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 Madden shook himself. “It seems as if someone ought to be aboard.” He broke away from the spell: “I wish they had left us some provisions—we need 'em.”

The hot heavy silence fell immediately after the remark, like a curtain that was heavy to lift.

“Let's look through the hold and see if there isn't someone here!” suggested Greer uneasily.

With a feeling that they were likely to encounter some being, human or spectral, at every turn, they went below. The farther they went the more inexplicable became the Minnie B'sdesertion. Her engines were in perfect order, her furnace so new that the grate bars were still unsealed from heat; the maker's name-plate was still bright on the boilers; her hull was quite dry, with less than six inches of water in her bilge. She had no cargo, except four or five tons of raw metal ingots used as ballast. The coal in her bunkers was nearly exhausted. Indeed she was riding so light that heavy weather would upset her like a chip. It seemed as if the crew had looted the Minnie B in a thorough and extraordinary manner, and then had simply vanished. Every now and then in their search the two