Page:The Black Cat November 1916.djvu/57



BY LEROY KENNETH

HE day was heavy with the promise of wind; there was a smell of frost in the air, and the big white flakes slowly sifting down were already covering their trail across the ice. Tom O'Neil, the master watch. surveyed his gang of sealers. The regular crew was overseas to the war, and the bunch of lubbers he had taken to the ice would be helpless in a blow.

"Come on, you loafers," he shouted. "We can't skin 'em now."

He jammed his pike into a cake of drift ice to pole-vault a fissure. The cake turned when he was in the air and, as his body slapped the water, his head crashed on the ice and stunned him.

The Sculpin plunged to the rescue, Scotty whipped a drag-line into the water, and the gang pulled them onto the ice.

"I wa'n't afraid," the Sculpin chuckled, pulling his wet shirt over his head.

His drawn face, and fishy eyes that seemed always staring with fright, had won him the title, "Sculpin," the most worthless fish of the sea. He was unpopular at the sealing grounds because he wore gloves. Gloves are a woman's garment; mittens the badge of a man. The Sculpin wore gloves always, eating, hunting, or sleeping. Even now, as he humped his back to the gale and stripped to the hide to wring the freezing water from his clothes, he kept on his gloves.

"We're caught," shouted O'Neil, above the moan of the wind, as the storm drove down upon them.

The Sculpin looked at the cloud of flakes waltzing among the ice-hummocks. "Better'n gas," he yelled. "I ain't afraid."

"This is hell," chattered O'Neil, as he tried to pound the ice out of his reefer.

"Nothing like," called the Sculpin, struggling back into his crusting clothes,—"just man-sized weather."

O'Neil searched the horizon of blurring white. The maze of hummocks was confusing, and the drifts over the bodies of the dead seals were constantly changing shape. He had come due north when they "walked the ship down;" but the compass was useless on the floe, for the whole mass might have turned since morning and the ship they had left at the south, might now be north, east, or west, while the bergs he had depended on to guide them back were erased from sight in the thick sheets of snow that went racing past.

"Have to hold her down 'til