"I'm fair ashamed t' have the canvas off her," said Skipper Job, after a long look to windward. "'Tis no more than a switch, an' we're clewed up for a snorter."
"They's no one t' see, sir," said the cook. "That's good; an' sure I hopes that nothin' heaves in sight t' shame us."
"Leave us shake the reef out o' the mains'l, sir, an' give her the fores'l," said the first hand.
"We're not in haste, b'y," the skipper replied. "She's doin' well as she is. We'll not make harbour this night, an' I've no mind t' be in the neighbourhood o' the Break-heart Rocks afore mornin'. Let her bide."
The weather thickened. With the night came a storm of snow in heavy flakes, which the wind swept over the deck in clouds. There was nothing to relieve the inky darkness. The schooner reeled forth and back on the port and starboard tacks, beating her way south as blind as a bat. There was no rest for the crew. The skipper was at the wheel, the first hand on the lookout forward, the cook and the two other hands standing by on deck for emergencies.
So far as the wind, the sea and the drift-ice were concerned, the danger was slight, for the Rescue was stoutly built; but the sea was strewn with vast fields and mountains of Arctic ice,—the glacier icebergs which drift out of the north in the spring—and in their proximity, in their great mass and changing position, lay a dreadful danger.
"Sure, I wisht you could chart icebergs," said the skipper to the cook. "But," he added, anxiously, "you can't. They moves so fast an' so peculiar that—that—well, I wisht they didn't."
"I wisht they wasn't none," said the cook.
"Ay, lad," said the skipper. "But they might be a wonderful big one sixty fathom dead ahead at this minute. We couldn't see it if they was."
"I hopes they isn't, sir," said the cook, with a shiver.