was the
first clear day in ever so long--and now the sun and the water were in
conspiracy to pretend it had always been this gay, fair weather.

The only blemish on the seascape was a troop of bergs, six in number,
out yonder to starboard. But they were dim and distant as we bore in
toward the headland at Quirpon Tickle. Quirpon is called "Carpoon" by
the fishermen because that isn't the way to pronounce it. And Tickle
has nothing to do with making you laugh. Quite the contrary. It means
a very serious business of creeping and twisting snakewise through a
channel that winds among the rocks. You are perfectly sure you are
about to ram the face of a wall--and then, lo and behold! there is a
way out at the last minute, and it leads you to another wall and
another rift that suddenly and impossibly opens to let you through.
You have to think of the pirates who used to run and hide in places
like that, and give the slip to honest sailor men from France and
England who were trying to run them down. If they didn't meet the
pirates they met and fought each other, which was vastly diverting to
the pirates and perhaps just as satisfying to themselves.

There were fishermen's dories bouncing about like happy children in
the shallower waters near the shore. I happened to be at the wheel,
and my one idea was not to hit those sharp and cruel rocks, not to
strike a fisherman, and to give the widest berth I could to the
distant menace of those icebergs.

Grenfell, red-booted and brown-sweatered, put his head in at the
wheel-house door, and the wind ruffled his silver hair as he cried:
"Run her so close to those rocks that you all but skin her!"

You see, his mind was only on Captain Cote, with the choke in his
throat, strangling and struggling, but going on with his duty as the
keeper of the light with the beams outflashing to the long, far bellow
of his mighty horn.

In our race against time, we were burning coal, that precious
commodity, then twenty-four dollars a ton,--and much more costly
to-day. Spruce and fir and juniper were piled on deck--some of the
wood across the barrels of whale-meat, in a vain attempt to shut off
the rotten smell of the food so loved by the dogs. But, hasten as we
might, the night closed down like a lid on a box as we sounded our
gingerly way through the perilous twistings of the Tickle. The wind
was rising, and as we looked back we saw the waves, running white and
high at a mad dance in cold moonlig