A favourable wind would tear the field loose from the cliffs and urge it to sea.
Teddy Brisk could not go at once to Doctor Luke's hospital at Our Harbour. There came a mild spell—the wind went to the south and west in the night; a splashing fall of tepid southern rain swept the dry white coats in gusts and a melting drizzle; and, following on these untimely showers, a day or two of sunshine and soft breezes set the roofs smoking, the icicles dissolving, the eaves running little streams of water, the cliffs dripping a promise of shy spring flowers, and packed the snow and turned the harbour roads to slush, and gathered pools and shallow lakes of water on the rotting ice of the bay.
Schooner Bay was impassable; the trail was deep and sticky and treacherous—a broken, rotten, imminently vanishing course. And sea-ward, in the lift of the waves, vast fragments of the field were shaking themselves free and floating off; and the whole wide body of ice, from Rattle Brook, at the bottom of the bay, to the great heads of Thimble and the Scotchman's Breakfast, was striving to break away to the open under the urge of the wind.
Teddy Brisk's adventure to Our Harbour must wait for frost and still weather; and wait it did—until in a shift of the weather there came a day when all that was water was frozen stiff overnight, and the wind fell away to a doubtful calm, and the cliffs of Ginger Head were a loom in the frosty distance across the bay.
"Pack that lad, mum," said Skipper Thomas then. "'Tis now or never."
"I don't like the look of it," the mother complained.
"I warns you, mum—you're too fond o' that lad."
"I'm anxious. The bay's rotten. You knows that, sir—a man as old as you. Another southerly wind would shatter——"
"Ecod! You'll coddle that wee lad t' death."