“They’re common.” Bethune launched off into his philosophy. “If you undertake anything that’s not quite usual, half your labor consists in clearing the ground; when you get at the job itself, it often doesn’t amount to much.”
“Chuck it!” Moran interrupted. “Jimmy, it’s your turn.”
Jimmy stayed below as long as he could stand it, hacking savagely with broken chisels at the hard wood, and scraping out the fragments with bruised fingers; then he came up and Moran took his place. It was trying work, and grew no easier when, by persistent effort, they made an opening for the saw. The tool had to be driven horizontally at an awkward height from the sand, and the position tired their wrists and arms. Still, the weather was propitious, which was seldom the case, and they toiled on, until exhaustion stopped them when it was getting dark. Then Moran sent Bethune ashore to look for stones with a cutting grit, and they sat in the cabin patiently rubbing down the nicked tools, while the deck above them grew white with frost.
It cost them two days to break the beam, and on the evening they succeeded there was a sharp drop in the temperature.
Jimmy was cooking supper when Moran called him up on deck and pointed seaward.
“See that?” he said. “Seems to me we’ve got notice to quit.”
Searching the western horizon, where the sea cut in an indigo streak against a dull red glow, Jimmy made out a faintly glimmering patch of white. Taking up the glasses, he saw that it was low and ragged, and fringed on its windward edge by leaping surf. This showed it was of some depth in the water, and he recognized it as a floe of thick northern ice.
“Yes,” he answered gravely; “we’ll have to hurry now.”
They spent the next week attacking the bulkhead. Jimmy thought it would have resisted them only that it had obviously been built in haste and here and there the strengthening irons had wrenched away through the working of the hull. They lost no time, but the work was heavy, and tried them hard.
It was late in the afternoon, and blowing fresh enough to make diving risky, when Jimmy prepared to go down for what he hoped would be the last attempt; but stopping a few moments he looked anxiously about. Gray fog streamed up from seaward in ragged wisps, and the long swell had broken into short, white-topped combers, over which the sloop plunged with spray-swept bows, straining hard at her cables as the flood tide ran past.