Victor Vail made no reply. Doc glanced at him sharply.
Tears stood in Victor Vail's eyes.
Doc's chance remark about grandchildren had made Victor Vail think of his long-lost daughter, Roxey.
THEY BRAVED an inferno for the next few minutes; an inferno of ice and wind. Pressure was forcing the pack ice high on the shore of the uncharted land. Frozen death crashed and lurched everywhere.
Doc Savage made it through in safety. He carried Victor Vail under one thewed arm, seeming not to feel the burden at all.
"We licked it," Doc said dryly. "The storm accounts for the thick haze we've had the last few days."
They hurried inland. Their mukluks stilt trod ice. It lay below to a depth of many feet. Occasional ridges of dark, impermeable stone rammed unlovely fangs out of the white waste.
The wind hooted and shrieked. Sometimes it whirled the two men along like crumpled balls of paper.
They mounted higher. The glacier thinned. The dark stone reared in greater profusion.
Doc Savage halted suddenly. He poised, motionless, metallic. No breath steam came from his strong lips.
"What is it?" breathed Victor Vail.
Doc released breath from his mighty lungs. It made a spurting plume that frosted on the fur of his parka. The air was turning colder.
"Something is stalking us!" Doc said dryly.
Victor Vail was astounded. His own senses were very keen made so by the years when he had been blind, and depended upon them. But he had heard nothing.
"I caught the odor of it," Doc explained.
Amazement gripped Victor Vail. He had not known this strange bronze man, through unremitting exercise, had developed the olfactory keenness of a wild thing.
Doc Savage pressed Victor Vail into a convenient crevasse. "Stay here!" Doc commanded. "Don't leave the spot. You might become lost!"
The void of shrieking wind swallowed Doc's bronze form. He glided to the right. His speed was amazing.
A few flakes of snow came sizzling through the gale. More followed. They were hard as fine hailstones. When Doc flattened close to a rock spine to listen, the snow sounded like sand on the stone. He heard nothing.
He crept on. The snow shut Out visions beyond a few yards. It stuck to his bearskin trousers. It rattled off his metallic face like shot;
Suddenly he caught blurred movement in the whistling abyss. He flashed for it. His hands hands in which steel bars became plastic as tin strips were open and ready. His charge was that of a mighty hunter of the wild.
The next instant, Doc became quarry instead of hunter.
It was a polar bear he had rushed!
The animal bounded to meet Doc. It seemed clumsy. The awkwardness was only in its looks, however. Its speed was as tremendous as its size. It was the most terrible killer of the arctic!
Doc sought to veer aside. The footing was too slippery. Straight into the embrace of the polar monster, he skidded!
SOME MEN acquainted with the arctic regions maintain the polar bear will flee from a human being, rather than attack. Others cite instances when the bruins were known to have taken the aggressive.
The truth of the matter is probably covered by the words of a certain famous arctic explorer.
"It depends on the bear," he said.
The bear Doc had met was the attacking type.
It erected on its rear legs. It was far taller than Doc. It flung monster forepaws out to inclose Doc's bronze form. A blow from one of those paws would have crushed down a bull buffalo.
Twisting, half ducking, Doc evaded the paws. His sinewy fingers buried in the fur of the polar monster. A jerk, a lightening flip, put him behind the bear.
Doc's fist swung with explosive force. It seemed to sink inches in the fat flesh of the animal. Doc had struck at a nerve center where his vast knowledge told him there was a chance of stunning the monster.
Bruin was not accustomed to this style of fighting. This small man-thing had looked like an easy quarry. The bear snarled, showing hideous fangs. With a speed that was astounding, considering the size and weight of the beast, it whirled.
Doc had fastened himself to the back of the animal. He clung there solely by the pinching power of his great leg muscles. Both his arms were free.
He struck the polar bear just back of the small head. He slugged again, hitting a more vulnerable spot.
Snarling horribly, the terror of the northern wastes sank to the glacier. The animal had met more than its match.
Doc could have escaped easily. But he did not. They needed food and a sleeping robe. Here were both. Doc's metallic fists pistoned a half dozen more stunning blows. Slavering and snarling, the bear stretched out.
Doc's mighty right arm slipped over the bear's head, just back of the ears. It jerked. A dull pop sounded. A great trembling seized all the great, white monster. The fight was over.
Silence fell, except for the moan of the blizzard.
Was it a low, mellow, trilling sound, remindful of the song of some exotic bird, which mingled with the whine of the wind? Or was it but the melodious note of the gale rushing through the neighboring pinnacles of rock and ice?
A listener could not have told.
Doc's strange sound sometimes came when he had accomplished some tremendous feat. Certainly, there was ample cause for it now.
No man, bare handed, had ever vanquished a more frightful foe.
Doc skidded the huge, hairy animal to a near-by pock in the bleak stone. He searched until he had found boulders enough to cover the cache of potential food and bedding. He did not want other bears to rob him.
He now hurried to get Victor Vail.
He reached the crevasse where he had left the violinist.
Ten feet from it, a gruesome red sprinkling rouged the ice. Blood! It no longer steamed. It was frozen solid, crusted with flakes of snow.
Scoring in the ice, already inlaid with snow, denoted a furious fight.
No sign was to be seen of Victor Vail!
Chapter 14
CORPSE BOAT
LIKE A hound in search of a scent, Doc set off. He ran in widening circles. He found faint marks that might have been a trail. They led inland. They were lost beyond the following within two rods.
Doc positioned himself in the lee of a boulder the size of a box car. Standing there, sheltered a little from the blizzard, he considered.
An animal would have devoured Victor Vail on the spot! There had been no bits of cloth scattered about, no gory patches on the ice, such as certainly would have accompanied such a cannibalistic feast.
Something else loomed large in Doc's mind, too. The odor his supersensitive nostrils had detected at first!
Doc's mighty bronze form came as near a shiver as it ever came.
There had been a bestial quality about that scent. Yet it had hardly been that of an animal! Nor was it human, either. It had been a revolting tang, reminiscent of carrion.
One thing he began to realize with certainty. It had not been the polar bear!
Doc shrugged. He stepped out into the squealing blizzard. Inland, he journeyed.
The terrain sloped upward. The glacier became but scattered smears of ice. Even the snow did not linger, so great was the wind velocity.
Doc crossed a ridge.
From now on, the way led down. Progress was largely a matter of defying the propulsion of the gale.
Snow was drifting here. This was a menace, for it covered crevasses, a fall into which meant death. Doc trod cautiously.
In a day or two, perhaps in a week, when the blizzard had blown itself out, the haze above would disperse, and let the everlasting sun of the arctic summer beat down upon the snow. This would become slush. Cold would freeze it. A little more would be added to the thickness of the glacier. For thus are glaciers made.
Warily, Doc sidled along. He let the wind skid him ahead when he dared. Had he been a man addicted to profanity, he would have been consigning all glaciers to a place where their coolness probably would be a welcome change.