Waterbury evening Democrat., 1888-04-04
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE ICE BREAKS AWAY.


 It was not yet o'clock. I was restless in my mind, under a great surprise, and was not sleepy. filled pipe, made me little pannikin of punch, and sat down before the fire to think. If ever I had suspected the accuracy of my conjecture that the French mans sudden astonishing indisposition was the effect of his extreme age coming upon him and breaking down the artificial vitality with which he had bristled into life under my hands, I must have found fifty signs to set my misgivings at rest in his drowsiness, nodding, bowed form, weakness, his tottering and trembling, and other features of his latest behavior. If I was right, then had reason to be thankful to Almighty God for this unparalleled and most happy dispensa- tion; for now 1 should have nothing to fear from the old roguss vindictiveness and hor- rid greed.
 Thus I sat for an hour smoking and wet ting my lips with the punch, while the fire burned low, so eXulting in the thought of my escape from the treacherous villain had re- covered from the grave and in the feeling that l might now be able to go to rest, to move here and there, to act as I pleased without being haunted and terrified by the shadow of his foul intent, that I hardly gave my mind for moment to the situation of the schooner nor to the barren consequences of my fine scheme of mines
 The wind blew strong. I could hear the hu1atning of it in every fiber of the vessel. The bed on which she rested trembled to the blows of the seas upon the rocks. From time to time, in the midst of my musing, I started to the sharp claps of parted ice. Still feeling sleepless I threw a few coals on the fire, and, catching sight of the pirate flag, p1Nn, op1it f ha f1aol. xx-,Ja fl, would permit, and sat down to contemplate the b >}us insignia embroidered on it. My mind lied with hundred fancies as my gaze went from the skull on the black field to the deaths head pipe that had fallen from the grasp of Tassard and lay on the deck; and 1 was sitting lost in a deep dream like contemplation, when I was startled and shocked into instantaneous activity by blast of noise, louder than any thunder clap that ever I heard, ringing and booming through the schooner. This was followed by a second and then third, at intervals dur ing which you might have counted ten, and I became sensible of strange, sickening motion, which lasted about twenty or thirty moments, such as might be experienced by one swiftly descending in a balloon, or in falling from a height while pent up in a coach.
 For little while the schooner heeled over so violently that the benches and all things movable in the cook room slid as far as they could go, and l heard a great chatter and commotion among the freight in the hold She then came upright again, and simultane- ously with this vast mass of water tum- bled on to the deck and washed over my head, and then fell another and then an- other, all in such a way as to make me know that the ice had broken and slipped the schooner close to the ocean, where she lay ex- posed to its surges-but not free of the ice, for she did not toss or roll.
 1 seized the lantern and SpranG to the cabin, where hung it up, and mounted the companion steps. But as put my hand to the door to thrust it open a sea broke over the side and filled the decks, bubbling and thundering past the companion hatch in such way as to advise me that I need but open the door to drown the cabin. I waited, my heart beating very hard, mad to see what had happened, but not daring to trust myself on deck lest should be immediately swept into the sea.
 Half an hour must have passed, during which time the decks were necessarily swept by the seas, insomuch that I never once durst open the door, even to look out. But nothing having happened to increase my consternation in this half hour, though the movement in the schooner was that of a very ponderous and majestical rolling and heav- ing, showing her bed to be af1oat, began to find my spirits, and to listen and wait with some buildings of hope and confidence At the expiration of this time the seas began to fall less heavily and regularly on to the deck, and presently could only hear them break ing forward, but without a quarter of their former weight, and nothing worse came aft than large, brisk showers of spray.
 1 armed myself with additional clothing for the encounter of the wet, cold and wind, and then pushed open the door and stepped forth. The sky was dark with rolling clouds, but the ice put it's own light into the air, and l could see plain if the first of, the dawn had broken. It was as I had supposed; the mass of the valley in which the schooner had been sepulchred for eight and forty years had come away from the main, and lay float ing within cables length of the coast. A stranger, more wonderful picture human eye never beheld. The island shore ran a ram part of faintness along tho darkness to where it died out in liquid dust to right and left. The schooner sat supon bed of ice that showed a surface of about half an acre; her stern was close to the sea, and about six feet above it. On her larboard quarter the slope or shoulder of the acclivity had been broken by the rupture, and you looked over the side into the clear sea beyond the limit of the ice there; but abreast of the foreshrouds the ice rose in kind of wall, great splinter it looked of what was before a small broad browed hill, and the wind or the sea having caused the body on which the schooner lay to veer this wall stood as shield betwixt the vessel and the surges, and was now receiving those blows which had heretofore struck her starboad side amidships and filled her decks.
 The wind blew from the southwest, but the trend of the island coast was northeast; and as the mass of ice was upon, in parting from the main, had foated to a cables length from the cliffs there was not much danger while the wind and sea held, of the berg If I may so term it being thrown upon the island. That the ice under the schooner was moving, and if so at what rate, it was too dark to enable me to know by observing the marks on the coast There was to be no sleep for me that night, and, knowing this, I stepped below and built up a good fire and