Billy Topsail was just a little bit puzzled at first. Why should Doctor Luke do these things? There was no gain—no material gain worth considering; but it did not take Billy Topsail long to perceive that there was in fact great gain—far exceeding material gain: the satisfaction in doing a good deed for what Doctor Luke called "the love of God" and nothing else whatsoever. Doctor Luke was not attached to any Mission. His work was his own: his field was his own—nobody contributed to his activities; nobody helped him in any way. Yet his work was done in the spirit of the missionary; and that was what Billy Topsail liked about it—the masterful, generous, high-minded quality of it.
Being an honest, healthy lad, Billy Topsail set Doctor Luke in the hero's seat and began to worship, as no good boy could very well help doing; it was not long, indeed, before Doctor Luke had grown to be as great a hero as Sir Archibald Armstrong, Archie's father—and that is saying a good deal. In the lap of the future there lay some adventures in which Billy Topsail and Archie Armstrong were to be concerned; but Billy Topsail was not aware of that.
Billy Topsail was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. Sometimes, however, he sighed:
"I wish Archie was here!"
And that wish was to come true.
Before Teddy Brisk was well enough to be sent home, something happened at Ragged Run Cove, which lay across Anxious Bight, near by the hospital at Our Harbour; and Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail were at once drawn into the consequences of the accident. It was March weather. There was sunshine and thaw. Anxious Bight was caught over with rotten ice from Ragged Run Cove to the heads of Our Harbour. A rumour of seals—a herd on the Arctic drift-ice offshore—had come in from the Spotted Horses. It inspired instant haste in all the cottages of Ragged Run—an eager, stumbling haste.
In Bad-Weather Tom West's wife's kitchen, somewhat after ten o'clock in the morning, in the midst of this hilarious scramble to be off to the floe, there was a flash and spit of fire, pale in the sunshine, and the clap of an explosion and the clatter of a sealing gun on the bare floor; and in the breathless, dead little interval, enduring between the appalling detonation and a man's groan of dismay and a woman's choke and scream of terror—in this shocked silence, Dolly West, Bad-Weather Tom's small maid, and Joe West's niece, stood swaying, wreathed in gray smoke, her little hands pressed tight to her eyes.
She was a pretty little creature—she had been a pretty little creature: there had been yellow curls, in the Labrador way—and rosy cheeks and grave blue eyes; but now of all this shy, fair loveliness——
"You've killed her!"