Adventure Magazine Cover — page 79: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

North of Watling aromas from the shores of Hispaniola, sighed through the shrouds. eee The long rollers of the restless Caribean spent themselves against the breakwaters, and the little ship, bow to the sea and tug- ging gently at her chain, heaved and sighed as she nodded to the passing swells that crept into the bay.. Over head a gannet, black and white and squawking raucously, planed ‘and whirled, and overside a school of flying-fish flitted and splashed along the starlit surface. The captain lolled luxuriously and smiled contentedly at the sky. On the tarpaulin- covered top of number two hatch, just for- ward of the bridge, a group of sailors were assembled, and their voices came up to him in a faint murmur. A puff of tobacco smoke drifted up and sailed off to leeward. For lack of a more interesting occupation he began listening idly to the voices. The mess-boy’s thin, high voice was the first to make itself clear. “and then he went along the port side and up into the pilot house, then out again and up the bridge ladder. Then I don’t know where he went. It was ’im all right, and I betcha . “Whut wuz thet, boy?’ broke in a gruff voice, evidently that of a newcomer. “Whut dye say ye seen?” “A man who walks around the decks every night at two o’clock,” piped the lad. “A stranger, nobody knows who he is. Three nights now I seen ’im. So did Bill Allen and Coogan. I don’t know where he comes from nor where he goes, but he walks about every night. Yes, he does, I tell you I seen ’im.”’ “Aw rats!’ said a strange voice. ‘“Some- body’s been tellin’ you ghost stories.” “{ dunno about that.” A puff of smoke waited upward and in his mind’s eye the captain could see “Chips,” the ancient ship’s carpenter, sitting with crossed legs and his short, black pipe between his teeth. ‘Ye never kin tell. Strange things happ’n aboard o ships, I kin tell ye. I remember oncet in the old Nancy B., a three-masted bark she wuz, from Capetown to Boston with = “Got nuthin’ to do wit’ th’ Estrella,” said the gruff voice. “And I kinda think th’ kid might be right. Thought I saw sum- thin’ t’other night myself.” “Well, who do you think it was?” asked the scornful one with a laugh. a7 “WHY Dolan, of course.” The lad’s voice was shrill and clear. “T saw im and it looked just like ‘im, not his face, of course, was too dark for that, but I mean his figure. And so did Allen see ‘im, and Coogan. Didn’t you?” There were two grunts of assent and the boy continued. “He’s come back to haunt us, maybe he was thrown over the side, instead of fallin’ over. How do we know?”’ “Rats!” scoffed the dissenter. “Then you stay up tonight and see im. I dare you. It makes cold shivers go down your back to see ’im parade around the decks. I tell you it is Dolan who went over the side north of—north of—what was it again, Mike?” zs , horth of Watling!” Captain Bleibtree arose slowly from his chair. His mouth was twitching and the pouches of flesh beneath his small eyes were — loose and flabby. The hunted look was again in his eyes and he suddenly felt very tired—and afraid. Again! Even after death, a death which he had witnessed with his own eyes, the spirit of the man he had wronged persisted in holding over his head the threat of vengeance. Was the shadow of this man, this hatred- maddened creature with a mind crippled by the captain’s blow, to darken the remainder of his life as it had darkened the past three years? Captain Bleibtree, in spite of his pusillanimous nature did not believe in ghosts or the supernatural, but he was en- tirely at a loss to account for the figure re- sembling Dolan which the sailors had been so certain they had seen. Sailors’ tales must always be recerved with a wide margin of leeway, he knew, but even so, when three men had said positively that they had seen the same strange form on three consecutive nights he reasoned that there was something to the story that lifted it above a mere fore- castle yarn. The late tragedy was still fresh in his mind, and the solemnity of the night, the sigh of the wind in the rigging, the eerie moonlight that now bathed the surface of the swelling water, the gull that planed and whirled, the enchantment of a night ghastly in its somber beauty, all these lent their aid in furthering the chain of thought started by the sailors’ gossip. Gomicbooks.com