he last words. "There,
sir, don't you hear it?" he asked suddenly.

I heard nothing but the creaking of the manilla sheet. It
was getting near noon, and fine, clear weather in southern
waters,--just the sort of day and the time when you would least
expect to feel creepy. But I remembered how I had heard that same
tune overhead at night in a gale of wind a fortnight earlier,
and I am not ashamed to say that the same sensation came over
me now, and I wished myself well out of the _Helen B._, and
aboard of any old cargo-dragger, with a windmill on deck, and an
eighty-nine-forty-eighter for captain, and a fresh leak whenever
it breezed up.

Little by little during the next few days life on board that
vessel came to be about as unbearable as you can imagine. It
wasn't that there was much talk, for I think the men were shy
even of speaking to each other freely about what they thought.
The whole ship's company grew silent, until one hardly ever heard
a voice, except giving an order and the answer. The men didn't
sit over their meals when their watch was below, but either
turned in at once or sat about on the forecastle smoking their
pipes without saying a word. We were all thinking of the same
thing. We all felt as if there were a hand on board, sometimes
below, sometimes about decks, sometimes aloft, sometimes on the
boom end; taking his full share of what the others got, but doing
no work for it. We didn't only feel it, we knew it. He took up no
room, he cast no shadow, and we never heard his footfall on deck;
but he took his whack with the rest as regular as the bells,
and--he whistled "Nancy Lee." It was like the worst sort of dream
you can imagine; and I dare say a good many of us tried to
believe it was nothing else sometimes, when we stood looking over
the weather rail in fine weather with the breeze in our faces;
but if we happened to turn round and look into each other's eyes,
we knew it was something worse than any dream could be; and we
would turn away from each other with a queer, sick feeling,
wishing that we could just for once see somebody who didn't know
what we knew.

There's not much more to tell about the _Helen B. Jackson_ so far
as I am concerned. We were more like a shipload of lunatics than
anything else when we ran in under Morro Castle, and anchored in
Havana. The cook had brain fever, and was raving mad in his
delirium; and the rest of the men weren't far from the same
state. The last three or