Next they saw the body handed up by a pair of frozen hands. It was just deep enough there for Martin’s head, as he stood on bottom, to all but show clear. They took the body from him, seeing only the half-submerged head, the upstretched arms, and at the end of them the frozen, hooked fingers trying to balance the frozen body. Martin followed the body, was helped up the beach, and there lay prone. It was some time before he could move, and his first clear speech was an apology. “I’m fair worked out,” he said. “I’ve come a long way--days and nights--days and nights-- I don’t know how many; but it seems like years of rowin’ I’ve had and nothin’ to eat--nor drink. Don’t mind if I refused your drink a while ago-- I’ll take it now that Eddie’s safe, and thank ye kindly for the same.” They buried Eddie--dug his grave through the many feet of snow, lowered him into the warm, brown earth, and had the good father say prayers over him. Martin was there--stayed to the last shovelful and sent his own prayer with it. Not till that was done did he hunt for a doctor. The doctor threw up his hands when he saw the sight, but without delay went to work. To save the arms and legs the entire ten fingers and toes would have to come off. The doctor told him that. “Go ahead,” said Martin. Bandaged up and rested, the doctor asked him his story. And he told it--simply, with emphasis only on the fate of the poor lad, Jack Teevens’s boy. “But when he was gone beyond all hope, when he was actually dead,” insisted the doctor, “why didn’t you take your cardigan jacket off him, and your oil-jacket, and put them back on yourself? He was dead, and much as you cared for him he would be no worse off. And you--with your constitution--you might have saved yourself from freezing up. Why didn’t you?” “Take the clothes off the poor dead boy?” protested Martin. “Take them back after I’d put them on him? Twist and toss about his poor body after he was cold in death? I couldn’t-- I couldn’t.” “God help you,” exclaimed the doctor--“you’re ruined for life!” “Aye,” assented Martin, “ruined I am.” “You take it calmly enough. Do you realize what it means, man? You, who were such a magnificent man when you were whole and sound, do you know what it means?” Martin regarded the doctor. “Do I know?” he gazed on his bandaged hands, and looked down on his poor stumps of feet. “God help me, ’tis well I know it. Ye’ll never fish again, Martin Carr; ye’ll never haul trawl or row dory again, nor stand to a wheel, nor reef a sail. The best part of your life’s gone. Ye’re such a creature, Martin Carr, as men throw pennies to in the street. But the last thing ye did in your full man’s life--maybe Jack Teevens will remember it when in another world he meets ye, that out of love of him ye stood by his boy--were a full dory-mate to him--and at the last gave him Christian burial.” The Salving of the Bark Fuller I