"Hard down helm! Le' go foresheet!" answered to the Mate's cry, the Old Man himself wrenching desperately at the spokes of the wheel. Sharp ring of a metal sheave, hiss of a running rope, clank and throb of engines, thrashing of sails coming hard to the mast, shouts!
Out of the mist a huge shadowy hull ranges alongside, the wash from her sheering cutwater hissing and spluttering on our broadside.
Three quick, furious blasts of a siren, unintelligible shouts from the steamer's bridge, a churning of propellers; foam; a waft of black smoke—then silence, the white, clammy veil again about us, and only the muffled throb of the liner's reversed engines and the uneasy lurch of our barque, now all aback, to tell of a tragedy averted.
"Oh! The murderin' ruffians! The b——y sojers!" The crisis over, the Old Man was beside himself with rage and indignation. "Full speed through weather like this! Blast ye!" he yelled, hollowing his hands. "What—ship—is—that?"
No answer came out of the fog. The throb of engines died away in a steady rhythm; they would be on their course again, 'slowed down,' perhaps, to twelve knots, now that the nerves of the officer of the watch had been shaken.
Slowly our barque was turned on heel, the yards trimmed to her former course, and we moved on, piercing the clammy barrier that lay between us and a landfall.
"Well, young fellers? Wha' d'ye think o' that now?" Bo'sun was the first of us to regain composure. "Goin' dead slow, worn't 'e? 'Bout fifteen, I sh'd siy! That's the wye wi' them mail-boat fellers: Monday, five 'undred mile; Toosd'y, four-ninety-nine; We'n'sd'y, four-ninety-height 'n 'arf—'slowed on haccount o' fog'—that's wot they puts it in 'er bloomin' log, blarst 'em!"
"Silence, there—main-deck!" The Old Man was pacing across the break of the poop, pausing to listen for sound of moving craft.
Bo'sun Hicks, though silenced, had yet a further lesson for us youngsters, who might one day be handling twenty-knot liners in such a fog. In the ghostly light of fog and breaking day he performed an uncanny pantomime, presenting a liner's officer, resplendent in collar and cuff, strutting, mincing, on a steamer's bridge. (Sailormen walk fore and aft; steamboat men, athwart.)
"Haw!" he seemed to say, though never a word passed his lips. "Haw! Them wind-jammers—ain't got no proper fog'orns. Couldn't 'ear 'em at th' back o' a moskiter-net! An' if we cawn't 'ear 'em, 'ow do we know they're there, haw! So we bumps 'em, an' serve 'em dem well right, haw!"