“You are not getting much chance—to
rest,” she said, with a sigh, and got up.
I went with her to the companionway, and opened the
door. She turned and looked at me.
“Good-night.”
“Good-night, Miss Lee.”
“I—I feel very safe with you on guard,”
she said, and held out her hand. I took it in
mine, with my heart leaping. It was as cold
as ice.
That night, at four bells, I mustered the crew as
silently as possible around the jollyboat, and we
lowered it into the water. The possibility of
a dead calm had convinced me that the sooner it was
done the better. We arranged to tow the boat
astern, and Charlie Jones suggested a white light
in its bow, so we could be sure at night that it had
not broken loose.
Accordingly, we attached to the bow of the jolly-boat
a tailed block with an endless fall riven through
it, so as to be able to haul in and refill the lantern.
Five bells struck by the time we had arranged the
towing-line.
We dropped the jolly-boat astern and made fast the
rope. It gave me a curious feeling, that small
boat rising and falling behind us, with its dead crew,
and its rocking light, and, on its side above the
water-line, the black cross—a curious feeling
of pursuit, as if, across the water, they in the boat
were following us. And, perhaps because the
light varied, sometimes it seemed to drop behind,
as if wearying of the chase, and again, in great leaps,
to be overtaking us, to be almost upon us.
An open boat with a small white light and a black
cross on the side.
FROM THE CROW’S NEST
The night passed without incident, except for one
thing that we were unable to verify. At six
bells, during the darkest hour of the night that precedes
the early dawn of summer, Adams, from the crow’s-nest,
called down, in a panic, that there was something crawling
on all fours on the deck below him.
Burns, on watch at the companionway, ran forward with
his revolver, and narrowly escaped being brained—Adams
at that moment flinging down a marlinespike that he
had carried aloft with him.
I heard the crash and joined Burns, and together we
went over the deck and, both houses. Everything
was quiet: the crew in various attitudes of exhausted
sleep, their chests and dittybags around them; Oleson
at the wheel; and Singleton in his jail-room, breathing
heavily.
Adams’s nerve was completely gone, and, being
now thoroughly awake, I joined him in the crow’s-nest.
Nothing could convince him that he had been the victim
of a nervous hallucination. He stuck to his
story firmly.
“It was on the forecastle-head first,”
he maintained. “I saw it gleaming.”
“Gleaming?”
“Sort of shining,” he explained.
“It came up over the rail, and at first it
stood up tall, like a white post.”
“You didn’t say before that it was white.”
