"What did 'e say?"
"Nothin', sir."
Apparently the children were not alone in finding this singular, for after another minute the mate descended from the bridge, walked aft, and followed his chief down the companion. He stayed below for close on a quarter of an hour, the steamer all this while moving dead slow, with just a lazy turn now and then of her propeller. When he returned it was with a bottle in his hand and a second bottle under his arm.
"Cracked as a drum," he announced to the seaman Lloyd on his way back to the bridge. "Says 'e's 'ad a revelation."
"A wot?"
"A revelation. Says 'e 'eard a voice from 'eaven las' night, tellin' 'im as Faith was dead in these times; that if a man only 'ad faith 'e could let everything else rip . . . and," concluded the mate heavily, resting his unoccupied hand on the ladder, "'e's down below tryin' it."
The seaman did not answer. The mate ascended again, and vanished in the fog. After a pause a bell tinkled deep down in the bowels of the ship. Her propeller began to churn the water, very slowly at first, then with gathering speed, and the Evan Evans forged ahead, shouldering her way deeper and deeper into the fog.
It had certainly grown denser. There was not the slightest reason for the children to hide. No one came near them; they could see nothing but the wet and dirty deck, the cook's galley close by (in which, as it happened, the cook lay in drunken slumber) and a boat swinging on davits close above their heads, between them and the limitless grey. Bill had disappeared some time before the skipper came aboard and was busy, no doubt, in the engine-room. In the shrouded bows one of the crew was working a fog-horn at irregular intervals, and for a while every blast was answered by a hoot from the steam-whistle above the bridge.
This lasted three hours or more. Then, though the fog-horn continued spasmodically, the whistle fell unaccountably silent. The children scarcely noted this; they were occupied with staring into the fog.
Of a sudden the bridge awoke to life again, and now with the bell. Ting . . . ting, ting, ting—ting—ting, ting, ting then ting, ting again.