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Updated: June 16, 2025
He ate his breakfast, drank three mugs of strong tea, and set out. A little dry snow had fallen during the night. The air was bitterly cold and motionless, and the only sound was the sharp crackling of the tide fingering the ice along the frozen land-wash. The sky was clear. With the rising of the sun above the rim of the sea a faint breath of icy wind came out of the west.
He hung about the harbor all day, sometimes in his own kitchen, sometimes down on the land-wash, and sometimes in other men's cabins. He put a new dressing on the wound of the lad who had received the knife and paid another visit to Dick Lynch. Lynch was still in bed; but this time he did not drag him out on the floor.
The infatuated skipper had not yet given up hope of winning the heart of the wonderful creature from up-along. Late in March a French brig, bound for St. Pierre, went ashore on the Squid Rocks to the north of Chance Along. Only two of her crew reached the land-wash alive.
She soon learned that no sign of the stranger's boat could be found in the harbor. Returning from the land-wash, she met Nick Leary. "How bes ye a-feelin' now?" she asked, not unkindly. "But it served ye right, Nick. A great man like ye has no call to be fightin' wid women." "Me poor head buzzes like a nest o' wasps whin ye pokes it wid a club," said Nick.
Black Dennis Nolan and his men stood by the frozen land-wash, along which the currents snarled, and rolling seas, freighted with splinters of black sea-ice, clattered and sloshed, waiting patiently for their harvest from the vast and treacherous fields beyond. A grim harvest! Grim fields to garner from, wherein he who sows peradventure shall not reap, and wherein Death is the farmer!
The sea hammered and sobbed among the rocks, and splintered the new ice along the land-wash. "If she comes ashore we'll be needin' more nor candle-light to work wid," remarked the skipper. Again the dull boom of a gun drifted in through the fog. "Aye, lads, she bes a-drawin' in to us," said old Barney Keen, with a note of intense satisfaction in his rusty voice.
After the storm from the northwest had blown itself out, a spell of soft weather set in along the coast. East and southeast winds brought fog and mild rains, the ice rotted along the land-wash and the snow dwindled from the barrens and left dripping hummocks and patches of black bog exposed.
It had never been opened since the building of the house. "The wind blows under Father McQueen's door like spray from the land-wash," said the old woman. "'Twill be comin' down the chimbly," said Dennis, aware of the tide of icy wind low about his feet. He crossed the room and opened the door of the dismal chamber reserved for the use of the missionary.
They pulled in the line until the wet hawser on the end of it appeared, and this they made fast to a rock on the beach as big as a house. A small light appeared between the ship and the shore, blinking and vanishing low down on the pitching sea. The glare from the fires on the land-wash presently discovered this to be an oil-lantern in the bows of a boat.
They ran the bully shoreward and lowered the sail. Darling sprang to the land-wash and found the battered body of a man wedged tight between two icy rocks at the foot of the cliff. It was frozen stiff; but it was evident that it had not always been frozen. The crabs had found it, and even the heavy clothing was torn to strips. Mr.
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