A folded floe and six miles of rubber ice were not sufficiently out of the way to constitute an impressive incident. Doctor Luke had fared better and worse in his time. So had Billy Topsail. All this was not a climax. It was something to be forgotten in a confusion of experiences of the same description. It would not remain very long in the memory of either. In what lay ahead, however—the passage of Tickle-my-Ribs—there was doubtless an adventure.
"She'll be heavin' in this wind," Billy Topsail said.
"We'll get across," Doctor Luke replied, confidently. "Come along!"
Tickle-my-Ribs was heaving. The sea had by this time eaten its way clear through the passage from the open to the first reaches of Anxious Bight and far and wide beyond. The channel was half a mile long—in width a quarter of a mile at the narrowest. Doctor Luke's path was determined. It must lead from the point of the island to the base of Blow-me-Down Dick and the adjoining fixed and solid ice of the narrows to Ragged Run Harbour. And ice choked the channel loosely from shore to shore.
It was a thin sheet of fragments—running through from the open. There was only an occasional considerable pan. A high sea ran outside. Waves from the open slipped under this field of little pieces and lifted it in running swells. In motion Tickle-my-Ribs resembled a vigorously shaken carpet. No single block of ice was at rest. The crossing would have been hazardous in the most favourable circumstances. And now aloft the moon and the ominous bank of black cloud had come close together.
Precisely as a country doctor might petulantly regard a stretch of hub-deep cross-road, Doctor Luke, the outport physician, when he came to the channel between the Little Spotted Horse and Blow-me-Down Dick of the Ragged Run coast, regarded the passage of Tickle-my-Ribs. Not many of the little pans would bear the weight of either himself or Billy Topsail. They would sustain it momentarily. Then they would tip or sink. There would be foothold only through the instant required to choose another foothold and leap towards it.
Always, moreover, the leap would have to be taken from sinking ground. When they came, by good chance, to a pan that would bear them up for a moment, they would have instantly to discover another heavy block to which to shape their agitated course. There would be no rest—no certainty beyond the impending moment. But leaping thus—alert and agile and daring—a man might——
Might? Mm-m—a man might! And he might not! There were contingencies. A man might leap short and find black water where he had depended upon a footing of ice—a man might land on the edge of a pan and fall slowly back for sheer lack of power to obtain a balance—a man might misjudge the strength of a pan to bear him up—a man might find no ice near enough for the next immediately imperative leap—a man might confront the appalling exigency of a lane of open water.
As a matter of fact, a man might be unable either to go forward or retreat. A man might be submerged and find the shifting floe closed over his head. A man might easily lose his life in the driving, swelling rush of the shattered floe through Tickle-my-Ribs. And there was the light to consider. A man might be caught in the dark. He would be in hopeless case if caught in the dark. And the light might——
Light was imperative. Doctor Luke glanced aloft.