With a jolly wind abeam—a snoring breeze from the southwest—the tight little _Bully Boy_, fore-and-after, thirty tons, Skipper Josiah Top, was footing it through the moonlight from Tutt’s Tickle to the Labrador: bound down north for the first fishing of that year. She was tearing through the sea—eagerly nosing the slow, black waves; and they heartily slapped her bows, broke, ran hissing down the rail, lay boiling in the broad, white wake, stretching far into the luminous mist astern. Salim Awad, the peddler, picked up at Bread-and-Water Harbor, leaned upon the rail—staring into the mist: wherein, for him, were melancholy visions of the star-eyed maid of Washington Street.... At midnight the wind veered to the east—a swift, ominous change—and rose to the pitch of half a gale, blowing cold and capriciously. It brought fog from the distant open; the night turned clammy and thick; the _Bully Boy_ found herself in a mess of dirty weather. Near dawn, being then close inshore, off the Seven Dogs, which growled to leeward, she ran into the ice—the first of the spring floes: a field of pans, slowly drifting up the land. And when the air was gray she struck on the Devil’s Finger, ripped her keel out, and filled like a sieve; and she sank in sixty seconds, as men say—every strand and splinter of her. But first she spilled her crew upon the ice. * * * * * The men had leaped to port and starboard, fore and aft, in unthinking terror, each desperately concerned with his own life; they were now distributed upon the four pans which had been within leaping distance when the _Bully Boy_ settled: white rafts, floating on a black, slow-heaving sea; lying in a circle of murky fog; creeping shoreward with the wind. If the wind held—and it was a true, freshening wind,—they would be blown upon the coast rocks, within a measurable time, and might walk ashore; if it veered, the ice would drift to sea, where, ultimately, in the uttermost agony of cold and hunger, every man would yield his life. The plight was manifest, familiar to them, every one; but they were wise in weather lore: they had faith in the consistency of the wind that blew; and, in the reaction from bestial terror, they bandied primitive jokes from pan to pan—save the skipper, who had lost all that he had, and was helplessly downcast: caring not a whit whether he lived or died; for he had loved his schooner, the work of his hands, his heart’s child, better than his life. It chanced that Salim Awad, who loved the star-eyed daughter of Khouri, and in this land sought to ease the sorrow of his passion—it chanced that this Salim was alone with Tommy Hand, the cook’s young son—a tender lad, now upon his first voyage to the Labrador. And the boy began to whimper. “Dad,” he called to his father, disconsolate, “I wisht—I wisht—I was along o’ you—on _your_ pan.”