Chapter XXXVII

_In Which Archie Armstrong Rejoins the "Rough and Tumble," With
Billy Topsail for Shipmate, and They Seem Likely to be Left on the
Floe, While Toby Farr, With the Gale Blowing Cold as Death and Dark
Falling, Promises to Make a Song About the Ghosts of Dead Men, but
is Entreated Not to Do So_

Archie Armstrong and Billy Topsail did not wait with Doctor Luke at Poor Luck Barrens until the cure of Trapper George was accomplished. In view of Archie's wish to return to St. John's with Cap'n Saul aboard the _Rough and Tumble_, it was arranged that the boys should go back to Bread-and-Butter Tickle alone, and thence down the coast to Our Harbour, as best they could manage, carrying news of Doctor Luke's detention and the cause of it. They were sorry to say good-bye to Doctor Luke; and Doctor Luke was sorry to say good-bye to them. When the time came, Billy Topsail, who had come to love and respect the man for his warm qualities and the work that he did, sought for words to express his feeling and his thanks; but being a simple, robust fellow, not accustomed to the frank expression of feeling, not used to conventional forms, he could manage but poorly. Archie Armstrong would have been ready, fluent, and sincere in the same situation. But Billy Topsail could only stutter and flush and come to an awkward full stop.

What Billy wanted to say was clear enough in his own mind. He had been with Doctor Luke a good deal. They had been in tight places together. But it was not that. "Tight places" are only relative, after all; what is an adventure in one quarter of the world may be a mild incident in another. And that Billy Topsail and Doctor Luke had been in danger together was not particularly impressive: Billy Topsail was used to danger--to peril of that sort--and had grown to regard it as among the commonplaces of life.

That aspect of his experience with Doctor Luke to which Billy Topsail had responded was the habit of service--the instant, willing, efficient answer to the call of helpless need. Indeed, Doctor Luke appeared to Billy Topsail to be a very great man--the greatest man, in his personality and life, Billy Topsail had ever known, not excepting Sir Archibald Armstrong. And Billy Topsail had come definitely to the conclusion that what he wanted to do with his life was precisely what Doctor Luke was doing with his.

It was this that he wanted to tell Doctor Luke; and it was this that he failed to tell him.

"Good-bye, sir," he said.

"Good-bye, Billy."

"Th-th-thanks, sir."

"Thanks?" cried Doctor Luke. "For what, Billy? _I'm_ the debtor."

"Th-th-thanks, sir."

"Thank _you_, Billy, boy, for your most excellent company."

And so Billy and Archie left Doctor Luke at Poor Luck Barrens--hard at work and happy in his work. They made Bread-and-Butter Tickle; they travelled down the coast without incident; they shook hands with Teddy Brisk, who was still telling his adventures on the ice-floe, his leg as sound as any leg; and they came safe to Our Harbour, where they waited until Cap'n Saul put in with the _Rough and Tumble_. And then Archie would hear of nothing but Billy's company to St. John's--Billy _must_ go to St. John's, and he _would_ go to St. John's on the _Rough and Tumble_, ecod, or Archie would put him in irons and carry him there! Billy had no sound objection. From St. John's he could travel easily to his home at Ruddy Cove and arrive there long before the Labrador mail-boat would be north on her first voyage.

And so the boys boarded the _Rough and Tumble_ together, fell in with Bill o' Burnt Bay, Jonathan Farr and little Toby once more, and put to sea. The _Rough and Tumble_ was not loaded; she had more seals to kill and stow away, and Cap'n Saul was resolved to "put back loaded"--a desirable end towards which his active crew, in conjunction with his own sealing wisdom, was fast approaching.

"I'll load in a week!" he boasted.

And then----

* * * * *

Sunday, then--and that a brooding day. It was a dull, dragging time. Not a gaff was out, not a gun; not a man put foot on the floe. The _Rough and Tumble_ killed no seals. It was not the custom. All that day she lay made fast to the ice, fretting for midnight. Cap'n Saul kept to his cabin. Time and quiet weather went wasting away. Quiet weather--quiet enough that day: a draught of westerly wind blowing, the sky overcast and blank, and a flurry of snow in the afternoon, which failed, before dusk, a black, still midnight drawing on.

On the first stroke of the midnight bell, for which he had waited since the dawn of that dull day, Cap'n Saul popped out of the cabin, like a jack-in-the-box, and stamped the bridge, growling and bawling his orders, in a week-day temper, until he had dropped the First Watch, and was under way through the floe, a matter of twenty miles, to land the Second Watch and the Third--feeling a way through the lanes.

Before dawn Bill o' Burnt Bay's watch, with Archie and Billy Topsail, was on the ice. Cap'n Saul put back to stand by the First Watch. Black dark yet. It was bleak on the floe! They shivered in the frost and dark. And the light lagged, as the light will, when it is waited for. It was a sad dawn. A slow glower and lift of thin, gray light: no warmth of colour in the east--no rosy flush and glow. When day broke, at last, the crew made into the herds, mad to be warm, and began to kill. Still, it was done without heart. There was less blithe slaughter, that day, than unseemly brooding and weather-gazing. It was a queer thing, too. There was no alarm of foul weather that any man could see.

A drear, gray day it was, day drawing near noon. Archie and Billy always remembered that. Yet there was no frost to touch a man's heart, no need to cower and whine in the wind, no snow to make a man afraid. A scowl in the northeast--a low, drab, sulky sky, mottled with blue-black and smoky white. They recalled it afterwards. But that was all. And Bill o' Burnt Bay fancied, then, with the lives of his crew in mind, that the weather quarter was doubtless in a temper, but no worse, and was no more than half-minded to kick up a little pother of trouble before day ran over the west.

And Bill was at ease about that.

"She'll bide as she is," he thought, "'til Cap'n Saul gets back."

Bill o' Burnt Bay was wrong. It came on to blow. The wind jumped to the northwest with a nasty notion of misbehaviour. It was all in a moment. A gust of wind, cold as death, went swirling past. They chilled to the bones in it. And then a bitter blast of weather came sweeping down. The floe began to pack and drive. Bill o' Burnt Bay gathered and numbered his watch. And then they waited for the ship. No sign. And the day turned thick. Dusk fell before its time. It was not yet midway of the afternoon. And the wind began to buffet and bite. It began to snow, too. And it was a frosty cloud of snow. It blinded--it stifled. It was flung out of the black northwest like flour from a shaken sack.

The men were afraid. They knew that weather. It was a blizzard. There was a night of mortal peril in it. There might be a night and a day--a day and two nights. And they knew what would happen to them if Cap'n Saul failed to find them before the pack nipped him and the night shut down. It had happened before to lost crews. It would happen again. Men gone stark mad in the wind--the floe strewn with drifted corpses. They had heard tales. And now they had visions. Dead men going into port--ship's flag at half-mast, and dead men going into port, frozen stiff and blue, and piled forward like cord-wood.

"I'll make a song about this," said Toby Farr.

"A song!" Archie Armstrong exclaimed.

"'Tis about the gray wraiths o' dead men that squirm in the night."

"I'd not do it!" Jonathan protested.

"They drift like snow in the black wind," said Toby.

"Ah, no!" said Jonathan. "I'd make no songs the night about dead men an' wraiths."

"Ay, but I'm well started----"

"No, lad!"

"I've a bit about cold fingers an' the damp touch----"

"I'd not brood upon that."

"An it please you, sir----"

"No."

"Ah, well," Toby agreed, "I'll wait 'til I'm cozy an' warm aboard ship."

"That's better," said Archie.

Billy Topsail shuddered. Toby's imagination--ghosts and dead men--had frightened him.

"It is!" he declared.