forgotten, but as I have told you this much I
may as well finish, and be done with it.

"It was partly due to a sailor's love for tobacco, partly to our cold,
drenched condition. A sailor will starve quietly, but go crazy if
deprived of his smoke. This is so well known at sea that a skipper, who
will not hesitate to sail from port with rotten or insufficient food
for his men, will not dare take a chance without a full supply of
tobacco in the slop chest.

"But our slop chest was under water, and the tobacco utterly useless. I
did not use it at the time, but I fished some out for the others. It
did not do; it would not dry out to smoke, and the salt in it made it
unfit to chew. But the bos'n had an upper bunk in the forward house, in
which was a couple of pounds of navy plug, and he and the sailor talked
this over until their craving for a smoke overcame their fear of death.

"Of course, by this time, all discipline was ended, and all my commands
and entreaties went for nothing. They sharpened their knives, and,
agreeing to go forward, one on the starboard rail, the other on the
port, and each to come to the other's aid if called, they went up into
the darkness of ashes and rain. I opened my room window, which
overlooked the main deck, but could see nothing.

"Yet I could hear; I heard two screams for help, one after the
other--one from the starboard side, the other from the port, and knew
that they were caught. I closed the window, for nothing could be done.
What manner of thing it was that could grab two men so far apart nearly
at the same time was beyond all imagining.

"I talked to the steward and cook, but found small comfort. The first
was a Jap, the other a Chinaman, and they were the old-fashioned
kind--what they could not see with their eyes, they could not believe.
Both thought that all those men who had met death had either drowned or
died by falling. Neither understood--and, in fact, I did not
myself--the theories of Herr Smidt. He had stopped his cheerful humming
to himself now, and was very busy with his instruments.

"'This thing,' I said to him, 'must be able to see in the dark. It
certainly could not have heard those two men, over the noise of the
wind, sea, and rain.'

"'Why not?' he answered, as he puttered with his wires. 'Cats and owls
can see in the dark, und the accepted explanation is that by their
power of enlarging der pupils they admit more light to the retina. But
that explanation nev