And young Raynor, whistling cheerily, passed on to his room to wash up and change.
Jack gave a shudder. “If they hit anything.” Well did he know what a small chance the men in the grimy, sooty regions of the fire-room and engine-space would stand in such a contingency. It would be their duty to keep up the fires till the rising water put them out, and then—every man for himself!
Woo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo! boomed the siren.
“Ugh! You sound as cheerful as a funeral,” shuddered Jack; and, to divert his mind into a more cheerful channel, he fell to running the wireless scale, in the hope that he might find himself in tune with some other ship with fresh news of the white monsters of the northern polar cap.
But the white silences were broken by no winged messages; and so the afternoon waned to twilight, and night descended once more about the fog-bound ship.
The strain of it all began to tell on the young wireless man. He made hourly reports to the shrouded figures on the bridge that looked like exaggerated ghosts in the smother of fog. The lights on the ship shone through the obscurity like big, dim eyes, and the constant booming and shrieking of the siren grew nerve-racking.
Vigilance was the order of the night. Bridge, deck and engine-room were all alike keyed up to the highest pitch of watchfulness. At any moment a message of terror might come clanging from the bridge to the engineers’ region.
The suspense made Jack, strong-nerved as he was, feel like crying out. If only something would happen, he felt that he would not care so much, but this silent creeping through the ghostly fog was telling on him.
Half dozing at times, Jack sat nodding at his key. All at once, without the slightest warning what all hands had been waiting for with keyed-up nerves happened.
From somewhere dead ahead the shriek of the siren was hurled back through the fog in a volley of echoes.