Stand By: The Story of a Boy's Achievement in Radio

  CHAPTER XVII

  BESIEGED

  "Don't lose your grip, men! Better freeze to the walls than fall belowthere!" Captain Bartlot's voice echoed through the great ice cave.

  Dwarfed to mere fly-size by the immensity of vast ice columns andice-frescoed sides of the cavern, Bartlot's crew clung to the precariousledges above the white-fanged wolf-pack that crouched waiting, waiting,below.

  Sinister shapes, long-jawed, powerful, were those shaggy killers of theNorth. When they had burst, full cry, from the cave depths, a paralysisof fear had numbed the men's brains for an instant. Another instant andthey had gone leaping, scrambling, screaming up the ice wall,--withnever a thought for food or weapons, never a thought for aught saveputting space between them and those slavering, slashing jaws.

  Endurance gains the wolf-pack its meat--relentless persistence in thechase and untiring watching and waiting for hunger, weakness and thirstto drop some beleaguered creature into their jaws.

  Green eyes of hate glared up from the cave floor at the men trapped onthe ice wall. Red tongues lolled hungrily over long jaws each time therewas some faint movement of slipping or sliding, for it might presage ahuman losing grip and falling into the waiting death ring below.

  One man did fall--Eric Borden, of the geological surveyors. The icecolumn against which his lank person was wedged broke and shot him,slipping and clawing, down the wall. The boom of the falling ice,Sanderson's knife hurled below, the flash of the two shots left inBartlot's revolver--these created distraction enough to hurl back thewolves for a moment, while many hands reached down to rescue a comrade,to haul him back to the ledges.

  Bartlot's shots had killed a wolf. The knife had drawn blood on another.Snarling and howling, the pack leaped upon its own unfortunates, torethem asunder, devoured them.

  The men on the ice above shivered and dug deeper into crack and crevice.

  Wedged precariously between two crystal-white stalactites on the wall,Lee Renaud trusted to the pressure of knee and foot to hold him firm,and thus leave his hands free. In spite of weariness, in spite of nerverack from the hundred-eyed monster that waited below, Lee forced hisfur-clad fingers on with their tinkering at a tiny radio set he carriedon his back, a finished, polished copy of his own crude portable outfit.Factory experts had carried out his ideas in a more compact, lighterarrangement than he had been able to achieve with the rough materialsavailable in his backwoods laboratory. But whether this new arrangementwould send the call for help as effectively as that old rattletrap haddone during the Sargon flood--well, that was something to be proved.

  Lee's hands trembled as he pushed the wire framing of the folding aerialup and up over his head, while he crouched low to give room for it inthe slanting niche in which his body was jammed.

  It was dangerous work, balancing one's self in a high ice crack whilebelow the killer horde squatted on its haunches and waited, as only thewolf-pack can wait, for its meat. A restless, fearsome, cruel-eyed hordeit was. One unbalancing movement, and Lee Renaud's body would goslithering down for the white-fanged horde to rend and tear into athousand pieces, even as it had done to its own wounded members.

  Shivers like an ague shot through his body, his hands were numbing fromthe bitter cold that inaction was letting creep through his double furs.

  Hurry,--he must hurry! Soon he would have no more feeling, no morecontrol. He and his companions would be dropping down like frozen lumpsfrom this frozen wall--dropping to a terrible death.

  Leaning forward precariously, Renaud slipped the head harness intoplace, adjusted receiver and mouthpiece, and threw his strength intocranking to generate power. His fingers, numb and clumsy within theirgreat fur gloves, pressed the buzzer signal of the tiny radio and sentits staccato call hissing out through the air strata of the Arctic.

  No answering buzz came back, no sign that his call had penetrated theether.

  "Bz-z-z-z!" went his frantic signaling. "Renaud calling!" he shoutedinto the tiny mouthpiece, as though to sweep his message on by the forceof his voice alone. "Renaud calling! Party trapped by wolves at icecave. Follow trail of route flags. Help! Bring guns, flares. Help!"

  Louder and louder grew his voice. But no heartening answer was flungback from the ship's radio. Not so much as a buzz or faintest whispersounded in the receiver strapped to his straining ears.

  No answer. Nothing.

  The only sound was a long-drawn wail as the white horde circled innearer, waiting, waiting beneath their prey.