"Moses-Josephs" ducked in thanks, and the captain locked the door behind him, and sat at his desk with the "old brown wallet" before him. "I vill count him once," he confided to the barometer, "for fear he may have ewaporated while I forgot him."
His glance fell next on the picture of his wife, framed in silver against the wall. As he slowly counted the rustling notes, he talked aloud to her in German, as he had done many times in sheer loneliness and longing:
"Four hundred pounds—the first four hundred pounds came hard, my Flora, didn't it? Ten years we saved it while I was fourth and third officer in the company. One thousand pounds—we had a grand celebration when that was landed high and dry, eh? Fifteen hundred—it is a grand investment this. Two thousand pounds—it is a fine fortune, but we would be rich with nothing."
The square-hewn face softened and the flinty blue eye was misty as the captain bundled the notes into the wallet and stooped to open the little safe beneath the desk. The combination, always puzzling for him, was unusually tricky, and as he wrestled with it the speaking tube whistled near his ear.
"There's thick fog ahead, sir. We'll be into it before long," rumbled the voice of the chief officer from the bridge.
The captain hastily thrust the wallet into the top drawer of his desk, wriggled into a heavy reefer, and went on the bridge. A dense belt of darkness hung low ahead on the water and curtained the stars. Presently this barrier strangely streaking the clear sky was changed to dirty, gray clouds, then into blinking mist. Thus the fog shut down like wool.
The lamenting whistle of the Wasdale at once began to protest against this game of hide-and-seek. The bridge indicator signaled "half speed," and the vessel stole ahead as if in nervous dread, like a blind horse in a crowded thoroughfare.
Before long she began to feel her way with frequent pauses, while those on watch, from bridge to crow's nest, listened, listened. Their eyes were useless; their ears dreaded lest they hear too loud reply to the siren that shouted over and over again to this world of gray nothingness that the Wasdale was abroad. The ship crept ahead, slowed to listen, crept ahead again, but the responses to her outcries so soon became softened or silent that they held no menace.
The hour was near midnight. In their staterooms, the cabin passengers awoke to cast sleepy abuse at the fog-horn, and turn over again to slumber, warm and dry, believing themselves as secure as in their own homes. On the bridge an uncouth, dripping specter in oil-skins suddenly threw back his head and spun round to face the starboard quarter as if he had felt the sting of a bullet.
A moment's waiting, the fog-horn of the Wasdale moaned again, and from out in the baffling pallor came the ghost of a reply, nearer than when last heard, louder than when its previous warning had startled the captain.