Part 86

His tour of investigation showed him that except for her smashed bow the steamer was intact. Her helplessness there in the sand was the more pitiable on that account.

He had not begun to take account of stock of his own responsibility for this disaster. The whirl of events had been too dizzying. As master of the ship he would be held to account for her mishap. But to what extent had he been negligent? He could not figure it out. He realized that excitement plays strange pranks with a man's consciousness of linked events or of the passage of time. He could not understand why the steamer piled up so quickly after the collision. According to his ample knowledge of the shoals, he had been on his true course and well off the dangerous shallows.

His first mate met him amidship. “I sent off one of our life-boats, sir. Told 'em to go back and hunt for the men we saw in the water. They found two. Others seem to be gone.”

“I'm glad you thought of it, Mr. Bangs. I ought to have attended to it, myself.”

“You had enough on your hands, sir, as it was. She was the Lucretia M. Warren, with granite from Vinal-haven. That's what gave us such an awful tunk.”

“Who are the men?”

“Mate and a sailor. They've had some hot drinks, and are coming along all right.”

“We'll have a word with them, Mr. Bangs.”

The survivors of the Warren were forward in the crew's quarters, and they were still dazed. They had not recovered from their fright; they were sullen.

“I'm sorry, men! Sailor to sailor, you know what I mean if I don't say any more. It's bad business on both sides. But what were you doing in the fairway?”

“We wa'n't in the fairway,” protested a grizzled man, evidently the mate. He was uneasy in his borrowed clothes--he had surrendered his own garments to a pantryman who had volunteered to dry them.

“You must have been,” insisted Captain Mayo.

“I know we was all of two miles north of the regular course. I 'ain't sailed across these shoals for thirty years not to know soundings when I make 'em myself. Furthermore, she'll speak for herself, where she's sunk.”

The captain could not gainsay that dictum.

The mate scowled at the young man.

“I've got a question of my own. What ye doing, yourself, all of two miles out of your course, whanging along, tooting your old whistle as if you owned the sea and had rollers under you to go across dry ground with, too?”

“I was not two miles out of my course,” protested the captain, and yet the sickening feeling came to him that there had been some dreadful error, somewhere, somehow.

“When they put these steamers into the hands of real men instead of having dudes and kids run 'em, then shipping will stand a fair show on this coast,” declared the mate, casting a disparaging glance at Mayo's new uniform. “It was my watch on deck, and I know what I'm talking about. You came belting along straight at us, two points out of your course, and I thought the fog was playing tricks, and I didn't believe my own ears. You have drowned my captain and four honest men. When I stand up in court they'll get the straight facts from me, I can tell you that. And they tell me it's your first trip. I might have knowed it was some greenhorn, when I heard you coming two points off your course. You'd better take off them clothes. I reckon you've made your last trip, too!”

It was the querulous railing of a man who had been near death; it was the everlasting grouch of the sailing-man against the lordly steamboater. Mayo had no heart for rebuke or retort. What had happened to him, anyway? This old schooner man seemed to know exactly what he was talking about.

“If you don't believe what I'm telling you, go out on deck and see if you can't hear the Hedge Fence whistle,” advised the mate, sourly. “If she don't bear south of east I'll eat that suit they're drying out for me. And that will show you that you're two miles to the norrard of where you ought to be.”

On his way to the pilot-house Captain Mayo did hear the hollow voice of the distant whistle, with its double blast and its long interval of silence. The sound came from abaft his beam and his disquietude increased.

Then the acute realization was forced in upon him that he had the general manager of the line to face. The captain had not caught sight of his superior during the excitement; he wondered now why Mr. Fogg had effaced himself so carefully.

The red coal of a cigar glowed in a corner of the pilothouse. From that corner came curt inquiry: “Well, Captain Mayo, what have you got to say about this?”

“I think I'll do my talking after I have had daylight on the proposition, sir.”

“Don't you have any idea how you happened to be off your course so far?” asked Fogg, his anxiety noticeable in his tones.

“How do you know I was off my course?”

“Well--er--why, well, you wouldn't be aground, would you, if you hadn't lost your way?”

“I didn't lose my way, Mr. Fogg.”