was too chill, the wind too keen for travel, the girls slept that night in the cabin. They awoke to a new world. The first glimpse outside the cabin brought surprised exclamations to their lips.

In a single night the world appeared to have been transformed. The "white line" was gone. So, too, was the ocean. Before them, as far as the eye could reach, lay a ma.s.s of yellow lights and purple shadows, ice-fields that had buried the sea. Only one object stood out, black, bleak and bare before them--the hull of the wrecked and abandoned ship.

"Look!" said Lucile suddenly, "we can go out to the ship over the ice-floe!"

"Let's do it," said Marian enthusiastically. "Perhaps there's some sort of a solution to our problem there."

They were soon threading their way in and out among the ice-piles which were already solidly attaching themselves to the sand beneath the shallow water.

And now they reached a spot where the water was deeper, where ice-cakes, some small as a kitchen floor, some large as a town lot, jostled and ground one upon another.

"Wo-oo, I don't like it!" exclaimed Lucile, as she leaped a narrow chasm of dark water.

"We'll soon be there," trilled her companion. "Just watch your step, that's all."

They pushed on, leaping from cake to cake. Racing across a broad ice-pan, now skirting a dark pool, now clambering over a pile of ice ground fine, they made their way slowly but surely toward their goal.

"Listen!" exclaimed Marian, stopping dead in her tracks.

"What is it?" asked Lucile, her voice quivering with alarm.

A strange, wild, weird sound came to them across the floe, a grinding, rushing, creaking, moaning sound that increased in volume as the voice of a cyclone increases.

Only a second elapsed before they knew. Then with a cry of terror Marian dragged her companion to the center of the ice-pan and pulled her flat to its surface. From somewhere, far out to sea, a giant tidal wave was sweeping through the ice-floe. Marian had seen it. The mountain of ice which it bore on its crest seemed as high as the solid ridge of rock behind them on the land. And with its weird, wild, rushing scream of grinding and breaking ice, it was traveling toward them. It had the speed of the wind, the force of an avalanche. When it came, what then?

With a rush the wild terror of the Arctic sea burst upon them. It lifted the giant ice-pan weighing hundreds of tons, tilted it to a dangerous angle, then dropped from beneath it. Marian's heart stopped beating as she felt the downward rush of the avalanche of ice. The next instant she felt it crumble like an egg-sh.e.l.l. It had broken at the point where they lay. With a warning cry of terror she sprang to her feet and pitched forward.

The cry was too late. As she rose unsteadily to her knees, she saw a dark brown bulk topple at the edge of the cake, then roll like a log into the dark pool of water which appeared where the cake had parted.

That object was Lucile. Dead or alive? Marian could not tell. But whether dead or alive she had fallen into the stinging Arctic brine.

What chance could there be for her life?

For the time being the ice-field was quiet. The tidal wave had spent its force on the sandy beach.

That other, less violent disturbances, would follow the first, the girl knew right well. Hastily creeping to the brink of the dark pool, she strained her eyes for sight of a floating bit of cloth, a waving hand.

There was none. Despair gripped her heart. Still she waited, and as she waited, there came the distant sound, growing ever louder, of another onrushing tide.

When Lucile went down into the dark pool she was not dead. She was conscious and very much alive. Very conscious she was, too, of the peril of her situation. Should that chasm close before she rose, or as she rose, she was doomed. In one case she would drown, in the other she would be crushed.

Down, down she sank. But the water was salt and buoyant. Now she felt herself rising. Holding her breath she looked upward. A narrow ribbon of black was to the right of her.

"That will be the open water," was her mental comment. "Must swim for it."

She was a strong swimmer, but her heavy fur garments impeded her. The sting of the water imperiled her power to remain conscious. Yet she struggled even as she rose.

Just when Marian had given up hope, she saw a head shoot above the water, then a pair of arms. The next instant she gripped both her companion's wrists and lifted as she never lifted before. There was wild terror in her eye. The roar of the second wave was drumming in her ears.

She was not a second too soon. Hardly had she dragged the half-unconscious girl from the pool than it closed with a grinding crash, and the ice-pan again tilted high in air.