Part 22

There was silence in the pilot-house after that. Ahead there was ticklish navigation. There were the narrow slues, the crowding shoals, the blind turns of Nantucket Sound, dreaded in all weathers, but a mariner's horror in a fog.

Nobska's clarion call drew slowly abeam to port, and after due lapse of time West Chop's steam-whistle lifted its guiding voice in the mists ahead.

“Better use the pelorus and be careful about West Chop's bearing after we pass her, Mr. Bangs,” Captain Mayo warned his first mate.

As a sailor well knows, the bearing of West Chop gives the compass direction for passage between the shoals known as Hedge Fence and Squash Meadow—a ten-mile run to Cross Rip Lightship. In a fog it is vitally important to have West Chop exact to the eighth of a point.

Fogg was glad that he was alone where he sat. He trembled so violently that he set an unlighted cigar between his teeth to keep them from rattling together.

The mate was outlined against the window, his eyes on the instrument, his ear cocked. Every half-minute West Chop's whistle hooted.

“Right, sir!” the mate reported at last, speaking briskly. “I make it west by nothe, five-eighths nothe.”

Fogg rose and half staggered forward, taking a position just to the left of the wheel and compass.

“East by south, five-eighths south,” the captain directed the helmsman. “Careful attention, sir. Tide is flood, four knots. Make the course good!”

The quartermaster repeated and twirled his wheel for the usual number of revolutions to allow a three-points change.

Captain Mayo stepped back and glanced at the compass to make certain that his helmsman was finding his course properly. “What in tophet's name is the matter with you, man?” he shouted. “Bring this ship around! Bring her around!” He grabbed the wheel and spun it. “You're slower than the devil drawing molasses,” raged Mayo, forgetting his dignity.

“She must have yawed,” protested the man. “I had her on her course, sir. I supposed I had her over.”

“You are not to suppose. You are to keep your eyes on that compass card and move quicker when I give an order.”

The helmsman's eyes bulged as he stared at the compass. While he had winked his eyes, so it seemed to him, the true course had fairly straddled away from the lubber line.

In his frantic haste Captain Mayo put her over too far. He helped the man set her on the right course. Then he signaled half speed. The devious and the narrow paths were ahead of them..

“That's an almighty funny jump the old dame made then,” pondered the quartermaster. But he was too well trained to argue with a captain. He accepted the fault as his own, and now that she was on her course, he held her there doggedly.

Even the Montana's half speed was a respectable gait, and the silent crew in her pilot-house could hear the sea lathering along her sides.

“What do you make of that, Mr. Bangs?” the captain asked, after a prolonged period of listening.

“Bell, sir!”

“But the only bell in that direction would be on Hedge Fence Lightship in case her whistle has been disabled.”

“Sounds to me like a vessel at anchor.”

“But it's right in the fairway.” Captain Mayo convinced himself by a glance at the compass. “No craft would drop her hook in the fairway. That's no bell on the Hedge Fence,” reflected the captain. “It's a schooner's bell. But sound often gets freaky in a fog. We're on our course to the fraction, and we've got to keep going!”

And after a moment the bell ceased its clangor. It was a distant sound, and its location was indefinite even to a sharp ear.

“It strikes me that sounds in general are a little warded all of a sudden,” said the captain to his mate. “I'll swear that I can hear Hedge Fence's five-second blasts now. But there she howls off the starboard bow. The clouds must be giving us an echo. We've got to leave it to the compass.”

A skilful mariner is careful about forsaking the steady finger of a proved compass in order to chase sounds around the corner in foggy weather. He understands that air strata raise the dickens with whistle-blasts. There are zones of silence—there is divergence of sound.

Fogg held his position, his legs braced, and nobody paid any especial attention to him. They in the pilothouse were too busy with other affairs.

There is one sound in thick weather that tells a navigator much. It is the echo of his own whistle.

The big steamer was hoarsely hooting her way.

Suddenly there was a sound which fairly flew up and hit Captain Mayo in the face. It was an echo. It was the sound of the Montana's whistle-blast flung back at him from some object so near at hand that there was barely a clock-tick between whistle and echo.

The captain yelped a great oath and yanked his bell-pulls furiously. “That echo came from a schooner's sails,” he shouted.

Then, dead ahead, clanged her bell. The next instant, plunging along at least eight miles an hour, in spite of engines clawing at full speed astern, the towering bow smashed into the obstacle in her path.

It was a mighty shock which sent a tremor from stem to stern of the great fabric. They saw that they hit her—a three-masted schooner at anchor, with her sails set, dingy canvas wet and idle in the foggy, breathless night. But their impact against her was almost as if they had hit a pier. The collision sent them reeling about the pilot-house. As they drove past they saw her go down, her stern a splintered mass of wreckage, in which men were frantically struggling.

“That's a granite-lugger! See her go down, like a stone!” gasped Mate Bangs. “My God! What do you suppose she has done to us forward?”

“Get there. Get there!” roared Captain Mayo. “Get there and report, sir!”

But before the chief mate was half-way down the ladder on his way the wailing voice of the lookout reported disaster. “Hole under the water-line forward,” he cried.

“There are men in the water back there, sir,” said a quartermaster.

“We're making water fast in the forward compartment,” came a voice through the speaking-tube.

Already they in the pilot-house could hear the ululation of women in the depths of the ship, and then the husky clamor of the many voices of men drowned the shriller cries.

Captain Mayo had seen the survivors from the schooner struggling in the water. But he rang for full speed ahead and ordered the quartermaster to aim her into the north, knowing that land lay in that direction.

“Eight hundred lives on my shoulders and a hole in her,” he told himself, while all his world of hope and ambition seemed rocking to ruin. “I can't wait to pick up those poor devils.”

In a few minutes—in so few minutes that all his calculations as to his location were upset—the Montana plowed herself to a shuddering halt on a shoal, her bow lifting slightly. And when the engines were stopped she rested there, sturdily upright, steady as an island. But in her saloon the men and women who fought and screamed and cursed, beating to and fro in windrows of humanity like waves in a cavern, were convinced that the shuddering shock had signaled the doom of the vessel. Half-dressed men, still dizzy with sleep, confused by dreams which blended with the terrible reality, trampled the helpless underfoot, seeking exit from the saloon.

The hideous uproar which announced panic was a loud call to the master of the vessel. He understood what havoc might be wrought by the brutal senselessness of the struggle. He ran from the pilot-house, stepping on the feet of the general manager, who was stumbling about in bewildered fashion.

“Call all the crew to stations and guard the exits,” Captain Mayo commanded the second mate.

On his precipitate way to the saloon the captain passed the room of the wireless operator, and the tense crackle of the spark told him that the SOS signal was winging its beseeching flight through the night.

Three men, half dressed, with life-preservers buckled on in hit-or-miss fashion, met him on the deck, dodged his angry clutch, and leaped over the rail into the sea, yelling with all the power of their lungs.

A quartermaster was at the captain's heels.

“Get over a life-boat on each side and attend to those idiots!” roared Mayo.

He thrust his way into a crowded corridor, beating frantic men back with his fists, adjuring, assuring, appealing, threatening. He mounted upon a chair in the saloon. He fairly outbellowed the rest of them. Men of the sea are trained to shout against the tempest.

“You are safe! Keep quiet! Sit down! This steamer is ashore on a sand-bank. She's as solid as Bunker Hill.” He shouted these assurances over and over.

They began to look at him, to pay heed to him. His uniform marked his identity.

“You lie!” screamed an excited man. “We're out to sea! We're sinking! Where are your life-boats?”

Bedlam began again. Like the fool who shouts “Fire!” in a throng, this brainless individual revived all the fears of the frenzied passengers.

Mayo realized that heroic action was necessary. He leaped down from the chair, seized the man who had shouted, and beat the fellow's face with the flat of his hard hand.

That scene of conflict was startling enough to serve as a real jolt to their attention. They hushed their cries; they looked on, impressed, cowed.

“If there's any other man in this crowd who wants to tell me I'm a liar, let him stand out and say so,” shouted Captain Mayo. “You're making fools of yourselves. There's no danger.”

He released the pallid and trembling man of whom he had made an example and stepped on to a chair. He put up his hand, dominating them until he had secured absolute silence.

“You—you—you!” he said, crisply, darting finger here and there, pointing out individuals. “You seem to have more level heads than the rest, you men! Go forward where the man is casting the lead. Cast the lead yourselves. Come back here and report to these passengers, as their committee. I'm telling you the truth. There's no water under us to speak of.” He remained in the saloon until his committee returned.

The man who reported looked a bit sheepish. “The captain is right, ladies and gentlemen. We could even see the sand where she has plowed it up—they've got lanterns over the rail. There's no danger.”

A steward trotted to Captain Mayo and handed him a slip of paper. The captain read the message and shook the paper in the faces of the throng.

“The revenue cutter Acushnet has our wireless call and is starting, and the Itasca will follow. I advise you to go to bed and go to sleep. You're perfectly, absolutely safe. You will be transferred when it's daylight. Now be men and women!”

He hurried out on deck. His men were hoisting aboard the three dripping, sputtering passengers who had run amuck.

“And those same men would look after a runaway horse and sneer that he didn't have any brains,” remarked Captain Mayo, disgustedly.

For the next half-hour he was a busy man. He investigated the Montana's wound, first of all. He found her flooded forward—her nose anchored into the sand with a rock-of-ages solidity.

His heart sank when he realized what her plight meant from the wrecking and salvage viewpoint. In those shifting sands, winnowed constantly by the rushing currents of the sound, digging her out might be a Gargantuan task, working her free a hopeless undertaking.

His tour of investigation showed him that except for her smashed bow the steamer was intact. Her helplessness there in the sand was the more pitiable on that account.

He had not begun to take account of stock of his own responsibility for this disaster. The whirl of events had been too dizzying. As master of the ship he would be held to account for her mishap. But to what extent had he been negligent? He could not figure it out. He realized that excitement plays strange pranks with a man's consciousness of linked events or of the passage of time. He could not understand why the steamer piled up so quickly after the collision. According to his ample knowledge of the shoals, he had been on his true course and well off the dangerous shallows.

His first mate met him amidship. “I sent off one of our life-boats, sir. Told 'em to go back and hunt for the men we saw in the water. They found two. Others seem to be gone.”

“I'm glad you thought of it, Mr. Bangs. I ought to have attended to it, myself.”

“You had enough on your hands, sir, as it was. She was the Lucretia M. Warren, with granite from Vinal-haven. That's what gave us such an awful tunk.”

“Who are the men?”

“Mate and a sailor. They've had some hot drinks, and are coming along all right.”

“We'll have a word with them, Mr. Bangs.”

The survivors of the Warren were forward in the crew's quarters, and they were still dazed. They had not recovered from their fright; they were sullen.

“I'm sorry, men! Sailor to sailor, you know what I mean if I don't say any more. It's bad business on both sides. But what were you doing in the fairway?”

“We wa'n't in the fairway,” protested a grizzled man, evidently the mate. He was uneasy in his borrowed clothes—he had surrendered his own garments to a pantryman who had volunteered to dry them.

“You must have been,” insisted Captain Mayo.

“I know we was all of two miles north of the regular course. I 'ain't sailed across these shoals for thirty years not to know soundings when I make 'em myself. Furthermore, she'll speak for herself, where she's sunk.”

The captain could not gainsay that dictum.

The mate scowled at the young man.

“I've got a question of my own. What ye doing, yourself, all of two miles out of your course, whanging along, tooting your old whistle as if you owned the sea and had rollers under you to go across dry ground with, too?”

“I was not two miles out of my course,” protested the captain, and yet the sickening feeling came to him that there had been some dreadful error, somewhere, somehow.

“When they put these steamers into the hands of real men instead of having dudes and kids run 'em, then shipping will stand a fair show on this coast,” declared the mate, casting a disparaging glance at Mayo's new uniform. “It was my watch on deck, and I know what I'm talking about. You came belting along straight at us, two points out of your course, and I thought the fog was playing tricks, and I didn't believe my own ears. You have drowned my captain and four honest men. When I stand up in court they'll get the straight facts from me, I can tell you that. And they tell me it's your first trip. I might have knowed it was some greenhorn, when I heard you coming two points off your course. You'd better take off them clothes. I reckon you've made your last trip, too!”

It was the querulous railing of a man who had been near death; it was the everlasting grouch of the sailing-man against the lordly steamboater. Mayo had no heart for rebuke or retort. What had happened to him, anyway? This old schooner man seemed to know exactly what he was talking about.

“If you don't believe what I'm telling you, go out on deck and see if you can't hear the Hedge Fence whistle,” advised the mate, sourly. “If she don't bear south of east I'll eat that suit they're drying out for me. And that will show you that you're two miles to the norrard of where you ought to be.”

On his way to the pilot-house Captain Mayo did hear the hollow voice of the distant whistle, with its double blast and its long interval of silence. The sound came from abaft his beam and his disquietude increased.

Then the acute realization was forced in upon him that he had the general manager of the line to face. The captain had not caught sight of his superior during the excitement; he wondered now why Mr. Fogg had effaced himself so carefully.

The red coal of a cigar glowed in a corner of the pilothouse. From that corner came curt inquiry: “Well, Captain Mayo, what have you got to say about this?”

“I think I'll do my talking after I have had daylight on the proposition, sir.”

“Don't you have any idea how you happened to be off your course so far?” asked Fogg, his anxiety noticeable in his tones.

“How do you know I was off my course?”

“Well—er—why, well, you wouldn't be aground, would you, if you hadn't lost your way?”

“I didn't lose my way, Mr. Fogg.”

“What did happen, then?”

“That's for me to find out.”

“I'm not going to say anything to you yet, Captain Mayo. It's too sudden—too big a blow. It's going to paralyze the Vose line.” Mr. Fogg said this briskly, as if he were passing small talk on the weather.

“I'm thankful that you're taking the thing so calmly, sir. I've been dreading to meet you.”

“Oh—a business man in these days can't allow himself to fly to pieces over setbacks. Optimism is half the battle.”

But Mayo, sitting there in that dark pilot-house for the rest of the night, staring out into the blank wall of the fog and surveying the wreck of his hopes, was decidedly not optimistic.

XXI ~ BITTER PROOF BY MORNING LIGHT

Bad news, bad news to our captain came That grieved him very sore; But when he knew that all of it was true, It grieved him ten time more, Brave boys! It grieved him ten times more! —Cold Greenland.

Morning brought to him neither cheer nor counsel. The winds swept the fog off the seas, and the brightness of the sunshine only mocked the gloom of Captain Mayo's thoughts.

He was most unmistakably far off his course. He took his bearings carefully, and he groped through his memory and his experience for reasons which would explain how he came to be away up there on Hedge Fence. Two of the masts of the sunken stone-schooner showed above the sea, two depressing monuments of disaster. He took further bearings and tested his compass with minute care. So far as he could determine it was correct to the dot.

It was a busy forenoon for all on board the steamer. The revenue cutters took off the passengers. Representatives of the underwriters came out from Wood's Hole on a tug. The huge Montana, set solidly into its bed of sand, loomed against the sky, mute witness of somebody's inefficiency or mistake.

Late in the day Captain Mayo and General-Manager Fogg locked themselves in the captain's cabin to have it out.

When the master had finished his statement Mr. Fogg flicked the ash from his cigar, studied the glowing end for a time, and narrowed his eyes.

“So, summing it all up, it happened, and you don't know just how it happened. You were off your course and don't know how you happened to be off your course. You don't expect us to defend you before the steamboat inspectors, with that for an explanation, Mayo?”

“All I can do is to tell the truth at the hearing, sir.”

“They'll break you, sure as a mule wags ears. There are five dead men inside that wreck yonder. Don't you reckon you'll be indicted for manslaughter?”

“I shall claim that the collision was unavoidable.”

“But you were off your course—were in a place you had no business to be in. That knocks your defense all to the devil. You are in almighty bad, Mayo. You must wake up to it.”

The young man was pale and rigid and silent.

“The Vose line is in bad enough as it is, without trying to defend you. I suppose I'll be blamed for putting on a young captain. Mayo, I am older than you are and wiser about the law and such matters. Why don't you duck out from under, eh?”

“You mean run away?”

“I wouldn't put it quite as bluntly as that. I mean, go away and keep out of sight till it quiets down. If you stay they'll put you on the rack and get you all tangled up by firing questions at you. And what will you gain by going through the muss? You've got to agree with me that the inspectors will suspend you—revoke your license. Here's this steamer here, talking for herself. If you stay around underfoot, and all the evidence is brought out at the hearing, then the Federal grand jury will take the thing up, probably. They'll have a manslaughter case against you.”