The stars dulled away, the dawn broke gray, and then the first long rays of the winter sun glinted the white of the crested seas. The weary man in the waist of the dory roused himself. He found himself still rowing, but that his mind had slept he felt certain. He looked about him--astern, ahead, to either side. No sail--nor smoke. He took note of the dory. Iced to a depth of six inches it was, and with every fresh slap of the sea more ice was adding. “A mile away now and we’d look like a lump of ice to any passing vessel,” he thought aloud. The no’wester whistled over the ridged seas. A no’west wind and white-tipped seas that broke over them--could man invent anything more freezing? And all night long it had been so. “Eddie,” called Martin, “Eddie-boy!” Again, “Oh, Eddie-lad-- Eddie-boy, shake yourself now, dear.” But no answer coming from the boy, Martin more closely regarded the figure in the stern. The rising rays of the sun were tinting the stiffened yellow oilskins, but the low-drawn sou’wester allowed Martin no glimpse of the features. The hands were encased in the heavy woollen mitts, which Martin now noted were coated with ice. Still, ice was no great matter. How he wished his own oilskins--what was left of them--were iced up, too. Ice kept out the biting wind. Gradually it came into his brain, even though the yet insufficient light revealed nothing of the boy’s face, that all was not quite natural. Once more a call, but no answer, not even the old familiar shifting of the legs. “Is it asleep you are, boy, and have you been asleep all night? Lad, lad, but if you’ve been asleep--” and bent over and lifted the sou’wester. The face was calm--calm as a waxen mask in a window. But the eyes--wide open! Quickly he drew off the boy’s mitts and felt of the hands within. The ice on the gunnels of the dory was not colder. Martin’s brain did not grasp it, what with his body being so numb, but his heart crowded itself inside him. He dropped back to his seat and resumed the oars. But only for a few strokes. He stood up, and with the bailer began to pound the ice off the dory. “She’ll sink else,” he said--“she’ll sink else, lad, and we’ll never get you ashore.” He broke the bailer trying to pound the ice off. He took the handle of an oar then--one of Eddie’s oars he noted dully, one of the oars which he had lightened by cutting down, to fit the boy’s feebler arms. The ice cleared away, he went back to his rowing. But again only a few strokes, when it seemed to sweep over him what it meant--the frozen body of the poor boy-- Jack Teevens’s boy. He rubbed an iced mitt across his eyes. “God, what a death for you, child! What a death! And such a beautiful boy! If ’twas a tough old knotted trawler like me-- And me that was to watch out for him! Yet to watch I meant, lad, but ’twas a long night--and a cold. And not overwarm myself was I, and I’m misdoubting, too, I slept to the oars. O God, ’tis cruel--cruel!” and dropped his head on his hands.