"No doubt. But you might just as well get over those longings first as last," I said; for I was beginning to get sick of his foolish spirit. "You had better forget the war, bury your old-time prejudices, and start new in the world, resolved to live and let live; to be a good fellow, and treat everybody alike and well. That's the way we do in the North,—or ought to."
Wade said not a word. I rather pity the fellow. He has got some mighty hard, painful lessons to learn before he will be able to start right in life.
Raed and the captain had stopped.
"They were right opposite here, over among the ice," Raed was saying. "I marked the spot by that high cake sticking up above the rest."
"We need scaling-ladders to get up among it," laughed Kit. "Talk of impenetrable jungles! here is a jungle of ice!"
Imagine, reader, a thousand ice-cakes from six to thirty feet square, and of every grade of thickness, piled sidewise, edgewise, slantwise, cross-wise, and flatwise on top of that, and you may, perhaps, gain some idea of the vast jam which filled the arm and lay heaped up twenty and thirty feet above us. For a moment we were at a loss how to surmount it; then all began looking along for some available cranny or rift which might offer a foothold.
"Here's a breach!" Weymouth shouted.
He had gone along a dozen rods farther. We followed to see him mounting by the jagged edge of a vast cake five or six feet thick which projected out over the ledges. Kit followed; and they stood at the top, stretching down helping hands. In five minutes we were all up, standing, clinging, and balancing on the glassy edges of ice, and hopping and leaping from cake to cake. Cracks, crevices, and jagged holes opened ten, fifteen, and twenty feet sheer down all about us. A single misstep would send us head-foremost into them.
"I say," exclaimed Capt. Mazard, barely saving himself from a tumble, "this is a devil of a funny place for a bear-hunt! No chance for rapid retreats! It will be fight bear, or die!"
The place where the bears had stood when old Trull had fired was back fifteen or twenty rods to the right. We worked off in that direction, getting occasional glimpses of the water down in the deep holes, and stopping once to pull Corliss out of a wedge-shaped crevice into which he had slipped. Arriving on a big broad cake,—which, for a wonder, lay flat side up,—we paused to reconnoitre.