He came toward me, smiling doubtfully, after he had worked out his calculations in the little chart-room.
“M. Lessaution will be enchanted, my lord,” said he. “We are within a few miles of our original starting-place. It is an extraordinary thing that we should have been driven back so exactly on the line we had come. I have only steered by the stars and dead reckoning.”
“He may be pleased enough,” I answered, “but he’ll be entirely alone in his gratification. Do you mean to say we’ve got to wrestle back all those weary miles? What desperate luck!—but just the usual kind that dogs my footsteps. Why, it’ll take weeks to do it sailing.”
“I’m afraid it would,” agreed the captain, “and that’s why I have another proposal to make. Since we got among the ice, I have been interviewing Mr. Eccles. He thinks that if we were in a dead calm, that he could get the split of the propeller-shaft rivetted, and made tight enough for half-steam. I would suggest, my lord, that we lie to and let him have a try.”
“But not in this ice,” I objected; “I don’t want a repetition of yesterday’s performance with a different climax. Suppose one of these great bergs turns turtle?”
“I have thought of that,” replied Waller, “but I have a plan. If you remember we were under the lee of some islands when we left on our cruise north. I think I can find them again, my lord. We could probably make them an ice-free harbor.”
“Why, certainly, then,” said I at once, glad to snatch at half a chance of curtailing a voyage that could be nothing but misery for me. “Search them out, captain, and let Mr. Eccles do his utmost.”
He went back to the wheel, and began to nose our bows to starboard, taking advantage of every breath to slip delicately from pool to pool.
About an hour later a thin column of smoke showed suddenly as we rounded the flank of a mighty berg, and there, a short mile to port, the familiar islands showed up, gray and haggard in the sunlight, as we had left them eight or nine stormy days before.
Lessaution had joined me by now, his little eyes agleam with pleasure. As he recognized his surroundings, he turned and seized my hand.