“’Very respectfully,

     “‘Your obedient servant,’

“and signs his own name and rating, Percy Algernon Willoughby—­call him that—­Chief Yeoman, U.S.  Navy, and glues that on behind the other sixty-seven endorsements and gloats over it, and for a few minutes feels like a bureau chief himself.  Then for another minute or two he thought of mailing it to them.  And he could see them reading that in Washington!  There would be an endorsement to go ringing down the departmental ancestral halls!  And as for the other yeomen, his colleagues in the service, for generations his name would resound among ’em.  But he decided that that would be too much glory for one yeoman, and besides, he didn’t know where he could start in at $70 a month (with additions) and all found, at his age, after being nineteen years on one job.  And right here, he had to admit to himself, he didn’t have so very much the best of Heels of the navy-yard.  So he looks it over again; fat as a history of the Roman Empire, and hefted it and—­well, there were young apprentice-boys aboard that didn’t weigh any more.  But to make sure, he lashes it to the butt-end of a fourteen-pound shell the gunner had once given him for a desk-weight.  He hated to lose that desk-weight, a relic of the Santiago fight, but a good cause this—­a good cause.  He starts to unscrew his air-port, but come to think, it was still daylight, and so he waits for the shades of night to fall.

“Well, that night—­three bells just gone in the mid-watch it was—­the marine guarding the patent life-buoy on the port side of the quarter-deck, fell into a reverie.  He ought to have been on the qui vive, so to speak—­alert, active, wide-awake, pacing his post briskly of course, according to instructions; and if it was daylight when the officer of the deck could see him, you betcher he would.  But it was the middle of the night, and a night in the Orient, with a sky of studded velvet and a sea that flowed by like a smooth roll of dark belting, and he was only—­Tolliver was his name, from Georgia—­only a slim young Southern boy dreaming of home and mother, and maybe of a girl he had left behind him, and he looked up at the emblazoned firmament and again at the flashing sea, and then he rested his head on the top chain-rail.

“For just a second.  He had said to himself he wouldn’t go to sleep; but all at once he heard a move below him, as of somebody unscrewing an air-port, and then he heard a voice say, ’Well, here goes a ghost that will stay laid!’ and then a plash, a pl-m-p! and looking over quickly, he saw plain as could be the phosphorus hole in the sea, then a quarter of a second later something white as a man’s face, and then it was gone into the ship’s wake.