"Deaf!" muttered Bart. "Deaf as posts! Well, that does make the thing a bit clearer."
The reaction from the tremendous exertions which Merriwell had put forth made itself felt now. The excitement having passed, he felt almost exhausted. He climbed up as high as he could on the boards, and Bart, who was terribly benumbed and chilled from long exposure to the cold water, held him thus while he rested.
"It was too much for you, old man!" he said consolingly.
"I had to try it!" was Merriwell's answer.
"The fog is shutting down again," said Bart.
"But it won't stay down. The sea looked red out toward the west. I think it will clear away to-night."
He was in no mood to say more. And the raft drifted on, while the gray fog settled round them, and its chill and gloominess seemed to go to their very hearts.
But as Merriwell had predicted, the fog lifted again, and at the end of another hour of an experience as terrible as either had ever been called to undergo, the gray bank again swung up toward the sky. The sun was sinking redly into the sea, and night was at hand—and what night might mean in their weakened and chilled condition, adrift on the great ocean toward which they seemed to be so resistlessly borne, they dared not think.
"The sloop!" Bart cried, rousing himself.
Merriwell lifted himself and looked. It was the sloop, sure enough. A little to the southward of east, with its dingy sails furled and their bulging shapes turned to great lumps of gold, with the mast standing out in dark tracery against the red skyline, lay the fishing-sloop.