It had certainly grown denser.  There was not the slightest reason for the children to hide.  No one came near them; they could see nothing but the wet and dirty deck, the cook’s galley close by (in which, as it happened, the cook lay in drunken slumber) and a boat swinging on davits close above their heads, between them and the limitless grey.  Bill had disappeared some time before the skipper came aboard and was busy, no doubt, in the engine-room.  In the shrouded bows one of the crew was working a fog-horn at irregular intervals, and for a while every blast was answered by a hoot from the steam-whistle above the bridge.

This lasted three hours or more.  Then, though the fog-horn continued spasmodically, the whistle fell unaccountably silent.  The children scarcely noted this; they were occupied with staring into the fog.

Of a sudden the bridge awoke to life again, and now with the bell. Ting . . . ting, ting, ting—­ting—­ting, ting, ting then ting, ting again.

The fog-horn stopped as though to listen.  By and by, as from minute to minute the bridge continued this eccentric performance, even the children became aware that something was amiss.

Abruptly the ringing ceased, ceased just as a tall man—­it was the Scotch engineer—­emerged from somewhere below and stood steadying himself by the rail of the ladder.

“What the deevil?” he demanded angrily, staring aloft.  “What the deev—­”

Here he collapsed on the lowest step. (A Glasgow man must be drunk indeed before he loses his legs.)

The seaman Sam Lloyd came running, jumped over the engineer’s prostrate body and climbed to the bridge.  There was a brief silence, and then he shouted down—­

“Dave!  Dave Morgan!”

“Ahoy!  What’s wrong there?”

Another seaman came staggering aft.

“Run, one o’ you an’ fetch up th’ old man.  Mate ’e’s dead drunk ’ere, an’ the ship pointin’ any way this ’arf hour.”

“I—­I canna,” said the engineer, raising himself erect from the waist and collapsing again; but the other staggered on and disappeared down the companion hatchway.  Two or three minutes passed before he re-emerged.

“It’s no go,” he shouted up.  “Skipper says as we must ’ave Faith.  Called me an onbelievin’ generation o’ vipers, an’ would I kindly leave ’im alone to wrastle.”

“Faith?” fairly yelled the voice from the bridge.  “Tell ’im the man’s lyin’ ‘ere outside o’ three pints o’ neat Irish—­tell ’im she’s been chasin’ ’er own tail for this two—­three hours—­tell ‘im the sound o’ breakers is distinkly audibble on the lee bow—­tell ’im—­oh, for Gawd’s sake tell ’im anythink so’s it’ll fetch ’im up!”

Dave Morgan dived down the companion again, and after a long interval returned with the skipper at his heels.  The old man was bare-headed now, and the faint breeze, blowing back his grey locks, exposed a high intellectual forehead underset with a pair of eyes curiously vague and at the same time introspective.