Then, after a long, wailing blast, he suddenly lifted up his hand.

“Port a bit till I tells yer,” he called.  “That’ll do.  Keep her so.”

The next sobbing cry of the siren brought a dull prolonged echo that reverberated in the air.

“I knowed we must be gettin’ close to un,” he said; “now we’ll be havin’ all open water again fer a whiles.”

The captain was tremulous with the excitement he bravely sought to suppress, and my own heart was certainly in my throat.  We were all straining our eyes at this moment, and all at once we dimly had revealed to us something like the shadow of a great ghost-like mass that slipped by us, very fast, with a roar of the great swells bursting loudly at its foot.

“Thunder! you Sammy!” shrieked the skipper.  “I won’t have you taking such chances.  I’m just as crazy to get there as you are but I’ll be hanged if I’m going to smash my ship.”

“We’s all right now, Cap’en,” answered the old man, quietly; “I sure knows all right what we is doin’.”

The captain had taken the wheel, and he glared at his binnacle like a wild man.  Now and then he gave a swift look around him, nervously, but the old man’s assurance had some effect upon him.  Yet once I heard him snarling: 

“Any man who ever catches me cruising around this country again can have me locked up in an asylum.  After I get shut of this job they can get some one else if they ever want to come back.”

And still the fog seemed to deepen, and the moisture dripped from everything, and the very air seemed hard to breathe.  The darkness began to come and all our lights were burning, while the siren continued to moan.  Several times, in answer to it, we faintly heard mournful sounds of fishermen’s horns, and once we blindly swerved just in time to avoid running down a tiny schooner.

“Beggin’ yer pardon, sor,” the old man said to me, “seem’ as how ye ain’t busy it might be yer wouldn’t mind startin’ a bit of prayer as how we don’t smash up one o’ them poor fellows.  We jist got ter take some chances, fer I mistrust th’ Lord he be wantin’ ter save that doctor o’ ours an’ only needs be asked the right way.”

We were now shooting through that fog like lost wild things, like the ducks and geese bewildered of a stormy night, which mangle themselves against the wire nettings of light houses.  Now and then the land abeam would give forth response to the booming of our whistle.  The old man Sammy had taken the wheel and his grim face was frozen into an expression of desperate energy, as his keen little grey eyes peered through the murk.  By this time there was a heavy roll and our tall spars were slashing at the mist as if seeking to cut down an unseen enemy.  Every man on board was under a nervous tension, conscious that a big thing was being done.  For a time there had been something akin to fear in all our hearts, but after a while it left us, to make room for the delirium of blind, reckless speed.