CHAPTER XII.
HOW THE GAME OF "FOLLOW MY LEADER" CAN BE PLAYED AT SEA.
There was yet another gathering of human beings on the wind-swept surface of the Atlantic that evening, to whose minds the minutes and hours were going by with no small burden of anxiety to carry.
Not an anxiety, perhaps, as great as that of the three families over there on the shore of the bay, or even of the three boys tossing along through the fog in their bubble of a yacht; but the officers, and not a few of the passengers and crew, of the great iron-builded ocean-steamer were any thing but easy about the way their affairs were looking.

It would have been so much more agreeable if they could have looked at them at all.
Had they no pilot on board?
To be sure they had, for he had come on board in the usual way, as they drew near their intended port; but they had somehow seemed to bring that fog along with them, and the captain had a half-defined suspicion that neither the pilot nor he himself knew exactly where they now were.

That is a bad condition for a great ship to be in at any time, and especially when it was drawing so near a coast which calls for good seamanship and skilful pilotage in the best of weather.
The captain would not for any thing have confessed his doubt to the pilot, nor the pilot his to the captain; and that was where the real danger lay, after all.

If they could only have choked down their pride, and permitted themselves to talk of their possible peril, it would very likely have disappeared.

That is, they could at least have decided to stop the vessel till they were rid of their doubt.
The steamer was French, and her captain a French naval officer; and it is possible he and the pilot did not understand each other any too well.
It was a matter of course that the speed of the ship should be somewhat lessened, under such circumstances; but it would have been a good deal wiser not to have gone on at all.