e, the road
went up a slight hill, and the keeper led the way at right angles along
a ridge of rock. It was rough almost beyond believing, but its very
barrenness had made it useful. As the keeper had shrewdly hoped, the
swirling blizzard had left its rough length bare, when all the lower
ground was deep in snow. For the hundredth time since he had been on the
station, Eric had to admit the wise foreknowledge of his chief.

As they swung on to the ridge the keeper turned and looked at Eric
again. He caught the boy's apologetic glance and smiled back. No word
was passed, but both understood.

The ridge helped them gallantly, though the wind whistled over it as
though it were the roof-pole of the world. More than once it seemed to
Eric as though the apparatus-cart would be turned upside down by some of
the terrific gusts, and the boy had a mental picture of the crew
floundering in the snow-drifts beneath.

Near the lighthouse, the ridge that had so befriended them merged into
the level, and the crew forced its way on through ever deepening drifts.
For about fifty yards the snow was above the hubs of the wheels, and
more than once it seemed that the apparatus cart was so deeply stuck as
to be immovable. The men left the shafts, and crowding round the cart
like ants they forced it free, and half carried and half pushed it
through the snow.

"Is there any shnow left at all?" queried Muldoon, when the worst of
this was overpassed.

"What do you mean?" one of the men asked.

"I thought we'd waded through all the shnow in the worrld," the Irishman
replied.

For a little space it was easy going until they came to the dunes above
the beach. There the crew halted. As Jefferson had said, sloping upwards
at an angle of forty degrees, was a steep sheet of glare ice, almost as
smooth as though it had been planed. It would have taken a fly to walk
on that surface, yet on the farther side of it was the only road to the
wreck. The light was on the end of a little spit and the vessel in
distress could be seen only from this spit. Without going on that neck
of land she could not be reached by the gun, and this passage was grimly
guarded by that sloping embattlement of ice.

"Up it, lads!" said the keeper.

The crew, gathered around the apparatus-cart, started up the slope. Six
feet was as far as they could get. Even without added weight no one
could stand on that glistening surface, and with the drag of the cart it
was impossib