Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/63

Rh living soul on her deck, or may I never see shore again."

"By all that's curious, you're right. There isn't a man showing!"

"'Bout ship," roared the skipper, and every man ran to his post, while I touched Captain York on the shoulder and pointed to the seemingly deserted and errant yacht.

But the skipper's eyes were not those of a ground-gazer; he needed no aid from me; what others had seen, he had seen, and he nodded an affirmative to my unspoken question.

"What do you think it means?" I asked, as we came up into the wind, and the men were belaying after close hauling for the beat; "are they hiding from us, or is she deserted?"

But the only answer I got was the one word "Rum," uttered with a jerky emphasis, and taken up by Dan, who said—

"Very rum, and a good many drunk below, or I don't know the taste of it." The obvious thought that the yacht we had sought and run down was without living men upon her decks had taken the lilt from the seamen's merry tongues, and a gloom settled on us all. Perhaps it was more than a mere surmise, for an uncanny feeling of something dreadful to come took hold of me, and I feared that, finding the yacht, we had also found the devil's work; but I held my peace on that, and made up my mind to act.