are floor; and in the breathless, dead little
interval between the appalling detonation and a man's groan of dismay
followed by a woman's choke and scream of terror, Dolly West,
Bad-Weather Tom's small maid, stood swaying, wreathed in gray smoke,
her little hands pressed tight to her eyes.

She was--or rather had been--a pretty little creature. There had been
yellow curls--in the Newfoundland way--and rosy cheeks and grave blue
eyes; but now of all this shy, fair loveliness----

"You've killed her!"

"No--no!"

Dolly dropped her hands. She reached out, then, for something to
grasp. And she plainted: "I ithn't dead, mother. I juth--I juth can't
thee." She extended her hands. They were discolored, and there was a
slow, red drip. "They're all wet!" she complained.

By this time the mother had the little girl gathered close in her
arms. She moaned: "The doctor!"

Terry West caught up his cap and mittens and sprang to the door.

"Not by the Bight!" Bad-Weather shouted.

"No, sir."

Dolly West whimpered: "It thmart-th, mother!"

"By Mad Harry an' Thank-the-Lord!"

"Ay, sir."

Dolly screamed--now: "It hurt-th! Oh, oh, it hurt-th!"

"An' haste, lad!"

"Ay, sir."

There was no doctor in Ragged Run Harbor; there was a doctor at
Afternoon Arm, however--across Anxious Bight. Terry West avoided the
rotten ice of the Bight and took the 'longshore trail by way of Mad
Harry and Thank-the-Lord. At noon he was past Mad Harry, his little
legs wearing well and his breath coming easily through his expanded
nostrils. He had not paused; and at four o'clock--still on a
dogtrot--he had hauled down the chimney smoke of Thank-the-Lord and
was bearing up for Afternoon Arm.

* * * * *

Early dusk caught him shortcutting the doubtful ice of Thank-the-Lord
Cove; and half an hour later, midway of the passage to Afternoon Arm,
with two miles left to accomplish--dusk falling thick and cold, then,
a frosty wind blowing--Creep Head of the Arm looming black and
solid--he dropped through the ice and vanished.

Returning from a professional call at Tumble Tickle in clean, sunlit
weather, with nothing more tedious than eighteen miles of wilderness
trail and rough floe ice behind him, Doctor Rolfe was chagrined to
discover himself fagged out. He had come heartily down the trail from
Tumble Tickle, but on the ice in the shank of the day--there had been
eleven miles of the floe--he had lagged and complained