Through the forenoon the chase on the course back to San Francisco continued without change. By eleven o'clock both yachts were moving through occasional light blotches of fog, though the two craft still moved in sight of each other. An hour later, however, the two yachts, with speed now down to eight miles an hour, entered a dense, white gloom in which they were soon shut out from sight of each other. Now, Captain Tom was reduced to the old trick of going by sound.
Fortunately, the "Victor" sounded a fog-horn at regular intervals of sixty seconds, as did the "Panther."
"I'm not going to take any chances, however, sir," Tom confided to the owner. "I'm going to keep close enough to hear her machinery, too."
Passing through the fog, the unseen "Victor" was off the better part of three hundred yards to port of the "Panther."
Of a sudden, however, there came a note that was new. Tom and Joe, in the captain's cabin, heard it, and ran out on deck. Davis was bending over the starboard rail of the bridge in his effort to comprehend the new sound.
"Too-whoo-oo!" Nearly abeam, and some three hundred yards off to starboard, that new sound came—a fog-horn identical with the "Victor's."
"What on earth is the trick, now?" wondered Joe Dawson.
"I'd be willing to give a day's pay to guess it all at once," responded the young skipper.
"Too-whoo-oo!" sounded the "Panther's" fog-horn. "Too-whoo-oo!" came the answer, from port, presumably from the "Victor's" fog-horn. "Too-whoo-oo!" came like an echo from starboard.