CHAPTER I
EVEN IN A WILDERNESS, ONE CANNOT ESCAPE THE DEVIL
"IF your Star Woman lies this way, cap'n," said Frontin, "devil take me if I want to find her! This ice—ah! A shot in this wilderness? Was that a gunshot or an ice-creak?"
Crawford seized his arm, stood listening. "A shot, true enough! Dead ahead of us. Bear to the left, I'll bear to the right. Watch yourself!"
The two men separated.
Although it was August and the wide expanse of Hudson Bay was now open water, all the winter's freeze was thrust here at the straits for exit, and not a ship had entered. No ship could fight this frozen sea until the jam burst. August, indeed? Here at the straits the very word was intolerable mockery.
Here nothing was in sight but ice and fog. The heavens above, the earth beneath, the waters under the earth, were all congealed into dead greyness; there was not even the blue shimmer of sun-struck bergs. Everything was unreal. The ear was assailed by a low, unceasing groan, which now rose into a crescendo of unearthly crashes and shrieks and again rolled in dim reverberant thunders, felt rather than heard; this came from the ice floes and small bergs and crushed mountains hanging at crazy angles, all hurled into one inchoate mass by the tremendous urge of the bay waters trying to crowd through the narrow straits to the sea.
In the air was that bitter and penetrating chill which comes of melting floes—a chill mocking at furs, thrusting into the very heart and entrails of the two men who appeared and vanished again, crawling across that drear expanse. To the northwest, hidden among the white masses, the position of the bark Northstar was marked by a thread of smoke two miles away; even this smoke looked cold and shivery as it wound shuddering into the sky and fog. To east and south rose the steep and awful cliffs of Cape Digge and the strait; they ran, ice-dripping, into heaven and melted in the horizon fog, cold barriers set two thousand feet in air to keep the inland sea cloaked in thin mist and bitter chill. Digge's Island was a dim blur; to west and south were grinding, crushing bergs and floes. Overhead was dun sunlight drowned in high fog—a ghastly and unearthly fog which threatened to close down again in an hour or two and add its clammy fingers to the merciless grip of the ice.
"The shot came from about here," called Crawford, giving a hallo to which none answered. He paused on a rounded hummock to sweep the surrounding surface with his gaze. From his left, where Frontin was toiling among upflung masses of rough ice, broke a sudden sharp cry.
"Here we are, cap'n! Name of the saints—come and look!"
Turning, Crawford hastened to join his lieutenant, scrambling over pinnacles and avoiding pools of melted water. Frontin, poised on a ridge of broken masses, uttered a curt comment.
"No hurry. He's dead, or I'm a liar!"
Cursing the bitter chill, Crawford climbed up beside this tall and saturnine comrade and friend, this Frontin of the cynical air and the warm heart. Reaching the ridge, he found himself looking down at a hollow, an icepan closed in all around by crushed pinnacles, like an open glade in a forest. Below the two men, at the near side of this hollow, lay the outstretched shape of a huge white bear, the top of its head blown away—and beside this, the motionless figure of a man, apparently an Eskimo, lying across a gun.
"These Eskimos have no fusils and don't use powder," said Crawford, for despite his astonishment, his brain was quickly at work. "Yet—where could he have come from? Certainly no ship has come ahead of us—the Eskimos told us that much. One might have followed us into the straits"
Frontin waved his hand at the ice around.
"One or a dozen. We ha' been carried in the ice for weeks, up one channel and down another—ah! I see that heaven has declared me a liar." He moved suddenly, "The man's not dead after all."
The two clambered down, leaping and sliding into the hollow where the ice was pooled with blood. Frontin turned the man over, lifted head to lap, tenderly soothed the poor hurt and disemboweled thing that had been human before the claws of the bear ripped so deep and far. The man's eyelids fluttered open, and his vacant gaze fell upon Crawford. He spoke feebly in English.
"The smoke—the smoke! It is a sure sign; I tell you, haste and slay them—no parley, no hesitation! No quarter to man or woman. English or French, slay them or they will kill us all. That smoke means a ship. I—I—ah! You—you are not Moses Deakin! Who are you?"
Intelligence leaped into those eyes, a last flicker of fast-dying fires.
"Where are you from?" demanded Crawford imperatively. "Your ship? Where is she?"
"Blast you to hell and sink you lower!" was the response. "Ho, Moses—Moses Deakin! No quarter to them—no quarter"
That was all. The hurt thing was at peace.
Now silence fell upon the two men—silence of wondering and slow comprehension. Frontin rose, turned his dark and glittering gaze upon the empty white desert surrounding them; his saturnine, hawk-nosed visage was wrinkled in perplexity. Crawford began to stuff tobacco into his pipe and stared down at the dead man, his wide and heavy-lidded eyes veiled thoughtfully. Frost and bleak winds had darkened the thin lines of nose and cheek and chin since he had left Newfoundland behind him, only to intensify their hard and aggressive determination.
Whence had this man come? No other ships had come through the roaring turmoil of the straits, according to the Eskimos. For weeks the Northstar had been carried back and forth and roundabout in the grip of ice and fog and currents, now out almost to open water, now back in the straits with the drift. Yet the presence of this man showed that some other ship was at hand, and any other ship spelled peril of the utmost to Hal Crawford.
Here in the bitter north, as on the golden main to the south, powder was the only lawgiver. During a generation and more, English, French and Bostonnais had disputed for possession of Hudson's great bay and its beaver trade. A year previously, the English Company of Adventurers had swept the French from the bay posts; what would happen this year or the next, no man could predict. The Iroquois war whoop had resounded from the dark pines these ten years, meeting at the apex of a great overland triangle the scalp-yell of the Sioux. The heroic Danish colony had perished in mad horror years ago. Freebooters and fur pirates slipped in through the straits and out again before the ice formed. Here only the fittest could survive; the conquered met with no quarter, whether from man or from nature.
"Queer words, cap'n," said Frontin reflectively. "He was repeating something that he had previously said. He must have seen our smoke. H'm! Then he would not have shot the bear unless forced to it. He was scouting us, eh? The bear attacked him, they killed each other"
"Ay," said Crawford, opening his firebag.
"No quarter, quoth he," resumed Frontin. "Death of my life! There is nothing in sight, though his ship may be hidden like ours. That name of Moses Deakin—a singular name! Have ye ever heard it before?"
"Ay," said Crawford again.
Frontin turned and gazed curiously at him, while he fumbled with flint and steel. Presently he had the tinder aglow—and abruptly he pinched it out. A sudden blaze swept into his steel-blue eyes. He hastily thrust away pipe and firebag.
"I have it—quick, now!" he exclaimed sharply. "Two men were out together, even as we are. Moses Deakin left this man, started back to their ship. He'll have heard the gunshot and will return to see what it means. Back, out of sight! It's our chance to catch him—and if we catch Moses Deakin we have the best prize on the bay. Back, back! Prime the guns and wait!"
Frontin paused not to reason why, but slid away and vanished among the hummocks above. Crawford stooped over the dead man and explored beneath the torn, frozen-red garments. His hand came away with a crinkle of paper, and he gave the document one sharp look that widened his eyes. Then he hastily turned the body face down as it had first lain, and followed his lieutenant into hiding. No footsteps had left any trace on the ice. Here was death and nothing else.
Crouched beside Frontin among the hummocks, Crawford briefly told what he knew of this Moses Deakin.
"A Boston fur-pirate; I heard queer tales of him both in New York and Boston. They say he's a great, hard, cold devil who sees visions, has dealings with the foul fiend and is cruel as any Mohawk. It is supposed that he has a secret post somewhere on the bay and agents among the Indians; he sneaks in and gets his furs when the straits open, and goes again swiftly. This is rumour, but he's reality. Either the French or the English would blow him out of the water if they could catch him at work—he's done them both a deal of harm."
"We don't care for furs," said Frontin. "Then why is he of value to us?"
"Because they say he knows the bay as no other man does—every river and shallow of it. That's how he eludes capture. You comprehend? If we catch him, we find the northwest passage and the south sea beyond."
"But," said Frontin thoughtfully, "I thought you had been tempted by the Star Woman, of whom Iberville told you!"
"An Indian legend, a wild dream!" Crawford's tone was impatient. "If nothing better offered, I'd chance it—but not if we can catch Moses Deakin and find the northwest passage!"
Frontin shrugged. The two men now waited silent, motionless; from their position no moving object could be seen, but this meant little. Except from some high elevation, a man or a dozen men could not be sighted among these heaped-up masses of ice. Then, suddenly, Frontin touched Crawford's elbow. Among the opposite crags of ice, across the hollow, appeared a moving shape which came abruptly into full view and paused to look down upon the scene of death. A great and grim man was this, whose entire bearing conveyed a singular impression of iron resolution and dominance.
A fur cap covered his head. Merging with the shaggy fur, an immense beard of grizzled black swept across his lower face and hung in two bushy prongs over his barrel of a chest. Between cap and beard were visible a massive, wide-nostriled nose and two most remarkable eyes. They were deeply set and far apart, beneath shaggy grizzled brows; they were extremely large, insolent, commanding, of a light and steely gray which contrasted strongly with the mass of jet hair. Across his shoulders lay a fusil, which he now suddenly lifted and fired in air.
"A signal!" breathed Frontin. "Now is our time"
"No—no!" denied Crawford, his low word desperately urgent. "Look! We are lost"
The gunshot had been answered by a burst of calls and shouts, so unexpected and so close that both watchers started. At once other men came into view, half a dozen of them, along the opposite ridge of ice. In a flash Crawford perceived his frightful error of calculation. The dead man had been companioned, not by Deakin alone, but by all these others!
Crawford met the crisis after his usual fashion. Setting his mouth to Frontin's ear, ignoring the group who were swiftly descending the opposite slope toward the bodies of man and bear, he spoke rapidly.
"Keep my gun, stay hidden; be ready for anything. If I go with them, watch and get a bearing on where their ship lies. Keep the smoke-flare going from the bark. You comprehend? They know all about us, we know nothing about them. Here—take care of this paper."
Into Frontin's hand he thrust the paper taken from the dead man; then he rose and strode forward. He was apparently unarmed, knife and tomahawk being hidden.
As Crawford thus swung into their sight, descending from the icy ridge to the hollow, the group of men stared at him for half a moment in gaping amazement. Then their guns swung up, but he spoke out with a cool assurance that gave them pause.
"Careful, Cap'n Deakin, careful! You're outnumbered and have stumbled into a very neat ambuscade. Ho, Frontin! Bid one of the men to fire in the air, that our good Moses may realize his position."
"Ay, cap'n," responded Frontin's voice, followed by the roar of a fusil in air.
Astounded by the appearance of Crawford, finding themselves apparently surrounded by hidden foes as they huddled there in the ice-hollow, the half-dozen Boston men dared not move. They crowded around Moses Deakin, who was measuring Crawford with his bold, hard gaze. Startled though he was, the fur-pirate was unafraid.
"Well?" he demanded truculently. "Who the devil may you be, that you know my name?"
Crawford, suiting action to utterance, surveyed him with a slight and whimsical smile.
"My dear Deakin," he responded calmly, "we ought to know you, since we've had men posted around your ship since last night! If we bore you any ill will, we might have taken that craft of yours a dozen times over. But to what end? As the redskins say, I'm bringing you a belt of white wampum and a calumet. Agree to a truce, and I'll go over to your ship with you and have a friendly talk."
"Your name?" growled Deakin, obviously taken all aback.
"Crawford."
"Blood and wounds! Not Hal Crawford, the pirate?" cried Deakin, while his men gaped and stared at hearing the name.
"So called. Come—is it peace or war? Give your word; I'll accept it."
Deakin was not the sort to hesitate when trapped. He put out his hand and advanced, giving Crawford a mighty grip. He made answer with apparent heartiness, yet with a ruthless treachery thinly veiled in those domineering eyes of his.
"Ay! Come aboard with us; peace it is, cap'n. To the ship, lads, and out o' this! The flood tide be lifting this accursed ice. Leave the corpse where it is."
Crawford turned and lifted his voice. "Frontin! Take the men back to the ship and signal in all the crew. If I do not return in three hours, come over the ice and hang Moses Deakin."
"Ay, cap'n," the unseen Frontin made reply.
Deakin showed huge yellow teeth through his beard at this threat, then rumbled out a laugh and turned. He set off for the southeast with Crawford beside him, while the men draggled after them and cast frightened glances at the desolate expanse of ice, now cracking and groaning and heaving from the rise of water below. No word was spoken. Since the hour lay close upon noon, Crawford guessed that the Bostonnais and his men were hungry.
So far, so good, he reflected. Whether he could carry through the bluff was of no great consequence; he scarcely even thought of the issue. Since he dared not betray his real ignorance by asking any questions, he accompanied Deakin in silence until he made out a tracery of spars lying ahead. Presently he discovered that the fur-pirate lay barely three miles away from the Northstar, in under the frowning cliffs of the mainland and close to the great cape itself.
Closer approach showed the Boston ship to be a large square-rigged corvette carrying three heavy guns to a side; by name, the Albemarle. When he found that Deakin had nearly thirty men aboard his rover, Crawford grimaced at thought of his little bark with her crew of fourteen. Presently they were up the side of the ice-gripped corvette, and Crawford followed his host aft to the main cabin. A wild, shaggy crew of men they were who stared at him, and scurvy had brushed some of them with its hideous hand.
Once down below, Crawford seated himself alone with Deakin, and a lanky boy fetched them pannikins of food and mugs of grog. A boatswain entered and asked for orders; Deakin gave them curtly, crisply, and dipped fingers in pannikin again. Crawford perceived that while this man was uncouth as any bear, he yet possessed strange depths of bravery, treachery, perhaps madness.
"And now to talk!" Deakin swigged his rum, accepted the tobacco Crawford offered, and made a light. "What force have ye? Half down with scurvy, I'll warrant."
"Force enough, and not a touch of scurvy so far."
"That's a lie," was the blunt response. Crawford's blue eyes narrowed.
"Softly, Master Deakin! Once for that word is enough. Any more of it and I'll put steel into you! Guard your tongue better. Who was that man mangled by the bear?"
"My lieutenant." Deakin gazed unwinkingly at his visitor. In his bold stare lay a more deadly menace than that which Crawford had just put into voice. "Had been three year with me. What sort o' ship have ye got?"
"A bark." Crawford put the light to his pipe and puffed. "I'm no pirate, as ye miscall me. I've no interest in furs or gain. I'm looking for the place that's over the horizon, and count on getting help from you."
The shaggy brows drew down. "What place is it, then?"
"Whatever may be there." Crawford coolly put his hand inside his shirt, and drew out the Star of Dreams that hung on its thong. At sight of it, Deakin's eyes opened wide. "The star, Cap'n Deakin—my star of dreams! I follow the sign. Call it a madman's fancy, if ye like; I seek only freedom, clear action, a chance to be myself. I'm sick of the struggle for pelf and place and power—I want a fresher world. I have goods and provisions and gold aboard the bark, and need to rob naught from other men. If others—mark it well!—think to rob me, I have teeth and can use 'em."
"Others have teeth, for that matter," said Moses Deakin, and those big eyes of his narrowed slightly as Crawford thrust away the star. "Blood and wounds! How d'ye expect me to believe such a tale? Who comes into these seas, but for furs?"
"I do, for one," was the cool response. "You have reason—use it! If I wanted loot, what easier than to take your ship? Then to seek that hidden trading post of yours and loot it. But that's nonsense—we have no quarrel. Here's what I want of you: Is it true, as pilots say, that from the northwest of this bay a passage leads to the south seas?"
Deakin frowned upon his questioner. His eyes glimmered in a way that Crawford misliked; they glinted with suspicion, with crafty search, with a slow and heavy pondering.
"Not to my knowledge," he made answer at length, "and I should know if any man does. Last year the French ships drove me far up to the nor'west, where I talked with Injuns. This folly of a south sea passage means naught."
So positive was Deakin's tone, so filled with assured conviction were his words, that Crawford could not but feel in this moment that he had been following a false trail. Deakin should know—that was true. If Deakin said no passage existed, then it might well be accepted as a fact.
While Crawford puffed in frowning silence, however, Deakin now continued with an abrupt change of topic and manner.
"What's to hinder me keeping you here while my men go take your ship? There's two hundred pound for you in Boston, dead or alive. You ha' gold aboard, and supplies that are worth more than gold in these parts. What's to hinder, eh?"
Crawford's thin lips emitted a thin cloud of smoke.
"Try it and see. What's two hundred pound and the loot of a bark, as against a winter's stock o' furs? A poor gamble, Cap'n Deakin. My men would give you as good as they got."
Deakin's teeth shone through his beard, and his eyes smouldered darkly. "I'll swallow no such tale of a south sea passage. H'm! You've not been i' the bay before, neither; but what about Frontin, your lieutenant—eh? Ay, I've heard of that French pirate! And sink me, but that explains it well enough, that does!"
"Explains what?" asked Crawford, somewhat astonished by these heavy ruminations.
"Your being here. No doubt Frontin caught some thread o' the tale; likely, the French Company's men heard it from the redskins. And you're just fool enough to go look into it. Fool! H'm! You and your star—honest enough in that folly, too! Ye did wrong to show me that star, for I have a nose to scent with. Warlock, that's what ye are, and I can see it all now. You have heard the tale, but so have I."
"Eh?" Crawford was suddenly alert, as the dog who scents unseen game. "What tale?"
"The Star Woman, o' course!"
With an air of irritated finality, as though he had found the answer to a troublous problem, Deakin lifted his mug and drained it. He banged down the pewter, licked his hairy lips, grunted savagely. Then he continued, his gaze fastened on Crawford.
"Ay, the Star Woman! Makes ye jump, eh? I've guessed it, sure enough. Little you know of her, though; while I've seen her—if not in the flesh, then otherwise. No white man has seen her in the flesh, and few enough o? the red devils; oh, ye cunning liar! It's not nor'west that you're seeking, but west and south. Well, whilst French and English are there, neither you nor I will do much looking in that direction. Dost know there's a host of ships behind us in the straits, icebound?"
"Ships?" repeated Crawford, catching swiftly at the more essential news despite his amazed wonder at the man's talk of the Star Woman. "How d'ye know?"
"Why, I saw them, as I saw the Star Woman. French ships o' the line, English frigates—bah! Come up on deck and talk in the open air. Plague upon this stuffy cabin!"
Moses Deakin shoved back his chair and rose. Crawford accompanied him to the ladder, still lost in marvel at what he had heard. At the ladder, Deakin motioned him to mount.
Then, as Crawford's back was turned, Moses Deakin threw up his arm and struck. The blow, sharp and light but deadly as an arrow, drove home to the base of the brain. Crawford fell against the ladder, then rolled down, paralyzed.
So there, it seemed, the Star of Dreams had led but to an ill fortune.
While these things chanced aboard the Albemarle, and the day dragged on, Frontin was heavily making his way back to his own ship. He did not regain the Northstar until afternoon; and if there was dismay in his own heart, he brought stark consternation to those aboard her.
It was a strangely diverse company that grouped around him to hear the tale he spat out between bites of food. The six Englishmen were hardy rascals who cared only that they should never see an English gaol again, following Crawford with blind infatuation. The eight Irishmen followed Crawford largely because Sir Phelim Burke did so, since they loved Phelim beyond measure. Only one of them could speak or write English.
"I sighted her ship and got bearings on her," concluded Frontin. "Can lead ye there in the dark, for she's fast in shore ice; but what use? I saw that big bear of a man come up from below alone, roar at his men, and shake his fist toward us. The cap'n is trapped and gone."
Sir Phelim Burke uttered a low groan of despair, and turned to stare helplessly at the fog which clamped them in. They stood on the maindeck—there was no frost in the air, only the chill of melting ice. The Norths tar, rigged in the fashion which another twenty years was to know as "schooner." lay grappled to a small berg. She was a new ship of oak, and the ice-battering had not so much as started a butt in her. Yet Frontin, as he drearily climbed aboard, had noted something which started his brain to frantic work.
Within the past half-hour fog had come down—heavy, cloaking mist that lay about them like an evil thing. Through it penetrated the groaning of the floes; even the berg beside them was filled with long heavings and shudderings and queer noises. The ice was all in movement, as it moved each day at high tide, now back and now forth, in a slow and regular motion with the varying trend of shore-currents and ice-drift. Blocked by the huge jam across the mouth of the straits, these outer masses were gradually disintegrating.
"Say the word, Master Frontin," spoke up one of the Englishmen, "and we be off with ye. We'll not let the cap'n bide on yon ship without a fight."
Frontin gave him a bleak look. "Go aloft, Dickon, and keep sharp watch. The fog has come down low, and up above it thins quickly. Watch sharp for the direction of the drift."
Dickon departed, and Frontin sent the other men to sleep and rest. Sir Phelim dully repeated the order to his Irish, and presently Frontin and Burke remained alone.
"What hope?" said Burke, despair in his branded, weary countenance. "Even is Hal not dead, how can we help? I understand your meaning, Frontin. The ice is moving us, and the fog has settled down. We cannot find that accursed ship now."
"I can find her in hell, when the time comes," said Frontin. He drained a mug of wine, wiped his lips, and settled back against the rail. When he had a tinder-match alight, he set it to his pipe and puffed comfortably.
"The cap'n is not dead, Sir Phelim, depend upon it! I think that he gave this Deakin too large a tale—frightened him. So Deakin caught him off guard and clamped him in irons. Why? No doubt to serve as hostage. That order to me, bidding me come over and hang Deakin unless the cap'n returned, frightened the man, set him thinking. This Deakin is no fool. He guessed that we could not come over and hang him, or take his ship either."
"Then what do you propose?"
"To do it, since he thinks we cannot," said Frontin coolly.
Burke regarded him steadily. "How can you find that ship again?"
Frontin smiled his thin, sardonic smile. "We've calculated the drift each day. The Bostonnais is inside the drift by the shore ice, and will not move until the outer ice has broken up or gone. There is no hurry. Perhaps this Deakin will set out to scout our ship and discover her position and strength. Sir Phelim, do you believe in omens?"
Burke now regarded him with some uneasiness. There was about this Frenchman, whose affection for Crawford was beyond words, something deep and terrible; his manner held a gloomy exultation. Burke, being in despondent mood, was ready to see misfortune in this or anything else.
"Omens? Well—at times. But you spoke of Deakin coming to scout our ship?"
"Yes. He will do it. He can find her."
"But he will discover our weakness!"
Frontin snapped his fingers. "Let him. Now, return to our omens! For example, that star which the cap'n wears. You believe in that Star of Dreams?"
Burke smiled a sad and twisted smile.
"I believe in his belief, my dear Frontin. He and you and I—we follow that star out of the world, over the horizon; it is a symbol of the happiness that we have never found, and will never find alive. It has led us here to this desolate spot. Is that an omen? Then all this damned and icebound northland is an omen, for we Irish believe that hell is a place of snow and ice. Has this fog a father? Out of whose womb came this ice, and who has gendered the hoary frost of heaven?"
"We can dispense with poetry, which has a suspiciously Biblical sound," said Frontin drily. "Thank heaven I am no Irishman, to make misfortunes into poetry! Instead, I make them into a ladder."
Sir Phelim laughed. "Poet yourself, dark man! Well, why all this talk of omens and the star that we follow?"
"Because I propose to follow it now."
For an instant Burke did not get the full import of these words, until something in the tone, in the glinting dark eyes, of Frontin gave him enlightenment. Then he started.
"Impossible! That were rank madness"
Frontin lifted his hand, made an imperturbable gesture. "Listen! Listen!"
The trembling grind of the crushing floes and bergs had never ceased. As he listened, however, Sir Phelim gradually detected a new and different sound—a strange sound that blanched his weathered cheeks and widened his eyes in horrified comprehension. This sound was a slow and relentless groan which emanated from the very heart of the bark herself. By some convergent pressure, her timbers were being squeezed and ground between floes and berg. A fraction of an inch at a time, she was being crushed.
"We have a choice," said Frontin coolly, when he saw that the other understood. "We may stay here and fight, blast holes in the ice, open a channel—and abandon the cap'n. We cannot rescue both him and the ship. Time presses, and we lack men."
"But you would leave her, and all she contains?"
"Follow the star!" Frontin uttered a short, hard laugh. "Follow the star, take that other ship"
"Man, are you mad?" broke out Sir Phelim. "You yourself have gold aboard here, and we cannot carry it over the ice!"
"The devil gave the gold, let him take it again," and Frontin waved his pipe carelessly. "Do you love gold? Neither do I. The Star of Dreams has gone aboard another ship, and we follow. That is all. Her crew outnumbers us, true, but they have no star."
Burke frowned thoughtfully. "Yet the ice is moving. There will be open channels to cross."
"We shall take the small boat to cross them, then. Listen! The movement has increased; all the ice outside here is moving now. Perhaps we have reached the end of this abominable delay! To-night we may either be free of the ice, or again inclosed. However, I can find that corvette."
They were silent. That horrible squeezing groan of wrenched oak was no longer to be heard. Perhaps the pressure on the bark was relieved, perhaps the sound was drowned in the increasing tumult from the fog-wrapped ice all around. The tumult had become a cacaphony of hideous noise. Out there in the fog the ice was heaving up in great masses and falling again, bursting into fragments, sliding and rending and crashing.
A hasty call from the man aloft brought Frontin to his feet. He darted into the cabin for a spyglass, then mounted the rigging. Sir Phelim Burke remained where he was, lost in surmise. He knew that Frontin had brought a mass of gold aboard the bark—was the Frenchman ready to abandon this gold utterly? That bespoke a greater love for Crawford than Burke had visioned in the man, who was outwardly so bitter and cynical.
"Damn the ice! The plan is madness, madness manifold!" Sir Phelim threw out his hands and gripped the rail in despair, as he stared at the fog. "Heart of the world gone wrong, and broken men adrift who pin faith to a star and drive across the horizon, blindly! Well, I think that this is not the first time men have trailed a star—but they were wise men. We are fools, Hal Crawford, and we love you—and are fools."
Up above, Frontin was standing beside the pointing Dickon, incredulity in his face as he hurriedly focused his glass. The sullen grinding and crashing of the ice had come to a sudden pause, and the drift had ceased. That drift had been to the northward. The fog, here little more than ice-steam, did not lift but clung close down; up above, however, there was a faint stir of wind which helped to dissipate the upper layers of mist, stirring it all into yeasty heavings.
From the masthead, Frontin could make out the line of coast, or rather the cape, and calculated that the bark had drifted two or three miles farther back toward the straits. There in the north the fog was thicker and heavier, a massive bank of greyness, now swirling away, now parting for a moment, now abruptly closing again. Frontin waited for another such shifting, his glass fastened toward the end of the cape. The grey wall parted abruptly—parted to disclose a tiny, fluttering bit of colour set in its midst. Nothing else was to be seen save this scrap of colour: the flag of England, set apparently in the sky and fog. Then a sudden shrill cry burst from the man Dickon.
"Rot me—off to larboard, master! Look quick!"
Frontin swung around, and a low word broke from his lips. A great eddy of the moving fogbank had blown an open lane—a perfect channel through the mist, walled on either hand. Looking down this lane, as though the scene had been there set for his sight by some whimsy of the invisible fingers which manipulated ice and fog and sea, Frontin had one swift glimpse of a towering frigate, all sail set, not three miles distant—and from her poop drooped the white flag of France! Even as he looked, the fog closed down again and she was gone like a dream-vision. The English flag, over by the cape, had also vanished. Frontin closed his glass and descended to the deck, a touch of colour in his cheeks, his dark eyes aglow. He came to Sir Phelim and clapped the latter on the shoulder.
"Eh?" cried the startled Irishman. "What's happened? Ye look strange"
"It's what is about to happen!" and Frontin laughed joyously. "Death of my life—who, think you, is out there in the fog?"
"Crawford?"
"No—Iberville! His fleet must have followed us through the straits. I saw the Profound lying out yonder not a league distant; I ought to know the old brute of a ship, since I once" Here Frontin checked himself and bit his lip, then continued more carefully. "She has been under Iberville's orders for two years, therefore the rest of his fleet must be in the straits. And off the cape is an English ship. Come! While the lions fight, the jackals may seize the bone. To work! If we were sure of heaven, we might tamely accept fate; but being minded to stay out of hell as long as possible, we'll fight. All hands on deck! Sir Phelim, you and your Irishmen get up food, rum or wine, and arms. Dickon, down from aloft!"
Now Frontin, knowing that the ice movement had halted with the tide, did a singular and characteristic thing. In the galley was still smouldering a fire, whence the smoke-signal had been drifting aloft all day. He ran to it, seized the ends of brands and whipped them into the embers, raked all the fire into a pot, crammed in some rotten canvas used for tinder, and with the flaming pot aswing in his hand darted down the deck aft—and chucked the whole thing into the stern cabins. Then he whirled upon the shouting, startled men who thought him gone mad, and his voice drove at them.
"Quick! Ships are close to us, all around us—an English fleet! The bark's being crushed i' the ice; our only hope is to get away and take the corvette that holds Cap'n Crawford—swift, before the flames reach the powder!"
Cursing and shouting mad oaths, furious terror and alarm plucking at them, the men scrambled to obey. Sir Phelim whipped his Irish with crackling Gaelic words, while Frontin got the other men at work swinging out the tiny skiff from the stern, with the smoke rolling up from below and the thought of powder-kegs to drive them with the spur of necessity.
Now, as though to increase their mad frenzy of haste, came out of the whole ship a frightful scream of twisted oak. She began to move upward, slowly, as the ice nipped and lifted her, started its work of rending through her hull. Into the skiff went fusils and pistols and blades, food and drink; one by one the men dropped to the ice, seized ropes and made fast to the skiff, or lifted at her bodily, each man cursing his neighbour to make more haste. Then they drew away from the heaving, groaning mass of timber, stumbling and slipping over the ice, following the tall figure of Frontin and the shorter, limping Phelim Burke.
So the fog closed around them.
After a little a ruddy brightness shone through the obscurity in their rear, as the red flames leaped higher. After this had died and vanished behind the heavy curtain of fog, came a sullen, booming detonation that shook the great floes, flung the men all asprawl on the ice, and left a frightful desolation in their hearts.
"Forward!" shouted Frontin, and they struggled up.