Harbor Tales Down North Part 5

"She's merry with me."

"Ay."

"Her tongue jus' sounds like brisk music, an' her laughter's as free as a spring o' water."

"She've showed me no favor."

"Does she blush in your presence?"

"She trembles an' goes pale."

"Do her eyes twinkle with pleasure?"

"She casts them down."

"Does she take your arm an' snuggle close?"

"She shrinks from me."

"Does she tease you with pretty tricks?"

"She does not," poor Tommy replied. "She says, 'Yes, sir!' an' 'No, sir!' t' me."

"Ha!" Sandy exclaimed. "'Tis I that she'll wed!"

"I'm sure of it. I'm content t' have her follow her will in all things. I loves the maid. I'll not pester her with complaint. Is you comin' along?"

"Tis sheer madness!"

"Is you comin' along?"

Sandy Rowl swept his hand over the prospect of fog and spindrift and wind-swept ice.

"Man," he cried, "look at that!"

"The maid's sick," Tommy Lark replied doggedly. "I loves her. Is you comin' along?"

"You dunderhead!" Sandy Rowl stormed. "I got t' go! Can't you understand that? You leaves me no choice!"

When Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl had leaped and crept through half the tossing distance to Scalawag Harbor, the fog had closed in, accompanied by the first shadows of dusk, and the coast and hills of Scalawag Island were a vague black hulk beyond, slowly merging with the color of the advancing night. The wind was up--blowing past with spindrift and a thin rain; but the wind had not yet packed the ice, which still floated in a loose, s.h.i.+fting floe, spotted and streaked with black lakes and lanes of open water. They had taken to the seaward edge of the pack for the advantage of heavier ice.

A line of pans, sluggish with weight, had lagged behind in the driving wind of the day before, and was now closing in upon the lighter fragments of the pack, which had fled in advance and crowded the bay.

Whatever advantage the heavier ice offered in the solidity of its footing, and whatever in the speed with which it might be traversed by agile, daring men, was mitigated by another condition involved in its exposed situation. It lay against the open sea; and the sea was high, rolling directly into Scalawag Run, in black, lofty billows, crested with seething white in the free reaches of the open. The swells diminished as they ran the length of the run and spent themselves in the bay. Their maximum of power was at the edge of the ice.

In Scalawag Run, thus, the ice was like a strip of shaken carpet--it's length rolling in lessening waves from first to last, as when a man takes the corners of an end of the strip and snaps the whole to shake the dust out of it; and the spindrift, blown in from the sea and s.n.a.t.c.hed from the lakes in the mist of the floe, may be likened to clouds of white dust, half realized in the dusk.

As the big seas slipped under the pack, the pans rose and fell; they were never at rest, never horizontal, except momentarily, perhaps, on the crest of a wave and in the lowest depths of a trough. They tipped--pitched and rolled like the deck of a schooner in a gale of wind. And as the height of the waves at the edge of the ice may fairly be estimated at thirty feet, the incline of the pans was steep and the surface slippery.

Much of the ice lying out from Point-o'-Bay was wide and heavy. It could be crossed without peril by a sure-footed man. Midway of the run, however, the pans began to diminish in size and to thin in quant.i.ty; and beyond, approaching the Scalawag coast, where the wind was interrupted by the Scalawag hills, the floe was loose and composed of a field of lesser fragments. There was still a general contact--pan lightly touching pan; but many of the pans were of an extent so precariously narrow that their pitching surface could be crossed only on hands and knees, and in imminent peril of being flung off into the gaps of open water.

It was a feat of l.u.s.ty agility, of delicate, experienced skill, of steadfast courage, to cross the stretches of loose ice, heaving, as they were, in the swell of the sea. The foothold was sometimes impermanent--blocks of ice capable of sustaining the weight of a man through merely a momentary opportunity to leap again; and to the scanty chance was added the peril of the angle of the ice and the uncertainty of the path beyond.

Once Tommy Lark slipped when he landed on an inclined pan midway of a patch of water between two greater pans. His feet shot out and he began to slide feet foremost into the sea, with increasing momentum, as a man might fall from a steep, slimy roof. The pan righted in the trough, however, to check his descent over the edge of the ice. When it reached the horizontal in the depths of the trough, and there paused before responding to the lift of the next wave, Tommy Lark caught his feet; and he was set and balanced against the tip and fling of the pan in the other direction as the wave slipped beneath and ran on. When the ice was flat and stable on the crest of the sea, he leaped from the heavy pan beyond, and then threw himself down to rest and recover from the shudder and daze of the fate he had escaped. And the dusk was falling all the while, and the fog, closing in, thickened the dusk, threatening to turn it impenetrable to the beckoning lights in the cottages of Scalawag Harbor.

Having come, at last, to a doubtful lane, spa.r.s.ely spread with ice, Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl were halted. They were then not more than half a mile from the rocks of Scalawag. From the substantial ground of a commodious block, with feet spread to brace themselves against the pitch of the pan as a man stands on a heaving deck, they appraised the chances and were disheartened. The lane was like a narrow arm of the sea, extending, as nearly as could be determined in the dusk, far into the floe; and there was an opposite sh.o.r.e--another commodious pan. In the black water of the arm there floated white blocks of ice. Some were manifestly substantial: a leaping man could pause to rest; but many--necessary pans, these, to a crossing of the lane--were as manifestly incapable of bearing a man up.

As the pan upon which Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl stood lay near the edge of the floe, the sea was running up the lane in almost undiminished swells--the long, slow waves of a great ground swell, not a choppy wind-lop, but agitated by the wind and occasionally breaking. It was a thirty-foot sea in the open. In the lane it was somewhat less--not much, however; and the ice in the lane and all round about was heaving in it--tumbled about, rising and falling, the surface all the while at a changing slant from the perpendicular.

Rowl was uneasy.

"What you think, Tommy?" said he. "I don't like t' try it. I 'low we better not."

"We can't turn back."

"No; not very well."

"There's a big pan out there in the middle. If a man could reach that he could choose the path beyond."

"'Tis not a big pan."

"Oh, 'tis a fairish sort o' pan."

"'Tis not big enough, Tommy."

Tommy Lark, staggering in the motion of the ice, almost off his balance, peered at the pan in the middle of the lane.

"'Twould easily bear a man," said he.

"'Twould never bear two men."

"Maybe not."

"Isn't no 'maybe' about it," Rowl declared. "I'm sure 'twouldn't bear two men."

"No," Tommy Lark agreed. "I 'low 'twouldn't."

"A man would cast hisself away tryin' t' cross on that small ice."

"I 'low he might."

"Well, then," Rowl demanded, "what we goin' t' do?"

"We're goin' t' cross, isn't we?"

"'Tis too parlous a footin' on them small cakes."