four days had been awful, and we had
been as near to having a mutiny on board as I ever want to be.
The men didn't want to hurt anybody; but they wanted to get away
out of that ship, if they had to swim for it; to get away from
that whistling, from that dead shipmate who had come back, and
who filled the ship with his unseen self. I know that if the old
man and I hadn't kept a sharp lookout the men would have put a
boat over quietly on one of those calm nights, and pulled away,
leaving the captain and me and the mad cook to work the schooner
into harbour. We should have done it somehow, of course, for we
hadn't far to run if we could get a breeze; and once or twice I
found myself wishing that the crew were really gone, for the
awful state of fright in which they lived was beginning to work
on me too. You see I partly believed and partly didn't; but
anyhow I didn't mean to let the thing get the better of me,
whatever it was. I turned crusty, too, and kept the men at work
on all sorts of jobs, and drove them to it until they wished I
was overboard, too. It wasn't that the old man and I were trying
to drive them to desert without their pay, as I am sorry to say
a good many skippers and mates do, even now. Captain Hackstaff
was as straight as a string, and I didn't mean those poor fellows
should be cheated out of a single cent; and I didn't blame them
for wanting to leave the ship, but it seemed to me that the only
chance to keep everybody sane through those last days was to work
the men till they dropped. When they were dead tired they slept a
little, and forgot the thing until they had to tumble up on deck
and face it again. That was a good many years ago. Do you believe
that I can't hear "Nancy Lee" now, without feeling cold down my
back? For I heard it too, now and then, after the man had
explained why he was always looking over his shoulder. Perhaps it
was imagination. I don't know. When I look back it seems to me
that I only remember a long fight against something I couldn't
see, against an appalling presence, against something worse than
cholera or Yellow Jack or the plague--and goodness knows the
mildest of them is bad enough when it breaks out at sea. The men
got as white as chalk, and wouldn't go about decks alone at
night, no matter what I said to them. With the cook raving in
his bunk the forecastle would have been a perfect hell, and
there wasn't a spare cabin on board. There never is on a
fore-and-after. So