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.