Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII

Next day they fell in with more sails, all circling slowly from
the east northerly towards the west. But just when they expected
to make the shoals by the Virgin the fog shut down, and they
anchored, surrounded by the tinklings of invisible bells. There
was not much fishing, but occasionally dory met dory in the fog
and exchanged news.

That night, a little before dawn, Dan and Harvey, who had been
sleeping most of the day, tumbled out to "hook" fried pies. There
was no reason why they should not have taken them openly; but they
tasted better so, and it made the cook angry. The heat and smell
below drove them on deck with their plunder, and they found Disko
at the bell, which he handed over to Harvey.

"Keep her goin'," said he. "I mistrust I hear somethin'. Ef it's
anything, I'm best where I am so's to get at things."

It was a forlorn little jingle; the thick air seemed to pinch it
off; and in the pauses Harvey heard the muffled shriek of a
liner's siren, and he knew enough of the Banks to know what that
meant. It came to him, with horrible distinctness, how a boy in a
cherry-coloured jersey - he despised fancy blazers now with all a
fisherman's contempt - how an ignorant, rowdy boy had once said it
would be "great" if a steamer ran down a fishing-boat. That boy
had a state-room with a hot and cold bath, and spent ten minutes
each morning picking over a gilt-edged bill of fare. And that same
boy - no, his very much older brother -was up at four of the dim
dawn in streaming, crackling oilskins, hammering, literally for
the dear life, on a bell smaller than the steward's breakfast-
bell, while somewhere close at hand a thirty-foot steel stem was
storming along at twenty miles an hour! The bitterest thought of
all was that there were folks asleep in dry, upholstered cabins
who would never learn that they had massacred a boat before
breakfast. So Harvey rang the bell.

"Yes, they slow daown one turn o' their blame propeller," said
Dan, applying himself to Manuel's conch, "fer to keep inside the
law, an' that's consolin' when we're all at the bottom. Hark to
her' She's a humper!"

"Aoooo - whoooo - whupp!" went the siren. "Wingle - tingle -
tink," went the bell. "Graaa - ouch!" went the conch, while sea
and sky were all milled up in milky fog. Then Harvey felt that he
was near a moving body, and found himself looking up and up at the
wet edge of a cliff-like bow, leaping, it seemed, directly over
the schooner. A jaunty little feather of water curled in front of
it, and as it lifted it showed a long ladder of Roman numerals -
XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., and so forth - on a salmon-coloured,
gleaming side. It tilted forward and downward with a heart-