Hullo!

There was a man standing on her deck.

She lay with her nose pointing up the river and her stern towards me.  The man stood by her wheel (for some idiotic reason, best known to himself, her builder had given her a wheel instead of a tiller), which was covered up with tarpaulin.  He stood with a hand on this tarpaulin case, and looked back over his shoulder towards me—­a tall fellow with a reddish beard and a clean-shaven upper lip.  I was drifting close by this time—­he looking curiously at me—­and I must have been studying his features for half a minute before I hailed him.

“Yacht ahoy!” I called out.  “Is that the Siren?”

Getting no answer, I pulled the boat close under the yacht’s side, made her fast, and climbed on board by way of the channels.

“This is the Siren, eh?” I said, looking down her deck towards the wheel.

There was no man to be seen.

I stared around for a minute or so; ran to the opposite side and looked over; ran aft and leaned over her taffrail; ran forward and peered over her bows.  Her counter was too short to conceal a man, and her stem had absolutely no overhang at all; yet no man was to be seen, nor boat nor sign of a man.  I tried the companion:  it was covered and padlocked.  The sail-hatch and fore-hatch were also fastened and padlocked, and the skylights covered with tarpaulin and screwed firmly down.  A mouse could not have found its way below, except perhaps by the stove-pipe or the pipe leading down to the chain-locker.

I was no believer in ghosts, but I had to hit on some theory there and then.  My nerves had been out of order for a month or two, and the long railway journey must have played havoc with them.  The whole thing was a hallucination.  So I told myself while pulling the coverings off the skylights, but somehow got mighty little comfort out of it; and I will not deny that I fumbled a bit with the padlock on the main hatchway, or that I looked down a second time before setting foot on the companion ladder.

She was a sweet ship; and the air below, though stuffy, had no taste of bilge in it.  I explored main cabin, sleeping cabins, forecastle.  The movable furniture had been taken ashore, as I had been told; but the fixtures were in good order, the decorations in good taste.  Not a panel had shrunk or warped, nor could I find any leakage.  At the same time I could find no evidence that she had been visited lately by man or ghost.  The only thing that seemed queer was the inscription “29.56” on the beam in the forecastle.  It certainly struck me that the surveyor must have under-registered her, but for the moment I thought little about it.

Passing back through the main cabin I paused to examine one or two of the fittings—­particularly a neat glass-fronted bookcase, with a small sideboard below it, containing three drawers and a cellaret.  The bookcase was empty and clean swept; so also were the drawers.  At the bottom of the cellaret I found a couple of flags stowed—­a tattered yellow quarantine-signal tightly rolled into a bundle, and a red ensign neatly folded.  As I lifted out the latter, there dropped from its folds and fell upon the cabin floor—­a book.