"I don't make it out, sir."
"Neither do I, by sight, but I see it through my nose. I smell it."
"Well, doesn't that beat all!" muttered Rush.
He bent every energy toward piercing the black bank ahead. For the first time Steve Rush experienced a sense of uneasiness, and for the first time he realized what the perils of the sea meant. Before, it had seemed to him that, unless a ship were laboring in a great storm, there could be little danger. Once a minute the siren far back in the darkness, near the engine superstructure, would wail out a long, dismal blast which, a moment later, was answered by the ship out there somewhere ahead. The sound of the other boat's siren did not seem to Steve Rush to be getting any nearer, but to the experienced ears of Captain Simms quite the contrary was plain.
"Look steady, down there!" he warned in a sharp tone which told Rush there was something that he did not know about was likely to happen.
"Look sharp!" he repeated to Bob Jarvis.
"I'm looking. I'm——"
Steve Rush's voice cut in quick and sharp, though there was little trace of excitement in it.
"Sheer off! Ship dead ahead!"
"Hard a-port!" commanded the captain, at the same time sounding a long wailing blast on the siren.