rted flintlock gun on the
rack above the still glowing stove. Sh! The child on the settle
muttered something in her sleep, and the old man, rigid as an ice
block, stood listening to her breathing, as if he were a burglar
robbing a rich man's bedroom, in which the owner himself lay sleeping.
But she quieted down again, and once more he breathed freely.

At last he was ready, all but the big coat. Well, he could do without
that. If he were not back before dark the difference it would make
would anyhow be negligible. There was no time to delay. He must go now
or never; and the indomitable old warrior stooped over to kiss the
child good-bye, though he dare only touch with his lips the golden
hair, for fear of waking her. Then in his simple way he breathed a
wordless prayer, committing her to God's keeping, and, stealthily
letting himself out, made straight for the likeliest part of the
headland from which to take the ice.

As one thinks now of that old man setting out alone over that endless
ocean of ice, one wonders if one has one's self ever attempted
anything heroic. But Uncle Rube thought only of one thing that
morning--of foiling his arch enemy on the Red Island Shoals; and
though nearly fourscore years had passed over him, he felt like a lad
of twenty as he strode rapidly along towards the landwash.

Of course he must haul his boat, but that he could easily do. Had he
not built her himself expressly, small, and of half-inch planking over
the lightest of frames, with two bilge streaks to act as runners, and
flat-bottomed that she should drag well over snow? When at length he
had launched her over the "ballicater" ice, and had pulled her clear
of the cracks by the landwash, he stopped and spent a grudgingly
spared moment in lighting his pipe. Then, heigho, and away for the
open sea--out on to which he marched with his head erect and his old
heart dauntless, like the peaceful Minute-Men of 1776.

Meanwhile an ever-increasing crowd of men, women, and even children
were pouring from apparently nowhere out on to the floe. The young men
were "copying," as we say, over the ice, that is, jumping from pan to
pan as they ventured far out from the land seeking the seals which the
running ice, driving out before the wind, had brought down from the
Gulf, and then killing them, and hauling them back into safety.

It was from them that I subsequently learned the story of the day.
Before night fell the wind had risen, and blew di