As they hurried across the last floe, the rain fell, and the wind blew heavily, dashing huge cakes against the windward side with a ceaseless crashing of broken ice. Before they could reach the end of the field, they saw their own turn as if on a pivot, and grind slowly past the leeward point of the one across which they pressed at full speed. Their efforts were in vain, for before they could reach the verge their refuge was twenty feet distant; but Regnar was equal to the emergency.
"Cast loose your rope, Charley," said he; and in five seconds he had coiled and whirled it twenty feet across the intervening chasm, to Peter, who seized and retained it. "Now, La Salle, follow me," he cried; and springing upon a floating fragment, he balanced himself with his pole until he reached a more stable support farther from the berg.
The impetus, however, carried him too far away, and La Salle had to choose between committing himself to a fragment without rope or pole, to be tossed about by the rising sea, or to wait until Regnar should reach the floe, and return for him in the boat. He chose the latter, but soon had the pleasure of seeing Regnar safely landed on the floe, from whence, in almost less time than it takes to tell it, the three launched their boat and paddled up to the place where La Salle awaited their arrival, intently watching the performance of their improvised life-boat.
He noted with pleasure that she drew little water, and that the light paddles drove her through the short, toppling sea with considerable speed, while her weather-boards prevented the shipping of any water. Leaping aboard, they soon crossed the narrow lead, and running under the lee of the ice-hills, drew their boat to the hut.
"If you have anything you want to be sure to keep, stow it in the boat," was La Salle's first order, as he saw the sea begin to dash across the windward end of the floe, while, whining with fear, the young seals were shoved and pushed, by the flippers of their dams, farther and farther up on the higher ice, until, tamed by fear, they surrounded the little hollow containing the hut.
Food, weapons, clothes, and ammunition were all deposited in the boat, as well as her mast, sail, and paddles, while her painter, attached to her sharp-pronged grapnel, lay coiled on her half-deck forward. All that afternoon the wind and sea arose, until, amid the drenching rain, they could hear around them the clamor of the terrified seals, the continual crash of breaking ice, and the sough of the heavy sea, whose spray drove over them in constantly increasing showers.