"No," admitted Wyllard. "I meant for the next few hours or so. In a general way, we're still pushing on."
"Then I'm not worrying much about pushing her through. That ice is light and scattered, and as she's going it won't hurt her much if she plugs some in the dark. It's what we're going to do the next two weeks I'm not sure about. If there's ice we mayn't fetch the creek the chart shows where we'd figured on laying her up in. It's still most a hundred miles to the north of us. The other inlet I'd fixed on is way further south."
This brought them back to the difficulty they had grappled with at many a council. The men they were in search of might have gone either north or south; or they might, though this seemed less likely, have gone inland, if, indeed, any of them survived.
"If we only knew how they'd headed," said Wyllard quietly. "Still, right or not, I'm for pushing on."
Then Charly, who held the wheel, broke in.
"I guess it's north," he said. "They'd have no use for fetching up among the Russians, and there's nobody else until you get to Japan. No white men, any way. Besides, from the Behring Sea to the Kuriles is quite a long way."
"If you were dumped down ashore there, which way would you go?" Dampier asked.
"If I'd a wallet full of papers certifying me as a harmless traveller, it would be south just as hard as I could hit the trail. Guess I'd strike somebody out prospecting, or surveying, and they'd set me along to the Kuriles. Still, if I'd been sealing, I wouldn't head that way. No, sir. That's dead sure."
There was a reason for this certainty, right or wrong, in the minds of the sealermen. How many of the skins they brought home were obtained in open water where they could fish without molestation they alone knew; but they were regarded in certain quarters as poachers and outlaws, who deserved no mercy. They had their differences with the Americans who owned the Prbyloffs, but the latter, it was admitted, had bought the islands, and might reasonably be considered to have some claim upon the seals which frequented them. The free-lances bore their execrations and reprisals more or less resignedly, though that did not prevent them occasionally exchanging compliments with oar butts or sealing clubs, but the Muscovite was a grim, mysterious figure they feared and hated.
"Then you'd have tried up north?" Wyllard suggested.