Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/107

Rh remembered, and a dozen expeditions were made into the Arctic, before the fate of Franklin's two great ships and his hundred and thirty men could be learned. Might the little Viborg with its crew find two men alone in all that northern wilderness?

Lost men, in passing down a shore, would build cairns on headlands to tell their line of travel to any other party. Now and again, as piles that might be cairns appeared, the Viborg halted and a boat took men ashore to search the heaps for messages. But only one might have been a cairn built by man; and that was too old and not of the Aurora cairn type. It gave no message if it ever bore one. The fog closed over the channels and the ship forced on. The shortening days and the sinking of the sun now warned of the nearing of winter; there was no time to waste while ice conditions in the channels favoured the vessel.

"Stop! Full speed ahead! Reverse; full speed astern! Full speed ahead!" The signals, with the bumping and scraping and battering against the ice in the closing channels, marked the mile after mile that the Viborg