The Ghost Ship/Chapter Ten.

Chapter Ten. Mystification.

Old Masters turned his face towards me as the fleeting vision became swallowed up in the darkness that now obscured the sky to the westwards, and I saw that he looked horror-struck, staring into space spell-bound.

As for me, I cannot express what I felt, because I am unable to describe it fully.

“There, there!” I exclaimed, clutching Captain Applegarth’s arm in nervous horror. “There she is again!”

But the skipper, although startled by the sudden appearance of the mysterious vessel in the first instance, as his ejaculation on catching sight of her showed, evidently did not regard her in the same light as the boatswain and myself.

“Why, Haldane, what’s the matter with you, my lad?” he said in a joking way, “You seem all of a tremble; and, by George, you grip tight!”

“I beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure,” I stammered out, trying to pull myself together as I released his arm. “But—but—did you—did you—see her, sir?”

“See that ship just now? Yes, of course I did. I suppose she sighted us lying here like a log and wanted us to report her or something, though why they lit that flare-up over her stern I am sure I can’t imagine. They couldn’t expect us to read her name at that distance. She must have been close on five miles off!”

“But, sir,” I cried out quickly. “She’s the same!”

“The same what, Haldane?”

“Why, the ship in distress, sir, that I sighted at sunset on Friday night just before our breakdown.”

Captain Applegarth whistled through his teeth.

“My good lad,” he said incredulously, “that’s simply impossible!”

“Well, sir, you may not believe me,” I urged, rather nettled that he should put me down in this way, “but I declare to you she is the identical vessel I saw that evening, as I told you at the time, and of which we went in chase till the gale stopped us and our machinery gave out! I cannot doubt the evidence of my own eyes, sir.”

“My dear boy,” replied the skipper, in kinder tones than I expected to this outburst, for he was a hot-tempered man generally, and disliked anything like argument from his officers when he had once said his say, being of the opinion that his word should be last. “Just reflect a moment and let your own natural good sense decide the point. How can it be likely that the vessel you asserted you saw on Friday night, hundreds of miles away from here, should come across us now under precisely similar circumstances, considering all that has happened since?”

“She’s the same ship, sir, nevertheless,” I maintained stubbornly, though I was a bit puzzled on my own account, mind, by his putting the case so strongly. “The vessel I saw on Friday night was a full-rigged ship, with her sails knocked about and had her ensign hoisted half-mast high at the peak, and this one seemed the same in every particular. I did not notice all that when she burnt the flare-up just now. The light only lasted an instant.”

“There is something in that, certainly, Haldane,” answered the skipper, wavering a little, I thought, in his ideas. “Still, when one is inclined to believe in a thing, the imagination is often a great aid in turning a wish into a certainty.”

“Besides, sir,” I continued, wishing to clench my argument, “if we were driven out of our course by the gale, she might have been similarly affected, and the winds and currents might have brought us together again.”

“That’s possible, but not probable,” he rejoined. “I’ve known two bottles of the same weight dropped overboard from the same ship at the same hour, and—”

“Well, sir?”

“One was found landed on the Lofoden Isles, off the coast of Norway: the other came ashore at Sandy Point, in the Straits of Magellan!”

He laughed when he said this, apparently thinking he had utterly settled the matter, but I checkmated him with his own theory.

“The very uncertainty of the action of the currents of the Atlantic which you instance, sir,” I said, “shows that what you think impossible might be very possible, and the strange, weird vessel that I saw three nights ago might have come within sight of us again.”

“That’s one for you, Haldane,” acknowledged the skipper very good-naturedly, for he was a fair man when anything was laid clearly before him. “But, recollect, no one saw this ship distinctly but yourself. I couldn’t say of my own knowledge what rig she was, and I certainly didn’t see any flag or sign of distress. I only saw something that looked like a ship burning a flare-up in the distance—that’s all.”

“Beg pardon, sir,” whispered old Masters, stepping up and touching his cap ere he addressed the skipper, “but I seed the ghost-ship, too, sir, the same as Master Haldane, sir.”

The skipper wheeled round and stared at him.

“Ghost-ship, man! What do you mean?”

“I means that there ghost-ship that hove in sight jist now and which have passed us afore, sir. She be sent as a warning to us, I knows, and as a Christian man, Cap’en Applegarth, I takes it as sich!”

The old seaman spoke so earnestly that the skipper, although he had hard work to keep himself in, answered him without ridiculing his extraordinary delusion, as he held it to be.

“I am a Christian man, too, I hope, bo’sun,” he said. “I believe in a divine power above, and put my trust in a merciful providence; but I can’t believe in any of your queer supernatural visitations, whether as warnings or what not!”

“Not if you seed the same blessed thing three times?”

“No; not if I saw it a hundred times!” he roared out impatiently.

“Ah, seein’ is believin’, I says,” whined old Masters, not a whit shaken on the point, in spite of the skipper’s scepticism. “Master Haldane seed it, and I seed it, and poor Jackson seed it.”

“Indeed?” cried the skipper. “I did not know he had been on deck before the accident.”

“It wore arter that, sir, that he seed the ghost-ship,” said the old boatswain in reply to the implied question. “It were jist afore he died.”

“Just before he died!” repeated Captain Applegarth indignantly, as if he thought he was being made a fool of. “Why, man, the poor fellow was out of his mind then, and besides, never stirred out of his cabin!”

“Ah, but he had the warnin’ jist the same, for Weston, it was, told me as how Jackson seed the ship and cried out when he lay there a-dyin’. Bulkheads can’t keep sperrits out, sir.”

“Nor in, either, as I know to my cost,” returned the skipper drily. “Your friend Weston is pretty familiar with them, if they come in his way, I fancy! Stuff and nonsense, bo’sun; how can you believe such rubbish? The other night you imagined the reflection of our own vessel, when that meteor came by, to be a ghost-ship, as you call it in your absurd folly; and to-night, when that craft to win’rd passed and lit a flare-up, hanged if you aren’t at it again with your ghost-ship! By George, it makes me sick, Masters, to think that a grown man and a good seaman like yourself should be such a confounded ass!”

“Hass or no hass, there she wer’,” said the old fellow doggedly. “But here comes Mr Fosset, sir. He were on the poop aft when that vessel passed as I speaks on. Ax him what he thinks of her and if she weren’t the same full-rigged ship as Master Haldane and all of us seed?”

“I will,” replied Captain Applegarth promptly; and on the first mate approaching nearer, he hailed him. “I say, Fosset, what did you think of that ship just now?”

The other’s answer, however, bewildered the skipper more than Masters and I had done previously.

“Ship!” said the first mate. “What ship?”

“That vessel that lit the flare-up awhile ago.”

“I didn’t see any flare-up!” replied Mr Fosset, “and certainly no ship has passed us to my knowledge since I’ve been on deck.”

“By George, I don’t know who or what to believe,” exclaimed Captain Applegarth, looking from the one to the other of us. “You’ve set my very brains wool-gathering between you, with your ‘vessels in distress’ and ‘ghost-ships’; I’m hanged if I won’t go down to the engine-room and have a little practical common sense knocked into me, as well as see how they’re getting on with the repairs to the machinery!”

So saying, the skipper went below, and, as there was nothing particular for me to do on deck, I followed his example. Instead of proceeding down to the engine-room, however, I only went as far as my bunk and turned in, wondering what the morrow would bring forth. I was haunted, though, by strange dreams all through the night, continually waking up and then getting to sleep again in snatches, only to wake up again immediately after I had dropped off.