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78 "Can't keep up much longer," he apologized thickly; "stood it about as long as I can. Take your trick and give me forty winks."

"You're a brick!" Alan protested. "Why didn't you call me sooner?"

"No good! I knew the way—you didn't. That is, I did until this accursed fog closed down. Now—God knows where we are—by my reckoning somewhere in Nantucket Sound."

Grasping a handle on the wheel-box, he jerked it three times; and the automobile horn blared raucously a threefold response up forward.

"Keep that going, three blasts, then a minute interval—and if the devil takes care of his own we may escape being run down."

With a sigh he collapsed upon the deck, and was almost instantly asleep. Hither and yon in the obscurity fog-signals of other shipping sounded a concert of discordance—the man-power horn of a catboat crying the warning back to the deep-throated whistle of a coastwise steamship and the impertinent drumming of a motor-boat's exhaust with the muffler cut out. This last boxed the compass, sounding now here, now there, now near, now far; though the complaints of other shipping diminished in volume and died away in the distance, giving place to others, still the plutter-plutter of that motor was never altogether lost.