Before they hove to the Selache, daylight broke on a frothing sea, across which scudded wisps of smoke-adrift and thin showers of snow. With two little wet rags of canvas set the schooner lay almost head on to the big combers. Having little way upon her, she lurched over instead of ramming the waves, and though now and then one curled on board across her rail it was not often that there was much heavy water upon her slanted deck.

All around the narrow circle a leaden sky met the sea. It was bitterly cold, and the spray stung the skin like half-spent pellets from a gun. There was only one man, in turn, exposed to the weather, and he had little to do but brace himself against the savage buffeting of the wind as he clutched the wheel. The Selache, for the most part, steered herself, lifting buoyantly while the froth came sluicing aft from her tilted bows, falling off a little with a vicious leeward roll when a comber bigger than usual smote her to weather, and coming up again streaming to meet the next. Sometimes she forged ahead in what is called at sea, by courtesy, a “smooth,” and all the time shroud and stay to weather gave out tumultuous harmonies, and the slack of every rope to leeward blew out in unyielding curves.

Three of the white men lay sleeping or smoking in the little cabin, which was partly raised above and partly sunk beneath the after-deck. It was a reasonably strong structure, but it worked, and sweated, as they sat at sea, and the heat of the stove had further opened up the seams in it. Moisture dripped from the beams overhead, moisture trickled up and down the slanting deck, there were great globules of water on the bulk-heading, and everything, including the men’s clothes and blankets, was wet. The men lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a laborious matter to sit. They said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amid the cataclysm of elemental sound. It became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight, dimmed by flying spray, to take a turn at the jarring wheel.

For three days the bad weather continued, and then, when the gale broke and a little pale sunshine streamed down on the tumbling sea, changing the gray combers to flashing white and green, the skipper gave her a double-reefed mainsail, part of the boom-foresail, and a jib or two, and thrashed her slowly back to the northward on the starboard tack. More than one of the men glanced over the taffrail longingly as the schooner gathered way. She was fast, and with a little driving and that breeze over her quarter she would bear them south toward warmth and ease at some two hundred miles a day, while the way they were going it would be a fight for every fathom with bitter, charging seas, and there lay ahead of them only cold and peril and toil incredible.

There are times at sea when human nature revolts from the strain that the overtaxed body must bear, the leaden weariness of worn-out limbs, and the subconscious effort to retain warmth and vitality in spite of the ceaseless lashing of the icy gale. Then, as aching muscles grow lax, the nervous tension becomes more insupportable, unless, indeed, utter weariness breeds indifference to the personal peril each time the decks are swept by a frothing flood, or a slippery spar must be clung to with frost-numbed and often bleeding hands. The men on the Selache knew this, and it was to their credit that they obeyed when Dampier gave the word to put the helm up and trim the sheets over. Wyllard, however, stood a little apart with a hard-set face, and he looked forward over the plunging bows, for he was troubled by a sense of responsibility such as he had not felt since he had, one night several years before, asked for volunteers. He realized that an account of these men’s lives might be demanded from him.

It was a fortnight later, and they had twice made a perilous landing without finding any sign of life on or behind the hammered beach, when they ran into the first of the ice. The gray day was near its end. The long heave faintly twinkling here and there, ran sluggishly after them. When creeping through a belt of haze they came into sight of several blurrs of grayish white that swung with the dim, green swell. The Selache was slowly lurching over it with everything aloft to the topsails then, and Dampier glanced at the ice with a feeling of deep anxiety.

“Earlier than I expected,” he commented. “Anyway, it’s a sure thing there’s plenty more where that came from.”

“Big patch away to starboard!” cried a man in the foremast shrouds.

Dampier turned to Wyllard. “What are you going to do?”

“What’s most advisable?”

The skipper looked grave. “Well,” he said, “that’s quite simple. Get out of this, and head her south just as soon as we can, but I guess that’s not quite what you mean.”

“No,” admitted Wyllard. “I meant for the next few hours or so. In a general way, we’re still pushing on.”

“I’m not worrying much about pushing her through. That ice is light and scattered, and as she’s going it won’t hurt her much if she plugs some in the dark. It’s what we’re going to do the next two weeks that I’m not sure about. If there’s ice we mayn’t fetch the creek, where we’d figured on laying her up. It’s still most a hundred miles to the north of us. The other inlet I’d fixed on is way further south.”

This brought them back to the difficulty with which they had grappled at many a council. The men for whom they searched might have gone either north or south, or they might have gone inland, if, indeed, any of them survived.

“If we only knew how they had headed,” said Wyllard quietly. “Still, right or not, I’m for pushing on.”

Then Charly, who held the wheel, broke in.

“I guess it’s north,” he assented. “They’d have no use for fetching up among the Russians, and there’s nobody else until you get to Japan. No white men, anyway. Besides, from the Behring Sea to the Kuriles is quite a long way.”

“If you were dumped down ashore there, which way would you go?” Dampier asked.

“If I’d a wallet full of papers certifying me as a harmless traveler, it would be south just as hard as I could hit the trail. Guess I’d strike somebody out prospecting, or surveying, and they’d set me along to the Kuriles. Still, if I’d been sealing, I wouldn’t head that way. No, sir. That’s dead sure.”

There was a reason for this certainty, right or wrong, in the minds of the sealers. How many of the skins they brought home were obtained in open water where they could fish without molestation they alone knew; but they were regarded in certain quarters as poachers and outlaws, who deserved no mercy. They had their differences with the Americans who owned the Pribilofs. It was admitted that the Americans had bought the islands, and might reasonably be considered to have some claim upon the seals which frequented them. The free-lances bore their execrations and reprisals more or less resignedly, though that did not prevent them from occasionally exchanging compliments with oar butts or sealing clubs. But the Muscovite was a grim, mysterious figure they feared and hated.

“Then you’d have tried up north?” Wyllard suggested.

“Sure,” answered the helmsman. “If I’d a boat and a rifle, and it was summer, I’d have pushed across for Alaska. You can eat birds and walrus, and a man might eat a fur-seal if he’d had nothing else for a week, though I’ve struck nothing that has more smell than the holluschickie blubber. If it was winter, I’d have tried the ice. The Huskies make out on it for weeks together, and quite a few of the steam whaler men have trailed an odd hundred or two miles over it one time or another. They hadn’t tents and dog-teams either.”

Wyllard’s face grew anxious. He had naturally considered both courses, and had decided that they were out of the question. Seas do not freeze up solid, and that three men should transport a boat, supposing that they had one, over leagues of ice appeared impossible. An attempt to cross the narrow sea, which is either wrapped in mist or swept by sudden gales, in any open craft would clearly result only in disaster, but, admitting that, he felt that, had he been in those men’s place, he would have headed north. There was one question which had all along remained unanswered, and that was how they had reached the coast from which they had sent their message.

“Anyway,” he said, after a long pause, “we’ll stand on, and run into the creek we’ve fixed on, if it’s necessary.”

Dusk had closed down on them, and it had grown perceptibly colder. The haze crystallized on the rigging, the rail was white with rime, and the deck grew slippery, but they left everything on the Selache to the topsails, and she crept on erratically through the darkness, avoiding the faint spectral glimmer of the scattered ice. The breeze abeam propelled her with gently leaning canvas at some four knots to the hour, and now and then Wyllard, who hung about the deck that night, fancied he could hear a thin, sharp crackle beneath the slowly lifting bows.

Next day the haze thickened, and there seemed to be more ice about, but the breeze was fresher, and there was, at least, no skin upon the ruffled sea. They took off the topsails, and proceeded cautiously, with two men with logger’s pikepoles forward, and another in the eyes of the foremast rigging. They struck nothing, fortunately, and when night came the Selache lay rolling in a heavy, portentous calm. Dampier and one or two of the men declared their certainty that there was ice near them, but, at least, they could not see it, though there was now no doubt about the crackling beneath the schooner’s side. It was an anxious night for most of the crew, but a breeze that drove the haze aside got up with the sun, and Dampier expected to reach the creek before darkness fell. He might have succeeded but for the glistening streak on the horizon, which presently crept in on them, and resolved itself into detached gray-white masses, with openings of various sizes in and out between them. The breeze was freshening, and the Selache was going through it at some six knots, when Dampier came aft to Wyllard, who was standing at the wheel. There was a moderately wide opening in the floating barrier close ahead of him. The rest of the crew stood silent watching the skipper, for they were by this time more or less acquainted with Wyllard’s temperament.

“You can’t get through that,” said Dampier, pointing to the ice.

Wyllard looked at him sourly, and the white men, at least, understood what he was feeling. So far, he had had everything against him—calm, and fog, and sudden gale—and now, when he was almost within sight of the end of the first stage of his journey, they had met the ice.

“You’re sure of that?” he questioned.

Dampier smiled. “It would cost too much, or I’d let you try.” He called to the man perched high in the foremost shrouds, and the answer came down: “Packed right solid a couple of miles ahead.”

Wyllard lifted one hand, and let it suddenly fall again.

“Lee, oh! We’ll have her round,” he said, and spun the wheel.

The men breathed more easily as they jumped for the sheets, and with a great banging and thrashing of sailcloth the vessel shot up to windward, and turned as on a pivot. As the schooner gathered way on the other tack, the men glanced at Wyllard, for the Selache’s bows were pointing to the southeast again, and they felt that was not the way he was going.

Wyllard turned to Dampier with a gesture of impatience.

“Baulked again!” he said. “It would have been a relief to have rammed her in. With this breeze we’d have picked that creek up in the next six hours.”

“Sure!” replied Dampier, who glanced at the swirling wake.

“Then, if we can’t get through the ice we can work the schooner round. Stand by to flatten all sheets in, boys.”

They obeyed orders cheerfully, though they knew it meant a thrash to windward along the perilous edge of the ice. Soon the windlass was caked with glistening ice, and long spikes of it hung from her rail, while the slippery crystals gathered thick on deck. Lumps and floes of ice detached themselves from the parent mass, and sailed out to meet the vessel, crashing on one another, while it seemed to the men who watched him that Wyllard tried how closely he could shave them before he ran the Selache off with a vicious drag at the wheel. None of them, however, cared to utter a remonstrance.

They brought the schooner around when she had stretched out on the one tack a couple of miles, and, standing in again close-hauled, found the ice thicker than ever. Then she came around once more, and, until the early dusk fell, Wyllard stood at the jarring helm or high up in the forward shrouds.

“We can’t work along the edge in the dark,” he said to Dampier.

“Well,” answered the skipper dryly, “it wouldn’t be wise. We could stand on as she’s lying until half through the night, and then come round and pick up the ice again a little before sun-up.”

Wyllard made a sign of acquiescence. “Then,” he said, “don’t call me until you’re in sight of it. A day of this kind takes it out of one.”

He moved aft heavily toward the deck-house, and Dampier watched him with a smile of comprehension, for he was a man who had in his time made many fruitless efforts, and bravely faced defeat. After all, it is possible that when the final reckoning comes some failures will count.

For several hours the Selache stretched out close-hauled into what they supposed to be open water, and they certainly saw no ice. They hove her to, and when the wind fell light brought her round and crept back slowly upon the opposite tack. Wyllard had gone to sleep after his day of anxious work, and daylight was just breaking when he next went out on deck. There was scarcely a breath of wind and the heavy calm seemed portentous and unnatural. The schooner lay lurching on a sluggish swell, with the frost-wool thick on her rigging, and a belt of haze ahead of her. The ice glimmered in the growing light, but in one or two places stretches of blue-gray water seemed to penetrate it, and Dampier, who strode aft when he saw Wyllard, said he believed that there must be an opening somewhere.

“By the thickness of it, that ice has formed some time, and as we’ve seen nothing but a skin it must have come from further north,” he added. “It gathered up under a point or in a bay most likely, until a shift of wind broke it out, and the stream or breeze sent it down this way. That seems to indicate that there can’t be a great deal of it, but a few days’ calm and frost would freeze it solid.”

“Well?” Wyllard returned impatiently.

“It lies between us and the inlet, and it’s quite clear that we can’t stay where we are. Once we got nipped, there’d probably be an end of her. We must get into that inlet at once or make for the other further south.”

Wyllard shook his head. “It all leads back to the same point. We must get through the ice. The one question is—how is it to be done?”

“With a working breeze I’d stand into the biggest opening, but as there’s none we’ll wait until it clears a little, and then send a boat in. The sun may bring the wind.”

They had breakfast while they waited, but the wind did not come, and it was several hours later when a pale coppery disc became visible and the haze grew thinner. Then they swung a boat out hastily, for it would not be very long before the light died away again. Two white men and an Indian dropped into the boat and they pulled across half a mile of sluggishly heaving water, crept up an opening, and presently vanished among the ice. Soon afterward the low sun went out, and wisps of ragged cloud crept up from the westward, while smears of vapor blurred the horizon, and the swell grew steeper. There was no wind at all, but blocks and canvas banged and thrashed furiously at every roll, until they lowered the mainsail and lashed its heavy boom to the big iron crutch astern. The boat remained invisible, but its crew had been given instructions to push on as far as possible if they found clear water, and Dampier, who did not seem uneasy about the men, paced up and down the deck while the afternoon wore away.