When he loped from the timber into the wind, high above the sea, he was dog-tired and breathless. It was offshore weather then; a black night threatened; it was blowing in tepid gray gusts from the southwest; a flutter of wet snow was in the gale. In the pool of ghostly, leaden dark, below Spear Rock, of Yellow Head, the ice of Skeleton Arm was wrenched from the coast; and with an accumulation of Arctic bergs and drift-pans, blown in by the last nor'easter, it was sluggishly moving into the black shadows of the open sea. And having observed the catastrophe, in a swift, sweeping flash, Billy Topsail stopped dead on the ridge of Spear Rock, dismayed and confounded.
To camp on Spear Rock was no incident of his dogged intention.
Bread-and-Butter Tickle, to which a persistent, feverish impression of urgency, divined from the puzzling character of the incident of the night before, had driven Billy Topsail since the drab dawn of that day, lay across the darkening reaches of Skeleton Arm. In the snug basin, beyond the heads of the narrows, the lamps were lighted in the cottages of the place. It was a twinkling, beckoning hospitality; it invited Billy Topsail to supper and to bed—to the conclusion of his haste and to the relief of his mystification.
But on the Labrador coast, as elsewhere, the longest way round is often the shortest way home. It was two miles across Skeleton Arm to Bread-and-Butter Tickle, on a direct line from Spear Head; it was four miles alongshore to Rattle Water Inlet, at the head of Skeleton Arm, and eight from Rattle Water to the lights of Bread-and-Butter. Billy Topsail reflected upon the discrepancy—the flurry of snow, too, and the swift approach and thick quality of the night; and having surveyed the ice, the fragments of which seemed still to be sufficiently in contact for crossing, he clambered down Spear Head to the shore of the sea.
"Can I cross?" he wondered.
After further reflection:
"I don't know," he concluded.
What mystified Billy Topsail, and drove and challenged him, as he had never been mystified and driven and challenged before, was a letter. Billy Topsail had come through the scrub timber and barrens beyond the first wild hills of Long-Age Inlet; and having came to the fork in the trail from Run-By-Guess to Poor Luck Barrens, where he was to camp for the night, he had been confronted by a new-cut stick, stoutly upright in the snow of the trail, and a flutter of red flannel rag, and a letter, snapped in the cleft head of the stick.
That the solitary wilderness of his journey should be so concerned with the outport world of that coast as to produce a letter was amazing; and that the letter should present itself, in the nick of time, where, probably, no other traveller except the mail-man had passed since the first snow fell, and that a fluttering flannel rag should declare its whereabouts, as though confidently beseeching instant conveyance to its destination, was more stimulating to Billy Topsail's reflection than mere amazement could be.