Ford's respect for Dabney Kinzer was growing, hourly. Here was this overgrown gawk of a green country boy, just out of his roundabouts, who had never spent more than a day at a time in the great city, and never lived in any kind of a boarding-house: in fact, here was a fellow who had had no advantages whatever, coming out as a sort of a hero. Even Ford did not quite understand it, Dab was so quiet and matter-of-course about it all; and as for the youngster himself, he had no idea that he was behaving any better than any other boy could, should and would have behaved, in those very peculiar circumstances. At all events, however, the gay and buoyant little "Swallow," with her signal-lantern swinging at her mast-head, was soon dancing away through the deepening darkness and the fog, and her steady young commander was congratulating himself that there seemed to be a good deal less of wind and sea, even if more of mist. "I couldn't expect everything to suit me," he said to himself. "And now I hope we sha'n't run down anybody. Hullo! Isn't that a red light, though the haze, yonder?" CHAPTER XII. There was yet another "gathering" of human beings on the wind-swept surface of the Atlantic, that evening, to whose minds it had come with no small degree of anxiety. Not, perhaps, as great as that of the three families over there on the shore of the bay, or even of the boys, tossing along 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 anything but easy in their minds. Had they no pilot on board? To be sure they had, but they had, somehow, seemed to bring that fog along with them, and the captain had a half-defined suspicion that neither he nor the pilot knew exactly where they were. That is a bad condition for a great ship to be in, and that, too, so near a coast which requires good seamanship and skillful pilotage in the best of weather. Not that the captain would have confessed his doubt to the pilot, or the pilot to the captain, and that was where the real danger lay. If they could only have permitted themselves to speak of their possible peril, it would probably have disappeared.