At the gangway at which the canoe had approached now stood the individual already introduced to our readers as Jack Fuller.  The same superstitious terror that caused his flight had once more attracted him to the spot where the subject of his alarm first appeared to him; and, without seeming to reflect that the vessel, in her slow but certain progress, had left all vestige of the mysterious visitant behind, he continued gazing over the bulwarks on the dark waters, as if he expected at each moment to find his sight stricken by the same appalling vision.  It was at the moment when he had worked up his naturally dull imagination to its highest perception of the supernatural, that he was joined by the rugged boatswain, who had passed the greater part of the night in pacing up and down the decks, watching the aspect of the heavens, and occasionally tauting a rope or squaring a light yard, unassisted, as the fluttering of the canvass in the wind rendered the alteration necessary.

“Well, Jack!” bluntly observed the latter in a gruff whisper that resembled the suppressed growling of a mastiff, “what the hell are ye thinking of now?—­Not got over your flumbustification yet, that ye stand here, looking as sanctified as an old parson!”

“I’ll tell ye what it is, Mr. Mullins,” returned the sailor, in the same key; “you may make as much game on me as you like; but these here strange sort of doings are somehow quizzical; and, though I fears nothing in the shape of flesh and blood, still, when it comes to having to do with those as is gone to Davy Jones’s locker like, it gives a fellow an all-overishness as isn’t quite the thing.  You understand me?”

“I’m damned if I do!” was the brief but energetic rejoinder.

“Well, then,” continued Fuller, “if I must out with it, I must.  I think that ’ere Ingian must have been the devil, or how could he come so sudden and unbeknownst upon me, with the head of a ’possum:  and then, agin, how could he get away from the craft without our seeing him? and how came the ghost on board of the canoe?”

“Avast there, old fellow; you means not the head of a ’possum, but a beaver:  but that ’ere’s all nat’r’l enough, and easily ’counted for; but you hav’n’t told us whose ghost it was, after all.”

“No; the captain made such a spring to the gunwale, as frighted it all out of my head:  but come closer, Mr. Mullins, and I’ll whisper it in your ear.—­Hark! what was that?”

“I hears nothing,” said the boatswain, after a pause.

“It’s very odd,” continued Fuller; “but I thought as how I heard it several times afore you came.”

“There’s something wrong, I take it, in your upper story, Jack Fuller,” coolly observed his companion; “that ’ere ghost has quite capsized you.”

“Hark, again!” repeated the sailor.  “Didn’t you hear it then?  A sort of a groan like.”

“Where, in what part?” calmly demanded the boatswain, though in the same suppressed tone in which the dialogue had been, carried on.