seemed to have no doubt. It was the specter of either the captain
or Vail; he excluded the woman, because she was shorter. As I stood
outside, he measured on me the approximate height of the apparition
--somewhere about five feet eight. He could see Burns's shirt, he
admitted, but the thing had been close to the window.

I found myself convinced against my will, and that afternoon, alone,
I made a second and more thorough examination of the forecastle and
the hold. In the former I found nothing. Having been closed for
over twenty-four hours, it was stifling and full of odors. The crew,
abandoning it in haste, had left it in disorder. I made a systematic
search, beginning forward and working back. I prodded in and under
bunks, and moved the clothing that hung on every hook and swung, to
the undoing of my nerves, with every swell. Much curious salvage I
found under mattresses and beneath bunks: a rosary and a dozen
filthy pictures under the same pillow; more than one bottle of
whiskey; and even, where it had been dropped in the haste of flight,
a bottle of cocaine. The bottle set me to thinking: had we a "coke"
fiend on board, and, if we had, who was it?

The examination of the hold led to one curious and not easily
explained discovery. The Ella was in gravel ballast, and my search
there was difficult and nerve-racking. The creaking of the girders
and floor-plates, the groaning overhead of the trestle-trees, and
once an unexpected list that sent me careening, head first, against
a ballast-tank, made my position distinctly disagreeable. And above
all the incidental noises of a ship's hold was one that I could not
place--a regular knocking, which kept time with the list of the boat.

I located it at last, approximately, at one of the ballast ports,