The former uttered a bitter little laugh, as he said: “Then we might as well watch with our eyes shut. There is no wind to move a sailing-vessel, even if there were one in all this great awful sea, which I doubt. As for a steamer, she would have to pass within fifty feet before any one aboard could either see or hear us. So I am going to try and forget our troubles in sleep, and would advise you to do the same. Good-night, old man.”
With this the disheartened lad slipped wearily down into the bottom of the canoe until his head rested on the hatch-coaming, in which position he was speedily oblivious of his melancholy surroundings. He dreamed of his adored father and dear Aunt Ruth, and was once more in his far-away, well-loved Eastern home. So he smiled as he slept.
As Serge sat there alone amid the immensity of that silent sea, he too thought of his home in green Sitka, of the mother and sisters who were watching for him, and he groaned aloud as he realized how little chance he had of ever seeing them again. Then the brave father, whose memory had been with him all these years, seemed to appear to him with loving words. By these he was so soothed and comforted that, after a while, he too slipped down, and, with his white face upturned to the dim sky, dropped into a slumber so profound that it seemed as though nothing could ever waken him from it.
So for an hour, or perhaps more, the bidarkie, still upbearing its precious human freight, drifted through limitless watery space unguided and unwatched, save by Him who watches over all and takes note of all in this His world.
As she drifted, the tiny craft became aware of a sister-ship towering dim and formless through the mist, but drifting like herself. There is a bond of sympathy between drifting ships, called by some people the attraction of floating bodies, that impels the smaller to seek the company of the larger. So the little ship drew gradually nearer and nearer to its big sister, and was disappointed when the latter began to move away. In another minute she would have disappeared, and the sleeping lads would never have known of her presence any more than she knew of theirs, had not something so incredible and wellnigh impossible happened that it might never happen again in all the years of the world.
Just as the steamer began to move away, for the ship that had come so silently drifting through the fog was no other than the steamer Norsk, which had left St. Paul that very afternoon, something small and sharp struck Serge Belcofsky’s face with stinging force. He started up with a piercing scream of pain and fright, but instantly wide awake.
His scream was answered by a loud “Hello! Who’s there?” uttered in a clear, manly voice from the stern of the vanishing ship.
“Help! Help! Don’t leave us! Help! Help!” yelled Phil and Serge, wild with excitement, hope, and fear. At the same time they tried with desperate energy to paddle after the vision of safety that had so suddenly come to them, and now seemed about to disappear as mysteriously as it had come. It did indeed glide out of sight in the all-enshrouding fog; but ere they lost hearing of the many sounds now arising from it, a ship’s boat, manned by lusty oarsmen who uttered cheery shouts of encouragement, shot out of the mist and, guided by the voices of the lads, came towards them. In the bow stood the sturdy, well-balanced figure of a man of thirty, holding a flaring torch above his head. The closely-bearded face thus revealed was to Phil and Serge as the face of an angel, and one they would never forget.
This man was Gerald Hamer, a Western Yankee, and leader of the Yukon Trading Company, that the Norsk was taking to Fort St. Michaels. It was he who, leaning over the after-rail of the ship, just as her engines were started, after being stopped for an hour for some slight repairs, heard and answered the despairing call for help, that apparently came from the very waters beneath him. The captain lay ill in his cabin, and the first officer, a thick-headed fellow, who understood English very imperfectly, was in charge of the ship.
When Gerald Hamer ran forward, told him of what he had heard, and begged him, in the name of humanity, to stop his ship and send a boat to the relief of those who were crying for help, the fellow refused to do so.