“If that Yankee chatterbox doesn’t soon do some work instead of answering me back every time I speak to him, he’s going to get some medical attention that’ll astonish him!” I watched them working a little ahead of me that night as I trod back and forth with the sledges. We had only two pick-axes in our whole outfit. Newcomb, at the base of a steep hummock, was using one ax in a pretense of picking at it, while I could see Ambler, standing on its slippery crest, nervously tightening his calloused hands about our other pick-ax handle as if debating whether to swing then on Newcomb’s head or wait till he was a little surer of his footing. While the doctor was in this uncertain frame of mind, Newcomb below him quit picking at the ice altogether, lashed a line to his pick-ax to make it serve as an anchor for something or other, and then, sad to relate, overboard into an open water lead went the precious pick-ax, line and all, a total loss!
In spite of the real tragedy which the loss of that pick-ax meant to us, what happened next made me roar. Ambler’s fingers closed firmly on the handle of our sole remaining ax, apparently determined, poor as his shot now was, to swing and make an end of the gadfly below him; then changing his mind, he leaped from the hummock, stopped only a second to wave the pick in Newcomb’s face while he bellowed,
“You bird-stuffing idiot! If I weren’t afraid of breaking our last ax on your worthless skull, I’d kill you with it!” and dropping the pick on the floe, he ran off to find the captain.
A few minutes later he was back, all smiles, to find Newcomb, instead of manning the last ax, casually scanning the sky for something really important—gulls perhaps.
“It’s all fixed now, Mr. Newcomb,” said Ambler cheerfully. “I offered the captain to trade you for another worthless cur for my sledge, but he couldn’t find one poor enough to make it a fair exchange, so bless his heart, he gave me Seaman Johnson for my road gang and said I could do what I pleased about you. So now you’re fired! Get out of here!”
Newcomb, pert as ever, enquired,
“Discharged, I presume you mean me to infer? How welcome! What am I to do now?”
“Tie your shotgun round your neck for ballast and jump after that pick-ax, if you want to do me a favor!” advised the doctor, fingering the last pick significantly. “Now get out of my way while I work, or there may yet happen what will go down in the log as a most regrettable accident!”
CHAPTER XXX
De Long was left with the problem of how to make Collins and Newcomb useful members of our primitive community. While Collins, before the captain noticed him, had done useful work when it suited him to help, I have little doubt that it was only for the Machiavellian purpose of building up a brutal mistreatment case against the captain. Had he been ordered to work steadily in harness like the others, he would either have flatly balked or else have done it only as a martyr, neither of which situations the captain was prepared to cope with. Newcomb’s case was a little different. Had he been my problem, I am confident that the toe of my boot, properly applied a few times, would have startlingly changed his outlook both on work and on keeping his mouth shut when spoken to, but De Long was constitutionally opposed to physical persuasion. Casting his eye about the floes, the skipper observed that seals were again occasionally in evidence, and decided that since both our Indians, Alexey and Aneguin, were laboring like all the others as pack-horses, he might well substitute Collins and Newcomb for them as hunters. Hunting being in all civilized circles a gentleman’s privilege, neither of these pseudo-seamen officers could well maintain that it was beneath the stations for which they had shipped, and if they shot anything, it would be of real value in stretching out our precious food supply, let alone giving us a change from the pemmican which constituted the fish, flesh, fowl and vegetable of our unvaried menu.