We parted with our mysterious passenger, the army officer, and weighed anchor just as the sun was setting.  Lookouts were posted early, and special instruction given by the captain to maintain a vigilant watch.  The fact that we were in the very theatre of war, and that several Spanish cruisers, including the Spanish torpedo boat “Terror,” were reported as being in the vicinity, kept a number of us on deck.

“It is one thing lying off a port with a lot of other ships and bombarding a few measly earthworks, and another to be sneaking about in the darkness like this, not knowing when you will run your nose against an enemy twice as large,” said Flagg, as several of Number Eight’s crew met on the forecastle.  “I tell you, it feels like war.”

“Reminds me of a story I heard once,” put in “Stump,” lazily.  He was lounging over the rail with his back to us and his words came faintly.  The deck was shrouded in gloom, and the vague outlines of the pilot-house, only a dozen feet away, was the length of our vision aft.  A soft, purling sound came from over the side where the waves lapped against the steel hull.  A shovel grated stridently now and then in the fire room, and occasionally a block rattled or a halliard flapped against the foremast overhead.  The surroundings and the strange, weird “feel” of the darkness were peculiarly impressive.

“I don’t know whether we care to hear any story,” observed “Hay.”  “Better keep it until later, ‘Stump.’  The night’s too wonderful to do anything except lounge around and think.  Whew! isn’t it dark?”

“This story I was going to tell you requires a setting like this,” replied “Stump.”  “It is about a ship that started from England years and years ago.  She had as passengers a lot of lunatics who were to be experimented upon by a doctor about as crazy as they.  He bought the ship, fitted it up with a number of little iron cages, and set forth with his queer cargo.  Ten days out, the lunatics broke from their quarters and captured the vessel.  One of them, who had been a sea captain in his time, took charge, and proceeded to carry out a little idea of his own, which was to make sane people crazy.”

“That was turning the tables with a vengeance,” drawled “Dye,” from his perch on an upturned pail.  “I wonder if he was any relation to ’Cutlets’?”

“A lineal ancestor, I’ll bet a biscuit,” chimed in “Hay.”  “Don’t you remember the quotation, ‘By these acts you will know their forefathers,’ or something like that?”

“Well,” resumed “Stump,” “the crazy captain put the doctor and the crew in the cages and began to feed them hardtack and berth-deck scouse and salt-horse and—­”

[Illustration:  The searchlight “Sweeping back and forth across the black of the horizon”]

“Must have been a Government naval contractor in his time,” murmured “Morrie.”