with
glistening ice, and long spikes of it hung from her rail, while the
slippery crystals gathered thick on deck. Then lumps and floes of ice
detached themselves from the parent mass, and sailed out to meet her,
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
schooner off with a vicious drag at the wheel. None of them, however,
cared to say a word to him.

They brought her round 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 round once more, and until the early
dusk fell Wyllard stood at the jarring helm or high up in the forward
shrouds. Then he called Dampier aside.

"We can't work along the edge in the dark?" he said.

"Well," said Dampier drily, "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 towards the deck-house, and Dampier watched him
with a smile of comprehension, for he was a man who had also in his
time made many fruitless efforts, and quietly 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. Then
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 in
the meanwhile, and daylight was just breaking when he next went out on
deck. There was scarcely an air 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. On the edge of it, the ice glimmered in the growing
light, but in one or two places stretches of blue-grey water seemed to
penetrate it, and Dampier, who strode aft when he saw Wyllard, said he
fancied 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
shif