CHAPTER XVII
Billy Topsail Wrings Out His Clothes and Finds Himself Cut off From Shore by Thirty Yards of Heaving Ice
BILLY could swim—could swim like any Newfoundland dog bred in Green Bay. Moreover, the life he led—the rugged, venturesome calling of the shore fishermen—had inured him to sudden danger. First of all he freed himself from the cumbersome mail-bag. He would not have abandoned it had he not been in such case as when, as the Newfoundlanders say, it was "every hand for his life."
Then he made for the surface with swift, strong strokes. A few more strokes brought him to the edge of the ice. He clambered out, still gasping for breath, and turned about to account to himself for his predicament.
The drift of snow had collapsed; he observed that it had covered some part of a wide hole, and that the exposed water was almost of a colour with the ice beyond—a polished black. Hence, he did not bitterly blame himself for the false step, as he might have done had he plunged himself into obvious danger through carelessness. He did not wonder that he had been deceived.
Her Majesty's mail, so far as the boy could determine, was slowly sinking to the bottom of the bay.
There was no help in regret. To escape from the bitter wind and the dusk, now fast falling, was the present duty. He could think of all the rest when he had leisure to sit before the fire and dream. He took off his jacket and wrung it out—a matter of some difficulty, for it was already stiff with frost. His shirt followed—then his boots and his trousers. Soon he was stripped to his rosy skin. The wind, sweeping in from the open sea, stung him as it whipped past.
When the last garment was wrung out he was shivering, and his teeth were chattering so fast that he could not keep them still. Dusk soon turns to night on this coast, and the night comes early. There was left but time enough to reach the first of the goat-paths at Creepy Bluff, two miles away—not time to finish the overland tramp to Ruddy Cove—before darkness fell.
When he was about to dress, his glance chanced to pass over the water. The mail-bag—it could be nothing else—was floating twenty-yards off the ice. It had been prepared with cork for such accidents, which not infrequently befall it.
"'Tis Her Majesty's mail, b'y," Billy could hear the mailman say.