of Arctic pans and
hummocks from the Labrador current; and a frosty night had caught them
together and sealed them to the cliffs of the coast. It was a most
delicate attachment--one pan to the other and the whole to the rocks.
It had yielded somewhat--it must have gone rotten--in the weather of
that day. What the frost had accomplished since dusk could be
determined only upon trial.

"Soft as cheese!" Doctor Rolfe concluded. "Rubber ice and air holes!"

There was another way to Ragged Run--the way by which Terry West had
come. It skirted the shore of Anxious Bight--Mad Harry and
Thank-the-Lord and Little Harbor Deep--and something more than
multiplied the distance by one and a half. Doctor Rolfe was completely
aware of the difficulties of Anxious Bight--the way from Afternoon Arm
to Ragged Run; the treacherous reaches of young ice, bending under the
weight of a man; the veiled black water; the labor, the crevices, the
snow crust of the Arctic pans and hummocks; and the broken field and
wash of the sea beyond the lesser island of the Spotted Horses. And he
knew, too, the issue of the disappearance of the moon, the desperate
plight into which the sluggish bank of black cloud might plunge a man.
As a matter of unromantic fact he desired greatly to decline a passage
of Anxious Bight that night.

Instead he moved out and shaped a course for the black bulk of the
Spotted Horses. This was in the direction of Blow-me-Down Dick of
Ragged Run, and the open sea.

He sighed. "If I had a son----" he reflected.

* * * * *

Well, now, Doctor Rolfe was a Newfoundlander. He was used to traveling
all sorts of ice in all sorts of weather. The returning fragments of
the ice of Anxious Bight had been close packed for two miles beyond
the narrows of Afternoon Arm by the northeast gale which had driven
them back from the open. This was rough ice. In the press of the wind
the drifting floe had buckled. It had been a big gale. Under the whip
of it the ice had come down with a rush. And when it encountered the
coast the first great pans had been thrust out of the sea by the
weight of the floe behind. A slow pressure had even driven them up the
cliffs of Creep Head and heaped them in a tumble below. It was thus a
folded, crumpled floe, a vast field of broken bergs and pans at
angles.

No Newfoundlander would adventure on the ice without a gaff. A gaff is
a lithe, ironshod pole, eight or ten feet in length.