THE YELLOW CAT[19]

BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

From _Harper's Magazine_

[19] Copyright 1915, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1916, by Wilbur
Daniel Steele.

At least once in my life I have had the good fortune to board a deserted
vessel at sea. I say "good fortune" because it has left me the memory
of a singular impression. I have felt a ghost of the same thing two or
three times since then, when peeping through the doorway of an abandoned
house.

Now that vessel was not dead. She was a good vessel, a sound vessel,
even a handsome vessel, in her blunt-bowed, coastwise way. She sailed
under four lowers across as blue and glittering a sea as I have ever
known, and there was not a point in her sailing that one could lay a
finger upon as wrong. And yet, passing that schooner at two miles, one
knew, somehow, that no hand was on her wheel. Sometimes I can imagine
a vessel, stricken like that, moving over the empty spaces of the sea,
carrying it off quite well were it not for that indefinable suggestion
of a stagger; and I can think of all those ocean gods, in whom no
landsman will ever believe, looking at one another and tapping their
foreheads with just the shadow of a smile.

I wonder if they all scream--these ships that have lost their souls?
Mine screamed. We heard her voice, like nothing I have ever heard
before, when we rowed under her counter to read her name--the
_Marionnette_ it was, of Halifax. I remember how it made me shiver,
there in the full blaze of the sun, to hear her going on so, railing
and screaming in that stark fashion. And I remember, too, how our
footsteps, pattering through the vacant internals in search of that
haggard utterance, made me think of the footsteps of hurrying warders
roused in the night.

And we found a parrot in a cage; that was all. It wanted water. We
gave it water and went away to look things over, keeping pretty close
together, all of us. In the quarters the table was set for four. Two
men had begun to eat, by the evidence of the plates. Nowhere in the
vessel was there any sign of disorder, except one sea-chest broken out,
evidently in haste. Her papers were gone and the stern davits were
empty. That is how the case stood that day, and that is how it has
stood to this. I saw this same _Marionnette_ a week later, tied up
to a Hoboken dock, where she awaited news from her owners; but even
there, in the midst of all the water-front bustle, I could not get rid
o