by Frank Norris
THE SHIP THAT SAW A GHOST
Very much of this story must remain untold, for the reason that if itwere definitely known what business I had aboard the trampsteam-freighter _Glarus_, three hundred miles off the South Americancoast on a certain summer's day, some few years ago, I would very likelybe obliged to answer a great many personal and direct questions put byfussy and impertinent experts in maritime law--who are paid to beinquisitive. Also, I would get "Ally Bazan," Strokher and Hardenberginto trouble.
Suppose on that certain summer's day, you had asked of Lloyds' agencywhere the _Glarus_ was, and what was her destination and cargo. Youwould have been told that she was twenty days out from Callao, boundnorth to San Francisco in ballast; that she had been spoken by the bark_Medea_ and the steamer _Benevento_; that she was reported to have blownout a cylinder head, but being manageable was proceeding on her wayunder sail.
That is what Lloyds would have answered.
If you know something of the ways of ships and what is expected of them,you will understand that the _Glarus_, to be some half a dozen hundredmiles south of where Lloyds' would have her, and to be still goingsouth, under full steam, was a scandal that would have made her brothersand sisters ostracize her finally and forever.
And that is curious, too. Humans may indulge in vagaries innumerable,and may go far afield in the way of lying; but a ship may not so much asquibble without suspicion. The least lapse of "regularity," the leastdifficulty in squaring performance with intuition, and behold she is onthe black list, and her captain, owners, officers, agents andconsignors, and even supercargoes, are asked to explain.
And the _Glarus_ was already on the black list. From the beginning herstars had been malign. As the _Breda_, she had first lost herreputation, seduced into a filibustering escapade down the SouthAmerican coast, where in the end a plain-clothes United Statesdetective--that is to say, a revenue cutter--arrested her off BuenosAyres and brought her home, a prodigal daughter, besmirched anddisgraced.
After that she was in some dreadful black-birding business in a farquarter of the South Pacific; and after that--her name changed finallyto the _Glarus_--poached seals for a syndicate of Dutchmen who lived inTacoma, and who afterward built a club-house out of what she earned.
And after that we got her.
We got her, I say, through Ryder's South Pacific Exploitation Company.The "President" had picked out a lovely little deal for Hardenberg,Strokher and Ally Bazan (the Three Black Crows), which he swore wouldmake them "independent rich" the rest of their respective lives. It is apromising deal (B. 300 it is on Ryder's map), and if you want to knowmore about it you may write to ask Ryder what B. 300 is. If he choosesto tell you, that is his affair.
For B. 300--let us confess it--is, as Hardenberg puts it, as crooked asa dog's hind leg. It is as risky as barratry. If you pull it off youmay--after paying Ryder his share--divide sixty-five, or possiblysixty-seven, thousand dollars between you and your associates. If youfail, and you are perilously like to fail, you will be sure to have aman or two of your companions shot, maybe yourself obliged to pistolcertain people, and in the end fetch up at Tahiti, prisoner in a Frenchpatrol-boat.
Observe that B. 300 is spoken of as still open. It is so, for the reasonthat the Three Black Crows did not pull it off. It still stands markedup in red ink on the map that hangs over Ryder's desk in the SanFrancisco office; and any one can have a chance at it who will meetCyrus Ryder's terms. Only he can't get the _Glarus_ for the attempt.
For the trip to the island after B. 300 was the last occasion on whichthe _Glarus_ will smell blue water or taste the trades. She will neverclear again. She is lumber.
And yet the _Glarus_ on this very blessed day of 1902 is riding to herbuoys off Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, complete in every detail (bara broken propeller shaft), not a rope missing, not a screw loose, not aplank started--a perfectly equipped steam-freighter.
But you may go along the "Front" in San Francisco from Fisherman's Wharfto the China steamships' docks and shake your dollars under the seamen'snoses, and if you so much as whisper _Glarus_ they will edge suddenlyoff and look at you with scared suspicion, and then, as like as not,walk away without another word. No pilot will take the _Glarus_ out; nocaptain will navigate her; no stoker will feed her fires; no sailor willwalk her decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She has seen a ghost.
* * * * *
It happened on our voyage to the island after this same B. 300. We hadstood well off from shore for day after day, and Hardenberg had shapedour course so far from the track of navigation that since the_Benevento_ had hulled down and vanished over the horizon no stitch ofcanvas nor smudge of smoke had we seen. We had passed the equator longsince, and would fetch a long circuit to the southard, and bear upagainst the island by a circuitous route. This to avoid being spoken. Itwas tremendously essential that the _Glarus_ should not be spoken.
I suppose, no doubt, that it was the knowledge of our isolation thatimpressed me with the dreadful remoteness of our position. Certainly thesea in itself looks no different at a thousand than at a hundred milesfrom shore. But as day after day I came out on deck at noon, afterascertaining our position on the chart (a mere pin-point in a reach ofempty paper), the sight of the ocean weighed down upon me with aninfinitely great awesomeness--and I was no new hand to the high seaseven then.
But at such times the _Glarus_ seemed to me to be threading a lonelinessbeyond all worlds and beyond all conception desolate. Even in morepopulous waters, when no sail notches the line of the horizon, thepropinquity of one's kind is nevertheless a thing understood, and to anunappreciated degree comforting. Here, however, I knew we were out, farout in the desert. Never a keel for years upon years before us hadparted these waters; never a sail had bellied to these winds.Perfunctorily, day in and day out we turned our eyes through long habittoward the horizon. But we knew, before the look, that the searchingwould be bootless. Forever and forever, under the pitiless sun and coldblue sky stretched the indigo of the ocean floor. The ether between theplanets can be no less empty, no less void.
I never, till that moment, could have so much as conceived theimagination of such loneliness, such utter stagnant abomination ofdesolation. In an open boat, bereft of comrades, I should have gone madin thirty minutes.
I remember to have approximated the impression of such empty immensityonly once before, in my younger days, when I lay on my back on atreeless, bushless mountainside and stared up into the sky for thebetter part of an hour.
You probably know the trick. If you do not, you must understand that ifyou look up at the blue long enough, the flatness of the thing beginslittle by little to expand, to give here and there; and the eye travelson and on and up and up, till at length (well for you that it lasts butthe fraction of a second), you all at once see space. You generally stopthere and cry out, and--your hands over your eyes--are only too glad togrovel close to the good old solid earth again. Just as I, so often onshort voyage, was glad to wrench my eyes away from that horrid vacancy,to fasten them upon our sailless masts and stack, or to lay my grip uponthe sooty smudged taffrail of the only thing that stood between me andthe Outer Dark.
For we had come at last to that region of the Great Seas where no shipgoes, the silent sea of Coleridge and the Ancient One, the unplumbed,untracked, uncharted Dreadfulness, primordial, hushed, and we were asmuch alone as a grain of star-dust whirling in the empty space beyondUranus and the ken of the greater telescopes.
So the _Glarus_ plodded and churned her way onward. Every day and allday the same pale-blue sky and the unwinking sun bent over that movingspeck. Every day and all day the same black-blue water-world, untouchedby any known wind, smooth as a slab of syenite, colourful as an opal,stretched out and around and beyond and before and behind us, forever,illimitable, empty. Every day the smoke of our fires veiled the streakedwhiteness of our wake. Every day Hardenberg (our skipper) at noonpricked a pin-hole in the chart that hung in the wheel-house, and thatshowed we w
ere so much farther into the wilderness. Every day the worldof men, of civilization, of newspapers, policemen and street-railwaysreceded, and we steamed on alone, lost and forgotten in that silent sea.
"Jolly lot o' room to turn raound in," observed Ally Bazan, thecolonial, "withaout steppin' on y'r neighbour's toes."
"We're clean, clean out o' the track o' navigation," Hardenberg toldhim. "An' a blessed good thing for us, too. Nobody ever comes down intothese waters. Ye couldn't pick no course here. Everything leads tonowhere."
"Might as well be in a bally balloon," said Strokher.
I shall not tell of the nature of the venture on which the _Glarus_ wasbound, further than to say it was not legitimate. It had to do with anill thing done more than two centuries ago. There was money in theventure, but it was not to be gained by a violation of metes and boundswhich are better left intact.
The island toward which we were heading is associated in the minds ofmen with a Horror.
A ship had called there once, two hundred years in advance of the_Glarus_--a ship not much unlike the crank high-prowed caravel ofHudson, and her company had landed, and having accomplished the evilthey had set out to do, made shift to sail away. And then, just afterthe palms of the island had sunk from sight below the water's edge, theunspeakable had happened. The Death that was not Death had arisen fromout the sea and stood before the ship, and over it, and the blight ofthe thing lay along the decks like mould, and the ship sweated in theterror of that which is yet without a name.
Twenty men died in the first week, all but six in the second. These six,with the shadow of insanity upon them, made out to launch a boat,returned to the island and died there, after leaving a record of whathad happened.
The six left the ship exactly as she was, sails all set, lanterns alllit--left her in the shadow of the Death that was not Death.
She stood there, becalmed, and watched them go. She was never heard ofagain.
Or was she--well, that's as may be.
But the main point of the whole affair, to my notion, has always beenthis. The ship was the last friend of those six poor wretches who madeback for the island with their poor chests of plunder. She was theirguardian, as it were, would have defended and befriended them to thelast; and also we, the Three Black Crows and myself, had no right underheaven, nor before the law of men, to come prying and peeping into thisbusiness--into this affair of the dead and buried past. There wassacrilege in it. We were no better than body-snatchers.
* * * * *
When I heard the others complaining of the loneliness of oursurroundings, I said nothing at first. I was no sailor man, and I was onboard only by tolerance. But I looked again at the maddening sameness ofthe horizon--the same vacant, void horizon that we had seen now forsixteen days on end, and felt in my wits and in my nerves that sameformless rebellion and protest such as comes when the same note isreiterated over and over again.
It may seem a little thing that the mere fact of meeting with no othership should have ground down the edge of the spirit. But let theincredulous--bound upon such a hazard as ours--sail straight intonothingness for sixteen days on end, seeing nothing but the sun, hearingnothing but the thresh of his own screw, and then put the question.
And yet, of all things, we desired no company. Stealth was our one greataim. But I think there were moments--toward the last--when the ThreeCrows would have welcomed even a cruiser.
Besides, there was more cause for depression, after all, than mereisolation.
On the seventh day Hardenberg and I were forward by the cat-head,adjusting the grain with some half-formed intent of spearing theporpoises that of late had begun to appear under our bows, andHardenberg had been computing the number of days we were yet to run.
"We are some five hundred odd miles off that island by now," he said,"and she's doing her thirteen knots handsome. All's well so far--but doyou know, I'd just as soon raise that point o' land as soon asconvenient."
"How so?" said I, bending on the line. "Expect some weather?"
"Mr. Dixon," said he, giving me a curious glance, "the sea is a queerproposition, put it any ways. I've been a seafarin' man since I was bigas a minute, and I know the sea, and what's more, the Feel o' the sea.Now, look out yonder. Nothin', hey? Nothin' but the same ol' skylinewe've watched all the way out. The glass is as steady as a steeple, andthis ol' hooker, I reckon, is as sound as the day she went off the ways.But just the same if I were to home now, a-foolin' about Gloucester wayin my little dough-dish--d'ye know what? I'd put into port. I surewould. Because why? Because I got the Feel o' the Sea, Mr. Dixon. I gotthe Feel o' the Sea."
I had heard old skippers say something of this before, and I cited toHardenberg the experience of a skipper captain I once knew who hadturned turtle in a calm sea off Trincomalee. I ask him what this Feel ofthe Sea was warning him against just now (for on the high sea anypremonition is a premonition of evil, not of good). But he was notexplicit.
"I don't know," he answered moodily, and as if in great perplexity,coiling the rope as he spoke. "I don't know. There's some blame thing orother close to us, I'll bet a hat. I don't know the name of it, butthere's a big Bird in the air, just out of sight som'eres, and," hesuddenly exclaimed, smacking his knee and leaning forward,"I--don't--like--it--one--dam'--bit."
The same thing came up in our talk in the cabin that night, after thedinner was taken off and we settled down to tobacco. Only, at this time,Hardenberg was on duty on the bridge. It was Ally Bazan who spokeinstead.
"Seems to me," he hazarded, "as haow they's somethin' or other a-goin'to bump up pretty blyme soon. I shouldn't be surprised, naow, y'know, ifwe piled her up on some bally uncharted reef along o' to-night and wentstrite daown afore we'd had a bloomin' charnce to s'y 'So long,gen'lemen all.'"
He laughed as he spoke, but when, just at that moment, a pan clatteredin the galley, he jumped suddenly with an oath, and looked hard aboutthe cabin.
Then Strokher confessed to a sense of distress also. He'd been having itsince day before yesterday, it seemed.
"And I put it to you the glass is lovely," he said, "so it's no blow. Iguess," he continued, "we're all a bit seedy and ship-sore."
And whether or not this talk worked upon my own nerves, or whether invery truth the Feel of the Sea had found me also, I do not know; but Ido know that after dinner that night, just before going to bed, a queersense of apprehension came upon me, and that when I had come to mystateroom, after my turn upon deck, I became furiously angry with nobodyin particular, because I could not at once find the matches. But herewas a difference. The other man had been merely vaguely uncomfortable.
I could put a name to my uneasiness. I felt that we were being watched.
* * * * *
It was a strange ship's company we made after that. I speak only of theCrows and myself. We carried a scant crew of stokers, and there was alsoa chief engineer. But we saw so little of him that he did not count. TheCrows and I gloomed on the quarterdeck from dawn to dark, silent,irritable, working upon each other's nerves till the creak of a blockwould make a man jump like cold steel laid to his flesh. We quarreledover absolute nothings, glowered at each other for half a word, and eachone of us, at different times, was at some pains to declare that neverin the course of his career had he been associated with such adisagreeable trio of brutes. Yet we were always together, and soughteach other's company with painful insistence.
Only once were we all agreed, and that was when the cook, a Chinaman,spoiled a certain batch of biscuits. Unanimously we fell foul of thecreature with so much vociferation as fishwives till he fled the cabinin actual fear of mishandling, leaving us suddenly seized with noisyhilarity--for the first time in a week. Hardenberg proposed a round ofdrinks from our single remaining case of beer. We stood up and formed anElk's chain and then drained our glasses to each other's health withprofound seriousness.
That same evening, I remember, we all sat on the quarterdeck till latean
d--oddly enough--related each one his life's history up to date; andthen went down to the cabin for a game of euchre before turning in.
We had left Strokher on the bridge--it was his watch--and had forgottenall about him in the interest of the game, when--I suppose it was aboutone in the morning--I heard him whistle long and shrill. I laid down mycards and said:
"Hark!"
In the silence that followed we heard at first only the muffled lope ofour engines, the cadenced snorting of the exhaust, and the ticking ofHardenberg's big watch in his waistcoat that he had hung by the arm-holeto the back of his chair. Then from the bridge, above our deck,prolonged, intoned--a wailing cry in the night--came Strokher's voice:
"Sail oh-h-h."
And the cards fell from our hands, and, like men turned to stone, we satlooking at each other across the soiled red cloth for what seemed animmeasurably long minute.
Then stumbling and swearing, in a hysteria of hurry, we gained the deck.
There was a moon, very low and reddish, but no wind. The sea beyond thetaffrail was as smooth as lava, and so still that the swells from thecutwater of the _Glarus_ did not break as they rolled away from thebows.
I remember that I stood staring and blinking at the empty ocean--wherethe moonlight lay like a painted stripe reaching to the horizon--stupidand frowning, till Hardenberg, who had gone on ahead, cried:
"Not here--on the bridge!"
We joined Strokher, and as I came up the others were asking:
"Where? Where?"
And there, before he had pointed, I saw--we all of us saw--And I heardHardenberg's teeth come together like a spring trap, while Ally Bazanducked as though to a blow, muttering:
"Gord 'a' mercy, what nyme do ye put to' a ship like that?"
And after that no one spoke for a long minute, and we stood there,moveless black shadows, huddled together for the sake of the blessedelbow touch that means so incalculably much, looking off over our portquarter.
For the ship that we saw there--oh, she was not a half-mile distant--wasunlike any ship known to present day construction.
She was short, and high-pooped, and her stern, which was turned a littletoward us, we could see, was set with curious windows, not unlike ahouse. And on either side of this stern were two great iron cressetssuch as once were used to burn signal-fires in. She had three masts withmighty yards swung 'thwart ship, but bare of all sails save a fewrotting streamers. Here and there about her a tangled mass of riggingdrooped and sagged.
And there she lay, in the red eye of the setting moon, in that solitaryocean, shadowy, antique, forlorn, a thing the most abandoned, the mostsinister I ever remember to have seen.
Then Strokher began to explain volubly and with many repetitions.
"A derelict, of course. I was asleep; yes, I was asleep. Gross neglectof duty. I say I was asleep--on watch. And we worked up to her. When Iwoke, why--you see, when I woke, there she was," he gave a weak littlelaugh, "and--and now, why, there she is, you see. I turned around andsaw her sudden like--when I woke up, that is."
He laughed again, and as he laughed the engines far below our feet gavea sudden hiccough. Something crashed and struck the ship's sides till welurched as we stood. There was a shriek of steam, a shout--and thensilence.
The noise of the machinery ceased; the _Glarus_ slid through the stillwater, moving only by her own decreasing momentum.
Hardenberg sang, "Stand by!" and called down the tube to theengine-room.
"What's up?"
I was standing close enough to him to hear the answer in a small, faintvoice:
"Shaft gone, sir."
"Broke?"
"Yes, sir."
Hardenberg faced about.
"Come below. We must talk." I do not think any of us cast a glance atthe Other Ship again. Certainly I kept my eyes away from her. But as westarted down the companion-way I laid my hand on Strokher's shoulder.The rest were ahead. I looked him straight between the eyes as I asked:
"Were you asleep? Is that why you saw her so suddenly?"
It is now five years since I asked the question. I am still waiting forStrokher's answer.
Well, our shaft was broken. That was flat. We went down into theengine-room and saw the jagged fracture that was the symbol of ourbroken hopes. And in the course of the next five minutes' conversationwith the chief we found that, as we had not provided against such acontingency, there was to be no mending of it. We said nothing about themishap coinciding with the appearance of the Other Ship. But I know wedid not consider the break with any degree of surprise after a fewmoments.
We came up from the engine-room and sat down to the cabin table.
"Now what?" said Hardenberg, by way of beginning.
Nobody answered at first.
It was by now three in the morning. I recall it all perfectly. The portsopposite where I sat were open and I could see. The moon was all butfull set. The dawn was coming up with a copper murkiness over the edgeof the world. All the stars were yet out. The sea, for all the red moonand copper dawn, was gray, and there, less than half a mile away, stilllay our consort. I could see her through the portholes with each slowcareening of the _Glarus_.
"I vote for the island," cried Ally Bazan, "shaft or no shaft. We rigs abit o' syle, y'know----" and thereat the discussion began.
For upward of two hours it raged, with loud words and shakenforefingers, and great noisy bangings of the table, and how it wouldhave ended I do not know, but at last--it was then maybe five in themorning--the lookout passed word down to the cabin:
"Will you come on deck, gentlemen?" It was the mate who spoke, and theman was shaken--I could see that--to the very vitals of him. We startedand stared at one another, and I watched little Ally Bazan go slowlywhite to the lips. And even then no word of the ship, except as it mightbe this from Hardenberg:
"What is it? Good God Almighty, I'm no coward, but this thing is gettingone too many for me."
Then without further speech he went on deck.
The air was cool. The sun was not yet up. It was that strange, queermid-period between dark and dawn, when the night is over and the day notyet come, just the gray that is neither light nor dark, the dim deadblink as of the refracted light from extinct worlds.
We stood at the rail. We did not speak; we stood watching. It was sostill that the drip of steam from some loosened pipe far below wasplainly audible, and it sounded in that lifeless, silent graynesslike--God knows what--a death tick.
"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's nomistake about it. She is moving--this way."
"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets hertoward us."
Would the morning never come?
Ally Bazan--his parents were Catholic--began to mutter to himself.
Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.
"I particularly don't want--that--out--there--to cross our bows. I don'twant it to come to that. We must get some sails on her."
"And I put it to you as man to man," said Strokher, "where might be yourwind."
He was right. The _Glarus_ floated in absolute calm. On all that slab ofocean nothing moved but the Dead Ship.
She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed toward us,the water turning from her forefoot. She came on; she was near at hand.We saw her plainly--saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, therust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I couldimagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluentwavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. Nosingle thing stirred aboard the hulk of her--but she moved.
We were helpless. The _Glarus_ could stir no boat in any direction; wewere chained to the spot. Nobody had thought to put out our lights, andthey still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of place in theirred-and-green garishness, like maskers surprised by daylight.
And in the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half-light betweendawn and day, at six o'clock, silent as the settlin
g of the dead to thebottomless bottom of the ocean, gray as fog, lonely, blind, soulless,voiceless, the Dead Ship crossed our bows.
I do not know how long after this the Ship disappeared, or what was thetime of day when we at last pulled ourselves together. But we came tosome sort of decision at last. This was to go on--under sail. We weretoo close to the island now to turn back for--for a broken shaft.
The afternoon was spent fitting on the sails to her, and when afternightfall the wind at length came up fresh and favourable, I believe weall felt heartened and a deal more hardy--until the last canvas wentaloft, and Hardenberg took the wheel.
We had drifted a good deal since the morning, and the bows of the_Glarus_ were pointed homeward, but as soon as the breeze blew strongenough to get steerageway Hardenberg put the wheel over and, as thebooms swung across the deck, headed for the island again.
We had not gone on this course half an hour--no, not twentyminutes--before the wind shifted a whole quarter of the compass and tookthe _Glarus_ square in the teeth, so that there was nothing for it butto tack. And then the strangest thing befell.
I will make allowance for the fact that there was no centre-board norkeel to speak of to the _Glarus_. I will admit that the sails upon anine-hundred-ton freighter are not calculated to speed her, nor steadyher. I will even admit the possibility of a current that set from theisland toward us. All this may be true, yet the _Glarus_ should haveadvanced. We should have made a wake.
And instead of this, our stolid, steady, trusty old boat was--what shallI say?
I will say that no man may thoroughly understand a ship--after all. Iwill say that new ships are cranky and unsteady; that old and seasonedships have their little crochets, their little fussinesses that theirskippers must learn and humour if they are to get anything out of them;that even the best ships may sulk at times, shirk their work, growunstable, perverse, and refuse to answer helm and handling. And I willsay that some ships that for years have sailed blue water as soberly andas docilely as a street-car horse has plodded the treadmill of the'tween-tracks, have been known to balk, as stubbornly and asconclusively as any old Bay Billy that ever wore a bell. I know this hashappened, because I have seen it. I saw, for instance, the _Glarus_ doit.
Quite literally and truly we could do nothing with her. We will say, ifyou like, that that great jar and wrench when the shaft gave way shookher and crippled her. It is true, however, that whatever the cause mayhave been, we could not force her toward the island. Of course, we allsaid "current"; but why didn't the log-line trail?
For three days and three nights we tried it. And the _Glarus_ heaved andplunged and shook herself just as you have seen a horse plunge and rearwhen his rider tries to force him at the steam-roller.
I tell you I could feel the fabric of her tremble and shudder from bowto stern-post, as though she were in a storm; I tell you she fell offfrom the wind, and broad-on drifted back from her course till thesensation of her shrinking was as plain as her own staring lights and athing pitiful to see.
We roweled her, and we crowded sail upon her, and we coaxed and bulliedand humoured her, till the Three Crows, their fortune only a plain sailtwo days ahead, raved and swore like insensate brutes, or shall we saylike mahouts trying to drive their stricken elephant upon the tiger--andall to no purpose. "Damn the damned current and the damned luck and thedamned shaft and all," Hardenberg would exclaim, as from the wheel hewould catch the _Glarus_ falling off. "Go on, you old hooker--you tub ofjunk! My God, you'd think she was scared!"
Perhaps the _Glarus_ was scared, perhaps not; that point is debatable.But it was beyond doubt of debate that Hardenberg was scared.
A ship that will not obey is only one degree less terrible than amutinous crew. And we were in a fair way to have both. The stokers, whomwe had impressed into duty as A.B.'s, were of course superstitious; andthey knew how the _Glarus_ was acting, and it was only a question oftime before they got out of hand.
That was the end. We held a final conference in the cabin and decidedthat there was no help for it--we must turn back.
And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, andthe "current" helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of the_Glarus_, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log-line ranout from the trail and strained back as the ship worked homeward.
We had never a mishap from the time we finally swung her about; and,considering the circumstances, the voyage back to San Francisco waspropitious.
But an incident happened just after we had started back. We were perhapssome five miles on the homeward track. It was early evening and Strokherhad the watch. At about seven o'clock he called me up on the bridge.
"See her?" he said.
And there, far behind us, in the shadow of the twilight, loomed theOther Ship again, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were leaving herrapidly astern. Strokher and I stood looking at her till she dwindled toa dot. Then Strokher said:
"She's on post again."
And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast anchoroff the "Front" our crew went ashore as soon as discharged, and in halfa dozen hours the legend was in every sailors' boarding-house and inevery seaman's dive, from Barbary Coast to Black Tom's.
It is still there, and that is why no pilot will take the _Glarus_ out,no captain will navigate her, no stoker feed her fires, no sailor walkher decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She will never smell blue wateragain, nor taste the trades. She has seen a Ghost.