Part 84

“East by south, five-eighths south,” the captain directed the helmsman. “Careful attention, sir. Tide is flood, four knots. Make the course good!”

The quartermaster repeated and twirled his wheel for the usual number of revolutions to allow a three-points change.

Captain Mayo stepped back and glanced at the compass to make certain that his helmsman was finding his course properly. “What in tophet's name is the matter with you, man?” he shouted. “Bring this ship around! Bring her around!” He grabbed the wheel and spun it. “You're slower than the devil drawing molasses,” raged Mayo, forgetting his dignity.

“She must have yawed,” protested the man. “I had her on her course, sir. I supposed I had her over.”

“You are not to suppose. You are to keep your eyes on that compass card and move quicker when I give an order.”

The helmsman's eyes bulged as he stared at the compass. While he had winked his eyes, so it seemed to him, the true course had fairly straddled away from the lubber line.

In his frantic haste Captain Mayo put her over too far. He helped the man set her on the right course. Then he signaled half speed. The devious and the narrow paths were ahead of them..

“That's an almighty funny jump the old dame made then,” pondered the quartermaster. But he was too well trained to argue with a captain. He accepted the fault as his own, and now that she was on her course, he held her there doggedly.

Even the Montana's half speed was a respectable gait, and the silent crew in her pilot-house could hear the sea lathering along her sides.

“What do you make of that, Mr. Bangs?” the captain asked, after a prolonged period of listening.

“Bell, sir!”

“But the only bell in that direction would be on Hedge Fence Lightship in case her whistle has been disabled.”

“Sounds to me like a vessel at anchor.”

“But it's right in the fairway.” Captain Mayo convinced himself by a glance at the compass. “No craft would drop her hook in the fairway. That's no bell on the Hedge Fence,” reflected the captain. “It's a schooner's bell. But sound often gets freaky in a fog. We're on our course to the fraction, and we've got to keep going!”

And after a moment the bell ceased its clangor. It was a distant sound, and its location was indefinite even to a sharp ear.

“It strikes me that sounds in general are a little warded all of a sudden,” said the captain to his mate. “I'll swear that I can hear Hedge Fence's five-second blasts now. But there she howls off the starboard bow. The clouds must be giving us an echo. We've got to leave it to the compass.”

A skilful mariner is careful about forsaking the steady finger of a proved compass in order to chase sounds around the corner in foggy weather. He understands that air strata raise the dickens with whistle-blasts. There are zones of silence--there is divergence of sound.

Fogg held his position, his legs braced, and nobody paid any especial attention to him. They in the pilothouse were too busy with other affairs.

There is one sound in thick weather that tells a navigator much. It is the echo of his own whistle.

The big steamer was hoarsely hooting her way.

Suddenly there was a sound which fairly flew up and hit Captain Mayo in the face. It was an echo. It was the sound of the Montana's whistle-blast flung back at him from some object so near at hand that there was barely a clock-tick between whistle and echo.

The captain yelped a great oath and yanked his bell-pulls furiously. “That echo came from a schooner's sails,” he shouted.

Then, dead ahead, clanged her bell. The next instant, plunging along at least eight miles an hour, in spite of engines clawing at full speed astern, the towering bow smashed into the obstacle in her path.

It was a mighty shock which sent a tremor from stem to stern of the great fabric. They saw that they hit her--a three-masted schooner at anchor, with her sails set, dingy canvas wet and idle in the foggy, breathless night. But their impact against her was almost as if they had hit a pier. The collision sent them reeling about the pilot-house. As they drove past they saw her go down, her stern a splintered mass of wreckage, in which men were frantically struggling.

“That's a granite-lugger! See her go down, like a stone!” gasped Mate Bangs. “My God! What do you suppose she has done to us forward?”

“Get there. Get there!” roared Captain Mayo. “Get there and report, sir!”

But before the chief mate was half-way down the ladder on his way the wailing voice of the lookout reported disaster. “Hole under the water-line forward,” he cried.

“There are men in the water back there, sir,” said a quartermaster.