Meanwhile the weather was fretting all about him. An hour, two hours passed, and what had been a little blow grew into a big one. The skin boat, light as a cork, fairly flew before it. Often it seemed to skip from wave to wave, taxing Joe’s skill at the steering paddle to the uttermost to keep it head on. To turn sidewise to the wind and sea was to be rolled over and over in the icy waters and be lost. Yet Joe kept her straight. Now and then some invisible force seemed to drag the cockleshell down, and a rush of foam came aboard, but she rose again, and Harry bailed out before the next volume of water could come in. It was wet and exciting work, but still neither boy lost his head, and still they kept afloat. There was a hissing roar in the waters and a howl of the wind overhead that made it difficult to hear one’s own voice even when shouting, but a nod of the head or a look of the eye was enough for a command from the skipper, and Harry obeyed promptly and steadily. Never had he admired Joe so before. The sturdy young whaleman seemed to glow with power as he sat erect in the stern of the umiak, his cap gone and his long hair blown about his set, watchful face, his will dominating the elements and shaping their fury to his purpose. On they drove through a period of time that seemed endless. There was no night to fall, else Harry was sure that it would have come and gone, and still Joe steered, erect and immobile as the Sphinx, while Harry bailed till he felt as if all the waters of Kotzebue Sound must have come into the boat and been thrown out again. His very arms were numb with weariness and the chill of it. How long a period five hours is can be known only by those who have passed it in physical discomfort and with great danger continually threatening, yet even such a period passes. Five hours, ten miles an hour at the very least, they were making a record passage of the sound, yet the lowering clouds and the mist blown from tempestuous waves gave them no glimpse of any land. Once Harry thought he could hear a dull booming sound, like the roar of cannon, but he could not be sure. The strain was telling on him, he knew, and he laid it to fancy. Then after a time he forgot it, for they seemed to enter a stretch of tremendous cross seas, seas which fairly leaped into the umiak and filled it faster than he could bail out. He worked with the tremendous energy of despair, and then the tumult ceased more quickly than it had arisen. The boat seemed gliding into still waters, and the booming roar grew very loud, for it sounded from behind, down the wind. He looked at Joe and saw his face lose its look of grim determination for the first time since the wind had begun to blow. Joe nodded his head over his left shoulder, and as Harry looked, a trailing cloud of mist lifted and showed a rugged cliff, in the shelter of which they were.