“What did you do?” asked Roger.
“Went without,” said Mrs Blackett. “What else could we do?”
“This one was so hot we cooled it in the snow,” said Peggy.
“Lucky it’s a long way to the tarn,” said Roger, who thought that if the ice had been a little nearer this hot-pot might have gone the same way as the other.
After dinner, when Mrs Blackett had admired the outside of the igloo as well as the inside, she said that she must be going, and that Nancy and Peggy must come with her.
“Your dinner was a fairly late one, you know, and it’ll be getting dark in an hour, so it doesn’t make very much difference. I’m sorry to take them off, but I was given a lift round the head of the lake, and the boat’s the only way to get back.”
“We’ll give you a full dog team now,” said Nancy, and they put Mrs Blackett on the sledge, and the whole Polar expedition pulled on the ropes or pushed behind as they ran the sledge along the old path through the wood until they came out of the trees and the snow stretched clear before them down to the road, with only one stone wall across it and that with a wide gap in it. Dozens of tracks showed where there had been tobogganing early in the morning.
Peggy, Nancy, and John joined Mrs Blackett on the sledge.
“Tomorrow won’t be wasted,” said Nancy to Dorothea. “Something always happens on Kanchenjunga. All right, mother? Tuck your feet in. John’s coming to bring the sledge up for the others. Let go at the stern there. Shove her off!”
There was a faint squeak from Mrs Blackett, and the sledge shot away over the snow, faster and faster, straight as an arrow down the steep hill-side, through the gap in the wall, and on towards the road.
“Come along,” said Susan, “we must tidy up in the igloo. Specially as we shan’t be there tomorrow.”
They raced back up the path through the trees, made everything what Susan and Titty called shipshape, and were back at the edge of the wood when John came toiling slowly uphill again with the sledge.
The six of them flew down the hill together.
“What about tomorrow’s signals?” asked Dick, as they were saying good night in the road.
“No point in climbing up there tomorrow,” said John. “Come straight to Holly Howe as early as you can.”
“I do wish it hadn’t all got to stop so soon,” said Dorothea, as she and Dick walked home along the road under trees heavy with snow. “Only three more days.”
Dick was thinking of something very different.
“Remember that first day, Dot?” he said. “Well, we’re going in a boat after all.”
CHAPTER VII
ARCTIC VOYAGE
IT FROZE harder than ever that night, and in the morning Dick and Dorothea set out for Holly Howe with the joyful news that there was an edging of thin ice along the shore of the lake. Dorothea had asked Mrs Dixon if she thought they ought to put on their best clothes. “They won’t be your best clothes if you spend a day in them with Mrs Blackett’s two,” Mrs Dixon had said. “If you ask me, you’d best go just as you are.”
“But it’s a party.”
“It won’t be that kind of party if those two have anything to do with it.” So they set out, just as they were, in ordinary Arctic rig, with woollen gloves and mufflers as well as their coats, for anybody could see that it would be pretty cold rowing across.
They found that news of the ice had already reached Holly Howe. A local Eskimo (the postman) had said there would be skating before night by the town landings, and John had just come up from the boathouse to say that there was a good deal of ice in the Holly Howe bay.
“Thicker than cat ice,” Roger told them. “John says it would bear a jolly big cat, a wild cat, or even a small puma.”
“They’ll have a job to bring their boat in,” said John, coming out with a big coil of stout rope, for use on Kanchenjunga. “I wonder what it’s like over on the other side.”
Titty came running round the corner of the house. She had been watching at the top of the field. “The boat’s just coming,” she called out, “but there’s only one of them in it.” She was gone.
“Come on, Susan,” John called in at the window, and they all hurried out by the garden gate. Titty was already running down the field to the boathouse. Roger was racing after her. Dorothea, in spite of what Mrs Dixon had said, could not help having a feeling that they were going to a party, though they saw that none of the others were tidier than usual. She did not run. Nor did Dick, but that was because he had pulled out his telescope, and was looking through it at the Beckfoot rowing boat, which was already in the bay.
“It’s Peggy,” he said.
“She’s taken the point of the bay very wide,” said John. “More ice out there, very likely.”
A moment later they saw Peggy looking round over her shoulder, and changing the direction of the boat.
“Come on,” said John. “Let’s get down there. She may not be able to bring the boat to the jetty. There may be less ice under Darien, where it’s deeper.”
Susan had caught them up, and now, party or no party, they ran full tilt down through the snow, through the little gate at the bottom of the field, and out on the stone jetty beside the Holly Howe boathouse. Roger and Titty had cleared a good deal of the snow off the jetty the morning before when they had gone down to meet the Amazons, and now they were stamping their feet on the stones to get rid of the snow from their boots.
“Look! Look!” cried Roger. “She’s met an iceberg.” And indeed they saw Peggy lift an oar and bring it down with a splash through a thin piece of floating ice.
John went scouting along the shore towards that high rocky southern point that they called the Peak of Darien, where pine trees rose above a cliff, but it was clear that, ice or no ice, Peggy meant to come straight in at the usual place. Dorothea shivered at the thought that in a few minutes she and Dick would be themselves afloat in this ice-strewn sea, though she would have been willing to do almost anything rather than be left behind and miss the chance of such a voyage. Dick was eagerly watching for the boat to meet the edge of thin ice that stretched for a good many yards out from the jetty. Would the boat simply cut the ice or would it lift its nose over the ice and then break through it from above by its own weight?
PEGGY IN THE CAT ICE
“Hullo!” called Peggy, from out in the bay and then, heading directly for the jety, settled down to row as hard as she could.
“She’s going to ram it,” cried Titty.
“Now, now, now!” shouted Roger. “She’s into it.”
Dick, his eye to the telescope, watched the nose of the boat cutting through the water.
Everybody held their breath.
There was a queer, cracking sound, taken up all round the bay, as the boat drove on, forcing a sheet of thin ice aslant out of the water before it, then another, then another, until Peggy’s oars were slipping and hitting ice on either side of her.
“She’s going to get stuck,” cried Roger.
“Go it, Peggy!” called Titty.
“It’s