In Which Archie Armstrong falls in with Bill o' Burnt Bay and Billy Topsail of Ruddy Cove and Makes a Speech
THERE is no telling what would have happened had the Dictator struck the jam of ice in the narrows of Long Tom Harbour. Captain Hand was not the man to lose half a voyage because there was a risk to be taken; had he been used to counting the risk, he would not have been in command of the finest ship in Armstrong and Son's fine fleet. Rather than be locked in the harbour, he had launched his vessel at the barrier, quietly confident that she would acquit herself well. But, as he had foreseen, the jam broke of its own weight before the steamer struck. Of a sudden, it cracked, and gave way; the key blocks had broken. It then remained only to breast the pack, which was not at all an impossible undertaking for the stout Dictator.
With her rivals following close, she struck the floe, broke a way through, and pushed on, with a great noise, but slowly, surely; and she was soon in the open sea. The course was then shaped northeast, for it appeared that open water lay in that direction. The floe retarded the ship's progress, but could not stop it; the ice pans crashed against her prow and scraped her sides, but she was staunch enough to withstand every shock; and so, gaining on the rest of the fleet, she crept out to sea, in the teeth of the rising gale.
At two o'clock in the morning, Archie Armstrong was still on the bridge with the captain and mate. The lights of the fleet were lost in the night behind. The Dictator had laboured through the first field of ice into open water. The sea was dotted with great, white "pans," widely scattered; and, as the captain had feared, there were signs of bergs in the darkness roundabout. The waves were rising, spume crested, on every hand; at intervals, they broke over the bows, port and starboard, with frightful violence. Gusts of wind whirled the spray to the bridge, where it soon sheathed men and superstructure in ice.
"Send a lookout aloft, Mr. Ackell," said the captain, after he had long and anxiously peered straight ahead.
The thud of ice, as the seas hurled it against the ship's prows, the hiss and crash of the waves, the screaming of the gale, drowned the captain's order.
"Pass the word for Bill o' Burnt Bay!" he roared.
A short, brawny man, of middle age, who had not missed a voyage to the ice in twenty years, soon appeared in response to the call, which had gone from mouth to mouth through the ship. Archie was inclined to smile when he observed Bill's unkempt, sandy moustache, which was curiously given an upward twist at one side, and a downward twist at the other. Nevertheless, he was strongly attracted to him; for he looked like a man who could be trusted to the limit of his courage and strength.
"Take a glass t' the nest, b'y, an' look sharp for bergs," the captain ordered. "Don't stay up there. Come back an' report t' me here."
The man went off with a brisk, "Ay, ay, sir!" It was his duty to clamber to the crow's-nest—a cask lashed to the topmast just below the masthead—and to sweep the sea for signs of bergs.