s work.

There must be land to the eastward, though nothing but the spinning mill
is visible. The land is below the level of the sea. There is probably
an entrance to some canal behind the moving sandbank. This is one of the
waste-places of the world--a place left clean on sailors' charts; no
one passes that way. These banks are as deadly as many rocks which have
earned for themselves a dreaded name in maritime story. For they never
relinquish anything that touches them. They are soft and gentle in their
embrace; they slowly suck in the ship that comes within their grasp.
Their story is a long, grim tale of disaster. Their treasure is vast and
stored beneath a weight, half sand, half water, which must ever baffle
the ingenuity of man. Fog, the sailors' deadliest foe, has its home on
these waters, rising on the low-lying lands and creeping out to sea,
where it blows to and fro for weeks and weeks together. When all the
world is blue and sunny, fog-banks lie like a sheet of cotton-wool on
these coasts.

"Barrin' fogs--always barrin' fogs!" Captain Cable had said as his last
word on leaving the Signal House. "If ye wait a month, never move in a
fog in these waters, or ye'll move straight to Davy Jones!"

And chance favored him, for a gale of wind came instead of a fog, one
of those May gales that sweep down from the northwest without warning or
reason.

At sunset the _Olaf_ had crept cautiously in from the west--a
high-prowed, well-decked, square-rigged steamer of the old school, with
her name written large amidships and her side-lights set aft. Captain
Petersen was a cautious man, and came on with the leadsman working like
a clock. He was a man who moved slowly. And at sea, as in life, he who
moves slowly often runs many dangers which a greater confidence and
a little dash would avoid. He who moves slowly is the prey of every
current.

Captain Petersen steamed in behind the beacon. He sighted the windmill
very carefully, very correctly, very cautiously. He described a
half-circle round the bank hidden a few feet below the muddy water. Then
he steamed slowly seawards, keeping the windmill full astern and the
beacon on his port quarter. When the beacon was bearing southeast he
rang the engine-room bell. The steamer, hardly moving before, stopped
dead, its bluff nose turned to the wind and the rustling waves. Then
Captain Petersen held up his hand to the first mate, who was on the high
forecastle, and the anchor splash