“My God!” cackled Forsythe with an hysterical explosion; and again, “My God!”

A long-drawn, irrepressible aspiration of expectancy rose from the warship’s decks as the stranger raised his haggard face, turned eyes unseeingly upon them, and fell back.  The forward occupant stirred not, save as the boat rolled.

From between decks someone called out, sharply, an order.  In the grim silence it seemed strangely incongruous that the measured business of a ship’s life should be going forward as usual.  Something within the newcomer’s consciousness stirred to that voice of authority.  Mechanically, like some huge, hideous toy, he raised first one arm, then the other, and hitched himself halfway up on the stern seat.  His mouth opened.  His face wrinkled.  He seemed groping for the meaning of a joke at which he knew he ought to laugh.  Suddenly from his lips in surprising volume, raucous, rasping, yet with a certain rollicking deviltry fit to set the head a-tilt, burst a chanty: 

  “Oh, their coffin was their ship, and their grave it was the sea: 
    Blow high, blow low, what care we!
  And the quarter that we gave them was to sink them in the sea: 
    Down on the coast of the high Barbaree-ee.”

Long-drawn, like the mockery of a wail, the minor cadence wavered through the stillness, and died away.

“The High Barbaree!” cried Trendon.

“You know it?” asked the captain, expectant of a clue.

“One of those cursed tunes you can’t forget,” said the surgeon.  “Heard a scoundrel of a beach-comber sing it years ago.  Down in New Zealand, that was.  When the fever rose on him he’d pipe up.  Used to beat time with a steel hook he wore in place of a hand.  The thing haunted me till I was sorry I hadn’t let the rascal die.  This creature might have learned it from him.  Howls it out exactly like.”

“I don’t see that that helps us any,” said Forsythe, looking down on the preparations that were making to receive the unexpected guests.

With a deftness which had made the Wolverine famous in the navy for the niceties of seamanship, the great cruiser let down her tackle as she drew skilfully alongside, and made fast, preparatory to lifting the dory gently to her broad deck.  But before the order came to hoist away, one of the jackies who had gone down drew the covering back from the still figure forward, and turned it over.  With a half-stifled cry he shrank back.  And at that the tension of soul and mind on the Wolverine snapped, breaking into outcries and sudden, sharp imprecations.  The face revealed was that of Timmins, the bo’s’n’s mate, who had sailed with the first vanished crew.  A life preserver was fastened under his arms.  He was dead.