before noon, and ate his first meal since the
murders. He looked better, and we had a long talk, I outside the
window and he within. He held to his story of the night before, but
was still vague as to just how the thing looked. Of what it was he
seemed to have no doubt. It was the specter of either the captain or
Vail; he excluded the woman, because she was shorter. As I stood
outside, he measured on me the approximate height of the
apparition--somewhere about five feet eight. He could see Burns's
shirt, he admitted, but the thing had been close to the window.

I found myself convinced against my will, and that afternoon, alone, I
made a second and more thorough examination of the forecastle and the
hold. In the former I found nothing. Having been closed for over
twenty-four hours, it was stifling and full of odors. The crew,
abandoning it in haste, had left it in disorder. I made a systematic
search, beginning forward and working back. I prodded in and under
bunks, and moved the clothing that hung on every hook and swung, to the
undoing of my nerves, with every swell. Much curious salvage I found
under mattresses and beneath bunks: a rosary and a dozen filthy
pictures under the same pillow; more than one bottle of whiskey; and
even, where it had been dropped in the haste of flight, a bottle of
cocaine. The bottle set me to thinking: had we a "coke" fiend on
board, and, if we had, who was it?

The examination of the hold led to one curious and not easily explained
discovery. The Ella was in gravel ballast, and my search there was
difficult and nerve-racking. The creaking of the girders and
floor-plates, the groaning overhead of the trestle-trees, and once an
unexpected list that sent me careening, head first, against a
ballast-tank, made my position distinctly disagreeable. And above all
the incidental noises of a ship's hold was one that I could not
place--a regular knocking, which kept time with the list of the boat.

I located it at last, approximately, at one of the ballast ports, but
there was nothing to be seen. The port had been carefully barred and
calked over. The sound was not loud. Down there among the other
noises, I seemed to feel as well as hear it. I sent Burns down, and he
came up, puzzled.

"It's outside," he said. "Something cracking against her ribs."

"You didn't notice it yesterday, did you?"

"No; but yesterday we were not listening for noises."

The knocking was on the