“Great Scott!” he shouted. “Look here. Ice! Why, there’s no boat left—it’s all ice! Well, I’ll be switched—why, we’ll have to chop her out, or she’ll sink with the weight of it—she’s down by the head now.”
Fresh exclamations of amazement followed as each head appeared in turn from below. It was true. The yacht was literally covered with ice, from one to six inches thick at the bow, where the spray combined with the rain to add to the layers of white coating. The sluggish movement of the vessel was explained—the weight of the ice burdened her. Here was a pleasing condition of things.
The boys snatched a hasty breakfast, and taking hatchets, hammers—anything with a sharp edge—they attacked the ice. Even Ransom insisted upon taking a hand. The boat was very beautiful in her glassy coating. The rigging, fringed with icicles, and the cold, gray light shining on the polished surface, made it look like a dull jewel. The boys, however, saw nothing of the beautiful side of it. There was a mighty job before them; a cold, hard, dangerous job, and they went at it as they had done with all the previous difficulties which they had encountered—with courage and energy.
Colder and colder it grew, until the thermometer registered five degrees below zero. The yacht still rolled and pitched so that the boys found it necessary to lash themselves to mast, spars and rigging while they chopped. The spray flew up and dashed into their faces and almost instantly froze; the sleeves of their coats became as hard and as stiff as iron pipes, and their hands stiffened so that the fingers could not hold the axe helves. Every few minutes one or the other would have to stop, go below and thaw out. They worked desperately, but new layers of frost formed almost as fast as the boys could hack it off. But chop and shovel they must or sink in plain sight of the town, inaccessible as though the boat were miles from shore.
How they ever lived through the three days during which the storm continued, God, who saved them, alone knows. It seemed almost a miracle that so small a craft should have lived through what it did.
When at the end of the weary time the wind subsided, the yacht rode over the choppy waves in much the same buoyant way as before—she was weather proof; but her crew was utterly exhausted; hands and faces were cut and bleeding from the fierce onslaught of the sleet-laden wind; fingers, toes and ears were frost-bitten, innumerable bruises—true badges of honor—covered their bodies, and the captain suffered intolerably from his injured ankle.
“Hours chopping ice off the ‘Gazelle’ to keep her from sinking under the weight of it,” quoted Kenneth from the entry in his log. “And this in the heart of the ‘Sunny South.’”
“I don’t believe there is any ‘Sunny South.’” Clyde was tired out, and his sentiments expressed his condition.
“Remember the old coon at Natchez?” said Frank. “He must have been a twin of Methuselah; he said he had never seen ice on the river so far south before, and he had lived on the Mississippi all his life.”
It was many, many hours before the “Gazelle” was free enough of her burden to allow the crew to rest; and not until three days of gale had spent its spite upon them could she be got under way and anchored in a sheltered spot.