Joe took the matter in hand. “Stand by,” he said, “ready to shove off; I’ll reason with this fellow.” He beckoned the Eskimo back a step from the water, and the other followed with a satisfied leer. Probably no one can be so insolent in the eyes of a white man as a half-drunken barbarian when he thinks he is safe in the abuse of power.
“You say the umiak is yours?” said Joe, quite humbly. Harry’s blood began to boil at this submissive tone, but he held his tongue.
“Yes,” replied the Eskimo, stepping nearer to Joe threateningly, “it is mine, and you must—ugh!”
Joe had suddenly caught a wrestling grip on him, and before the tipsy man of the ice knew what had happened, he was swung into the air and sent whirling into the shallow water of Kotzebue Sound, gun and all. Joe sprang to the umiak. “Shove off!” he said sharply, and putting his own shoulder to the light boat, with Harry’s help it slid into deep water while Joe sprang aboard. A roar of laughter went up from the crowd on shore as the discomfited Eskimo staggered to his feet, and tried in vain to use his wet gun on the fast receding boat. Then a moment after, the mood of the crowd changed, and they began to shoot, but none of the shots took effect. The wind was at their backs, and under steady strokes of the paddle the umiak was soon out of shooting distance. The last the two boys saw of the great trading fair at Hotham Inlet was a group of their former companions standing on the beach shooting at them. The last they heard was the uproar of drunken riot and occasional rifle-shots as the land blurred in the distance behind them. They were free once more, headed south, and the dancing waters of Kotzebue Sound flashed around them as they spread their deerskin sail before the freshening breeze.
“We are well out of that,” said Joe, glancing to windward with a sailor-man’s eye, “but I don’t exactly like the looks of the weather.”
Harry noted the gathering clouds to northward, the discontent in the voice of the wind overhead, and agreed with him. The shallow waters of the sound were already leaping in a jumble of waves, from whose white caps the wind-snatched spindrift swept to leeward. Their light boat danced along like an eggshell before the wind, safe as yet, but with it he well knew they could go only with the gale. They were bound to sail before it. After all, what matter? That was the direction in which they wished to go, and the harder it blew the faster they would go. So while Joe stood by the steering paddle, Harry busied himself in making all snug aboard, and tried not to fret about the weather.
Meanwhile the weather was fretting all about him. An hour, two hours passed, and what had been a little blow grew into a big one. The skin boat, light as a cork, fairly flew before it. Often it seemed to skip from wave to wave, taxing Joe’s skill at the steering paddle to the uttermost to keep it head on. To turn sidewise to the wind and sea was to be rolled over and over in the icy waters and be lost. Yet Joe kept her straight. Now and then some invisible force seemed to drag the cockleshell down, and a rush of foam came aboard, but she rose again, and Harry bailed out before the next volume of water could come in. It was wet and exciting work, but still neither boy lost his head, and still they kept afloat. There was a hissing roar in the waters and a howl of the wind overhead that made it difficult to hear one’s own voice even when shouting, but a nod of the head or a look of the eye was enough for a command from the skipper, and Harry obeyed promptly and steadily. Never had he admired Joe so before. The sturdy young whaleman seemed to glow with power as he sat erect in the stern of the umiak, his cap gone and his long hair blown about his set, watchful face, his will dominating the elements and shaping their fury to his purpose.
On they drove through a period of time that seemed endless. There was no night to fall, else Harry was sure that it would have come and gone, and still Joe steered, erect and immobile as the Sphinx, while Harry bailed till he felt as if all the waters of Kotzebue Sound must have come into the boat and been thrown out again. His very arms were numb with weariness and the chill of it. How long a period five hours is can be known only by those who have passed it in physical discomfort and with great danger continually threatening, yet even such a period passes. Five hours, ten miles an hour at the very least, they were making a record passage of the sound, yet the lowering clouds and the mist blown from tempestuous waves gave them no glimpse of any land.
Once Harry thought he could hear a dull booming sound, like the roar of cannon, but he could not be sure. The strain was telling on him, he knew, and he laid it to fancy. Then after a time he forgot it, for they seemed to enter a stretch of tremendous cross seas, seas which fairly leaped into the umiak and filled it faster than he could bail out. He worked with the tremendous energy of despair, and then the tumult ceased more quickly than it had arisen. The boat seemed gliding into still waters, and the booming roar grew very loud, for it sounded from behind, down the wind. He looked at Joe and saw his face lose its look of grim determination for the first time since the wind had begun to blow. Joe nodded his head over his left shoulder, and as Harry looked, a trailing cloud of mist lifted and showed a rugged cliff, in the shelter of which they were.