I stood for a moment at the foot of the companion accustoming my eyes to the gloom.  After a moment, with a shock of surprise, I made out a shining pair of bead-points gazing at me unblinkingly from the shadow under the bitts.  Slowly the man defined himself, as a shape takes form in a fog.  He was leaning forward in an attitude of attention, his elbows resting on his knees, his forearms depending between them, his head thrust out.  I could detect no faintest movement of eyelash, no faintest sound of breathing.  The stillness was portentous.  The creature was exactly like a wax figure, one of the sort you meet in corridors of cheap museums and for a moment mistake for living beings.  Almost I thought to make out the customary grey dust lying on the wax of his features.

I am going to tell you more of this man, because, as you shall see, he was destined to have much to do with my life, the fate of Dr. Karl Augustus Schermerhorn, and the doom of the Laughing Lass.

He wore on his head a red bandana handkerchief.  I never saw him with other covering.  From beneath It straggled oily and tangled locks of glossy black.  His face was long, narrow, hook-nosed and sinister; his eyes, as I have described them, a steady and beady black.  I could at first glance ascribe great activity, but only moderate strength to his slender, wiry figure.  In this I was mistaken.  His sheer physical power was second only to that of Captain Selover.  One of his forearms ended in a steel hook.  At the moment I could not understand this; could not see how a man so maimed could be useful aboard a ship.  Later I wished we had more as handy.  He knew a jam hitch which he caught over and under his hook quicker than most men can grasp a line with the naked hand.  It would render one way, but held fast the other.  He told me it was a cinch-hook hitch employed by mule packers in the mountains, and that he had used it on swamp-hooks in the lumber woods of Michigan.  I shouldn’t wonder.  He was a Wandering Jew.—­His name was Anderson, but I never heard him called that.  It was always “Handy Solomon” with men and masters.

We stared at each other, I fascinated by something, some spell of the ship, which I have never been able to explain to myself—­nor even describe.  It was a mystery, a portent, a premonition such as overtakes a man sometimes in the dark passageways of life.  I cannot tell you of it, nor make you believe—­let it pass——­

Then by a slow process of successive perceptions I became aware that I was watched by other eyes, other wax figures, other human beings with unwavering gaze.  They seemed to the sense of mystic apprehension that for the moment held possession of me, to be everywhere—­in the bunks, on the floor, back in the shadows, watching, watching, watching from the advantage of another world.

[Illustration:  Slowly the man defined himself as a shape takes form in a fog.]

I don’t know why I tell you this; why I lay so much stress on the first weird impression I got of the forecastle.  It means something to me now—­in view of all that happened subsequently.  Almost can I look back and see, in that moment of occultism, a warning, an enlightenment——­But the point is, it meant something to me then.  I stood there fascinated, unable to move, unable to speak.