unscrew his air-port, but come to think, it was still daylight, and so
he waits for the shades of night to fall.

"Well, that night--three bells just gone in the mid-watch it was--the
marine guarding the patent life-buoy on the port side of the
quarter-deck, fell into a reverie. He ought to have been on the _qui
vive_, so to speak--alert, active, wide-awake, pacing his post briskly
of course, according to instructions; and if it was daylight when the
officer of the deck could see him, you betcher he would. But it was the
middle of the night, and a night in the Orient, with a sky of studded
velvet and a sea that flowed by like a smooth roll of dark belting, and
he was only--Tolliver was his name, from Georgia--only a slim young
Southern boy dreaming of home and mother, and maybe of a girl he had
left behind him, and he looked up at the emblazoned firmament and again
at the flashing sea, and then he rested his head on the top chain-rail.

"For just a second. He had said to himself he wouldn't go to sleep; but
all at once he heard a move below him, as of somebody unscrewing an
air-port, and then he heard a voice say, 'Well, here goes a ghost that
will stay laid!' and then a plash, a pl-m-p! and looking over quickly,
he saw plain as could be the phosphorus hole in the sea, then a quarter
of a second later something white as a man's face, and then it was gone
into the ship's wake.

"'Man overboard!' he yells, and snaps the patent life-buoy over the
side, and the marine on the starboard side of the quarter he yells, 'Man
overboard!' and the marine on the after-bridge he yells, 'Man
overboard!' and the two seaman on watch on the for'ard bridge, 'Man
overboard, sir!' they yell, and the watch officer orders, 'Hard on your
wheel, Quartermaster!' and to the bosun's mate on watch the watch