aw the boat hurled upon the ice. Then a blinding haze
of snow shut out everything, and he came down with a run.

He stood for several minutes gazing forward grim in face beside the
wheel, but he could see nothing except the filmy whiteness and the tops
of the seas that had steadily been getting steeper. The schooner was
driving furiously down upon the ice, but it was evident to him that to
send Wyllard any assistance was utterly beyond his power. He could
have hove the schooner to while he got the bigger boat over, and two
men might have pulled her towards the ice with the breeze astern of
them, but it was perfectly clear that they could neither have made a
landing nor have pulled her back again. It was also, though this
appeared of less consequence, uncertain whether he and the other man
could have brought the schooner round or have got more sail off her,
which would, as he recognised, very soon have to be done. Still, he
stood on while the snow grew thicker until they heard the wash of the
sea upon the ice close to lee of them, and then it was a hard-clenched
hand he raised in sign to the helmsman.

"On the wind. Haul lee sheets!" he said.

She came round a little, heading off the ice, and when she drove away
with the foam seething white beneath one depressed rail and the spray
whirling high about her plunging bows, there was a curious tense look
in the white men's faces as they gazed into the thickening white haze
to lee of her.

They thrashed her out until Dampier decided that there was sufficient
water between him and the ice, and then stripped most of the sail off
her, and she lay to until next morning, when they once more got sail on
her and ran in again. The breeze had fallen a little, it was rather
clearer, and they picked up the point, though it had somewhat changed
its shape. Then they got a boat over, and the two men who went off in
her found a few broken planks, a couple of oars, and Charly's cap
washing up and down in the surf. They had very little doubt as to what
that meant.

CHAPTER XXV.

NEWS OF DISASTER.

When the boat reached the schooner Dampier went off with one of the
men, and contrived to make a landing on the ice with difficulty only to
find it covered with a trackless sheet of slushy snow. Though he
floundered shorewards a mile or two there was nothing except the
shattered boat to suggest what had befallen Wyllard and his companions,
but the skipper, who retraced his st