“‘Yes, clearly now, sir, that you recall it.’
“‘Come, let’s work out the latitude,’ he said, ‘and we’ll find that iceberg’s situation. My heart’s on fire. Oh!’ he cried, but softly, in a tone that thrilled through me, ‘my wife is dear to me. I pray, I pray! we may not be too late.’
“I still failed to grasp what was in his mind, and suspected that his reason had been a little weakened by the shock of the news he had received. When we had worked out our observations he exposed the chart he used to prick off the ship’s course on, and mused upon it, and measured angles and distances.
“‘It is at this season,’ said he, ‘that the ice breaks away out of the south and comes in fleets of bergs thickly crowding north. There’s been heavy weather. We’ll not allow for a larger drift than a league a day. Try for her in fifty. That’s it. That will put the berg when the Prairie Chief struck it in about fifty-one.’
“I thought now I began to understand him.
“‘You mean fifty-one degrees of south latitude?’
“‘Of course I do,’ he answered.
“I measured the distance due south from the place where our ship then was, and made it a few hundred miles—I forget the figure.
“‘It’s a short run,’ said he, looking at the chart. ‘The boat did it in ten days, and that’s not above three knots an hour.’ I was silent. ‘I shall strike the parallel of fifty degrees,’ he continued, after a pause, ‘then run away east. If I sight nothing I shall head back. I’ll find her—under God,’ he added, removing his cap, and glancing upwards with an expression of rapt devotion.
“This was an extraordinary undertaking, prompted as it was by an impulse bred of the imagination of a mind in slumber, yet by no means irrational, seeing that it was certain, if the seaman Dickens reported aright, there was a shipwrecked company upon an iceberg within a few days’ sail.