A fur hat and a pair of mittens were made for Nancy at once, and were taken across to Beckfoot by the doctor after one of his jaw-inspections at Holly Howe. Nancy was allowed to see them from a distance. There was no point in letting her handle them. “The fewer things we have to disinfect the better,” said Mrs Blackett, “but you see what’s waiting for you as soon as you are all right.”
A good many days had passed since the doctor had carried back to Nancy not a dispatch (which might too easily give secrets away), but a simple mathematical formula, invented by Dick, to let her know that the key had arrived and was being used.
“Fram : Igloo :: 10,000 : I.”
This meant, of course, that the houseboat was ten thousand times better than the igloo; and Nancy had bounced in her bed and hugged herself at the thought of what must be going on there. She was bursting to join the others, and there never was a patient Who was in such a hurry to be cured. Every time the doctor came to Holly Howe to look at jaws, he brought good news of her to the explorers, who were anxiously calculating how long the frost must last if Captain Nancy was to join them on the ice. They heard that her face was rather less like a pumpkin than it had been. Then they heard of her getting up in the mornings, and even being allowed to go downstairs. “She’ll be out and about before we know where we are,” said the doctor.
They made no more attempts to see her by coming to Beckfoot.
Mrs Blackett had told them to keep to their own side of the lake, and they only once came north of Rio Bay. That was when all the Eskimos were talking of the lake being frozen from end to end, and it was more than anybody could bear not to have a look at the northern part beyond the islands. All seven explorers, with both sledges, and a quarantine flag carried by Titty (the D.’s had left theirs at the farm), set out from the Fram one morning, and skated close along the shores of Long Island, across the mouth of Rio Bay, until they could see that tremendous sheet of ice stretching before them into the hills.
“There’s no doubt about the Arctic now,” said Peggy. “It’s good enough for anybody.”
“If only it doesn’t thaw,” said Roger.
“If only Nancy was ready,” said John.
Both telescopes were trained on the Beckfoot promontory, as if some miracle might happen, and Captain Nancy come skating down the lake to meet them.
“Let’s just go to the farthest island,” said Titty.
“We might do that,” said John.
It was not very far, and presently the yellow quarantine flag was waving on the top of a little pile of rocks and stones that stuck up out of the ice.
“We won’t go another yard,” said John, “until the day. Much better keep it as unexplored as possible.”
“This is our farthest north,” said Dick, “not counting when we went to Beckfoot.”
“Let’s make a cache,” said Titty.
“We will,” said John, looking about him. “Good. Some untidy Eskimo’s left a ginger-beer bottle. We couldn’t have anything better.”
“Cork in it, too,” said Roger.
Dorothea wondered what they wanted it for, but was soon tearing a leaf out of the note-book, in which her romance was still stuck at the beginning of chapter one. John borrowed a pencil as well.
“What about Cache Island?” he said, “or has it got a name already?”
“We’ve never given it one,” said Peggy.
John wrote:
“Cache Island.
“Reached this point of northern latitude,
28th January.
“S., A., & D. North Polar Expedition.”
“Swallows, Amazons, and D.’s,” Peggy explained, looking over his shoulder.
Titty and Roger were already building a little cairn of small stones. The scrap of paper was put in the bottle. The bottle was walled up inside the cairn, and after one last look into the frozen north, the expedition left Cache Island and set off southwards on the return journey to the Fram.
CHAPTER XVI
SAILING SLEDGE
LIFE in the Fram had become as regular as clockwork, when one day, after a busy morning in the cabin, they were setting out on a sledge run down to Cormorant Island and back, “to keep the dogs in good condition,” as Peggy said, and stopped a moment in the middle of the lake, because Roger, as so often, was having trouble with a skate. John was screwing it up properly, and getting the strap in the right place, when there was a faint, breathless cry from Titty, “A sail! A sail!” and they saw the first of the ice yachts swooping out from between Long Island and the Rio shore.
Dick and Dorothea had never sailed themselves. They could not know what the sight of that white wing gliding past the dark trees meant to the mate of the Amazon and the captain and crew of the Swallow.
“It’s very pretty,” said Dorothea.
She got no answer at all. All five of her new friends were as if stunned. For a minute or two not one of them spoke, and then, as the white sail swept nearer and nearer to the shore, Dorothea heard John say, quietly, as if to himself alone, “Going about. She’ll be going about. But how can she?”
And at that moment the white sail fell suddenly aquiver, narrowed, widened again, and seemed almost to leap from under the dark woods as it swooped out once more towards the middle of the lake.
“She’s gone about,” Peggy, Susan, Titty and Roger spoke all together.
“But how does it work?” said Dick.
“Tacking,” said Roger.
“How?” said Dick.
“If only it was summer we’d show you,” said Titty.
But the white sail was coming nearer, swooping from side to side of the lake, faster than any boat, beating against the southerly wind that was blowing from Spitzbergen. Presently the ice-yacht passed close by them, and they could hear the roar of the runners, and see the ice-dust flying from under them. Soon it was far away, and they watched it until it disappeared behind Spitzbergen before showing again, a tiny flash of white flying to and fro as it neared the foot of the lake.
“It was on three skates,” said Dick.
“Can’t we put a sail on the sledge?” said Titty. “The whole lake’s frozen now.”
“Nansen did it,” said Roger.
There was again a silence.
During those working days in the Fram before they had got into the habit of making Dorothea tell stories, Titty and she had been made to read aloud, for the good of the expedition, from the books on Arctic exploration that they had found in Captain Flint’s cabin bookshelves. Nansen had been their favourite author. In his First Crossing of Greenland, his whole expedition had been even smaller than their own, six explorers, counting the Lapps, instead of their own seven, or rather eight as soon as Captain Nancy should recover.
In both Nansen’s books they had found pictures of his sledges under sail. As soon as they had seen them they had thought of trying what they could do in the way of hoisting sail on their own. But at that time the lake was not yet bearing all over, and Susan had been very sure that this was an idea that would not be approved by their parents. “One good puff, and you’ll be off the ice and into the water.”
“And then what?” Roger had said.
That had been the end of the idea. There had been another reason, too. All the sledges in the Nansen books were rigged with a square sail, and though John could handle a little fore-and-aft sail, like Swallow’s, he knew square sails worked altogether differently. Besides, he had not got one.
The ice-yacht, skimming to and fro against the wind, going about exactly like Swallow herself, and with a sail almost like hers, made the thing seem possible once more, and by now there were no spaces of open water waiting to engulf a sailing sledge.
“I wonder what’s become of Swallow’s old mast?” said John suddenly. “The one that was broken in the shipwreck.”
“We brought it back from Horseshoe Cove,” said Titty.
“Come on,” said John. “Let’s get back fairly early, and have a look for it in the boathouse.”
/>
*
Next morning, when the signal was the same as usual, the wind was blowing from the north, and so cold that Dorothea and Dick went to Houseboat Bay by road and down through the wood to get the shelter of the trees. It was cold enough even so, and as they came down on the shore they were looking forward to warming up again in the Fram’s snug cabin. But they found the cabin door was locked, and nobody there. It was far too cold to stand about on the ice, waiting, so they put on their skates, left their sledge by the houseboat, and skated out of the bay to see if the others were in sight.
At first they could see no sign of them. There were the usual lot of seals skating about round the end of Long Island, and they saw the white sail of yesterday’s ice yacht racing along against the background of the trees on the farther side of the lake.
“They may be coming by road, too,” said Dorothea.
“Not with the wind behind them,” said Dick. “They wouldn’t even notice it was cold.”
And at that moment a little brown sail showed under Darien.
“Hullo!” said Dick. “What’s that? Another ice yacht. But what a little one!”
Something seemed to be wrong with the sail. Two or three times it was dropped altogether, and hoisted again. Half a dozen people seemed to be busy with it.
“I believe it’s them,” said Dorothea suddenly. “That very small one must be Roger.”
“It can’t be,” said Dick.
“It’s a sledge,” said Dorothea. “It isn’t spidery enough for an ice yacht.”
“And I’ve gone and left my telescope in my knapsack,” said Dick.
He was on the point of skating back to the Fram to fetch it when he saw that the brown sail was moving. It was nearer. That little crowd that had been round it on the ice had disappeared. It was coming faster and faster, straight down wind, rushing towards them. The freezing wind from the north bothered his eyes. He screwed them up behind his spectacles, and stared as hard as he could. It did almost look like the Beckfoot sledge. But with a queer brown sail and a mast and . . . yes, it could be nothing else.
“Dot,” he said, “it is them. They’ve got their yellow flag on the top of the mast.”
In a few seconds the sledge was half-way towards them. Its passengers were half-hidden by the brown sail. A row of legs stuck out on one side.
Dick and Dorothea shouted at the tops of their voices.
There was a cheerful yell. Someone on the sledge had seen them.
“They’ll be right into us in a minute,” said Dorothea. “Look out. They’re coming straight for us.”
They could see John at the back of the sledge leaning out and hauling in a rope as hard as he could.
A loud word of command rang out.
“Shove your port legs down . . . hard!”
Five boots met the ice. The sledge swerved violently to the left, came broadside on to the wind, skidded sideways with a sharp screech from the iron runners beneath it, and turned over with a loud crash as its mast slammed down on the ice. Skates, knapsacks, and explorers seemed to be almost everywhere.
“Quick, quick,” cried Dorothea. “They must have hurt themselves most awfully.”
But the explorers had been luckier than they deserved.
“No damage done,” John was saying. He was sitting up on the ice, with the main sheet still in his hand, looking at the overturned sledge. “The mast isn’t broken. And the sail isn’t torn. Only old ropes gone. We can easily rig her again.”
“Are you all right, Roger?” Susan was limping towards the ship’s boy, who, like the captain, seemed to be in no hurry about getting up.
“Usual knees,” said Roger, “but not bad.”
Dorothea was trying to help Titty to her feet.
“It’s quite all right,” said Titty. “Only don’t hurry . . . I say, wasn’t she just going it?”
“No need to suck it when it’s bleeding like that,” said Susan.
Peggy was hobbling along, licking a finger from which blood kept dripping on the ice.
“Anybody hurt?” she asked.
“Come along to the Fram, everybody,” said Susan. “There’s lots of lint and a bottle of iodine in the cupboard.” Even if Susan had remembered that the Fram was not theirs with everything in it, she would have decided at once that no one would grudge a bandage and some iodine to a finger that left a crimson trail.
“Some beastly thing cut through my glove,” said Peggy. “A skate, probably.”
“Come on to the Fram,” said Susan, who had herself come down pretty hard. And then, sharply, “Look out, Dorothea! Peggy’s going to faint.”
“I’m jolly well not,” said Peggy.
It was true she did feel rather sick; but, as for fainting, when she was in Captain Nancy’s place, not she! “Shiver my timbers!” she said, with rather less than the usual ring. “Shiver my timbers! It’s nothing at all. Shove your hand into my pocket, D., and get hold of the key.”
She held up the hand with the bleeding finger to keep it out of the way, while Dorothea rummaged in the pocket of her coat and brought out the key of the houseboat. The wounded climbed painfully aboard, and a minute or two later the cabin had become a dressing-station as well as a tailor’s shop, and Captain Flint’s iodine was being generously slopped on cuts and scrapes.
Dick, John, and Titty were the last to come in. They had waited to collect skates and knapsacks, and to tow the now dismasted sledge.
“But why did it turn over?” Dick was asking, as they came down into the cabin.
“Not enough beam,” said John. “Too narrow. She was all right until we tried reaching, and then we were over at once. And the trouble is, you can’t really steer her at all.”
“The quarantine flag was just right,” said Roger. “It means ‘Look out! These are dangerous people!’ and so we were. It’s a jolly good thing that nobody got in the way.”
“Anyway, we’ve sailed,” said Titty.
”SHOVE YOUR PORT LEGS DOWN … HARD!”
*
After dinner in the Fram, John and Peggy (whose hand had been impressively bandaged), decided to have another try. Captain Flint had a good supply of spare ropes in the fo’c’sle, so that they were able to repair the rigging. Dick watched what they were doing, and tried to copy John’s knots with a bit of rope they had discarded.
“Turning sailor?” said John. “Why not?”
“I’d awfully like to know how it works,” said Dick.
“We’ll want a bit more weight,” said John, “if Susan and the others aren’t coming.”
“Do take care,” said Susan, looking down from the deck of the Fram when they were ready to start. “Ice isn’t like water. It’s no joke capsizing on it. Roger’s knees are in an awful mess, and so is Titty’s elbow.”
Dorothea was on the point of saying that Dick had better not go, but she stopped herself in time. She knew Dick’s face very well, and one glance at it showed that at that moment it would not be any use to try to keep him back.
They towed the sledge up against the wind, and sailed down with it as before; and, though there was less wind than in the morning, again they upset the moment they tried to swing round and sail into Houseboat Bay. The sledge fell over, the mast hitting the ice a fearful crack. John, Peggy, and Dick picked themselves up rather glumly. And just at that moment the ice yacht came flying by, beating up against the wind, swooping from side to side of the lake like a swallow, turning as it neared each shore by what seemed to Dick as near as might be to a miracle.
“It’s no good,” said John, when they had rolled up the sail, tidied up the sledge after its adventures, climbed back to the deck of the Fram, and were going down into the cabin, “it’s no good. We can sail with the wind, but it’s no good trying to sail any other way. It’s as bad as trying to sail a narrow rowing boat.”
“Any more wounds?” asked Susan.
“None to matter,” said Peggy.
Dick and John went straight to the bookshelf, got out the Na
nsen books, and looked once more at the pictures of the sailing sledges, and read again what Nansen said about them.
“He didn’t try to sail except with the wind,” said John.
“It’s much better than towing both ways,” said Dick.
And that night, as Dick and Dorothea went home together over the ice to Dixon’s Farm, he could talk of nothing else.
“Why shouldn’t we sail, too?” he asked her. “Think if there was the right wind when we go to the North Pole, and they hoist a sail and we have to crawl behind. They’ll beat us by miles and miles. And their sail wasn’t the same shape as Nansen’s . . .”
At supper he was still talking of sailing, and of why the sledge had upset when the wind had caught it broadside on.
Mrs Dixon thought he was talking of the ice-yacht.
“Bonny sight it was and all. There was three or four of them rushing about on the lake in ’95, and racing for a silver cup.”
Dick explained that they had been sailing the Beckfoot sledge, and that he wanted to sail their own.
Mrs Dixon did not think he meant it, and went on talking of the racing of the ice yachts all those years ago, when she had been a young girl, and herself had skated from one end of the lake to the other.
Mr Dixon, as usual, sat silent.
But next morning, as Dick was hurrying across the yard to run up to the observatory to see what signal there might be at Holly Howe, Mr Dixon stopped him by the woodshed.
“There’s a bit of a larch pole in there that happen might do you for a mast.”
Dick and Dorothea were very late that day in coming to the Fram. They did not explain what had kept them.
“It’s no good saying anything about it,” said Dick, “in case we can’t do it after all.”
There was no wind that day, and so no sailing, but he took the opportunity of making a careful drawing of one of the sailing sledges in the Nansen books, and that night after supper he was late to bed, sitting up with Mr Dixon by the kitchen fire, looking at the drawing by the light of an oil lamp on the corner of the kitchen table, and planning how the mast should be made and what would be the best way to fix it upright on the sledge.