Billy Topsail, M.D.

And by and by the first brief barrier of new ice confronted Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail. They must cross it. A black film – the colour of water in that light – bridged the way from one pan to another. Neither Doctor Luke nor Billy Topsail would touch it. They leaped it easily. A few fathoms forward a second space halted them. Must they put foot on it? With a running start a man could – well, they chose not to touch the second space, but to leap it.

Soon a third interval interrupted them. No man could leap it. Doctor Luke cast about for another way. There was none. He must run across. A flush of displeasure ran over him. He scowled. Disinclination increased.

"Green ice!" said he.

"Let me try it, sir!"

"No."

"Ay, sir! I'm lighter."

"No."

Billy Topsail crossed then like a cat before he could be stopped – on tiptoe and swiftly; and he came to the other side with his heart in a flutter.

"Whew!"

The ice had yielded without breaking. It had creaked, perhaps – nothing worse. Doctor Luke crossed the space without accident. It was what is called "rubber ice." There was more of it – there were miles of it. As yet the pans were close together. Always however the intervals increased. The nearer the open sea the more wide-spread was the floe. Beyond – hauling down the Spotted Horses, which lay in the open – the proportion of new ice would be vastly greater.

At a trot, for the time, over the pans, which were flat, and in delicate, mincing little spurts across the bending ice, Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail proceeded. In a confidence that was somewhat flushed – they had rested – Doctor Luke went forward. And presently, midway of a lane of green ice, he heard a gurgle, as the ice bent under his weight. Water washed his boots. He had been on the lookout for holes. This hole he heard – the spurt and gurgle of it. He had not seen it.

"Back!" he shouted, in warning.

Billy ran back.

"All right, sir?"

Safe across, Doctor Luke grinned. It was a reaction of relief.

"Whew! Whew!" he whistled. "Try below."

Billy crossed below.

"Don't you think, sir," said he, doubtfully, "that we'd best go back?"

"Do you think so?"

Billy reflected.

"No, sir," said he, flushing.

"Neither do I. Come on."

CHAPTER XVIII

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.