"Well, where is the schooner, if you can see her?" growled Pepper Sneed. "Steer for her if you can sight her--I can't!"
He seemed morose and angry. Perhaps it was just fear. Russ did not stop to determine that point. The operator took the steering wheel, first standing up to get an idea of his course.
"Say, it _is_ getting dark!" he cried. "Well, we'll have to go it blind. We'll pick up the schooner in a minute or two, I expect. She ought to be right over there," and he pointed.
"Humph! You're away off!" declared his companion. "The last I saw her, and I was headed right for her, she was over there," and he indicated a direction differing from that Russ had shown by at least forty-five degrees.
"I wish they'd show a light!" Russ murmured as he tried to peer through the mist and the gathering darkness. "Why don't they show a light? We could see that!"
"Maybe they don't know we're lost," suggested Pepper Sneed.
"Lost!" cried Russ. "We're not lost! We'll be up to them in a minute or so, but I do wish they'd show a light."
The motorboat _Ajax_ was chugging over the heaving water at good speed, but as far as the eyes of either of her occupants could see, she might have been driving straight into the utter desolation of a vast ocean, for not an object was in sight.
The wind had again taken up that nerve-racking moaning and groaning sound, as of an unseen giant in distress, and the spray from the crests of the waves blew in the faces of the two young men, as they crouched down behind the shelter of the half-cabin.
It seemed as though the storm had begun, had halted in its purpose, or had gone off momentarily in some other direction, and was now headed back, to sweep destruction down on those aboard the _Mary Ellen_, and the two in the motorboat.
That was a question Russ and Mr. Sneed asked of themselves over and over again as they drove into the very teeth of the storm. They had to head into it, as in the small boat no other course would have been safe. Fortunately the _Ajax_ was built dory-fashion, with high bow and stern, after the pattern of the skiffs in which the fishermen of the New Foundland banks go out in heavy weather.
"What are you going to do?" asked Mr. Sneed, as Russ increased the speed of the engine, so that the small craft fairly tore up the inclined hills of green waters, which the waves represented, and slid down them with sickening speed on the other slope.