He tried to think it out; but he had such horrible thoughts that he knew that course would never do. He lifted his body from his seat and tried to stand up. He could not, the first time, or the second, but the third he held his feet. The dory was again sagging under the weight of ice; from stem to stern, gunnels, thwarts, planks inside and out, were nearly a foot thick with it. The painter coiled in the bow was big around as a barrel. Across the body of the dead boy it was beginning to pack solid. Martin gouged the gob-stick from out of the frozen bottom and began to break the ice off. He could hardly hold it with one hand, and so put both to it. A good part of the ice knocked loose and thrown over, he reapplied himself to the oars. It was plain enough to him now. “However else it comes, ’tis for you, Martin Carr, to stand to your rowin’--to stand to it till you can push your arms out no more from your shoulders, till your fingers will cling no longer to the handles, till--till you’re cold and stiff, no less, Martin Carr, than the poor boy there before you. If that comes, well and good, you’ve done your best. ’Tis to shore you must reach, or be picked up, or die to your oars. And mind it always, Martin Carr-- Christian burial for Jack Teevens’s boy.” So he rowed on. All that day and all that long night he rowed--all through a snow-storm that enveloped him like ever-rolling white clouds, and through which only his fisherman’s instinct kept him to his course. “‘Twill be east-no’the-east this wind--if I know wind at all, and ’tis no’the by west you’re to head, Martin. Two points for’ard of the port beam you’ll keep that wind, and there you are, Martin, for the nearest point of Newf’undland--if ever you get there. But, oh, ’tis mortal cold and mortal tirin’,” he muttered, and yet rowed on, regarding his arms not as his own, but as a mechanism directed by some inner force and instinct that he did not recognize as part of himself. Four full days and nights, and for the first time Martin Carr almost admitted himself beaten. His fingers, he observed, were stiffening more frequently; the rapping against the hard gunnel no longer brought the blood. Certainly they would freeze up soon. And if they froze he would be unable to row. They might freeze stiff and straight, like Eddie’s there. And if so? He groaned--he would be unable to grasp the oars. But hold--he would fix that. If freeze his fingers must, he would see that they froze so as to be of some use to a man. And conscientiously he curled them around the handles of the oars. Stubborn they were at first, but he forced them into position and held them motionless till they were securely frozen to the handles of the oars.