The signal was set, and ten minutes later both boys were busy below putting a fire under the boiler and getting everything in readiness for departure. It was unaccustomed work, and though they had often planned it together, there were many things over which they hesitated and were a little in doubt. Thus the time passed rapidly, and though a black smoke now poured from the Bowhead’s funnel, there was little steam on. Two hours the boys were below before they realized it, and Joe finally said with some uneasiness,—
“Wonder why those fellows don’t come aboard?”
“Don’t know,” said Harry. “You watch that steam gauge and I’ll go on deck and see if they are coming. Is that their boat alongside?”
Something bumped and grated along the Bowhead’s side. Harry started for the deck. Then something struck the ship again, this time hard enough to jar it from stem to stern. Joe followed Harry up the ladder. As they reached the deck the most astonishing change met their eyes. The treacherous Arctic gale had veered to the north and was blowing again with unexampled fury. Where had been open water for miles the Arctic pack was now crowding down upon them. The first scouts of ice were already bumping their sides, and the roar of the wind through the rigging seemed like hoarse shouts of derision at the thought that a ship might escape its fury. They had swung up alongside the shore pack, which stood firm, and already the seaward ice was crushing against them. Working in the depths of the fire-room, they had sensed nothing of this change, and now the realization of it came upon them with stunning force.
Joe was the first to rouse from his stupefaction. “Go forward,” he said, “into the chain locker. Knock the shackling pins out of both those cables and let them run overboard. Then come down into the engine-room with me.”
Harry did as he was bidden in a sort of dream, the plunge from bright hope to chill fear was so great. In the engine-room he found Joe, sweating.
“We can’t do it,” he cried. “If the Eskimos had only come to us, we would have been all right; but two of us cannot fire, and run the engine, and steer ship, all at the same time, even if we could get out of the grip of the ice. I’m afraid we’re done for.”
Even as he spoke the ship staggered. The ice had crashed against her with such force that both boys were thrown from their feet. Joe stopped the engines, which had been turning slowly.
“I’m afraid we’re done for,” he repeated, and took his way to the deck, followed by Harry. The scene that met them there was one never to be forgotten. No man may stand in the forefront of the onrush of the Arctic pack and forget it. Cakes of ice leaped like wolves on its forward edge. Behind them crushed the solid phalanx of the sea, white, resistless, terrible. The wolf cakes sprang at the ship, and bit at it. They leaped upon the solid shore floe, and climbed one another’s shoulders there, and always just behind them came the forward impulse of that great white sea of ice. The touch of this main pack crumpled the shore floe. It crushed the Bowhead’s staunch sides as if they had been eggshells. The decks burst from beneath with the pressure, the tall masts toppled and fell, and the wreck, crashing and grinding into the shore ice, became but a formless part of the ridge that the pack pushed up in front of it as it moved majestically shoreward. Mightily, foot by foot, it moved. Ice cakes burst with the roar of artillery, snapped like rifles, and the rumble of floe on floe was like the onrushing hoof-beats of a million cavalry. The cohorts of the ever-victorious Frost King were in full charge. Higher and higher piled this ridge of onslaught, nearer and nearer the shore it pushed, and the once staunch ship was rolled and pounded to chaff under the hoof-beats of its white horses.