Part 19

“And she nigh rammed the _Nequasset_ in the fog the last trip I made up the coast. It was simply touch and go, Mr. Fogg, and all her fault. We were following the rules to the letter.”

“And that's one way of spoiling the business of a steamboat line,” snapped Fogg. He added, to himself, “But it isn't my way!”

“I'm sorry, but I have been trained to believe that a record for safety is better than all records for speed, sir.”

“I let Jacobs go because he was old-fashioned, Mayo. This is the age of taking chances--taking chances and getting there! Business, politics, railroading, and steam-boating. The people expect it. The right folks do it.”

“You are general manager of this line, Mr. Fogg. Do you order me to make schedule time, no matter what conditions are?”

“You are the captain of this boat. I simply want you to deliver up-to-date goods. As to how you do it, that is not my business. I'm not a sea-captain, and I don't presume to advise as to details.”

Captain Mayo was young, He knew the 'longcoast game. He was ambitious. Opportunity had presented itself. He understood the unreasoning temper of those who sought dividends without bothering much about details. He knew how other passenger captains were making good with the powers who controlled transportation interests. He confessed to himself that he had envied the master of the rushing _Triton_ who had swaggered past as if he owned the sea.

Till then Mayo had been the meek and apologetic passer-by along the ocean lane, expecting to be crowded to one side, dodging when the big fellow bawled for open road.

He remembered with what haste he always manouvered the old _Nequasset_ out of the way of harm when he heard the lordly summons of the passenger liners. Was not that the general method of the freighter skippers? Why should he not expect them to get out of his way, now that he was one of the swaggerers of the sea? Let them do the worrying now, as he had done the worrying and dodging in the past! He stepped back to his window, those reflections whirling in his brain.

“This is no freighter,” he told himself. “Fogg is right. If I don't deliver the goods somebody else will be called on to do it, so what's the use? I'll play the game. Just remember--will you, Mayo--that you've got your heart's wish, and are captain of the _Montana_. If I lose this job on account of a placard with red letters, I'll kick myself on board a towboat, and stay there the rest of my life.”

He yanked a log-book from the rack and noted the steamer's average speed from the entries. He signaled to the engine-room through the speaking-tube.

“Give her two hundred a minute, chief!” he ordered.

And fifteen seconds later, her engines pulsing rhythmically, the big craft was splitting fog and water at express speed, howling for little fellows to get out from underfoot.

Down in the gleaming depths of her the orchestra was lilting a gay waltz, silver clattered over the white napery of the dining-room, men and women laughed and chattered and flirted; men wrote telegrams, making appointments for the morrow at early hours, and the wireless flashed them forth. They were sent with the certainty on the part of the senders that no man in these days waits for tide or fog. The frothing waters flashed past in the night outside, and they who ventured forth upon the dripping decks glanced at the fan of white spume spreading into the fog, and were glad to return to cozy chairs and the radiance of the saloon.

High up forward, in the pilot-house, were the eyes and the brains of this rushing monster. It was dark there except for the soft, yellow gleam of the binnacle lights. It was silent but for the low voice of a mate who announced his notations.

Occasionally the mates glanced at each other in the gloom when a steamer's whistle sounded ahead. This young captain seemed to be a chap who carried his nerve with him! They were used to the more cautious system of Captain Jacobs.

The master did not reduce speed. He leaned far out, his hand at his ear. The third time an unknown sounded her blast he took a quick glance at the compass.

“Two points shift--so she shows,” he said aloud. “We'll pass her all right.”

The change in the direction of the sound had assured him. A few minutes later the whistle voiced a location safely abeam. But the next whistle they heard sounded dead ahead, and increased in volume of sound only gradually. They were overtaking a vessel headed in the same direction.

Captain Mayo pulled the cord oftener and sounded more prolonged, more imperious hoots. He ordered no change in his course. He was headed for the Point Judith whistler, and did not propose to take chances on fumbling by any detours. The craft ahead at last seemed to recognize the voice of its master. The sound of the whistle showed that it had swung off the course.

The mate mumbled notations.

“All ears out!” ordered the captain. “We ought to make that whistler!” And in the next breath he said: “There she is!” He pointed a wet hand ahead and slightly to port. A queer, booming grunt came to them. “You're all right, old girl,” he declared. “Jacobs wasn't over-praising you.” He reached over the sill and patted the woodwork of his giant pet. He turned to the quartermaster. “East, five-eighths south,” was his direction.

“East, five-eighths south, sir!”

“What's the next we make, captain?” asked the general manager from the gloom at the rear of the pilot-house.

“Sow and Pigs Lightship, entrance of Vineyard Sound, sir.”

“Good work! I'm going to take a turn below. See you again! What can I tell any uneasy gentleman who is afraid he'll miss a business appointment in the morning?”

“Tell him we'll be on time to the dot,” declared the captain, quietly.

Mr. Fogg closed the pilot-house door behind himself and chuckled when he eased his way down the slippery ladder.

Mr. Fogg sauntered through the brilliantly lighted saloon, hands in his pockets, giving forth an impression of a man entirely at ease. Nobody appeared to recognize the new general manager of the Vose line, and he attracted no special attention. But if any one had been sufficiently interested in Mr. Fogg to note him closely it would have been observed that his mouth worked nervously when he stood at the head of the grand stairway and stared about him. His jowls sagged. When he pulled out his handkerchief his hand trembled.

He descended the stairs to the main-deck and peered about in the smoking-quarters, running his eyes over the faces of the men gathered there. All at once he lifted his chin with a little jerk and climbed the stairs again. A big man tossed away a cigar and followed at a respectful distance. He pursued Mr. Fogg through the saloon and down a corridor and went into a stateroom on the general manager's heels.

“By gad, Burkett, I'm getting cold chills!” exploded Mr. Fogg, as soon as the door was closed.

“Don't understand just why.”

“Those people out there--I've just been looking 'em over. It's monkeying with too big a proposition, Burkett. You can't reckon ahead on a thing like this.”

“Sure you can. I've doped it right.”

“Oh, I know you understand what you're talking about, but--”

“Well, I ought to know. I've been pilot for the re-survey party on the shoals for the last two months. I know every inch of the bottom.”

“But the panic. There's bound to be one. The rest of 'em won't understand, Burkett. It's going to be awful on board here. I'll be here myself. I can't stand it.”

“Look here, governor; there won't be any panic. She'll slide into the sand like a baby nestling down into a crib. There isn't a pebble in that sand for miles. Half of this bunch of passengers will be abed and asleep. They won't wake up. The rest will never know anything special except that the engines have stopped. And that ain't anything unusual in a fog. It's a quiet night--not a ripple. Nothing to hurt us. The wireless will bring the revenue cutter out from Wood's Hole, and she'll stand by till morning and take 'em off.”

“The theory is good. It's mostly my own idea, and I'm proud of it, and I was mighty glad to find a man of your experience to back me up with the practical details,” said Fogg, trying to fortify his faith with words but failing. “But now that it's coming down to cases I'm afraid of it.”

“Well, it's up to you, of course, governor. I insist it can be done, and done smooth, and you'll lay off this steamer nice, slick, and easy! That will put a crimp into the Vose line and make them stockholders take notice the next time a fair offer is made.”

“It's the thing to do, and I know it. The conditions are just right, and we've got a green captain to make the goat of. All set! But it's an awful thing to monkey with--eight hundred people, and no knowing how they'll take it! It came over me while I stood there and looked at 'em!”

“Sand is sand, and the whole, round earth is braced up under that sand. She can't sink. She'll simply gouge her way like a plow into a furrow, and there she'll stick, sitting straight, solid as an island--and it will be a devil of a while before they'll be able to dig her out. It's a crimp for the Vose line, I say, governor!” Malevolence glowed in Burkett's little eyes.

“Of course, the money I'm getting for this job looks good to me, governor, but my chance to put a wallop into anything that old Vose and his sons are interested in looks just as good. I wouldn't be in this just for the money end of it. I'm no pirate, but when they kicked me out of the pilot-house and posted me up and down this coast, they put themselves in line to get what's coming to 'em from me.”

“But have you considered every side of it?” pleaded Fogg. “You're the practical man in this proposition. What can happen?”

“If you do exactly what I tell you to do nothing can happen but what's on our program. Just let me stiffen you up by running the thing over once more.”

He pulled a hand-smutched, folded chart from his breast pocket and spread it over his knees. With blunt forefinger he indicated the points to which he made reference in his explanation.

“When he fetches Nobska horn on his port, bearing nor'west by west, he'll shift his course. After about five miles he's due to shift again, swinging six points to nor-rard. You'll hear the mate name the bearing of West Chop steam-whistle. Then you walk right up to the left of the compass and stand there. You may hear a little tongue-clattering for a few seconds. There'll be a little cussing, maybe, but you won't be cussed, of course. You stand right there, calm and cool, never batting an eyelid. And then it will happen, and when it does happen it will be a surprise-party all right.”

“It's wrecking a seven-thousand-ton passenger-steamer in the night!” mourned the general manager.

“It isn't! It's putting her into a safe cradle.”

“But at this speed!”

“That chap in the pilot-house is no fool. He'll get his hint in time to save her from real damage. You needn't worry!”

Fogg opened his traveling-bag and lifted out a strip of metal. He handled it as gingerly as if it were a reptile, and he looked at it with an air as if he feared it would bite him.

“That's the little joker,” said Burkett. “About two points deviation by local attraction will do the business!”

“I'm tempted to throw it overboard and call it all off, Burkett. I have put through a good many deals in my life in the big game, but this looks almost too raw. I can't help it! I feel a hunch as if something was going to miscue.”

“I've got no more to say, governor.”

“My crowd doesn't ask questions of me, but they expect results. If I don't do it, I suppose I'll kick myself in the morning.” He cocked up his ear and listened to the bawling of the liner's great whistle. “But it seems different in the night.”

“You ain't leaving any tracks,” encouraged Burkett. “And this being his first run makes it more plausible. You're here all naturally, yourself. It might seem rather queer if you made another trip. It's his first run on her, I remind you. If he makes a slip-up it won't surprise the wise guys-a mite.”

“It seems to be all set--I've got to admit it. By gad, Burkett, I have always put a thing through when I've started on it! That's why they call in the little Fogg boy. I'd rather apologize to my conscience than to--Well, never mind who he is.” He tucked the strip of metal into his inside coat pocket and buttoned the coat. “Blast it! nothing that's very bad can happen in this calm sea--and that last life-boat drill went off fine. Here goes!” declared Fogg, with desperate emphasis.

“That's the boy!” declared Burkett, encouraged to familiarity by their association in mischief.

The general manager found the night black when he edged his way along the wet deck to the pilot-house. The steamer's lights made blurred patches in the fog. Now she seemed to have the sea to herself; there were no answering whistles.

“I'm back again, Captain Mayo,” he said, as he closed the door against the night. “I hope I won't bother you folks here. I'll stay out from underfoot.” He sat down on a transom at the extreme rear of the house and smoked his cigar with nervous vehemence.

Another quartermaster succeeded the man at the wheel, the mate made his notations of dead reckoning and pricked the chart, the usual routine was proceeded with. Mayo continued at the window, head out-thrust, except when he glanced at chart or compass or noted the dials which marked the screws' revolutions.

Every now and then he put his ear to the submarine-signal receiver. At last he heard the faint, far throb of the Sow and Pigs submarine bell--seven strokes, with the four seconds' interval, then the seven strokes repeated.

A bit later he got, sweet and low as an elfland horn, the lightship's chime whistle. It was dead ahead, which was not exactly to his calculation. The tide set had served stronger than he had reckoned. He ordered the helmsman to ease her off a half-point, in order to make safe offing for the turn into Vineyard Sound.

Well up in the sound the bell of Tarpaulin Cove reassured him, and after a time he heard the unmistakable blast of the great reed horn of Nobska uttering its triple hoot like a giant owl perched somewhere in the mists.

“Nobska,” said the mate. “We are certainly coming on, sir.”

“Nobly,” agreed Captain Mayo, allowing himself a moment of jubilation, even though the dreaded shoals were ahead.

“Are you going to keep this speed across the shoals, Captain Mayo?” asked the general manager, displaying real deference.

“No, sir!” stated the captain with decision, bracing himself to give Mr. Fogg a sharp word or two if that gentleman advanced any more of his “business man's reasons” for speed. “It would not be showing due care.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that,” affirmed Mr. Fogg, heartily. “It may be a little out of place, right now, but I want you to know that I feel that I have picked out just the right man to command this ship. I'm glad of a chance to say this where your mates can hear me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fogg,” returned the young man, gratefully. “This is a soul-racking job, and I'm glad you are here to see what we are up against. I don't feel that we'll be wasting much time in crossing the shoals if we go carefully. We can let her out after we swing east of Monomoy. She's a grand old packet.”

In the gloom Fogg ran his fingers gingerly over the outside of his coat to make sure that the strip of metal was in its place.

There was silence in the pilot-house after that. Ahead there was ticklish navigation. There were the narrow slues, the crowding shoals, the blind turns of Nantucket Sound, dreaded in all weathers, but a mariner's horror in a fog.

Nobska's clarion call drew slowly abeam to port, and after due lapse of time West Chop's steam-whistle lifted its guiding voice in the mists ahead.

“Better use the pelorus and be careful about West Chop's bearing after we pass her, Mr. Bangs,” Captain Mayo warned his first mate.

As a sailor well knows, the bearing of West Chop gives the compass direction for passage between the shoals known as Hedge Fence and Squash Meadow--a ten-mile run to Cross Rip Lightship. In a fog it is vitally important to have West Chop exact to the eighth of a point.

Fogg was glad that he was alone where he sat. He trembled so violently that he set an unlighted cigar between his teeth to keep them from rattling together.

The mate was outlined against the window, his eyes on the instrument, his ear cocked. Every half-minute West Chop's whistle hooted.

“Right, sir!” the mate reported at last, speaking briskly. “I make it west by nothe, five-eighths nothe.”

Fogg rose and half staggered forward, taking a position just to the left of the wheel and compass.

“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.

“We're making water fast in the forward compartment,” came a voice through the speaking-tube.

Already they in the pilot-house could hear the ululation of women in the depths of the ship, and then the husky clamor of the many voices of men drowned the shriller cries.

Captain Mayo had seen the survivors from the schooner struggling in the water. But he rang for full speed ahead and ordered the quartermaster to aim her into the north, knowing that land lay in that direction.

“Eight hundred lives on my shoulders and a hole in her,” he told himself, while all his world of hope and ambition seemed rocking to ruin. “I can't wait to pick up those poor devils.”