But the boat was doomed. They could not pull the stern free in time. The ice came on, ramming and jamming--and in an instant the stern was cut off, and was crushed to kindling-wood. The ice chewed the splinters savagely, as a husky gnaws a bone. This time there was no question of repairs. They had half a boat, and the gaunt cliffs of the shore were far away, with bits of ice dotting the black water between. They had their guns, and they fired at intervals to signal to the shore. "Evidently there ain't nobody at home," Bill remarked grimly. The pan was taking them out to the sea, just as it did with Grenfell and the dogs on that earlier memorable occasion. Bill was a venturesome soul. "I'm going to copy," he announced briefly. That meant, as I have explained, that he would jump from one cake of ice to the next. Eliza crossing the river-ice in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was nothing to the feat he set himself in that perilous, pitiless northern sea. There was no causeway to the land. He would have to do as a lumberman does in a log-jam, jumping before the object he has stepped on has time to sink with him. There would be no chance to think. He would have to keep on the move every instant, and death might be the penalty of a misstep. "Mebbe," said Bill, as coolly as though it were a question of running bases at a ball-game, "mebbe I'll git close enough to the land so some o' the boys 'll see me. Lend me your boat-hook, will you, Doctor?" The Doctor, who would rather have taken the water-hazard himself, passed over the boat-hook. Bill jumped from pan to pan, nimble as a goat. Fortune seemed to be favoring the brave. His leaps would have broken records at a track-meet. Sometimes he put out the boat-hook after the manner of a pole-vaulter, and flung himself with its aid across a terrifying chasm. But as Grenfell watched and waited in suspense, all of a sudden, to his acute dismay, he saw the pole slip from his comrade's grasp. Bill staggered on the edge of a pan, and gave a desperate wrench of the body to save himself from falling. In vain. In another instant he was struggling in the waves. In a moment more the pans might crush him, or he might be so benumbed that he could make no further effort to help himself. While the Doctor stood there in mental anguish because he could do nothing to help his comrade, he saw Bill with a desperate effort throw a burly leg over the edge of the pan and scramble out, seemingly none the worse for the ducking. All Bill could do now was to stand on his pan and let the wind and the sea take him where they would. Grenfell kept on shooting, but there was no response from the shore. Bill's pan crept nearer and nearer to the Doctor's--but not near enough to let Bill get back. At last the shooting was answered. They saw the flash of an oar--always the first signal of rescue under these conditions--and a boat hove in sight. The two men on the ice shouted excited encouragement to each other at the same instant.