Sunday, then—and that a brooding day. It was a dull, dragging time. Not a gaff was out, not a gun; not a man put foot on the floe. The Rough and Tumble killed no seals. It was not the custom. All that day she lay made fast to the ice, fretting for midnight. Cap'n Saul kept to his cabin. Time and quiet weather went wasting away. Quiet weather—quiet enough that day: a draught of westerly wind blowing, the sky overcast and blank, and a flurry of snow in the afternoon, which failed, before dusk, a black, still midnight drawing on.
On the first stroke of the midnight bell, for which he had waited since the dawn of that dull day, Cap'n Saul popped out of the cabin, like a jack-in-the-box, and stamped the bridge, growling and bawling his orders, in a week-day temper, until he had dropped the First Watch, and was under way through the floe, a matter of twenty miles, to land the Second Watch and the Third—feeling a way through the lanes.
Before dawn Bill o' Burnt Bay's watch, with Archie and Billy Topsail, was on the ice. Cap'n Saul put back to stand by the First Watch. Black dark yet. It was bleak on the floe! They shivered in the frost and dark. And the light lagged, as the light will, when it is waited for. It was a sad dawn. A slow glower and lift of thin, gray light: no warmth of colour in the east—no rosy flush and glow. When day broke, at last, the crew made into the herds, mad to be warm, and began to kill. Still, it was done without heart. There was less blithe slaughter, that day, than unseemly brooding and weather-gazing. It was a queer thing, too. There was no alarm of foul weather that any man could see.
A drear, gray day it was, day drawing near noon. Archie and Billy always remembered that. Yet there was no frost to touch a man's heart, no need to cower and whine in the wind, no snow to make a man afraid. A scowl in the northeast—a low, drab, sulky sky, mottled with blue-black and smoky white. They recalled it afterwards. But that was all. And Bill o' Burnt Bay fancied, then, with the lives of his crew in mind, that the weather quarter was doubtless in a temper, but no worse, and was no more than half-minded to kick up a little pother of trouble before day ran over the west.
And Bill was at ease about that.
"She'll bide as she is," he thought, "'til Cap'n Saul gets back."
Bill o' Burnt Bay was wrong. It came on to blow. The wind jumped to the northwest with a nasty notion of misbehaviour. It was all in a moment. A gust of wind, cold as death, went swirling past. They chilled to the bones in it. And then a bitter blast of weather came sweeping down. The floe began to pack and drive. Bill o' Burnt Bay gathered and numbered his watch. And then they waited for the ship. No sign. And the day turned thick. Dusk fell before its time. It was not yet midway of the afternoon. And the wind began to buffet and bite. It began to snow, too. And it was a frosty cloud of snow. It blinded—it stifled. It was flung out of the black northwest like flour from a shaken sack.
The men were afraid. They knew that weather. It was a blizzard. There was a night of mortal peril in it. There might be a night and a day—a day and two nights. And they knew what would happen to them if Cap'n Saul failed to find them before the pack nipped him and the night shut down. It had happened before to lost crews. It would happen again. Men gone stark mad in the wind—the floe strewn with drifted corpses. They had heard tales. And now they had visions. Dead men going into port—ship's flag at half-mast, and dead men going into port, frozen stiff and blue, and piled forward like cord-wood.
"I'll make a song about this," said Toby Farr.