Awaking with a start of surprise, he found that the day had dawned. He rose and stared out over the bow of the ship. Ice floes showed close to the port rail, and beyond these the open sea and the cold glint of the great North pack. He swung to starboard and studied the haze through which the sun was rising on a long slant. Land was there, and he made a swift calculation—the ship must be crossing the open Kotzebue Sound.
Out of the land mist as the sun veiled itself behind a cloud there emerged a leaping thing of well-sheeted canvas and belching funnels. The Bear had stolen a march on the poacher during the hours of the night, and a shot came skipping across the waves. It missed the Pole Star's stern by a scant cable's length. Another followed from the revenue cutter's bow gun, and this burst in the whaleboats that lined the starboard rail.
A roar of fright and defiance rolled upward to Stirling. The leader sprang from the galley house and dashed up the poop steps. A horde of his followers swarmed from the forecastle hatch and the forehold, and some leaped down the engine-room companion. The funnel belched big clouds of smoke and the fire doors clanged. The Pole Star swerved toward the west and the open sea. This manoeuvre saved the revolutionists from certain capture.
Stirling waited with held breath and rigid lips. It was nip and tuck for the flying poacher, but gradually the distance between her and the cutter increased. The next shots fell short.
Men danced on deck and shook their fists toward the cutter, while the stokehold crew took turns in coming to the rail of their hatchway and raving at the Bear. They glanced aloft at the lone figure in the crow's-nest, but there was no malice in their expressions.
Stirling's blood tingled at the excitement of the game, and he lost his enmity for the Russians. They acted like children freed from bondage. They had fled from Vladivostok, been wrecked in the Gulf of Anadir, and were now on the second leg of their adventure. It led to the icy North and strange waters.
The ship plunged away from the coast and toward the North pack. Stirling realized that the Bear would follow to the bitter end, and he knew there was also another revenue cutter in the Arctic Ocean—the chances were slim for the Russians to escape, and the trap might be sprung at Point Barrow which juts far out into the Arctic.
Hurtling west, and then edging toward the north as the day advanced, the Pole Star avoided the pack and settled down to steady progress toward the American shore in the vicinity of Icy Cape.
The day unrolled with the cold sun swinging over the land and through the mists. The night, which came with slow shadowing, found Stirling weak and listless from lack of food and water, and he realized that an effort would have to be made to escape from the crow's-nest. The crew had drunk the entire store of gin and trade whisky, and they roamed the deck in groups, their attention fastened upon the low coast along which many Arctic whalers had been wrecked. The passageway between this coast and the grounded ice was narrow in places. A north-easter would crush the ship and drive it ashore.
The lane of ice-free waters widened as Cape Lisburne was passed. This lane often had been blocked by light floes, and Stirling studied the grounded pack to the west and north, coming to the conclusion that the season would be an extremely open one. Never before in his experience had he seen clearer steaming to the eastward.