The greatest adventure
"How long will it take us to get ready?" the Doctor asked.
"About six months. You, Drake, and your daughter if she comes, must
get thoroughly hardened before we start. Hansen and I can see to
overhauling the ship and laying in the necessary stores. We're both old
hands at the game."
"Where is your ship now?"
"Drydock. Rio de Janeiro."
"What!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Do you mean to say you came clear to San
Francisco just to show me that reptile bird?"
"Why not?" the Captain asked complacently. "I knew you would join us."
"Am I as easy as they told you I was?"
"No, Doctor. You wouldn't swallow a mermaid."
"Such is the bubble reputation. Edith, this comes of your collection of
freaks. I wish you would adopt some less humiliating form of charity in
future."
"You haven't believed my story of all those big beasts in the oil yet,"
the Captain reminded him soothingly.
"No, and I'll be hanged if I do until I see them with my own eyes.
Well, I'm game. That thing in the box is real, anyway. You can
telegraph the Rio de Janeiro drydock to give your ship a thorough
overhauling. Fit up quarters somewhere for a passenger or two."
"Ole and I saw to all that before we left."
"Easier and easier. Well, well. You _are_ a surprising person."
This bit of information seemed almost to surprise him more than the
captain's strange tale. "It's too late for lunch and too early for
dinner. Will you have tea with us?"
"We shall be only too glad to enjoy your hospitality," Ole
sententiously replied.
"Ah, Hansen, I see you have a treatise on Dutch etiquette among your
literary treasures as well as a table of logarithms. All right, boys.
Edith, tell Wong to do his best in the true old Spanish style."
5
"BATTLES LONG AGO"
Seven strenuous months of physical toughening lay behind Drake,
Edith, and her father. They had lost no time in setting about their
preparations for the hardships ahead.
The day after the tea with Captain Anderson and the mate they were on
their way to the Canadian Rockies. Before leaving, Dr. Lane gave the
efficient Wong a sheaf of checks dated the first of each month for the
next three years. With these Wong was to pay his own salary and keep
the house in order.
To his rage and stupefaction Drake was dragged kicking from his puzzles
to become a hardened mountaineer. The Doctor was determined that the
obstinate archaeologist should accompany them to see with his own eyes
the originals of Hansen's photographs. Anderson and the mate left San
Francisco the same afternoon to return to Rio via Boston.
The party of three had gone straight north to a fashionable resort
in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. They planned to begin their
training gradually. Arrived at the luxurious hotel, they hired guides
and mapped out their program. Four hours' mountain hiking a day for the
first week, six the second, and so on up to fifteen, when they would be
sufficiently seasoned to dispense with the guides.
Drake, who had brought with him the fourteen most promising of Hansen's
puzzles for study, proved a most refractory companion. As the daily
marches lengthened he seemed to demand more and more sleep. It was a
ten minute job to get him out of bed in the mornings. The Doctor became
alarmed, thinking the rarefied air and violent exercise might have
affected the young man's heart. A searching physical examination showed
him to be in perfect health. Drake himself said nothing, enduring the
interminable climbs up precipices and the endless crawls over glaciers
with glum stoicism.
When the party left their quarters at the hotel to live in the bleak
open with only their sleeping bags for shelter, Drake became positively
morose. Edith declared in confidence to her father that the cranky
young antiquarian was developing such a devil of a temper that the only
comfortable course would be to send him home. She had stood all she
could of the snapping turtle. The thought of a possible two years with
him in a frozen wilderness appeared singularly uninviting.
"I should like to beat him up," she confided, "for I am sure there is
nothing the matter with him but a vile disposition."
An unusually cold and foggy night on the snowfields gave her the key
to Drake's ailment. Unable to sleep for the wretched discomfort,
she lay on her side staring wide-eyed at the soupy mist. Presently
she became aware of a tiny, faint glow in the direction of Drake's
quarters. Slipping from her bag she crawled on all fours over the soft
snow toward the source of the light. Unobserved she got close enough
to see Drake lying flat on his stomach in his sleeping bag, his head
propped up on his hands, intent on one of Hansen's photographs. The
dim illumination came from an improvised reading lamp consisting of
two inches of candle in a small tomato can on its side. She stole back
to her bag and crept in, to keep a lookout on the dim glow. After
what seemed an eternity it vanished, only to reappear half a minute
later. Drake had lighted another two-inch candle. And so it went until
about an hour before dawn when the glow finally disappeared and Drake
presumably slept the sleep of the unjust.
Edith said nothing of her discovery to her father. The next night
was clearer. Between cat naps she watched again. Once more the light
vanished an hour before dawn, and the criminal slept. Edith decided not
to peach. Instead she contrived an ingenious plan for the salvaging of
whatever survived the general wreck of Drake's temper.
She had not long to wait before putting her plan into action. The two
men shared the labor of splitting wood and keeping the campfire going
while she cooked. They planned at last two hot meals a week, descending
from the snowfields to the timberline to find fuel, for with their
heavy packs it was impossible to carry oil. On these occasions the men
peeled off their coats and went after wood with a will. The prospect
of a well-cooked steaming hot meal put enthusiasm even into the
dissipated, cantankerous Drake.
Edith bided her time. When next the perspiring Drake, having collected
twice as much wood as he could carry, was swearing under his breath
like a bobcat, she quietly abstracted the fourteen photographic puzzles
from the inner pocket of his discarded coat.
"It's a dirty trick," she murmured, stowing them safely away inside her
shirt, "but it is for his own good."
That night Drake was like a forlorn cow that has just lost its beloved
calf. Edith heard him rooting about in the dark, scraping his shins and
swearing at anything and everything. That night, she said later, was
just one long, whispered curse.
She let him suffer for his calf three days. Then, with a six-foot
crevasse between them, she confessed. Drake looked murder at her. But
by the time he scrambled the mile and a half which she, with rare
foresight, had placed between them by going rapidly ahead of the party,
the outraged Drake was too exhausted to fight. He regained his fourteen
tormentors only on the solemn promise that he would blow out the candle
every morning at two o'clock sharp. Thus, unless the enthusiastic
Doctor insisted upon routing them from their bags ahead of schedule,
Drake would get a full four hours' sleep every night.
"If that isn't enough to sweeten your disposition," Edith stipulated,
"I'll add half an hour at a time until we hit the right dose."
Under the new ordering of his disreputable habits Drake became as
suave as melted butter. Not that he talked much more than he had, for
he still emulated the oyster. What little he did say, however, was all
that Edith desired in affability. The Doctor, noticing the change,
ascribed it to a sudden, bone-freezing drop in the temperature.
"Drake will do famously when we get to the real thing," he told Edith.
"Just see how this cold snap bucks him up."
"Oh, he will be all right," Edith agreed. "When he gets something to do
he will lose his grouch for good."
After twelve weeks of roughing it on the snowfields and glaciers of
the Rockies the three went to Alaska for a more drastic course of the
same training. Little by little they accustomed themselves to scantier
and scantier clothing, until by the end of their hardening they were
clambering over ice and snow in howling blizzards with no clothing
but a single loose overall garment of wool. The Doctor in his joyous
enthusiasm was inclined to go farther, pointing out that if stark
nakedness in the snow is the proper thing for consumptive children,
surely a breech clout in a blizzard should be sufficient for tough
campaigners like themselves. But Edith wouldn't hear of it, although
Drake seemed to entertain the suggestion favorably.
And now all this, the hardship and the fun, lay behind them. That night
they were sailing from Montreal for Rio de Janeiro, there to meet the
rest of the expedition and undergo their last training. They must
learn to fly. Dr. Lane still believed that an airplane might prove
the decisive factor in the success of their venture, although Captain
Anderson, with all an old sailor's conservatism, belittled the idea
and grudged the two months' delay which it would cost.
Ole, on the contrary, by letter and cablegram, fairly gloated over the
prospect. A mastery of flying would bring him many steps nearer the
omniscience which was his ideal in this imperfect life. The Captain's
letters reported him already a past master of the art of flying--on
paper. He had even invented an improved type of flying machine which,
according to the envious Anderson, resembled a wheelbarrow with wings.
This masterpiece of Ole's unsuspected mechanical genius was still
in the chrysaloid stage of development, being as yet only one-third
drawings and two-thirds pure theory. Still, all in all it justified
Ole's high rating in the Boston intelligence tests. Anderson could
never have done anything like it.
Except for Drake's alleged seasickness the voyage down to Rio de
Janeiro was uneventful. Drake had telegraphed from Vancouver to one
of his antiquarian cronies to meet him in Montreal with half a ton of
carefully selected books, for the most part profusely illustrated works
on biology, geology and evolution. With these he shut himself up in his
cabin, admitting only the stewards who reported him in the last stages
of seasickness. Smelling a prosperous rat, Dr. Lane left the sufferer
to his agonies and hopefully promenaded the decks or played quoits with
Edith.
On the morning of the last day of the voyage the doctor's patience
was rewarded. The invalid emerged from his cabin looking, as Edith
informed him, as fresh as a young string bean.
"I'm better," Drake announced.
"That's good," said the Doctor. "How are Hansen's photographs?"
Drake tried not to look pleased. He failed. His face broke into a grin.
"Doing as well as could be expected, thank you," he replied.
"Have you deciphered them?"
"If I say 'yes' you will pester me to death with questions; if I say
'no' you will set me down as a blockhead. So I shall evade the question
by answering both yes and no. And that, as a matter of fact, is the
exact state of affairs."
"The Lord should have made you a woman," the Doctor remarked.
"A beautiful blonde," Drake sighed. "A perfect thirty-six," he added
with an admiring glance at Edith's lithe figure.
"I'll give you a swift kick unless you come through with what you have
found," the Doctor snapped. "Come on; out with it."
"Before violence I am powerless. I am too proud to run away." He became
more serious. "You were right when you said my education was lopsided.
A thorough knowledge of biology, geology, evolution and half a dozen
tougher sciences is just what I lack now to read those fragments fully.