"I'm not permitted to tell you that."
"Well then, if the telegram is for Mrs. Jacob Luke," said Tommy Lark gravely, "Sandy Rowl an' me will take a look at the ice in Scalawag Run an' see what we makes of it. I 'low we'll jus' have to. Eh, Sandy?"
Sandy Rowl's face was twisted with doubt. For a moment he deliberated. In the end he spoke positively.
"We'll take a look at it," said he.
They went then to the crest of Black Cliff to survey the ice in the run. Not a word was spoken on the way. A momentous situation, by the dramatic quality of which both young men were moved, had been precipitated by the untimely receipt of the telegram for Elizabeth Luke's mother.
Point-o'-Bay, in the lee of which the cottages of Point-o'-Bay Cove were gathered, as in the crook of a finger, thrust itself into the open sea. Scalawag Island, of which Scalawag Harbor was a sheltered cove, lay against the open sea. Between Point-o'-Bay and Scalawag Island was the run called Scalawag, of the width of two miles, leading from the wide open into Whale Bay, where it was broken and lost in the mist of the islands. There had been wind at sea—a far-off gale, perhaps, then exhausted, or plunging away into the southern seas, leaving a turmoil of water behind it.
Directly into the run, rolling from the open, the sea was swelling in gigantic billows. There would have been no crossing at all had there not been ice in the run; but there was ice in the run—plenty of ice, fragments of the fields in the Labrador drift, blown in by a breeze of the day before, and wallowing there, the wind having fallen away to a wet, gray breeze which served but to hold the ice in the bay.
It seemed, from the crest of Black Cliff, where Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl stood gazing, each debating with his own courage, that the ice was heavy enough for the passage—thick ice, of varying extent, from fragments, like cracked ice, to wide pans; and the whole, it seemed, floated in contact, pan touching pan all the way across from the feet of Black Cliff to the first rocks of Scalawag Harbor.
What was inimical was the lift and fall of the ice in the great swells running in from the open sea.