y 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, shifting 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
snatched 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
quantity; 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