“Well, here’s hoping,” he murmured to Bruce, as the plane hopped off.

As for the Major, he sat with face fixed as a bronze statue.  His gaze was toward the Pole.

For fourteen hours they soared steadily onward.  Only the air, which grew crisper and more stinging as they advanced steadily northward, told them they were nearing the Pole.  Observations from the plane were impossible.  The sun, which had been appearing less and less each day, was now quite lost to them.  Only the moon in all its glory tinted the blue ice-piles with wavering ghost colors.  The wind for once was still.  Not a bird appeared in the sky, not an animal met the gaze of their binoculars as they peered below.  It was as if the whole Northern realm had become suddenly silent at the magnificent spectacle of three men sailing alone over spaces never yet traveled by man, and where dangers lurked at every turn.

The plane, too, was surprising its driver.  It answered his least touch on the lever controls.  The engines were working perfectly.  Only now and again he caught a faint lurch which told his practiced senses that some of the rudely improvised splices were working loose.  Even these gave him no great alarm; at least, they did not seem sufficiently serious to warrant an immediate landing.

But suddenly, as they were soaring over the wildest, most treacherous-looking stretch of floe ice that eyes have ever rested upon, the plane gave a lurch.  A shudder ran through her from wing to wing, and, with a plunge, she shot side-wise.  The outer half of her right wing had doubled up on the inner half, like a blade to a jack-knife.

Bruce took in the situation at a glance.  Before a hand could stop him, he had unbuckled his straps, and, creeping to the extremity of the remaining half of the wing, he clung there, thus adding his weight to its balancing power.

Already Barney had shut off the engines.  With the added weight to the right the plane became steadier.  Danger of a whirling spin to the ice-surface seemed for the time averted.

“What a landing-place!” groaned Barney, almost touching the starting lever in his eagerness to save the plane.  But he stayed his hand; to start the engine under such conditions would be madness.  Some form of landing they must make, even if it was but to “crash.”

So they sped steadily downward, realizing that the goal they sought must now, with the aid of their dog-team, be easily within their grasp; yet realizing also that all means of returning was likely to be denied them, unless, indeed, one were to call five dogs a means of traveling over hundreds of miles of tangled, tumbling mountains of ice.

Suddenly, Barney’s heart leaped for joy.  Just before them, within possible area of landing, lay a perfectly level stretch of ice.  It was not large, was, in fact, perilously small, yet it offered a possible landing.