And so, the oars secured beyond accident or future weakness, Martin Carr resumed his solemn way to the shore. How far to the shore then? He did not know--maybe forty, maybe fifty, maybe sixty, maybe one hundred miles. For all he knew he might have been rowing zigzag all over the ocean, running S’s, as sometimes green hands steered a vessel over the wide sea. However, row he did, gray winter skies and grim slate-colored seas about him. Lonesome? Aye, it was lonesome. In thirty years of fishing Martin Carr had never known so lonesome a time. Consider it--no sail, no smoke, no gull even to come screaming astern, and the boy’s frozen body ever facing him in the stern. Only the slap of chopping seas under the dory’s low gunnels--that and the tumble of green-gray seas--interminable seas, curling like serpents, rolling always toward one and spitting foam as they rolled. Always that--that and the frozen body in the stern, and the thoughts that _would_ come to him. Such thoughts! Sometimes Martin Carr thought he would move the body to the bow, where he might not have it forever before his eyes. But again he wasn’t quite sure that he would not see it just as clearly even if behind him; and somehow he was not quite sure that he did want it moved, even if he could do it now, which he doubted, his own fingers frozen as they were to the oars. Or his hands once removed, he was not sure he could reshape them to the handles of the oars again. So perhaps it was just as well, and he faced the dead boy anew. For two days and two nights more, with his dead dory-mate’s face ever staring at him from the stern--for six frosty days and six freezing winter nights in all--through that northern wind, and sea, and snow, and hail, Martin Carr rowed the dory. And made land at last. It did not look much--an iron-bound shore, where the sheer rock rose straight as the wall of a church and against which the high seas beat furiously. He could not land there--he had to hunt a harbor. He made out one at last--an inlet, with signs of people near by. His eyes were no more than pin-points in his head, but he could make out the five or six low huts set up on the rocks, and for them he headed. The way was caked in ice, and that made hard work of it for a man who had come so far without food or drink to force his way through. Using the oars as poles, he might with less labor have beaten a channel through, but his fingers, frozen to the oars, were not yet to be unsealed. He could do only one thing, and that was row. And so he rowed, ever rowed, making a channel by forcing the bow of the dory over the ice till of its own weight it broke through and went on.