to his
progress and yet no egress.

He immediately stopped rowing and rested his oars, listening. No sound
came to him except the slap of the increasing waves and the occasional
flap of a wet fish in its last struggles.

He carried no pocket compass, and the light gave no hint of the
direction of the sun. In the five minutes that he sat there the head
of his dory swung around and, even had he known the exact compass
direction of the _Charming Lass_ before the fog, he would have been
unable to find it.

The situation did not alarm him in the least, for he had experienced
it often before. Reaching into the bow, he drew out the dinner-horn
that was part of the equipment of the dory and sent an ear-splitting
blast out into the fog.

It seemed as though the opaque walls about him held in the sound as
heavy curtains might in a large room; it fell dead on his own ears
without any of the reverberant power that sound has in traveling
across water.

Once more he listened. He knew that the schooner, being at anchor,
would be ringing her bell; but he hardly hoped to catch a sound of
that. Instead, he listened for the answering peal of a horn in one of
the other dories. Straining his ears, he thought he caught a faint
toot ahead of him and to starboard.

He seized his oars and rowed hard for several minutes in the direction
of the sound. Then he stopped, and, rising to his feet, sent another
great blast brawling forth into the fog. Once more he listened, and
again it seemed as though an answering horn sounded in the distance.
But it was fainter this time.

A gust of wind, rougher than the others, swirled the fog about him in
great ghostly sheets, turning and twisting it like the clouds of
greasy smoke from a fire of wet leaves. The dory rolled heavily, and
Code, losing his balance, sprawled forward on the fish, the horn
flying from his hand overboard as he tried to save himself.

For a moment only it floated; and then, as he was frantically swinging
the dory to draw alongside, it disappeared beneath the water with a
low gurgle.

The situation was serious. He was unable to attract attention, and
must depend for his salvation upon hearing the horns of the other
dories as they approached the schooner. Rowing hard all the time, with
frequent short pauses, he strained his ears for the welcome sound.

Sometimes he thought he caught a faint, mellow call; but he soon
recognized that these were deceptions, produced in his ears