Edison Marshall

“ Here and there it was gashed with crevices,—those deep glacier chasms into which a stone falls in silence. For a moment Ned regarded it with considerable displeasure.
He was not equipped for ice scaling. Perhaps it was best not to try to go on. But as he waited, the long way down and around seemed to grow in his imagination. It was that deadly hour of late afternoon when the founts of energy run low and the thought-mechanism is dulled by fatigue;—and some way, he felt his powers of resistance slipping away from him. He forget, for the moment, the Fear that is the very soul of wisdom. ”

“ All things remain as they were,—the eternal silence, the wild creatures absorbed in their occupations; the trees never lifting their bowed heads from their burdens of snow. Ned did not dream that mortal eyes would ever rest upon his form again, vanishing without trace except for the axe that had fallen at the edge of the crevice and the imprint of his snowshoes on the trail behind. There was no reason in heaven or earth for doubting but that this ivory glacier would be his sepulcher forever.
In that little instant the scope of his mind was incredibly vast. ”

“ He must follow a lone trail—like the old gray pack leader whose sluts cannot keep pace.
Thereafter, day and night, Ned watched his chances. Never he climbed to the top of the ridge but that he searched, with straining eyes, for the glimpse of a dog-sledge on the horizon, or perhaps the faint line of a distant island. On the nights that he spent at the home cabin, he made an intense study of Doomsdorf's most minor habits, trying to uncover some little failing, some trifling carelessness that might give him his opportunity. He made it a point to leave his axe in easy reaching distance ”