"Ay, sir."
There was of course no doctor at Ragged Run; there was a doctor, Doctor Luke, at Our Harbour, however—across Anxious Bight. Tommy West avoided the rotten ice of the Bight, which he dared not cross, and took the 'longshore trail by way of Mad Harry and Thank-the-Lord. At noon he was past Mad Harry, his little legs wearing well and his breath coming easily through his expanded nostrils—he had not paused; and at four o'clock—still on a dog-trot—he had hauled down the chimney smoke of Thank-the-Lord and was bearing up for Our Harbour. Early dusk caught him short-cutting the doubtful ice of Thank-the-Lord Cove; and half an hour later, midway of the passage to Our Harbour, with two miles left to accomplish—dusk falling thick and cold, then, and a frosty wind blowing—the heads of Our Harbour looming black and solid in the wintry night beyond—he dropped through the ice and vanished. There was not a sign of him left—some bubbles, perhaps: nothing more.
[CHAPTER XIII]
In Which Doctor Luke Undertakes a Feat of Daring and Endurance and Billy Topsail Thinks Himself the Luckiest Lad in the World
Returning from a call at Tumble Tickle, in clean, sunlit weather, with nothing more tedious than eighteen miles of wilderness trail and rough floe ice behind him, Doctor Luke was chagrined to discover himself a bit fagged. He had come heartily down the trail from Tumble Tickle in the early hours of that fine, windy morning, fit and eager for the trudge—as a matter of course; but on the ice, in the shank of the day—there had been eleven miles of the floe—he had lagged. A man cannot practice medicine out of a Labrador outport harbour and not know what it means to stomach a physical exhaustion. Doctor Luke had been tired before. He was not disturbed by that. But being human, he looked forward to rest; and in the drear, frosty dusk, when he rounded the heads of Home, opened the lights of Our Harbour, and caught the warm, yellow gleam of the lamp in the surgery window, he was glad to be near his supper and his bed.
And so he told Billy Topsail, whom he found in the surgery, replenishing the fire.
"Ha, Billy!" said he. "I'm glad to be home."
Afterwards, when supper had been disposed of, and Doctor Luke was with Billy in the surgery, the rest of the family being elsewhere occupied, there was a tap on the surgery door. Doctor Luke called: "Come in!"—with some wonder as to the event. It was no night to be abroad on the ice. Yet the tap on the surgery door could mean but one thing—somebody was in trouble; and as he called "Come in!" and while he waited for the door to open, Doctor Luke considered the night and wondered what strength he had left.