happened that I used to know this fellow. I
had even been quite chummy with him in the old days--that is, to
the extent of drinking too many beers with him in certain hot-country
ports. I remembered him as a stolid and deliberate sort of a person,
with an amazing hodge-podge of learning, a stamp collection, and a
theory about the effects of tropical sunshine on the Caucasian race,
to which I have listened half of more than one night, stretched out
naked on a freighter's deck. He had not impressed me as a fellow who
would be bothered by his nerves.

And there was another thing about the story which struck me as rather
queer. Perhaps it is a relic of my seafaring days, but I have always
been a conscientious reader of the weather reports; and I could remember
no weather in the past week sufficient to shake a man out of a top,
especially a man by the name of Bjoernsen--a thorough-going seafaring
name.

I was destined to hear more of this in the evening from the ancient
boatman who rowed me out on the upper river. He had been to sea in his
day. He knew enough to wonder about this thing, even to indulge in a
little superstitious awe about it.

"No sir-ee. Something _happened_ to them four chaps. And another
thing--"

I fancied I heard a sea-bird whining in the darkness overhead. A shape
moved out of the gloom ahead, passed to the left, lofty and silent, and
merged once more with the gloom behind--a barge at anchor, with the
sea-grass clinging around her water-line.

"Funny about that other chap," the old fellow speculated. "Bjoernsen--I
b'lieve he called 'im. Now that story sounds to me kind of--" He
feathered his oars with a suspicious jerk and peered at me. "This McCord
a friend of yourn?" he inquired.

"In a way," I said.

"Hm-m--well--" He turned on his thwart to squint ahead. "There she is,"
he announced, with something of relief, I thought.

It was hard at that time of night to make anything but a black blotch
out of the _Abbie Rose_. Of course I could see that she was pot-bellied,
like the rest of the coastwise sisterhood. And that McCord had not
stowed his topsails. I could make them out, pursed at the mastheads
and hanging down as far as the cross-trees, like huge, over-ripe pears.
Then I recollected that he had found them so--probably had not touched
them since; a queer way to leave tops, it seemed to me. I could see also
the glowing tip of a cigar floating restlessly along the farther rail. I
called: "Mc