“Foolishness.”

“No, sir.  We’ll go by Pymeut in an ice-boat, lickety split.  And it’ll be a good excuse for not stopping, though I think we ought to say good-bye to Nicholas.”

This view inclined the Colonel to think better of an ice-boat.  He had once crossed the Bay of Toronto in that fashion, and began to wonder if such a mode of progression applied to sleds might not aid largely in solving the Minook problem.

While he was wondering the Boy unlashed the sled-load, and pulled off the canvas cover as the Colonel came back with his mast.  Between them, with no better tools than axe, jack-knives, and a rope, and with fingers freezing in the south wind, they rigged the sail.

The fact that they had this increasingly favourable wind on their very first day showed that they were specially smiled on by the great natural forces.  The superstitious feeling that only slumbers in most breasts, that Mother Nature is still a mysterious being, who has her favourites whom she guards, her born enemies whom she baulks, pursues, and finally overwhelms, the age-old childishness stirred pleasantly in both men, and in the younger came forth unabashed in speech: 

“I tell you the omens are good!  This expedition’s goin’ to get there.”  Then, with the involuntary misgiving that follows hard upon such boasting, he laughed uneasily and added, “I mean to sacrifice the first deer’s tongue I don’t want myself, to Yukon Inua; but here’s to the south wind!” He turned some corn-bread crumbs out of his pocket, and saw, delighted, how the gale, grown keener, snatched eagerly at them and hurried them up the trail.  The ice-boat careened and strained eagerly to sail away.  The two gold-seekers, laughing like schoolboys, sat astride the pack; the Colonel shook out the canvas, and they scudded off up the river like mad.  The great difficulty was the steering; but it was rip-roaring fun, the Boy said, and very soon there were natives running down to the river, to stare open-mouthed at the astounding apparition, to point and shout something unintelligible that sounded like “Muchtaravik!”

“Why, it’s the Pymeuts!  Pardner, we’ll be in Minook by supper-ti—­”

The words hadn’t left his lips when he saw, a few yards in front of them, a faint cloud of steam rising up from the ice—­that dim danger-signal that flies above an air-hole.  The Colonel, never noticing, was heading straight for the ghastly trap.

“God, Colonel!  Blow-hole!” gasped the Boy.

The Colonel simply rolled off the pack turning over and over on the ice, but keeping hold of the rope.

The sled swerved, turned on her side, and slid along with a sound of snapping and tearing.

While they were still headed straight for the hole, the Boy had gathered himself for a clear jump to the right, but the sled’s sudden swerve to the left broke his angle sharply.  He was flung forward on the new impetus, spun over the smooth surface, swept across the verge and under the cloud, clutching wildly at the ragged edge of ice as he went down.