into her. She was of a type common enough on the high seas, except that a
step for a mast showed that she had presumably been used for skimming
about open shores. Of her passengers, one lay forward, prone and quiet. A
length of sail cloth spread over him made it impossible to see his garb.
At his breast an ugly protuberance, outlined vaguely, hinted a deformity.

The other sprawled aft, and at a nearer sight of him some of the men
broke out into nervous titters. There was some excuse, for surely such a
scarecrow had never before been the sport of wind and wave. A thing of
shreds he was, elaborately ragged, a face overrun with a scrub of beard,
and preternaturally drawn, surmounted by a stiff-dried, dirty, cloth
semi-turban, with a wide, forbidding stain along the side, worked out the
likeness to a make-up.

"My God!" cackled Forsythe with an hysterical explosion; and again, "My
God!"

A long-drawn, irrepressible aspiration of expectancy rose from the
warship's decks as the stranger raised his haggard face, turned eyes
unseeingly upon them, and fell back. The forward occupant stirred not,
save as the boat rolled.

From between decks someone called out, sharply, an order. In the grim
silence it seemed strangely incongruous that the measured business of a
ship's life should be going forward as usual. Something within the
newcomer's consciousness stirred to that voice of authority.
Mechanically, like some huge, hideous toy, he raised first one arm, then
the other, and hitched himself halfway up on the stern seat. His mouth
opened. His face wrinkled. He seemed groping for the meaning of a joke at
which he knew he ought to laugh. Suddenly from his lips in surprising
volume, raucous, rasping, yet with a certain rollicking deviltry fit to
set the head a-tilt, burst a chanty:

"Oh, their coffin was their ship, and their grave it was the sea:
_Blow high, blow low, what care we!_
And the quarter that we gave them was to sink them in the sea:
_Down on the coast of the high Barbaree-ee._"

Long-drawn, like the mockery of a wail, the minor cadence wavered through
the stillness, and died away.

"The High Barbaree!" cried Trendon.

"You know it?" asked the captain, expectant of a clue.

"One of those cursed tunes you can't forget," said the surgeon. "Heard a
scoundrel of a beach-comber sing it years ago. Down in New Zealand, that
was. When the fever rose on him he'd pipe up. Used to beat time with a
steel hook he