The captain signalled "Go ahead!" The chance must be taken. To be caught between two fields in a great storm was a fearful situation. So the ship pushed into the ice, moving at a snail's pace, labouring hard, and complaining of the pressure upon her ribs. Soon she made no progress whatever. The screw was turning noisily; the vessel throbbed with the labour of the engines; but she was at a standstill.
"Stuck, sir!" exclaimed the mate.
"Ay, mate," the captain said, blankly, "stuck."
The ship struggled bravely to force her way on; but the ice, wedged all about her, was too heavy.
"God help the men!" said the captain, as he signalled for the stopping of the engines. "We're stuck!"
"An' God help us," the mate added, in the same spirit, "if the fields come together!"
Conceive the situation of the Dictator. She lay between two of many vast, shifting fields, all of immeasurable mass. The captain had deliberately subjected her to the chances in an effort to rescue the men for whom he was accountable to the women and children of Green Bay. She was caught; and if the wind should drive the fields together, her case would be desperate, indeed. The slow, mighty pressure exerted by such masses is irresistible. The ship would either be crushed to splinters, or—a slender chance—she would be lifted out of danger for the time.
Had there been no broken ice about her, destruction would have been inevitable. Her hope now lay in that ice; for, with the narrowing of the space in which it floated, it would in part be forced deep into the water, and in part be crowded out of it. If it should get under the ship's bottom, it would exert an increasing upward pressure; and that pressure might be strong enough to lift the vessel clear of the fields. The captain had known of such cases; but now he smiled when he called them to mind.
"Take a week's rations an' four boats t' the ice, mate," he directed, "an' be quick about it. We'll sure have t' leave the ship."
While the mate went about this work, the captain paced the bridge, regardless of the cold and storm. It was dark, the wind was bitter and strong, the snow was driving past; but still he paced the bridge, now and then turning towards the darkness of that place, far off on the floe, where his men, and the young charge he had been given, were lost. The women of Green Bay would not forgive him for lives lost thus; of that he was sure. And the lad—that tender lad——