[CHAPTER VIII.]
IN NIGHT AND MIST.
When a couple of savage dogs or a brace of quarrelsome cats stand defying one another a bucket of cold water or a lighted fire-cracker generally gives them a perfectly new subject to think about. The argument is pretty sure to be postponed.
Something like this result came to pass when Philip and the man Belmont felt the Old Province shivering beneath them, after that terrific jar. It was followed, shout upon shout, by what each felt sure must be the beginning of alarm and of unexpected peril.
One instant the boy and the man remained motionless, silent, with startled faces.
“What was that? The boiler can’t have burst!” exclaimed Belmont. His nerves could hardly have been in a state to endure much. He sprang to the left entrance of the saloon and disappeared. Philip turned to the right, forgetting Belmont and all his schemes and threats. He was anxious to reach Gerald’s state-room and to find out what had happened. Before he had gained the middle of the cabin doors were opening. Loud exclamations came from one side and the other. He caught glimpses of semi-arrayed occupants either scrambling into their clothes or hastily appearing and looking out in terror, now this way, now that. The explosion, or whatever it was, had sounded unmistakably from the forward part and below the deck of the steamer, judging from the peculiar thickness of the sound and the dull violence of the shock. By two and three a crowd was already centering forward.
He unlocked the state-room door with trembling fingers. Gerald was sitting up on the edge of the lower berth, looking about him with an alarmed air, but plainly not at all sure that any thing in particular had waked him.
“Say—Philip,” he questioned, rubbing one of his eyes rather sleepily, “did you hear any thing just now? It’s awfully funny. But I waked up—with such a start, and now I can’t tell what on earth could have frightened me.”
“You must have heard what we all heard,” answered Philip, striving to speak composedly, while his alert ear caught vague sounds from without that were not re-assuring. “There was an odd noise, an explosion of some sort, forward a minute ago. I was just going to see what made it. I’ll bring you word.”
“An explosion? What could it have been? You don’t think it’s any thing about the boat? Are we running yet?”
“No; we were going very slowly, because of the fog, when it came. Hark! the whistle had stopped; now it goes on again. It hardly seems like any thing wrong with the steam. Very likely it was only a gas-tank, or something of that sort. I’ll hurry back.”