could
not do that, it cut through them. The windrowed ice beating and
crushing under the bows took strange, distorted, glistening shapes.
Now another such shape appeared before them; where the glare dissipated
to a bare glow in the swirling snow, he saw a vague shadow. The man
moving the searchlight failed to see it, for he swung the beam on. The
shadow was so dim, so ghostly, that Alan sought for it again before he
hailed; he could see nothing now, yet he was surer, somehow, that he
had seen.

"Something dead ahead, sir!" he shouted back to the bridge.

The bridge answered the hail as the searchlight pointed forward again.
A gust carried the snow in a fierce flurry which the light failed to
pierce; from the flurry suddenly, silently, spar by spar, a shadow
emerged--the shadow of a ship. It was a steamer, Alan saw, a long,
low-lying old vessel without lights and without smoke from the funnel
slanting up just forward of the after deckhouse; it rolled in the
trough of the sea. The sides and all the lower works gleamed in
ghostly phosphorescence, it was refraction of the searchlight beam from
the ice sheathing all the ship, Alan's brain told him; but the sight of
that soundless, shimmering ship materializing from behind the screen of
snow struck a tremor through him.

"Ship!" he hailed. "Ahead! Dead ahead, sir! Ship!"

The shout of quick commands echoed to him from the bridge. Underfoot
he could feel a new tumult of the deck; the engines, instantly stopped,
were being set full speed astern. But Number 25, instead of sheering
off to right or to left to avoid the collision, steered straight on.

The struggle of the engines against the momentum of the ferry told that
others had seen the gleaming ship or, at least, had heard the hail.
The skipper's instant decision had been to put to starboard; he had
bawled that to the wheelsman, "Hard over!" But, though the screws
turned full astern, Number 25 steered straight on. The flurry was
blowing before the bow again; back through the snow the ice-shrouded
shimmer ahead retreated. Alan leaped away and up to the wheelhouse.

Men were struggling there--the skipper, a mate, and old Burr, who had
held the wheel. He clung to it yet, as one in a trance, fixed, staring
ahead; his arms, stiff, had been holding Number 25 to her course. The
skipper struck him and beat him away, while the mate tugged at the
wheel. Burr was torn from the wheel now, and he made no resistance