Vanderberg strode forward. Frontin looked at Crawford, and grinned thinly.
“You’ve cowed them,” said he. “Now watch your back o’ dark nights.”
“Not I,” said Crawford, and pointed forward. “They’ll fight for me now. You’ll see. They’ll be all for the north venture.”
And a roar of applause to Vanderberg’s tale of gold approved his prediction. Thus easily were the wild, childish men swung to any purpose.
So, after troublous days, the Irondelle came to rest in a little cove amid beetling cliffs, fast moored and well-sheltered against anything but a blow direct from the north.
She had not reached her goal without misadventure. Off the Banks she had raised three sail of the line, one foggy morning—French frigates, which only her virtue of speed enabled her to escape. Of the thirteen hands forward, one man had slipped on an icy shroud and fallen to his death, another had been knifed in a quarrel; this reduced the total aboard to fifteen. Wilful waste had reduced Saint-Castin’s looted provisions to woeful want, the gear aloft was dropping to shreds, there was not a sound line aboard her save those that held her moored off the black rocks, and the entire stock of powder in the makeshift magazine had been flooded and ruined. Yet, because the ballast of rum was not yet exhausted and the lure of gold was before them, the men were willing enough to face the worst. The one redeeming feature was that in the bleak snow-clad land fronting them there was no enemy.
On the night of their arrival in the cove, Vanderberg summoned all hands aft to a council in the cabin. They listened in silence as he laid the situation bluntly before them—fierce, wolfish faces in the lantern-light, haggard with toil and privation, lustful for unearned gold, branded men and cutthroats and wild beasts in the image of God.
“Without powder,” concluded Vanderberg, “we are defenceless. Without food, we are powerless. Without gear and canvas, the ship cannot leave here. Without more men, we could not work her south. Before us there is a waste of snow and icy woods—a white desert. One man among us knows this land; let him speak.”
All eyes went to Frontin. He, holding a candle to his pipe, nodded his head coolly.
“Good. From that white desert facing us,” he said, “we shall get men, provisions, powder, gear, and a ship. Is that satisfactory?”