Alan followed him to the quarters of the crew, where night lunch for the men relieved from watch had been set out, and took a seat at the table opposite him. The louder echoing of the steel hull and the roll and pitching of the vessel, which set the table with its dishes swaying, showed that the sea was still increasing, and also that they were now meeting heavier ice. At the table men computed that Number 25 had now made some twenty miles north off its course, and must therefore be approaching the neighborhood where the distress signals had been heard; they speculated uselessly as to what ship could have been in that part of the lake and made the signals. Old Burr took no part in this conversation, but listened to it with frightened eyes, and presently got up and went away, leaving his coffee unfinished.
Number 25 was blowing its steam whistle again at the end of every minute.
Alan, after taking a second cup of coffee, went aft to the car deck. The roar and echoing tumult of the ice against the hull here drowned all other sounds. The thirty-two freight cars, in their four long lines, stood wedged and chained and blocked in place; they tipped and tilted, rolled and swayed like the stanchions and sides of the ship, fixed and secure. Jacks on the steel deck under the edges of the cars, kept them from rocking on their trucks. Men paced watchfully between the tracks, observing the movement of the cars. The cars creaked and groaned, as they worked a little this way and that; the men sprang with sledges and drove the blocks tight again or took an additional turn upon the jacks.
As Alan ascended and went forward to his duty, the increase in the severity of the gale was very evident; the thermometer, the wheelsman said, had dropped below zero. Ice was making rapidly on the hull of the ferry, where the spray, flying thicker through the snow, was freezing as it struck. The deck was all ice now underfoot, and the rails were swollen to great gleaming slabs which joined and grew together; a parapet of ice had appeared on the bow; and all about the swirling snow screen shut off everything. A searchlight which had flared from the bridge while Alan was below, pierced that screen not a ship's length ahead, or on the beam, before the glare dimmed to a glow which served to show no more than the fine, flying pellets of the storm. Except for the noise of the wind and the water, there had been no echo from beyond that screen since the shore signals were lost; now a low, far-away sound came down the wind; it maintained itself for a few seconds, ceased, and then came again, and continued at uneven intervals longer than the timed blasts of Number 25's whistle. It might be the horn of some struggling sailing vessel, which in spite of the storm and the closed season was braving the seas; at the end of each interval of silence, the horn blew twice now; the echo came abeam, passed astern, and was no longer to be heard. How far away its origin had been, Alan could only guess; probably the sailing vessel, away to windward, had not heard the whistle of Number 25 at all.
Alan saw old Burr who, on his way to the wheelhouse, had halted to listen too. For several minutes the old man stood motionless; he came on again and stopped to listen. There had been no sound for quite five minutes now.
"You hear 'em?" Burr's voice quavered in Alan's ear. "You hear 'em?"
"What?" Alan asked.
"The four blasts! You hear 'em now? The four blasts!"
Burr was straining as he listened, and Alan stood still too; no sound came to him but the noise of the storm. "No," he replied. "I don't hear anything. Do you hear them now?"
Burr stood beside him without making reply; the searchlight, which had been pointed abeam, shot its glare forward, and Alan could see Burr's face in the dancing reflection of the flare. The man had never more plainly resembled the picture of Benjamin Corvet; that which had been in the picture, that strange sensation of something haunting him, was upon this man's face, a thousand times intensified; but instead of distorting the features away from all likeness to the picture, it made it grotesquely identical.