Awaiting him, the skipper stood upon the bridge, tall in his spotless uniform of navy blue, grizzled, austere on this far height with all his ship beneath him. The days and nights of lonely mastery, when every movement of that enormous structure, every revolution throughout its complicated mechanism, and every act among those hundreds on board were his to answer for; those days and nights were over now. In these two remaining hours, when he faced the climax of that struggle against the elements into which every voyage resolves itself, the law had given him a companion. As he had looked upon the land whose imminence is the final ordeal for every deep-water captain, he had seen approaching him the only man who had a right to share his responsibility without taking his orders. And now, as MacKenzie gained the bridge and these two exchanged greetings, each called the other by his title, captain. MacKenzie looked into the northeast, appraising the hostile elements--the raging breakers on the bar, the swirling currents hidden in North Channel, the headlands ravenous for wreckage, the gray fog that clung to the slopes above them. Striving to read from their aspect the signs of any conspiracy against this ship, whose safety was his trust now, he studied the fog longer than all the others; he watched for any movement which might betray the connivance of the treacherous hill wind. But the fog remained motionless on the heights. He spoke; the great liner turned under his feet. From the red-hulled lightship she departed northward and a little to the east, and she left the distant harbor entrance to the right of her foaming wake. For seven miles she traveled, skirting the outside of the roaring bar, until she had passed the curve where the horseshoe hooks inward parallel to the land. Here she reached an unmarked spot on the tumbling waters which MacKenzie knew as well as a landsman knows his own doorstep. Again he spoke; the huge bulk swerved as obediently as a living creature, found the new course, and plunged down North Channel with the Potato Patch roaring on her right, and on her left the surf under the ringing cliffs. Between these bounds, which narrowed as the ship went on, he guided her, while the great, green seas hammered her forward deck and hidden currents strove desperately against her keel, now fighting to drive her on the rocks and now to drag her upon the shoal. Four miles, and then she shook the last hampering deluge from her bows as she emerged between Bonita’s teeth and the last bar buoy. At the outer entrance of the Golden Gate she lingered for a moment, as one who hesitates before plunging into a final peril.