_In Which Discretion Urges Doctor Luke to Lie Still in a Pool of
Water_
It was a mean light--this intermittent moonlight: with the clouds slow
and thick, and the ominous bank of black cloud rising all the while from
the horizon. A man should go slow in a light like that! But Doctor Luke
and Billy Topsail must make haste. And by and by they caught ear of the
sea breaking under the wind beyond the Little Spotted Horse. They were
nearing the limits of the ice. In full moonlight the whitecaps flashed
news of a tumultuous open. A rumble and splash of breakers came down
with the gale from the point of the island. It indicated that the sea
was working in the passage between the Spotted Horses and Blow-me-Down
Dick of the Ragged Run coast. The waves would run under the ice--would
lift it and break it. In this way the sea would eat its way through the
passage. It would destroy the young ice. It would break the pans to
pieces and rub them to slush.
Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail must make the Little Spotted Horse and
cross the passage between the island and the Ragged Run coast.
"Come on!" said the Doctor again.
Whatever the issue of haste, they must carry on and make the best of a
bad job. Otherwise they would come to Tickle-my-Ribs, between the Little
Spotted Horse and Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run, and be marooned from
the mainshore. And there was another reason. It was immediate and
desperately urgent. As the sea was biting off the ice in Tickle-my-Ribs
so too it was encroaching upon the body of the ice in Anxious Bight.
Anxious Bight was breaking up. The scale of its dissolution was
gigantic. Acres of ice were wrenched from the field at a time and then
broken up by the sea. What was the direction of this swift melting? It
might take any direction. And a survey of the sky troubled Doctor Luke
no less than Billy Topsail. All this while the light had diminished. It
was failing still. It was failing faster. There was less of the moon. By
and by it would be wholly obscured.
"If we're delayed," Doctor Luke declared, "we'll be caught by the
dark."
"Hear that, sir!" Billy exclaimed.
They listened.
"Breaking up fast!" said the Doctor.
Again there was a splitting crash. Another great fragment of the ice had
broken away.
"Come on!" cried Billy, in alarm.
At first prolonged intervals of moonlight had occurred. Masses of cloud
had gone driving across a pale and faintly starlit sky. A new proportion
was disclosed. Now the stars were brilliant in occasional patches of
deep sky. A glimpse of the moon was rare. From the northeast the ominous
bank of black cloud had risen nearly overhead. It would eventually
curtain both stars and moon and make a thick black night of it.
A man would surely lose his life on the ice in thick weather--on one or
other of the reaches of new ice. And thereabouts the areas of young ice
were wider. They were also more tender. Thin ice is a proverb of peril
and daring. To tiptoe across the yielding film of these dimly visible
stretches was instantly and dreadfully dangerous. It was horrifying. A
man took his life in his hand every time he left a pan.
Doctor Luke was not insensitive. Neither was Billy Topsail. They began
to sweat--not with labour, but with fear. When the ice bent under them,
they gasped and held their breath. They were in livid terror of being
dropped through into the sea. They were afraid to proceed--they dared
not stand still; and they came each time to the solid refuge of a pan
with breath drawn, teeth set, faces contorted, hands clenched--a shiver
in the small of the back. This was more exhausting than the labour of
the folded floe. Upon every occasion it was like escaping an abyss.
To achieve safety once, however, was not to win a final relief--it was
merely to confront, in the same circumstances, a precisely similar
peril. Neither Doctor Luke nor Billy Topsail was physically exhausted.
Every muscle that they had was warm and alert. Yet they were weak. A
repetition of suspense had unnerved them. A full hour of this and
sometimes they chattered and shook in a nervous chill.
In the meantime they had approached the rocks of the Little Spotted
Horse.
They rested a moment.
"Now for it, boy!" said the Doctor, then.
"Ay, ay, sir!"
"Sorry you came, Billy?"
Billy was a truthful boy--and no hero of the melodrama.
"I wisht we was across, sir," said he.
"So do I," the Doctor agreed. "Come," he added, heartily; "we'll _go_
across!"
In the lee of the Little Spotted Horse the ice had gathered as in a
back-current. It was close packed alongshore to the point of the island.
Between this solidly frozen press of pans and the dissolving field in
Anxious Bight there had been a lane of ruffled open water before the
frost fell. It measured perhaps fifty yards. It was now black and
still--sheeted with new ice which had been delayed in forming by the
ripple of that exposed situation.
Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail had encountered nothing as doubtful. They
paused on the brink. A long, thin line of solid pan-ice, ghostly white
in the dusk beyond, was attached to the rocks of the Little Spotted
Horse. It led all the way to Tickle-my-Ribs. They must make that line of
solid ice. They must cross the wide lane of black, delicately frozen new
ice that lay between and barred their way. And there was no way out of
it.
Doctor Luke waited for the moon. When the light broke--a thin, transient
gleam--he started.
"Wait," said he, "until I'm across."
A few fathoms forth the ice began to yield. A moment later Doctor Luke
stopped short and recoiled. There was a hole--gaping wide and almost
under his feet. He stopped. The water overflowed and the ice cracked. He
must not stand still. To avoid a second hole he twisted violently to the
right and almost plunged into a third opening. It seemed the ice was
rotten from shore to shore.
And it was a long way across. Doctor Luke danced a zigzag towards the
pan-ice under the cliffs--spurting forward and retreating and swerving.
He did not pause. Had he paused he would have dropped through. When he
was within two fathoms of the pan-ice a foot broke through and tripped
him flat on his face. With his weight thus distributed he was
momentarily held up. Water squirted and gurgled out of the break--an
inch of water, forming a pool.
Doctor Luke lay still and expectant in this pool.