Tilting the left plane to its utmost, adjusting the tail, Barney glided onward.  With bated breath he saw the white plain rise to meet them.  With trembling hand he touched a lever here, a button there.  Then—­a jar—­the landing-wheels had touched.  They touched again.  The moving plane fairly ate up the scant level space, yet she slowed and slowed until at last, with hardly a tremor, she rested against the outcropping ridge of ice at the floe’s edge.

With a glowing smile the Major unstrapped himself to reach out his hands in thanks and congratulation to his pilots.

But—­where were they?  They had disappeared.  He found them in front of the plane calling to him for assistance.  Then he saw the danger their more practiced eyes had already noticed.  The ice at this point was piling.  At this moment the very cake against which they had stopped was beginning to rise.  Within a space of moments, the plane, unless turned and thrust backward, would be crushed beneath hundreds of tons of ice.  “If we can get her back we can save her!” panted Bruce.

“Swing her!” shouted Barney, throwing his whole strength against the right wing.

“Now she moves!” yelled Bruce joyously.  “Now!  Heave ho!”

The great craft turned slowly on her wheels.  Now the plane was clearing the ice.  Now—­now in just a second—­she would be safe.

But no—­the right wheel caught in an ice-crevice.  Three desperate efforts they made to free her, then, just as the giant cake towered, crumbling above them, the Major shouted the word of warning that sent them leaping back to safety but cost them their machine.

True, it stood there, still.  The mechanism was perfect, the engines uninjured.  But the right wing was completely demolished.  Buried beneath tons and tons of ice, the craft that had carried them so far was crushed beyond all hope of repair.

With despair tugging at their hearts, the three stood looking at the wreckage.  But they were not of the breed that quits.

“We’d better get our stuff and what’s left of the plane out of the way of danger,” said Bruce at length.

“The stuff—­blankets, grub and the like, yes, but”—­Barney smiled in spite of himself—­“why the plane?  She’s done for.”

“Because,” said Bruce, “you can never tell what will happen.”

The pressure which was piling the ice diminished rapidly, and the back edge of the cake proved a safe place to make camp.  Soon they were boiling tea over a small oil stove and discussing the future as calmly as they might have done had they been in the old office-shack back on the Hudson Bay Railroad.

“Now to find where we are,” exclaimed the Major, knocking the tea leaves from his cup.

The interest in this project was keen.  After working out his reckoning, estimating the speed of their flight and counting the hours they had been in the air, the Major laid down his pencil.