"All right, Billy, we'll have you aboard in a minute."
"Hurry up, it's awful lonesome out here," came back Billy's cheerful hail through the fog.
Frank and Harry laid on to the rope and started to haul the pontoons and their freight inboard, but even as their hands closed on the rope the booming roar of the menacing steamer's whistle permeated the fog once more.
It seemed as if this time it was directly over them.
"Start the engine," cried Harry, as the full sense of their peril was borne in on him.
The shriek of the large vessel's whistle was now sounding almost in their ear-drums. Frank expected every minute to see the obscurity pierced by a huge black prow.
But as this thought flashed across him there came a sudden diversion. The tow-rope they were hauling on suddenly was torn from their hands, almost dragging them overboard, and though they could hardly see it they could "feel" the presence of a huge vessel going past not twenty feet astern.
"Billy!" shouted Frank as the tow-rope was jerked from his grasp.
The only reply was a grinding, rasping crash as if some great object were brushing resistlessly past a smaller one, and then the whistle boomed out again.
This time, however, its sound came in diminishing form and as the Ocean Spray cruised round blindly in the fog, searching in vain for any trace of the raft, it grew fainter and fainter and finally died away into the distance.