“Sounds to me like a vessel at anchor.”
“But it's right in the fairway.” Captain Mayo convinced himself by a glance at the compass. “No craft would drop her hook in the fairway. That's no bell on the Hedge Fence,” reflected the captain. “It's a schooner's bell. But sound often gets freaky in a fog. We're on our course to the fraction, and we've got to keep going!”
And after a moment the bell ceased its clangor. It was a distant sound, and its location was indefinite even to a sharp ear.
“It strikes me that sounds in general are a little warded all of a sudden,” said the captain to his mate. “I'll swear that I can hear Hedge Fence's five-second blasts now. But there she howls off the starboard bow. The clouds must be giving us an echo. We've got to leave it to the compass.”
A skilful mariner is careful about forsaking the steady finger of a proved compass in order to chase sounds around the corner in foggy weather. He understands that air strata raise the dickens with whistle-blasts. There are zones of silence—there is divergence of sound.
Fogg held his position, his legs braced, and nobody paid any especial attention to him. They in the pilothouse were too busy with other affairs.
There is one sound in thick weather that tells a navigator much. It is the echo of his own whistle.
The big steamer was hoarsely hooting her way.
Suddenly there was a sound which fairly flew up and hit Captain Mayo in the face. It was an echo. It was the sound of the Montana's whistle-blast flung back at him from some object so near at hand that there was barely a clock-tick between whistle and echo.
The captain yelped a great oath and yanked his bell-pulls furiously. “That echo came from a schooner's sails,” he shouted.