"'Twould be a tidy little fix," said he. "Eh, sir?"
"Well, if that's all you have to say," said Doctor Luke—and he laughed—"come right along!"
It was blowing high. There was the bite and shiver of frost in the wind. Half a gale ran in from the open sea. Midway of Anxious Bight it would be a saucy, hampering, stinging head-wind. And beyond the Head the ice was in doubtful condition. A man might conjecture: that was all. What was it Tommy West had said? "A cat couldn't cross!" It was mid-spring. Freezing weather had of late alternated with periods of thaw and rain. There had been windy days. Anxious Bight had even once been clear of ice. A westerly wind had broken the ice and swept it out beyond the heads; a punt had fluttered over from Ragged Run Cove.
In a gale from the northeast, however, these fragments had returned with accumulations of Arctic pans and hummocks from the Labrador Current; and a frosty night had caught them together and sealed them to the cliffs of the coast. It was a slender attachment—a most delicate attachment: one pan to the other and the whole to the rocks.
It had yielded somewhat—it must have gone rotten—in the weather of that day.
What the frost had accomplished since dusk could be determined only upon trial.
"Soft as cheese!" Doctor Luke concluded.
"Rubber ice," said Billy.
"Air-holes," said the Doctor.
There was another way to Ragged Run—the way by which Tommy West had come. It skirted the shore of Anxious Bight—Mad Harry and Thank-the-Lord and Little Harbour Deep—and something more than multiplied the distance by one and a half. Doctor Luke was completely aware of the difficulties of Anxious Bight, and so was Billy Topsail—the way from Our Harbour to Ragged Run: the treacherous reaches of young ice, bending under the weight of a man, and the veiled black water, and the labour, the crevices, the snow-crust of the Arctic pans and hummocks, and the broken field and wash of the sea beyond the lesser island of the Spotted Horses.