The next moment he signaled Brannigan to start the motors. The flying boat began to quiver throughout her length. They were about to make the jump-off. CHAPTER XVIII THE GIANT BERG The first movement of the big flying boat attracted the attention of the crowd of onlookers as well as the soldiery and the excited civilian that had put in such a ridiculous claim for possession of Tom Swift’s newest invention. Those gathered in the pilot room of the seaplane could see everyone hurrying to get out of the expected course of the _Winged Arrow_. “We’ll settle that fellow’s hash when we come back,” declared Tom, shaking his head, as he glanced out at the stranger. “_If_ we come back, you mean,” replied Ned. “And take it from me, Tom, that chap is linked up with the French fellow that bothered us before we left Shopton.” “Looks so. But that Polansky, as this chap called him, was no Frenchman, I tell you.” “Doesn’t matter. He had an awful amount of nerve,” said Ned. “Now we’re rising!” The seaplane took the air as nicely as she had before. Captain Olaf Karofsen was tracing the course they should follow across Iceland. The place to which he directed Tom for gasoline was a small whaling port facing the stretch of Arctic Ocean called the Greenland Sea. The long twilight of this northern clime made the journey really a pleasant one. Tom, to avoid air currents caused by the mountains, veered a little and skirted a shoulder of Mount Hekla, from the crater of which a thin column of smoke was rising. The captain told them there had been no eruption of the ancient volcano since he was a child, but it was not entirely cold. Captain Karofsen was much more interested in the management of the seaplane, however, than he was in the physical wonders of Iceland. The boys were eager to know the particulars of the wreck of the _Kalrye_ and how Mr. Damon and Mr. Nestor had been thrown upon the iceberg. “I lost das schooner—yes,” said the captain, shaking his head. “Das insurance don’t pay me for all. And if them gentlemen are lost for good, I never get over it.” It seemed that in the night and fog two monstrous peaks of ice loomed up ahead of the _Kalrye_, but so many miles away that the captain and crew of the schooner had no idea their boat would collide with the berg. She had run bow on to a ledge, and with a heavy sea following her, the stiff hull of the schooner was battered into wreckage in a very few minutes. The two boats were got safely out and the crew divided. Both boats were well provisioned. The one in which the two passengers sailed with their treasure and baggage was badly managed. A billow caught up the craft and threw her broadside upon the ice. “She vas smashed like you step on von cockroach,” groaned Karofsen. “But dark as it vos, I see all the party high and dry. They signal us with flashlight. We tell them we go for help—yes. It was the best we could do.”