One day in the spring, when the bergs and great floes of the open had been blown to sea, and the snow was gone from the slopes of the hills, and the sun was out, and the earth was warm and yellow and merrily dripping, old John Wull attempted a passage of the harbor by the ice, which there had lingered, confined. It was only to cross the narrows from Haul-Away Head to Daddy Tool’s Point, no more than a stone’s throw for a stout lad. The ice had been broken into pans by a stiff breeze from the west, and was then moving with the wind, close-packed, bound out to sea, there to be dispersed and dissolved. It ran sluggishly through the narrows, scraping the rocks of the head and of the point; the heave of the sea slipped underneath and billowed the way, and the outermost pans of ice broke from the press and went off with the waves. But the feet of old John Wull were practised; he essayed the crossing without concern—indeed, with an absent mind. Presently he stopped to rest; and he stared out to sea, musing; and when again he looked about, the sea had softly torn the pan from the pack.
Old John Wull was adrift, and bound out.
“Ahoy, you, Jehoshaphat!” he shouted. “Jehoshaphat! Oh, Jehoshaphat!”
Jehoshaphat came to the door of his cottage on Daddy Tool’s Point.
“Launch that rodney,”[[1]] Wull directed, “an’ put me on shore. An’ lively, man,” he complained. “I’ll be cotchin’ cold out here.”
With the help of Timothy Yule, who chanced to be gossiping in the kitchen, Jehoshaphat Rudd got the rodney in the open water by the stage-head. What with paddling and much hearty hauling and pushing, they had the little craft across the barrier of ice in the narrows before the wind had blown old John Wull a generous rod out to sea.
“Timothy, lad,” Jehoshaphat whispered, “I ’low you better stay here.”
Timothy kept to the ice.
“You been wonderful slow,” growled Wull. “Come ’round t’ the lee side, you dunderhead! Think I wants t’ get my feet wet?”