l Rideout took. Isn't you Ezekiel Rideout's
boy?"

"Bet yer life I am," said Bagg.

CHAPTER IX

_In Which Jimmie Grimm and Billy Topsail, Being Added Up
and Called a Man, Are Shipped For St. John's, With Bill o'
Burnt Bay, Where They Fall In With Archie Armstrong, Sir
Archibald's Son, and Bill o' Burnt Bay Declines to Insure
the "First Venture"_

Of course, Donald North, who had been ferryman to his father, had no
foolishly romantic idea of his experience on that pan of ice; nor had
Jimmie Grimm, nor had Billy Topsail. Donald North would not have
called it an adventure, nor himself a hero; he would have said,
without any affectation of modesty, "Oh, that was jus' a little mess!"
The thing had come in the course of the day's work: that was all.
Something had depended upon him, and, greatly to his elation, he had
"made good." It was no more to him than a hard tackle to a boy of the
American towns. Any sound American boy--any boy of healthy courage and
clean heart--would doubtless have taken Job North off the drifting
floe; and Donald North, for his part, would no doubt have made the
tackle and saved the goal--though frightened to a greenish pallor--had
he ever been face to face with the necessity. Had he ever survived a
football game, he would have thought himself a hero, and perhaps have
boasted more than was pleasant; but to have taken a larger chance with
his life on a pan of ice was so small and usual a thing as presently
to be forgotten.

Newfoundland boys are used to that.

* * * * *

It was still spring at Ruddy Cove--two weeks or more after Bagg came
back to his real home--when Donald North's friends, Billy Topsail and
Jimmie Grimm, fell into considerable peril in a gale of wind off the
Chunks. Even they--used to such adventures as they were--called it a
narrow escape.

"No more o' that for _me_," said Billy Topsail, afterwards.

"Nor me," said Jimmie Grimm.

"You'll both o' you take all that comes your way," Bill o' Burnt Bay
put in, tartly.

It was aboard the _First Venture_, which Bill o' Burnt Bay had as
master-builder built at Ruddy Cove for himself. She was to be his--she
_was_ his--and he loved her from stem to stern. And she was his
because Sir Archibald Armstrong, the great St. John's merchant and
ship-owner, had advanced the money to build her in recognition of
Skipper Bill's courageous rescue of Archie Armstrong, Sir A