They slipped again—and again and again. It was hopeless. Doctor Luke lay still—pondering.
Billy Topsail's agony of anxiety increased.
"Is you safe, sir?"
"Stay where you are!"
"Ay, sir!"
Doctor Luke could not continue to lie still. Presently he would be frozen in the pool of water. In emergencies he was used to indulging in a simple philosophical reflection: A man can lose his life but once. Now he shot his gaff towards the pan-ice, to be rid of the incumbrance of it, and lifted himself on his palms and toes. By this the distribution of his weight was not greatly disturbed. It was not concentrated upon one point. It was divided by four and laid upon four points.
And there were no fearsome consequences. It was a hopeful experiment. Doctor Luke stepped by inches on his hands towards the pan-ice—dragging his toes. In this way he came to the line of solid ice under the cliffs of the Little Spotted Horse and gained the refuge of it. And then he directed the crossing of Billy Topsail, who was much lighter, and crossed safely. Whereupon they set out for the point of the Little Spotted Horse and the passage of Tickle-my-Ribs. And they were heartened.
A country physician might say of a muddy, midnight call, in the wind and dark of a wet night in the fall of the year, that the roads were bad. Doctor Luke would have said of the way from Our Harbour to the Little Spotted Horse that he had been "in a bit of a mess." Thus far there had been nothing extravagantly uncommon in the night's experience. Doctor Luke and Billy Topsail had merely encountered and survived the familiar difficulties of a passage of Anxious Bight in a period of critical weather in the spring of the year.