This was a straight dig at the Old Man’s “be gentle” orders, but it didn’t pierce his skin.  Swope laughed, genuinely amused, his soft, rippling laugh that always frightened us so much.  “Peaceful, eh?  By the Lord, Mister, it sounded like an army overhead.  And it was no more than a ghost!” He peered aft, and discerned Newman at the wheel, recognizing him by bulk, I guess, for the binnacle lights were half shuttered and Newman’s face invisible.  But I’m sure he recognized him, for he pursed his lips in a way I had seen him do before when he looked at Newman.  He strolled away forward, to the break of the poop, glancing this way and that, and back again to the hatch.  “If it were moonlight, I’d say your man was touched,” says he to Lynch.  “But I suppose he was half asleep and dreaming.”

“I’ll wake him up and work the dreams out of him,” promised Mister Lynch.

“But no hazing, Mister.  The men are in bad enough temper as it is.”

Aye, thus to Lynch, as though the rest of us were beyond ear-shot.  But all the time his eyes were upon us, measuring the effect of his words.  Oh, he was a sly beast, a “slick one,” as Beasley said.

“Which is the lad who beheld this—­ghost?” he added.

The second mate shoved Oscar forward so that he stood in the light that streamed up from the cabin.

“So one little ghost scared you, eh?” says he to poor trembling Oscar.  “Why, my man, if all the ghosts in this ship were to begin walking about, we living men would be crowded into the sea.”  With that he went below, laughing, as though he had just made a fine joke, and leaving us more frightened than ever.

The mate went below again also, but he wasn’t laughing.  We sensed that the news worried Fitzgibbon, and that strengthened our conviction.  Blackjack Fitzgibbon had cause for worry.  So we thought.  Wasn’t it he, as well as Swope, who mishandled the boy to his death?

That ended the scene aft.  Oscar relieved the wheel; he had to.  Lynch put the rest of us to work again, and during the balance of the watch we saw ghosts in every corner.

When we went below at eight bells, we held a grand talk in the foc’sle, a parliament that practically all hands attended.  Aye, we were quite convinced that the ghost was abroad.  Oscar stuck to his yarn, and embellished it, and left no room in our minds for doubt.  Newman laughed at us, and denied the presence of a spook on the poop; that done he turned in and slept.  But his evidence didn’t shake our belief.  Oscar gave too many particulars.

The compass had not been shuttered when he went aft to relieve the wheel, and he had seen Nils standing in the light.  He couldn’t be mistaken.  “Yust as plain like a picture.”  He knew him by his boyish stature, by his beardless features, by his clothes.  He was wearing his Scotch-plaid coat and red tam-o’-shanter; Oscar couldn’t be mistaken in them, because he had helped Nils pick them out in a Glasgow slops shop “last ship.”  Didn’t his mates remember those togs?