“Let’s get around to the other side,” cried Ned. “Goodness me! maybe there are other folks cast away here.” “It nefer is _dem_?” questioned Captain Olaf Karofsen excitedly. Tom changed the controls. The great flying boat heeled over a little as her nose drove into the wind. As she passed out from the shelter of the pinnacle of ice the power of the gale smote upon the seaplane as it had not before. The wind howled and whistled. Tom signaled to the power room for the compressed air pump to be started again. In this gale he realized the boat would roll, and this was dangerous. She needed more balance-weight. Again the structure rolled and groaned. Mr. Damon and Mr. Nestor cried out. They had not experienced this motion before. The _Winged Arrow_ came to an even keel, then once more dipped sideways. With a crash one wing-end scraped along the hill of ice. The rebound carried the plane away from the wall of ice; but she began to descend, slowly but surely. Tom speeded up, and the groaning boat shot away from the hillside. Behind them the spiral of smoke came from a cleft into which it had been impossible for any of them to see. The flying boat was flapping downward like a broken-winged bird! “Are we wrecked? Is it a smash-up?” queried Mr. Nestor anxiously. “Bless my anchors!” gasped Mr. Damon. “We’ve got to make a landing,” said Tom, with some show of cheerfulness. “But there is a pretty level field of ice to make it on. I think we shall be all right.” The next moment the boat was bouncing on its wheels and tail. The power had been shut off. Soon they came to a halt and it was possible to discover how badly the flying boat was damaged, if damaged at all. CHAPTER XXIV UNEXPECTED GOOD FORTUNE Mr. Wakefield Damon was possessed of a bulldog trait. When he once set his teeth into a thing he would not let go until he had mastered it. While Tom and the others were giving way to excitement over the result to the flying boat of the shock it had undergone, Mr. Damon (when once the door in the hull was opened) leaped out and stared up the slope of the ice peak to see if he could again observe the curl of smoke which had been rising from that height as the flying boat passed over it. “There is somebody up there. Bless my tortoise-shell glasses! there must be somebody up there. Smoke doesn’t come out of a hill of ice by any natural means, that is sure.” But he did not see the smoke now. He called to Olaf Karofsen. He had picked up a few words of the Old Norse dialect much used by the people of the “back end” of Iceland, and the schooner captain spoke that language, too. So the other Americans in the party did not understand what Mr. Damon and the captain were so excitedly talking about. “What made that smoke, Captain?” demanded Mr. Damon. “Fire,” declared the man promptly.