A few minutes later, standing on bales of merchandise for’ard on the upper deck, they watched the altering of the course and the race for that single opening, narrow and ever narrower in the close-packed ice. It was exciting enough, for they got out just in time. Thirty-four hours afterward the _Los Angeles_ was still beating about on the edge of the pack, looking for another break in the long white line. The spirits of the passengers steadily sank. To their jealous imagining all those phantom ships, and the score unseen, were now forging ahead. Only the _Los Angeles_ besieged the ice in vain. Men stood in knots discussing the captain’s mistakes and airing their own knowledge. They had expected this state of things if he persisted in keeping so far to the east. Hour by hour Gillies’s credit fell. The only break in the dead monotony of the afternoon was suggested in the general invitation to come for’ard and hear Gedge roast the captain. It went ill that day with any witness in Gillies’s favor. In the middle of dinner people looked up from their plates and said: “What’s that?” The bean-feaster was the first to find his tongue. “By ——,” he said, “we’ve stopped!” The passengers dropped their knives and forks and rushed on deck. The bean-feaster was right. In trying to get round the eastern shoulder of the floe, the _Los Angeles_ had run aground in Norton Sound, thirty miles from the mainland. The engines were reversed, and the water round the propeller was set boiling. The ship never budged. The deck resounded to the uproar of many tongues. To waste thirty-six hours feeling her way round the floe was bad enough, but to be “hung up on a sand-bar,” a hundred and fifty miles from Nome, with a wicked-looking ice-pack bearing down on you from the west—! And here comes the _Charles Nelson_ once more, very perky this time, profiting by the object lesson and steering clear of the bar. The _Los Angeles_ humbled her pride to ask for a line. “Can’t get near enough,” the word came back. “I’m in three fathom now!” and away _Charles Nelson_ goes, leaving the big steamer to her fate. “What’s that feller calls himself a captain, what’s he goin’ to _do_?” demanded Mr. Gedge of his satellites. “‘Wait for the tide!’ Yah! He’s got the most high-spirited idears of any man I ever—‘Wait!’ After wastin’ two days and nights a’ready! ‘Wait!’ While the other fellers are knockin’ the bottom out o’ Nome!” This was a harassing thought, but the captain still had his apologists, even in the Kangaroo Court. It was O’Gorman’s friend with the fiery beard who dared to point out, “Mr. Gedge told us on Friday and Saturday the captain was ‘incompetent and foolhardy.’ On Sunday and Monday he’s ‘over-cautious and damnably slow.’ To-night Mr. Gedge tells us—” “To-night,” that gentleman shouted, “I’m tellin’ you still more about this —— captain. Did they or did they not say to us in Seattle that Gillies was a first-rate seaman?” “Yes, and so he is!”