Explore "The Rise of Roscoe Paine" by Joseph C. Lincoln on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The fog had come almost without warning. When, after leaving the bank, at four o'clock or thereabouts, I walked down to the shore and pulled my skiff out to where the Comfort lay at her moorings, there had not been a sign of it. Now I was near the entrance of the bay, somewhere abreast Crow Point, and all about me was gray, wet blankness. Sitting in the stern of the little launch I could see perhaps a scant ten feet beyond the bow, no more.
It was the sudden shift of the wind which had brought the fog. When I left the boat house there had been a light westerly breeze. This had died down to a flat calm, and then a new breeze had sprung up from the south, blowing the fog before it. It rolled across the water as swiftly as the smoke clouds roll from a freshly lighted bonfire. It blotted Denboro from sight and moved across the bay; the long stretch of beach disappeared; the Crow Point light and Ben Small's freshly whitewashed dwellings and outbuildings were obliterated. In ten minutes the Comfort was, to all appearances, alone on a shoreless sea, and I was the only living creature in the universe.