I looked at him.

“What do you think?” I replied.

“I don’t know what to think,” he said.  “But I’ve a feeling that it’s something to do with all the rest,” and he indicated aloft, with his head.

“I’ve been thinking, too,” I remarked.

“That it is?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I answered, and told him how the idea had come to me at my dinner, that the strange men-shadows which came aboard, might come from that indistinct vessel we had seen down in the sea.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, as he got my meaning.  And then for a little, he stood and thought.

“That’s where they live, you mean?” he said, at last, and paused again.

“Well,” I replied.  “It can’t be the sort of existence we should call life.”

He nodded, doubtfully.

“No,” he said, and was silent again.

Presently, he put out an idea that had come to him.

“You think, then, that that—­vessel has been with us for some time, if we’d only known?” he asked.

“All along,” I replied.  “I mean ever since these things started.”

“Supposing there are others,” he said, suddenly.

I looked at him.

“If there are,” I said.  “You can pray to God that they won’t stumble across us.  It strikes me that whether they’re ghosts, or not ghosts, they’re blood-gutted pirates.

“It seems horrible,” he said solemnly, “to be talking seriously like this, about—­you know, about such things.”

“I’ve tried to stop thinking that way,” I told him.  “I’ve felt I should go cracked, if I didn’t.  There’s damned queer things happen at sea, I know; but this isn’t one of them.”

“It seems so strange and unreal, one moment, doesn’t it?” he said.  “And the next, you know it’s really true, and you can’t understand why you didn’t always know.  And yet they’d never believe, if you told them ashore about it.”

“They’d believe, if they’d been in this packet in the middle watch this morning,” I said.

“Besides,” I went on.  “They don’t understand.  We didn’t ...  I shall always feel different now, when I read that some packet hasn’t been heard of.”

Tammy stared at me.

“I’ve heard some of the old shellbacks talking about things,” he said.  “But I never took them really seriously.”

“Well,” I said.  “I guess we’ll have to take this seriously.  I wish to God we were home!”

“My God! so do I,” he said.

For a good while after that, we both worked on in silence; but, presently, he went off on another tack.

“Do you think we’ll really shorten her down every night before it gets dark?” he asked.

“Certainly,” I replied.  “They’ll never get the men to go aloft at night, after what’s happened.”

“But, but—­supposing they ordered us aloft—­” he began.

“Would you go?” I interrupted.

“No!” he said, emphatically.  “I’d jolly well be put in irons first!”