ery much what happens t' my life," young Tommy
declared. "You'll mind that I said so. An' I'm glad that I isn't
carin' very much any more. Mark that, Sandy--an' remember."

Between the edge of Tommy Lark's commodious pan and the promising
block in the middle of the lane lay five cakes of ice. They varied in
size and weight; and they were swinging in the swell--climbing the
steep sides of the big waves, riding the crests, slipping downhill,
tipped to an angle, and lying flat in the trough of the seas. In
respect to their distribution they were like stones in a brook: it was
a zigzag course--the intervals varied. Leaping from stone to stone to
cross a brook, using his arms to maintain a balance, a man can not
pause; and his difficulty increases as he leaps--he grows more and
more confused, and finds it all the while harder to keep upright. What
he fears is a mossy stone and a rolling stone. The small cakes of ice
were as slippery as a mossy stone in a brook, and as treacherously
unstable as a rolling stone; and in two particulars they were vastly
more difficult to deal with; they were all in motion, and not one of
them would bear the weight of a man. There was more ice in the lane.
It was a mere scattering of fragments and a gathered patch or two of
slush.

Tommy Lark's path to the pan in the middle of the lane was definite:
the five small cakes of ice--he must cover the distance in six leaps
without pause; and, having come to the middle of the lane, he could
rest and catch his breath while he chose out the course beyond. If
there chanced to be no path beyond, discretion would compel an
immediate return.

"Well," said he, crouching for the first leap, "I'm off, whatever
comes of it!"

"Mind the slant o' the ice!"

"I'll take it in the trough."

"Not yet!"

Tommy Lark waited for the sea to roll on.

"You bother me," he complained. "I might have been half way across by
this time."

"You'd have been cotched on the side of a swell. If you're cotched
like that you'll slip off the ice. There isn't a man livin' can cross
that ice on the slant of a sea."

"Be still!"

The pan was subsiding from the incline of a sea to the level of the
trough.

"Now!" Sandy Rowl snapped.

When the ice floated in the trough, Tommy Lark leaped, designing to
attain his objective as nearly as possible before the following wave
lifted his path to an incline. He landed fairly in the middle of the
first cake, and had left it for the s