Very much of this story must remain untold, for the reason that if it
were definitely known what business I had aboard the tramp
steam-freighter _Glarus_, three hundred miles off the South American
coast on a certain summer's day, some few years ago, I would very
likely be obliged to answer a great many personal and direct
questions put by fussy and impertinent experts in maritime law--who
are paid to be inquisitive. Also, I would get "Ally Bazan," Strokher
and Hardenberg into trouble.
Suppose on that certain summer's day, you had asked of Lloyds's
agency where the _Glarus_ was, and what was her destination and
cargo. You would have been told that she was twenty days out from
Callao, bound North to San Francisco in ballast; that she had been
spoken by the bark _Medea_ and the steamer _Benevento_; that she was
reported to have blown out a cylinder head, but being manageable was
proceeding on her way under sail.
That is what Lloyds's 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
hundred miles south of where Lloyds's would have her, and to be still
going South, under full steam, was a scandal that would have made her
brothers and 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 as quibble without suspicion. The least lapse of
"regularity," the least difficulty in squaring performance with
intuition, and behold she is on the black list, and her captain,
owners, officers, agents and consignors, and even supercargoes, are
asked to explain.
And the _Glarus_ was already on the black list. From the beginning
her stars had been malign. As the _Breda_, she had first lost her
reputation, seduced into a filibustering escapade down the South
American coast, where in the end a plain-clothes United States
detective--that is to say, a revenue cutter--arrested her off Buenos
Ayres and brought her home, a prodigal daughter, besmirched and
disgraced.
After that she was in some dreadful blackbirding business in a far
quarter of the South Pacific; and after that--her name changed
finally to the _Glarus_--poached seals for a syndicate of Dutchmen
who lived in Tacoma, and who afterward built a clubhouse 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 would make them "independent rich" the rest of their respective
lives. It is a promising deal (B. 300 it is on Ryder's map), and if
you want to know more about it you may write to ask Ryder what B. 300
is. If he chooses to tell you, that is his affair.
For B. 300--let us confess it--is, as Hardenberg puts it, as crooked
as a dog's hind leg. It is as risky as barratry. If you pull it off
you may--after paying Ryder his share--divide sixty-five, or possibly
sixty-seven, thousand dollars between you and your associates. If
you fail, and you are perilously like to fail, you will be sure to
have a man or two of your companions shot, maybe yourself obliged to
pistol certain people, and in the end fetch up at Tahiti, prisoner in
a French patrol-boat.
Observe that B. 300 is spoken of as still open. It is so, for the
reason that the Three Black Crows did not pull it off. It still
stands marked up in red ink on the map that hangs over Ryder's desk
in the San Francisco office; and anyone can have a chance at it who
will meet Cyrus 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
which the _Glarus_ will smell blue water or taste the trades. She
will never clear again. She is lumber.
And yet the _Glarus_ on this very blessed day of 1902 is riding to
her buoys off Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, complete in every
detail (bar a broken propeller shaft), not a rope missing, not a
screw loose, not a plank started--a perfectly equipped steam
freighter.
But you may go along the "Front" in San Francisco from Fisherman's
Wharf to the China steamships' docks and shake your dollars under the
seamen's noses, and if you so much as whisper _Glarus_ they will edge
suddenly off 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; no captain will navigate her; no stoker will feed her
fires; no sailor will walk 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
had stood well off from shore for day after day, and Hardenberg had
shaped our course so far from the track of navigation that since the
_Benevento_ had hulled down and vanished over the horizon no stitch
of canvas nor smudge of smoke had we seen. We had passed the equator
long since, and would fetch a long circuit to the southard, and bear
up against the island by a circuitous route. This to avoid being
spoken. It was tremendously essential that the _Glarus_ should not
be spoken.
I suppose, no doubt, that it was the knowledge of our isolation that
impressed me with the dreadful remoteness of our position. Certainly
the sea in itself looks no different at a thousand than at a hundred
miles from shore. But as day after day I came out on deck at noon,
after ascertaining our position on the chart (a mere pin-point in a
reach of empty paper), the sight of the ocean weighed down upon me
with an infinitely great awesomeness--and I was no new hand to high
seas even then.
But at such times the _Glarus_ seemed to me to be threading a
loneliness beyond all worlds and beyond all conception desolate.
Even in more populous waters, when no sail notches the line of the
horizon, the propinquity of one's kind is nevertheless a thing
understood, and to an unappreciated degree comforting. Here,
however, I knew we were out, far out in the desert. Never a keel for
years upon years before us had parted these waters; never a sail had
bellied to these winds. Perfunctorily, day in and day out we turned
our eyes through long habit toward the horizon. But we knew, before
the look, that the searching would be bootless. Forever and forever,
under the pitiless sun and cold blue sky stretched the indigo of the
ocean floor. The ether between the planets can be no less empty, no
less void.
I never, till that moment, could have so much as conceived the
imagination of such loneliness, such utter stagnant abomination of
desolation. In an open boat, bereft of comrades, I should have gone
mad in thirty minutes.
I remember to have approximated the impression of such empty
immensity only once before, in my younger days, when I lay on my back
on a treeless, bushless mountainside and stared up into the sky for
the better part of an hour.
You probably know the trick. If you do not, you must understand that
if you look up at the blue long enough, the flatness of the thing
begins little by little to expand, to give here and there; and the
eye travels on and on and up and up, till at length (well for you
that it lasts but the fraction of a second), you all at once see
space. You generally stop there and cry out, and--your hands over
your eyes--are only too glad to grovel close to the good old solid
earth again. Just as I, so often on short 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 upon the sooty smudged
taffrail of the only thing that stood between me and the Outer Dark.
For we had come at last to that region of the Great Seas where no
ship goes, the silent sea of Coleridge and the Ancient One, the
unplumbed, untracked, uncharted Dreadfulness, primordial, hushed, and
we were as much alone as a grain of star-dust whirling in the empty
space beyond Uranus and the ken of the greater telescopes.
So the _Glarus_ plodded and churned her way onward. Every day and
all day the same pale-blue sky and the unwinking sun bent over that
moving speck. Every day and all day the same black-blue water-world,
untouched by 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 streaked whiteness of our wake. Every day Hardenberg (our
skipper) at noon pricked a pin-hole in the chart that hung in the
wheel-house, and that showed we were so much farther into the
wilderness. Every day the world of men, of civilization, of
newspapers, policemen and street-railways receded, and we steamed on
alone, lost and forgotten in that silent sea.
"Jolly lot o' room to turn raound in," observed Ally Bazan, the
colonial, "withaout steppin' on y'r neighbour's toes."
"We're clean, clean out o' the track o' navigation," Hardenberg told
him. "An' a blessed good thing for us, too. Nobody ever comes down
into these waters. Ye couldn't pick no course here. Everything
leads to nowhere."
"Might as well be in a bally balloon," said Strokher.
I shall not tell of the nature of the venture on which the _Glarus_
was bound, further than to say it was not legitimate. It had to do
with an ill thing done more than two centuries ago. There was money
in the venture, but it was to be gained by a violation of metes and
bounds which are better left intact.
The island toward which we were heading is associated in the minds of
men 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 of Hudson, and her company had landed, and having
accomplished the evil they had set out to do, made shift to sail
away. And then, just after the palms of the island had sunk from
sight below the water's edge, the unspeakable had happened. The
Death that was not Death had arisen from out the sea and stood before
the ship, and over it, and the blight of the thing lay along the
decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the terror 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 what had happened.
The six left the ship exactly as she was, sails all set, lanterns all
lit--left her in the shadow of the Death that was not Death.
She stood there, becalmed, and watched them go. She was never heard
of again.
Or was she--well, that's as may be.
But the main point of the whole affair, to my notion, has always been
this. The ship was the last friend of those six poor wretches who
made back for the island with their poor chests of plunder. She was
their guardian, as it were, would have defended and befriended them
to the last; and also we, the Three Black Crows and myself, had no
right under heaven, nor before the law of men, to come prying and
peeping into this business--into this affair of the dead and buried
past. There was sacrilege in it. We were no better than
body-snatchers.
* * * * * * *
When I heard the others complaining of the loneliness of our
surroundings, I said nothing at first. I was no sailor man, and I
was on board only by tolerance. But I looked again at the maddening
sameness of the horizon--the same vacant, void horizon that we had
seen now for sixteen days on end, and felt in my wits and in my
nerves that same formless rebellion and protest such as comes when
the same note is reiterated over and over again.
It may seem a little thing that the mere fact of meeting with no
other ship should have ground down the edge of the spirit. But let
the incredulous--bound upon such a hazard as ours--sail straight into
nothingness for sixteen days on end, seeing nothing but the sun,
hearing nothing 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
great aim. But I think there were moments--toward the last--when the
Three Crows would have welcomed even a cruiser.
Besides, there was more cause for depression, after all, than mere
isolation.
On the seventh day Hardenberg and I were forward by the cat-head,
adjusting the grain with some half-formed intent of spearing the
porpoises that of late had begun to appear under our bows, and
Hardenberg 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
do you know, I'd just as soon raise that point o' land as soon as
convenient."
"How so?" said I, bending on the line. "Expect some weather?"
"Mr. Dixon," said he, giving me a curious glance, "the sea is a queer
proposition, put it any ways. I've been a seafarin' man since I was
big as 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'
skyline we've watched all the way out. The glass is as steady as a
steeple, and this 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 way in my little dough-dish--d'ye know
what? I'd put into port. I sure would. Because why? Because I got
the Feel o' the Sea, Mr. Dixon. I got the Feel o' the Sea."
I had heard old skippers say something of this before, and I cited to
Hardenberg the experience of a skipper captain I once knew who had
turned turtle in a calm sea off Trincomalee. I asked him what this
Feel of the Sea was warning him against just now (for on the high sea
any premonition is a premonition of evil, not of good). But he was
not explicit.
"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 or other close to us, I'll bet a hat. I don't know the name of
it, but there's a big Bird in the air, just out of sight som'eres,
and," he suddenly 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 the
dinner 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
spoke instead.
"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, if we piled up on some bally uncharted reef along o'
to-night and went strite 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
clattered in the galley, he jumped suddenly with an oath, and looked
hard about the cabin.
Then Strokher confessed to a sense of distress also. He'd been
having it since day before yesterday, it seemed.
"And I put it to you the glass is lovely," he said, "so it's no blow.
I guess," he continued, "we're all a bit seedy and ship-sore."
And whether or not this talk worked upon my own nerves, or whether in
very truth the Feel of the Sea had found me also, I do not know; but
I do know that after dinner that night, just before going to bed, a
queer sense of apprehension came upon me, and that when I had come to
my stateroom, after my turn upon deck, I became furiously angry with
nobody in particular, because I could not at once find the matches.
But here was 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
the Crows and myself. We carried a scant crew of stokers, and there
was also a chief engineer. But we saw so little of him that he did
not count. The Crows and I gloomed on the quarterdeck from dawn to
dark, silent, irritable, working upon each other's nerves till the
creak of a block would make a man jump like cold steel laid to his
flesh. We quarrelled over absolute nothings, glowered at each other
for half a word, and each one of us, at different times, was at some
pains to declare that never in the course of his career had he been
associated with such a disagreeable trio of brutes. Yet we were
always together, and sought each 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 the
creature with as much vociferation as fishwives till he fled the
cabin in actual fear of mishandling, leaving us suddenly seized with
noisy hilarity--for the first time in a week. Hardenberg proposed a
round of drinks from our single remaining case of beer. We stood up
and formed an Elk's chain and then drained our glasses to each
other's health with profound seriousness.
That same evening, I remember, we all sat on the quarterdeck till
late and--oddly enough--related each one his life's history up to
date; and then 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
forgotten all about him in the interest of the game, when--I suppose
it was about one in the morning--I heard him whistle long and shrill.
I laid down my cards and said:
"Hark!"
In the silence that followed we heard at first only the muffled lope
of our engines, the cadenced snorting of the exhaust, and the ticking
of Hardenberg's big watch in his waistcoat that he had hung by the
arm-hole to the back of his chair. Then from the bridge, above our
deck, prolonged, intoned--a wailing cry in the night--came Strokher's
voice:
"Sailoh-h-h!"
And the cards fell from our hands, and, like men turned to stone, we
sat looking at each other across the soiled red cloth for what seemed
an immeasurably 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
the taffrail was as smooth as lava, and so still that the swells from
the cutwater of the _Glarus_ did not break as they rolled away from
the bows.
I remember that I stood staring and blinking at the empty
ocean--where the moonlight lay like a painted stripe reaching to the
horizon--stupid and 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
heard Hardenberg's teeth come together like a spring trap, while Ally
Bazan ducked 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 blessed
elbow touch that means so incalculably much, looking off over our
port quarter.
For the ship that we saw there--oh, she was not a half-mile
distant--was unlike any ship known to present day construction.
She was short, and high-pooped, and her stern, which was turned a
little toward us, we could see, was set with curious windows, not
unlike a house. And on either side of this stern were two great iron
cressets such as once were used to burn signal-fires in. She had
three masts with mighty yards swung 'thwart-ship, but bare of all
sails save a few rotting streamers. Here and there about her a
tangled mass of rigging drooped and sagged.
And there she lay, in the red eye of the setting moon, in that
solitary ocean, shadowy, antique, forlorn, a thing the most
abandoned, the most sinister 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
neglect of duty. I say I was asleep--on watch. And we worked up to
her. When I woke, why--you see, when I woke, there she was," he gave
a weak little laugh, "and--and now, why, there she is, you see. I
turned around and saw her sudden like--when I woke up, that is."
He laughed again, and as he laughed the engines far below our feet
gave a sudden hiccough. Something crashed and struck the ship's
sides till we lurched as we stood. There was a shriek of steam, a
shout--and then silence.
The noise of the machinery ceased; the _Glarus_ slid through the
still water, moving only by her own decreasing momentum.
Hardenberg sang, "Stand by!" and called down the tube to the
engine-room.
"What's up?"
I was standing close enough to him to hear the answer in a small,
faint voice:
"Shaft gone, sir."
"Broke?"
"Yes, sir."
Hardenberg faced about.
"Come below. We must talk." I do not think any of us cast a glance
at the Other Ship again. Certainly I kept my eyes away from her.
But as we started down the companionway 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
for Strokher's answer.
Well, our shaft was broken. That was flat. We went down into the
engine-room and saw the jagged fracture that was the symbol of our
broken hopes. And in the course of the next five minutes'
conversation with the chief we found that, as we had not provided
against such a contingency, there was to be no mending of it. We
said nothing about the mishap coinciding with the appearance of the
Other Ship. But I know we did not consider the break with any degree
of surprise after a few moments.
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
ports opposite where I sat were open and I could see. The moon was
all but full set. The dawn was coming up with a copper murkiness
over the edge of the world. All the stars were yet out. The sea,
for all the red moon and copper dawn, was gray, and there, less than
half a mile away, still lay our consort. I could see her through the
portholes with each slow careening of the _Glarus_. "I vote for the
island," cried Ally Bazan, "shaft or no shaft. We rigs a bit o'
syle, y'know----" and thereat the discussion began.
For upward of two hours it raged, with loud words and shaken
forefingers, and great noisy bangings of the table, and how it would
have ended I do not know, but at last--it was then maybe five in the
morning--the lookout passed word down to the cabin:
"Will you come on deck, gentlemen?" It was the mate who spoke, and
the man was shaken--I could see that--to the very vitals of him. We
started and stared at one another, and I watched little Ally Bazan go
slowly white to the lips. And even then no word of the ship, except
as it might be this from Hardenberg:
"What is it? Good God Almighty, I'm no coward, but this thing is
getting one 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,
queer mid-period between dark and dawn, when the night is over and
the day not yet come, just the gray that is neither light nor dark,
the dim dead blink as of the refracted light from extinct worlds.
We stood at the rail. We did not speak; we stood watching. It was
so still that the drip of steam from some loosened pipe far below was
plainly audible, and it sounded in that lifeless, silent grayness
like--God knows what--a death tick.
"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's no
mistake about it. She is moving--this way."
"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets
her toward 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't want 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
your wind."
He was right. The _Glarus_ floated in absolute calm. On all that
slab of ocean 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, the rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping
deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her
sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean.
She made no sound. No single thing stirred aboard the hulk of
her--but she moved.
We were helpless. The _Glarus_ could stir no boat in any direction;
we were chained to the spot. Nobody had thought to put out our
lights, and they still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of
place in their red-and-green garishness, like maskers surprised by
daylight.
And in the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half-light
between dawn and day, at six o'clock, silent as the settling of the
dead to the bottomless 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
the time of day when we at last pulled ourselves together. But we
came to some sort of decision at last. This was to go on--under
sail. We were too 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 after
nightfall the wind at length came up fresh and favourable, I believe
we all felt heartened and a deal more hardy--until the last canvas
went aloft, 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 strong enough to get
steerageway Hardenberg put the wheel over and, as the booms swung
across the deck, headed for the island again.
We had not gone on this course half an hour--no, not twenty
minutes--before the wind shifted a whole quarter of the compass and
took the _Glarus_ square in the teeth, so that there was nothing for
it but to tack. And then the strangest thing befell.
I will make allowance for the fact that there was no centre-board nor
keel to speak of to the _Glarus_. I will admit that the sails upon a
nine-hundred-ton freighter are not calculated to speed her, nor
steady her. I will even admit the possibility of a current that set
from the island toward us. All this may be true, yet the _Glarus_
should have advanced. We should have made a wake.
And instead of this, our stolid, steady, trusty old boat was--what
shall I say?
I will say that no man may thoroughly understand a ship--after all.
I will say that new ships are cranky and unsteady; that old and
seasoned ships have their little crotchets, their little fussinesses
that their skippers 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, grow unstable, perverse, and refuse to answer helm and
handling. And I will say that some ships that for years have sailed
blue water as soberly and as docilely as a street-car horse has
plodded the treadmill of the 'tween-tracks, have been known to balk,
as stubbornly and as conclusively as any old Bay Billy that ever wore
a bell. I know this has happened, because I have seen it. I saw,
for instance, the _Glarus_ do it.
Quite literally and truly we could do nothing with her. We will say,
if you like, that that great jar and wrench when the shaft gave way
shook her and crippled her. It is true however, that whatever the
cause may have been, we could not force her toward the island. Of
course, we all said "current"; but why didn't the log-line trail?
For three days and three nights we tried it. And the _Glarus_ heaved
and plunged and shook herself just as you have seen a horse plunge
and rear when his rider tries to force him at the steam-roller.
I tell you I could feel the fabric of her tremble and shudder from
bow to stern-post, as though she were in a storm; I tell you she fell
off from the wind, and broad-on drifted back from her course till the
sensation of her shrinking was as plain as her own staring lights and
a thing pitiful to see.
We roweled her, and we crowded sail upon her, and we coaxed and
bullied and humoured her, till the Three Crows, their fortune only a
plain sail two days ahead, raved and swore like insensate brutes, or
shall we say like mahouts trying to drive their stricken elephant
upon the tiger--and all to no purpose. "Damn the damned current and
the damned luck and the damned shaft and all," Hardenberg would
exclaim, as from the wheel he would catch the _Glarus_ falling off.
"Go on, you old hooker--you tub of junk! 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 a
mutinous crew. And we were in a fair way to have both. The stokers,
whom we had impressed into duty as A.B.'s, were of course
superstitious; and they knew how the _Glarus_ was acting, and it was
only a question of time before they got out of hand.
That was the end. We held a final conference in the cabin and
decided that there was no help for it--we must turn back.
And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, and
the "current" helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of
the _Glarus_, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log-line
ran out 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 was
propitious.
But an incident happened just after we had started back. We were
perhaps some five miles on the homeward track. It was early evening
and Strokher had 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 the
Other Ship again, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were leaving her
rapidly astern. Strokher and I stood looking at her till she
dwindled to a dot. Then Strokher said:
"She's on post again."
And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast
anchor off the "Front" our crew went ashore as soon as discharged,
and in half a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors'
boarding-house and in every 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 walk her decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She will never
smell blue water again, nor taste the trades. She has seen a Ghost.