It extended from the sky to the ground, black as ink, vivid tongues of lightning flying out of it, and it swept everything before it with irresistible fury.
Blocks of ice were flying through the air with the force of cannon balls, great clouds of it, ground to powder, rolled up like a fog before the rush of wind, and a roaring of the gale arose that sounded dreadful.
Barney put full speed in the driving wheels.
Click, click, click! they dug into the ice, the Ranger rushed on at a tremendous rate, and a wild buzz arose from the flying spokes and from under the steel runners.
“Be heavens! if that thing stroikes us it’s all over wid ther Ranger but ther shoutin’!” cried the Celt, nervously.
“We may be able to outstrip it in a race,” said Frank.
“Can’t we rise in ther air an’ escape it?”
“No; don’t you see that it would reach us before we got above it?”
The inventor dashed out on deck again, where Pomp and the doctor then were swiftly unfurling the sails.
Lending them his assistance, Frank quickly succeeded in getting the canvas up, and as there was a beam wind they hauled around the braces and stays, and the speed of the Ranger was materially increased.
She was now flying over the ice with all the speed at her command, and made a mile a minute.
The terrible cyclone was roaring on in her wake, its sable cloud spreading over a large tract of territory.
“We hold our own so far,” muttered the doctor.
“Golly, dis am wuss dan a lightnin’ express train,” said Pomp.
“It’s lucky we’ve got a clear field of ice ahead,” Frank remarked, as he clutched the railing. “If we hadn’t, that monster would soon reach us and hurl the Ranger up in the air.”
The canvas was bulging as if it would burst from the bolt ropes, and the wheel motors inside were fairly howling as the armatures flew around at the top of the speed imparted by the battery.
Along they shot, the terrific pace undiminished, the runner’s bumping over the lumpy spots, crashing across the cracks, and plowing up the snow they encountered.
The exciting race was kept up for the northeast, for the cyclone followed the trend of the land.
Suddenly the strain on one of the square sails became so great that it burst in two with a report like a gun-shot.