drew up in a spasm. The
_Richardson_, they said, was looking for boats; how long could men live
in little boats exposed to that gale and cold?

He turned back to the others about the radio cabin; the glow from
within showed him faces as gray as his; it lighted a face on the
opposite side of the door--a face haggard with dreadful fright. Old
Burr jerked about as Alan spoke to him and moved away alone; Alan
followed him and seized his arm.

"What's the matter?" Alan demanded, holding to him.

"The four blasts!" the wheelsman repeated. "They heard the four
blasts!" He iterated it once more.

"Yes," Alan urged. "Why not?"

"But where no ship ought to be; so they couldn't find the ship--they
couldn't find the ship!" Terror, of awful abjectness, came over the
old man. He freed himself from Alan and went forward.

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 ascende