They knew this, and it was to their credit that they obeyed when Dampier gave the word to put the helm up and trim the sheets over. Their leader, however, stood a little apart with a hard-set face, and he looked forward over the plunging bows, for he was troubled by a sense of responsibility such as he had not felt since he had, one night several years ago, asked for volunteers. He realised that an account of these men's lives might be demanded from him.
It was a fortnight later, and they had twice made a perilous landing without finding any sign of life on or behind the hammered beach, when they ran into the first of the ice. The grey day was almost over, and the long heave ran sluggishly after them faintly wrinkled here and there, when creeping through a belt of haze they came into sight of several blurrs of greyish white that swung with the dim, green swell. The _Selache_ was slowly lurching over it with everything aloft to the topsails then. Dampier glanced at the ice disgustedly.
"Earlier than I expected," he said. "Anyway, it's a sure thing there's plenty more where that came from."
"Big patch away to starboard!" cried a man in the foremast shrouds.
Dampier turned to Wyllard. "What are you going to do?"
The skipper laughed grimly. "Well," he said, "that's quite simple. Get out of this, and head her south just as soon as we can, but I guess that's not quite what you mean."
"No," admitted Wyllard. "I meant for the next few hours or so. In a general way, we're still pushing on."
"Then I'm not worrying much about pushing her through. That ice is light and scattered, and as she's going it won't hurt her much if she plugs some in the dark. It's what we're going to do the next two weeks I'm not sure about. If there's ice we mayn't fetch the creek the chart shows where we'd figured on laying her up in. It's still most a hundred miles to the north of us. The other inlet I'd fixed on is way further south."
This brought them back to the difficulty they had grappled with at many a council. The men they were in search of might have gone either north or south; or they might, though this seemed less likely, have gone inland, if, indeed, any of them survived.
"If we only knew how they'd headed," said Wyllard quietly. "Still, right or not, I'm for pushing on."