But it was little comfort that Whitaker derived from contemplation of this fact. He was beginning to be more definitely perplexed and distressed. He had no watch with him, no means of ascertaining the time even roughly; but unquestionably they had been upwards of two hours if not more at full tilt, and now were braving wilder waters; and still he saw no sign of anything resembling a termination of the adventure. In fact, they were leaving behind them every likely landing place.
"Damn it!" he grumbled. "What are they aiming at—Boston?"
Near the forward wheel a miniature binnacle housing a compass with phosphorescent card, advised him from time to time, as he consulted it, of the lay of their course. They were just then ploughing almost due northeast over a broad expanse, beckoned on by the distant flicker of a gas-buoy. But the information was less than worthless, and every reasonable guess he might have made as to their next move would have proved even more futile than merely idle; for when they had rounded the buoy, instead of standing, as any reasonable beings might have been expected to, on to Fisher's Island or at a tangent north toward the Connecticut littoral, they swung off something south of east—a course that could lead them nowhere but to the immensities of the sea itself.
Whitaker's breath caught in his throat as he examined this startling prospect. The Atlantic was something a trifle bigger than he had bargained for. To dare its temper, with a southwester brewing (by every weather sign he knew) in what was to all intents an open boat, since he would never be able to leave the cockpit for an instant's shelter in the cabin in any sort of a seaway—!
He shook a dubious, vastly troubled head. But he held on grimly in the face of dire forebodings.
Once out from under the lee of Gardiner's Island, a heavier run of waves beset them, catching the boats almost squarely on the beam: fortunately a sea of long, smooth, slow shouldering rollers, as yet not angry. Now and again, for all that, one would favour the Trouble with a quartering slap that sent a shower of spray aboard her to drench Whitaker and swash noisily round the cockpit ere the self-bailing channels could carry it off. He was quickly wet to the skin and shivering. The hour was past midnight, and the strong air whipping in from the open sea had a bitter edge. His only consolation inhered in the reflection that he had companions in his misery: those who drove the leading boat could hardly escape what he must suffer; though he hoped and believed that the woman was shut below, warm and dry in the cabin.
Out over the dark waste to starboard a white light lifted, flashing. For a while a red eye showed beneath it, staring unwinkingly with a steadfast and sardonic glare, then disappeared completely, leaving only the blinking white. Far ahead another light, fixed white, hung steadily over the port counter, and so remained for over an hour.
Then most gradually the latter wore round upon the beam and dropped astern. Whitaker guessed at random, but none the less rightly, that they were weathering Block Island to the south with a leeway of several miles. Indisputably the Atlantic held them in the hollow of its tremendous hand. The slow, eternal deep-sea swell was most perceptible: a ceaseless impulse of infinite power running through the pettier, if more threatening, drive of waves kicked up by the wind. Fortunately the course, shifting to northeast by east, presently took them out of the swinging trough of the sea. The rollers now led them on, an endless herd, one after another falling sullenly behind as the two boats shot down into their shallow intervals and began to creep slowly up over the long gray backs of those that ran before.
It was after three in the morning, and, though Whitaker had no means of knowing it, they were on the last and longest leg of the cruise. They still had moonlight, but it was more wan and ghastly and threatened presently to fail them altogether, blotted out by the thickening weather. The wind was blowing with an insistent, unintermittent force it had not before developed. A haze, vaguely opalescent, encircled the horizon like a ghost of absinthe. The cold, formless, wavering dusk of dawn in time lent it a sickly hue of gray together with a seeming more substantial. Swathed in its smothering folds, the moon faded to the semblance of a plaque of dull silver, then vanished altogether. By four-thirty, when the twilight was moderately bright, Whitaker was barely able to distinguish the leading boat. The two seemed as if suspended, struggling like impaled insects, the one in the midst, the other near the edge, of a watery pit walled in by vapours.
He recognized in this phenomenon of the weather an exceptionally striking variation of what his sea-going experience had taught him to term a smoky sou'wester.