As this notion was passed from one to another, we cried out aloud, that our hour was come.  Captain Goss was in the middle of us.  ’Hold your baby screeches,’ says he.  ’You’ll be none the worse; it’s me and the smack she has to do with.’  Even, as he spoke, she was on us.  Some fell on their knees, and others clenched their fists and their teeth; but instead of the crash of meeting timber, we heard but a rustle, and the shadow of her sails flitted, as it were, across us; and as they passed, the wind was cold, cold, and struck us like frost; and the next minute the Lively Nan had sunk below our feet, and we found ourselves in the roaring sea, struggling among the wreck of the mast.  The smack was gone, and the strange ship gone, and the gale blowing steady and strong.  One by one, mates, we got astride of the mast, and lashed ourselves with odds and ends of broken rope; and then we began, as we rose and fell on the sea, to look about and muster how many we were.  The crew, including the captain, was seven hands, but we were sure there were eight men sitting on the mast.  It was too dark to see faces; but you could see the dark figures clinging to the spar.

‘Answer to your names, mates,’ says Bartholomew, who somehow took the lead.  And so he called over the list till he came to the captain.

‘Captain Goss?’

‘Here,’ says the captain’s voice.

We now knew there was somebody behind him who was not one of the crew.  It was too dark, however, to see distinctly, and Goss interrupted our view such as it was.

‘Who is the man on the end of the mast, Captain Goss?’ says Bartholomew.

‘You might be old enough to guess that!’ replied the captain, and his voice was husky-like, but quite clear; and it never trembled.  ’Some men call him one thing, some another; and we of the sea call him Davy Jones.’

Mates, at that we clustered up together as well as we could, and fixing our eyes on what was passing at the other end of the mast, we hardly attended to the seas that broke over and over us.  At last, we saw Captain Goss, by the light of the beds of bursting foam, fumbling for something in his breast.

‘Is it a Bible you have there?’ cried Bartholomew.  The captain didn’t answer, but pulled out the thing he was trying for; and we guessed somehow, for we could hardly see, that it was the greasy pack of cards.

‘Double or quits!’ he shouted, ‘on all I’ve staked;’ and in another instant there was one horrid, unearthly screech, like what we heard in the cabin before, and the mast, as it were, tipped the heel of it, the cross-trees rising many feet above the water.  Whether or no it was the motion of the waves that had tossed it, no man can say; but when the mast rolled again with the next sea, the heel came up empty:  Captain Goss and his companion were gone!

‘Thank God,’ says Old Bartholomew, ‘for Jonah is in the sea.’  In less than half an hour, mates, we were tossed ashore, without a bruise or scratch.  We walked the beach till daylight, and then we saw that the mast had disappeared.  None ever saw more a timber or a rope’s-end of the Lively Nan.  She had been staked and won; but the greasy cards, mates, lay wet and dank upon the beach, and we left them to wither there among the sea-weed.