“Then out of her upper works—­I swear I could see the tangle of ropes and slatting canvas—­came a voice that rang in my ears for many a day, no matter how the others heard it.  It shouted: 

“We’re the spirits of them ye run under!  We’re the spirits of them ye run under!”

“My soul and body, Miss Bostwick, but I was scairt!” confessed the old salt.  “That rushing sound and the voices crashed on through our rigging and went down wind in a most amazing style.  It was a ghost warning like nothing I’d ever heard before or since.  And it struck the whole crew the same way.  We begun to question what the Marlin B. was.  She was a new schooner and had made but one trip to the Banks previous to this one we was on.  We began to ask why her original crew had not stayed with her.

“You can’t fool sailormen, Miss Bostwick,” continued the old man, shaking his head with great solemnity.  “They sees too much and they knows too much.  Sutro Brothers had got rid of the Marlin B.’s first crew and picked up strangers, but murder will out.  The story come to us through the night and in the snow squall.  We couldn’t stand for no murder ship.  We made the skipper put back.”

“Why, wasn’t that mutiny?” gasped the girl.

“He was glad enough to turn back hisself.  Even if he lost his ticket he would have turned back.  Then we learned what it meant.  On her first trip for fish, returning to Salem, the Marlin B. run under a smaller fishing craft and every soul aboard of her was lost.  And it stands to reason that every time that murder schooner went out of the harbor and came to the spot where she’d run the other craft down, those uneasy souls would rise up and denounce the Marlin B.”

“Oh!” gasped the girl, startled, for Tunis Latham and Orion stood behind her.

“Your tongue’s hung in the middle and wags both ends, Horry,” growled the young skipper.  “You trying to scare Miss Bostwick out of her wits?  What you poor, weak-minded, misguided fellows heard that time in the snow squall was a flock of black gulls coming down with the wind.  And somebody aboard of the Marlin B. was a ventriloquist.  Your whole crew weren’t ignorant of the accident that happened on her first trip.  Somebody had it in for Sutro Brothers, and made much of little, same as usual.”

“Oh, they did?” muttered Horry.

“Anyway,” said Captain Latham, “that’s neither here nor there.  We aren’t sailing the Marlin B., for she’s in Chilean waters, owned by a South American millionaire.  You can stow that kind of talk, Horry—­anyway, while Miss Bostwick is aboard.”

They were until late in the evening beating into Paulmouth Harbor, but the heavens were starlit and the air as soft as spring.  The tolling of the bell buoy over Bitter Reef was mellow and soothing; they heard it for a long time before the Seamew made the short leg of the final tack and went rushing in past the danger mark under the urge of a sudden puff of the fitful breeze.