ROBINSON caught the child from the berth. He paused—it was an instinct born of Labrador experience—to wrap a blanket about her, though she was clothed for the day. She reminded him quietly that she would catch cold without her cap; and this he snatched in passing. Then he was on deck—in the midst of a litter from aloft and of a vast confusion of terrified cries.
Before she struck, the Fish Killer had ascended a gently shelving beach of ice, washed smooth by the sea. There she hung precariously. Her stem was low, so low that the choppy sea came aboard and swamped the cabin; and the bow was high on the ice. Her bowsprit was in splinters, her topmast on deck, her spliced mainmast tottering; she was the bedraggled wreck of a craft.
Beyond, the berg towered into the fog, stretched into the fog; only a broken wall of blue-white ice was visible. The butt of the bowsprit overhung a wide ledge. To scramble to the shattered extremity, to hang by the hands, to drop to safe foothold: this would all have been easy for children. The impulse was to seek the solid berg in haste before the schooner had time to fall away and sink.
Robinson ran forward.
"Got that kid?" Skipper Libe demanded. "Ah, you has! Billy Topsail!" he roared.
Billy answered.
"Get ashore on that ice!" the skipper ordered.
Billy ran out on the broken bowsprit and dropped to the berg. He looked back expectantly.
"Take the kid!"
A push sent Robinson on the same road. He dropped Mary into Billy's waiting arms. Then he, too, looked back for orders.