Shorn of her power, the Holter still followed her helmsman's course. But it became a listless, sluggish course. The ship was like a suddenly freed slave that does not know what to do with his own freedom.
For six years she had plodded Lake Michigan, always with the biggest possible paying load and always working at top speed. Many times she had groaned and protested, but she had been forced to obey the dictates of the engine that turned her side wheel. Now the engine, the tyrant, was dead from misuse of its own power. But without it the Holter had neither mind nor will of her own.
She smashed head-on into a mountainous wave that set her decks awash. For another moment or two she held her course, carried by her own momentum. Then, slowly and unwillingly, as though afraid to do such a thing and not trusting herself to do it, she swung broadside to the waves.
A muffled shout floated out of the engine room. Fat little Captain Schultz, a slicker covering his round body and anxiety written on his face, was peering down an opened hatch. Sluicing rain pelted the slicker and bounded off. Ramsay's eyes found the deck hand.
Eyes wide and mouth agape, he was standing near the wheelhouse. Naked terror was written on his face as he stared at something out in the lake. Ramsay followed his gaze.
To the starboard, the right side of the Holter, the lake seemed strangely calm. It was as though the wind and the storm did not strike with outrageous strength there, and oddly as if that part of the water might be commanded by some inexplicable force. Unable to tear his gaze away, expecting to see something special, Ramsay kept his eyes riveted on the calm water.
He saw a ripple, but not one born of storm and wind. There was something here that had nothing to do with the driving wind, or the cold rain, or even the tremendous waves. The deck hand covered his eyes with his hand.
At that instant, a great white apparition swam up through the water. It was a ghost, a creature of nightmares, a terrible thing seen only in terror-ridden moments. Ramsay controlled an impulse to shout or to flee. The thing came up to within inches of the surface and wallowed there like a greasy fat hog. Whitish-gray, rather than pure white, it flipped an enormous tail while it sported near the surface.
The thing, a fish, seemed fully nine feet long and possibly it carried a hundred pounds of weight for every foot. It bore no scales but seemed to be clothed in an overlapping series of armored plates. Its snout, pointed somewhat like a pig's, was tipped with barbels, or feelers. Dull eyes showed.
Again Ramsay controlled his fear. The thing, sober judgment told him, was nothing more or less than a great sturgeon, the mightiest fish of these inland waters. The fact that it was white, rather than the conventional gray-green or olive-green, was of no significance whatever. All living creatures, from elephants down to mice, occasionally produced an albino. It was not beyond reason that there could be an albino sturgeon.