Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/77



the veranda at the same time and walked towards each other and the door where the figure had disappeared.

The front room was vacant of everything but its ordinary furniture. The chairs stood in their usual places. Books, instruments and papers lay undisturbed on the large table in the centre of the floor. Caldwell lighted a match and with it the standing gas-light on the table. Every portion of the room was visible then, and no living beings were in it but ourselves. Walking out on the balcony I called to Page and he came up.

The door of the middle room was closed but not locked. We opened it and went in.

Don Ricardo had used this second room fora work-place. Drawing-boards, surveying implements, and two or three chairs were its only contents.

The back room door was shut. Lighting the gas in the working room we opened it cautiously.

A draft of air blew towards us and

the gas-jet in the second room fluttered

and flapped and nearly went out. Closing the door quickly, Caldwell scraped a match on the heel of his boot and ignited the gas at the bracket on the wall at the head of the bed.

The sky-light was open. Left so by the undertaker's attendants to ventilate the room, about which the odor of chlorine still lingered from the disinfecting agents used after the Don's death. The blank wall checked our further progress.

The bed was stripped. We looked below it. We looked in the movable closet or wardrobe standing on the right. We opened the drawers of the bureau on the other side of the room. We made a variety of absurd investigations into every nook and corner—and found nothing.

Page sat down and lighted a fresh cigar, offering one to Caldwell at the same time and another to me. The smell of chlorine was unpleasant and we joined him in smoking, Thus far our

search to understand the mystery ended in nothing more tangible. Ended in smoke.

Sailors are almost always superstitious. I have been one myself and I know of what I speak. Things come to men who go down to the sea in ships and do business in the great waters that landsmen never dream of. Old shellbacks believe in marvellous happenings because they must. Wouldn't the testimony of a dozen witnesses, men of truth and honor, combining to tell how each and every one of them had seen me kill you or you kill me, send me or you to the gallows? Very good. I can bring you the attested oaths of a thousand men who have seen that embodiment of the terrible, the Shrouded Demon of the Sea; who have found themselves working away up and out on a yard-arm in some night of storm and darkness, sideby-side with something that wore the form and features of a shipmate dead, sewed in his hammock and launched overboard days before, with a thirty-two pound shot at his heels; who have seen a ship with everything set, manned by no mortal men, drive straight into the teeth of a gale and vanish, shadowy masts and spars going over the side of a ghostly hull, which rose and plunged and sunk, while groans and shrieks of men and women came over the surging sea to the ears of the horrified witnesses, and have had this drama of death three times repeated in their sight in an hour. Superstition is hardly the term to apply to this sort of thing. It's simply a belief in facts as patent to the eyes of those who see them as are the ordinary scenes of a city to a lounger in its streets. What's the use of saying they can't be, when they ere?

So two of us being of the sea, we sat, and smoked, and talked, of this apparition. If one of us only had seen it, the others might have doubted its reality, and attributed the whole thing to the fumes of Mr. Whip's strong water acting