"You can search me!" responded the other boy. "If this sort of business keeps on I shall wish, with Wash, that we'd never come to Alaska." "You can wish it with me!" grumbled Mark. "Washington doesn't want to get back to Maine any more than I do right now, Jack." "We must complete the repairing of the _Snowbird_," gasped Jack. "And where are the rods--and the plane frame? And where are the lights?" They held on to each other in the darkness of this over-shadowed hollow and neither boy was willing to speak for a moment. Then Andy Sudds staggered to them. "I've lost my gun!" he ejaculated, with a quaver in his voice that was quite surprising. "And we've lost our lamps; but we'll find 'em, Andy," said Jack Darrow, curiously enough becoming leader of the expedition right then, instead of the man. It wasn't that the old hunter was frightened; merely, he did not know what to do in this emergency. "Do you notice--?" began Jack, seriously, and then stopped. "Do I notice what, son?" responded Andy. "I don't see how you can notice anything without a light," interrupted Mark querulously. This statement seemed to arouse Jack's faculties completely. He did not continue his remark, but said: "That's our first job; isn't it?" "What's our first job?" asked the hunter. "To get a light. We can't find the flying machine, nor get back to Roebach's camp, without light. Why, it can't be more than mid-afternoon, yet it's as dark as a stack of black cats in a coal-chute." "And that's where I feel as though I'd been," declared Mark. "Where?" "Fighting the cats in the coal-hole. Ouch! I'm lame and sore all over." "We're sure up against it," repeated Andy. "But there must be some way out, boys." "Light is the first requisite," agreed Jack, more cheerfully. "Got any matches, Andy?" "Plenty of 'em in a corked flask. I don't ever travel without matches, son," returned the old hunter. "But matches won't show us the way to Roebach's camp," complained Mark. "Don't croak, old boy," advised Jack. "Let's have that bottle of cosmolene I saw you tuck in your pocket there at the _Snowbird_." "I was taking that to the professor. He said he would want it," said Mark. "What's it good for?" "You'll come pretty near seeing in a minute, Mark," returned the quick-thinking Jack. "Here, Andy! let me have that woolen scarf you wear. You'll have to say good-bye to it--bid it a fond farewell." "I'm sort of friendly to that scarf, youngster," said the hunter. "What's to be done to it?" "It's going to become a lamp wick right here and now," declared young Darrow, promptly. "So! I've got the cosmolene smeared on it already. There! that's the last of it. Now a match, Andy." "Joshua!" grumbled the hunter. "It _is_ good-bye, I guess!" The match flared up. Jack touched it to the greasy woolen cloth. It began to burn brightly and steadily at once.