They are fought
alone, in the dark, on the sea; and sometimes the lion-hearted live to
make a modest tale of it around a winter's fire; but more often the
sequel is, "Found drowned"--if even that.
Captain Barney, frightened into desperate courage, and Dan, in grim
realization that the measure of his good deed this night was the
measure of the soul he was getting to know, fought sternly. They were
on the open sea with all its mystery and lurking fate, and the dark was
all about. There was not even the impression of distance; the swells
arose as though at their elbows, tossed them with great, slimy ease,
let them down again, plucked them this way and that, while the humming
tow-line ran out to the vague, phantom, reeling tug ahead.
There was a suspicion of snow in the veiled sky, and the wind stabbed
like a knife. Twice the tug cut through a field of ice making out on
an offshore current, and the thumping the little row-boat received
seemed likely to rend her into drift-wood. But that was only one of
the chances; and the two men went on into the icy blast with jaws so
tightly clenched that their cheek muscles stood out in great knots.
The silence, the danger, the vagueness hung heavily. As Dan cast his
eyes gloomily into the wake of the tug, he saw a dark object shoot out
of the foam and dart down upon them like a torpedo; in fact a torpedo
could not have worked more serious effect upon the boat than did that
heavy, water-soaked log.
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