“All right. If that breeze gets us we’ll be O. K. And say, bud, keep an ear out for some ship the old man thinks he’s going to get a message from, will you?” “I reckon it’s a message from the dead,” I said cryptically, but the mate was gone. Within an hour Captain Trinder came down. He looked rather bleary about the eyes because of his long night’s vigil. If he had turned in when leaving Duluth he would have at least got some sleep, because we didn’t run into the fog until about five o’clock. But the watchman told me he had gone all over the ship--he had never been on her before--from the chain locker forward to the fan tail aft. “Any news?” he said at once, just as though he fully expected me to hand him a nice printed radiogram from the bottom of the lake. “No, sir. Do you think the fog will hold on, sir?” He didn’t answer my foolish question. How could any one tell how long a fog would last? “How near are we, captain?” “Oh, we’ve got plenty of time yet. I’ve been keeping up speed, and we ought to be within range of the foghorn in about an hour. But I’d like to have word, though.” With that he tore out, and I could hear him thumping across the deck above as he went back to his point of vantage over the wheelhouse. We slid along at our regular speed of between twelve and fifteen knots. The fog clung almost to the water’s edge, and the small waves seemed trying to dissolve it by lapping it up. There was not a breath of wind except what went past us due to the steamer’s motion. This was wet and warm, as though the weather were perspiring. I kept very close watch on the radio signals that came along. They were few and far between. In those days the range of a ship’s signals was not very great, and when we neared the copper-laden hills around Calumet what signals there were seemed to be swallowed up and reached us only as little, disconnected blurbs of noise. There was no static, and if it had not been for the fog, the day would have been perfect. The sun rose higher and higher, and seemed trying its best to break through. At ten o’clock I picked up a Canadian report indicating “fine weather, moderate variable winds.” I was sorry for the skipper. For twenty years he had avoided this passage, and now here he was near the spot where the end of his first voyage with his wife had so tragically come. He was in a fog, and he had the responsibility of three hundred passengers on his shoulders in addition to other worries.