The men landed on the rock early in February. At that time there was no open water within five or six miles of the lighthouse in any direction. The men were landed on the ice and made their way up to where Campbell was waiting for them. On February 27, Campbell and his visitors left the rock to go in pursuit of the seals they had noticed on the ice the day before. His wife saw them start across the ice and then returned to her household duties. They had not been gone more than four hours, when the wind, which had been growing colder and blowing steadily from the eastward, shifted to the southwest. The southwest wind is the agency that dashes the ice fields against the cliff and breaks them up. She thought that the men, being so much lower, might not have noticed the wind, and she hoisted the danger signal. They must have seen it, for she soon caught sight of them hurrying over the ice toward the rock. They were within gunshot of the lighthouse, when the ice cracked with a sound like thunder, and a long, blue line appeared, running east and west, parallel with the lighthouse rock and with North Bird Rock, about five miles to the westward. The big crack was followed by a general splitting up of the ice floe. She saw the men standing just the other side of the open water. She saw her husband wave his hands at her and she waved back. Then the darkness came, like a great blanket dropped from the wintry skies, and men and ice were blotted from her vision. But even in her sore distress she did not forget the duty incumbent on the lighthouse keeper. She clambered up into the lantern and lighted the great oil lamp, saw that it was filled, and attended to the other duties she had seen her husband perform. Morning, when it came, gave no glimpse of her husband and his companions, nor did the third or the fourth day bring them back to her. After that the days grew into weeks, and the worse than widowed woman found herself confined to lonely and racking imprisonment on the ice-locked rock. But not for a single night did she fail to fill and light the lamp that had been her hapless husband's charge. When the Government steamer touched at Great Bird Bock, on May 5, 1897, the captain looked long and earnestly at the lighthouse perched far above him, and wondered why there was not the customary greeting. He saw no sign of life. There was the derrick rope swinging in the wind, but no moving figures at the top of the cliff, as there were wont to be. Closely scanning the rock, he saw at last a white, gaunt face at the window. In a little while a thin, tottering figure crept to the brow of the ledge, but it was some minutes before the tender's captain could recognize in that wasted being the comely woman whom he had known as Angus Campbell's wife. "Where is your husband?" he shouted. "Angus is dead," came the answer, in a faint, palsied voice, "and so are Jim Duncan and George Bryson."