The Ghost Ship Part 9

"And Mr Stokes?"

"Faith, he's drivin' his pigs to market in foine stoil; you should only hear him, cap'en!" answered the Irishman, looking out to windward.

"Begorrah, ain't it blowin', though, sir! Sure, as we used to say at ould Trinity, _de gustibus non est disputandum_, which means, Mister Spokeshave, as yo're c.o.c.kin' up your nose to hear what I'm after sayin', it's moighty gusty, an' there's no denyin' it!"

The skipper laughed, as he generally did at Garry's nonsensical, queer sayings.

"By George, O'Neil! I must go down and have a gla.s.s of grog to wash the taste of that awful pun out of my mouth!" he cried, turning to leave the bridge for the first time since he had come up there at sunset. "You can call me if anything happens or should it come to blow worse, but I shall be up and down all night to see how you're getting on."

"Och! the divvle dout ye!" muttered the Irishman in his quizzing way, as the skipper went down the ladder, giving a word to the boatswain and man at the wheel below as he pa.s.sed them on his way up. "Ye niver give a chap the cridit of keeping a watch to himself!"

Soon after this I, too, left the deck and turned in, Garry O'Neil telling me he did not want me on the bridge and that I had better sleep while I could, a permission I readily availed myself of, tired out with all I had gone through and the various exciting episodes of the evening.

There was no change in the weather the following morning, the wind even blowing with greater force and the sea such as I had never seen it before, and such a sea as I hope never to experience again; so, in order that the ship might ride the more easily and those below in the engine- room better able to go on with the repair of the cylinder than they could with the old barquey pitching her bows under and then kicking up her heels sky high, varying her performances by rolling side to side violently, like a pendulum gone mad, the skipper had all our spare spars lashed together, and attaching a stout steel wire hawser to them, launched the lot overboard through a hole in the bulwarks, where one of the waves had made a convenient clean sweep, veering the hawser ahead with this "jetsam" to serve as a floating anchor for us, and moor the ship.

By this means we all had a more comfortable time of it, the old barquey no longer shipping water in any considerable quant.i.ty and there being less work below in the way of clearing it, all of the bilge-pumps, fortunately for us all, Stoddart and the engine-room staff were able to keep going; otherwise we must have foundered long since!

The gale continued without abatement all that day and the next, the second since our mishap, when, late in the afternoon the wind began to go down, veering from the north-west to the north, and so on, back to the eastern quadrant.

Soon after this, just before it got dark, an English man-of-war hove in sight, and, seeing our disabled condition, signalled to ask whether we required any a.s.sistance.

Through the clumsiness of Mr Spokeshave, who had charge of our signal department and showed his cleverness by hoisting the very numbers of the flags giving the skipper's reply, that, though our engines were temporarily broken-down, they were fast being repaired, the captain of the man-of-war could not understand him; and so, fearing the worst, ranged up under our stern to see what help he could render, in what he evidently considered, from Spokeshave's "hoist," to be a pressing emergency.

"Ship ahoy!" he shouted through a speaking trumpet from his quarter-deck aft, which was on a level with our bridge, the vessel, a splendid cruiser of the first-cla.s.s, towering over the comparatively puny dimensions of the poor, broken-down _Star of the North_. "Shall I send a boat aboard with a.s.sistance?"

"No, thank you very much," replied our skipper, taking off his cap and returning the greeting of the naval officer. "We've got over the worst of it now, sir, and will be soon under weigh again, as the weather is breaking."

"Glad to hear it," returned the other, who could read our name astern as she lay athwart us. "Where are you bound to?"

"New York, sir," sang out the skipper. "Twelve days out from England.

We've been disabled forty-eight hours."

"Hope your engines will soon be in working order," sang out the handsome officer from the deck of the man-of-war, giving some other order at the same minute, for I heard the shrill sound of a boatswain's pipe and the rattle of feet along her deck. "Please report us when you reach your destination."

"What name, sir?"

"Her Majesty's ship _Aurora_, on pa.s.sage from Bermuda to Halifax."

With that he waved his hand, and her white ensign, whose blood-red cross of Saint George stood out in bold relief, dipped in parting salute to our vessel, which reciprocated the compliment as the man-of-war bore away on her course to the northward, a group of officers rollicking round their captain on her deck aft and gazing at us as she moved off rapidly under a full pressure of steam, evidently admiring our skipper's wonderful sea anchor.

As the n.o.ble ship glided away through the still tempestuous sea against a strong headwind, a thing of beauty and of might--such a contrast to us lying there, almost at the mercy of the seas--I could not help thinking of the wondrous power of mind over matter displayed in our grand ocean steamers, and what a responsibility rests upon their engineers!

How little do the thousands of pa.s.sengers who yearly go to and fro across the Atlantic know, or, indeed, care to know, that their comfort and the rate at which they travel through the water--they who talk so glibly of making the pa.s.sage in such and such a time, be the sea smooth or rough, and the wind fine or contrary--that all this depends on the unceasing vigilance of the officers in charge of the vessel, in which they voyage!

Do they even think, I wondered, that while they are sleeping, eating, enjoying themselves and doing what they please on board, even grumbling at some little petty defect or shortcoming which they think might be prevented, the engineers below, in an atmosphere in which _they_ could not breathe, are incessantly watching the movements of the machinery and oiling each part at almost every instant of time, moving this slide and that, adjusting a valve here and tightening a nut there, ever cooling the bearings and raking at the furnaces and putting on fresh coal, this being done every hour of the day and night through the pa.s.sage from land to land? Have any of them realised the fact that these same engineers and their able a.s.sistants, the firemen and oilmen and trimmers, the whole stoke-hold staff, so to speak, run a greater risk of their lives, in the event of an accident happening, than any one else in the ship, as, should a boiler or cylinder burst they may be scalded to death before the noise of the explosion could reach those above? Or again, should the vessel strike on a rock, the compartment below in which perforce they are compelled to work deep down in the vessel's bowels will fill, from the very weight of the engines, quicker than any other part of the ship, most probably, when those confined below must necessarily be liable to be drowned, like rats in a hole, without the chances of escape possessed by the pa.s.sengers and hands on board.

"No, I don't suppose any one even thinks of such things," said I to myself as I left the bridge and went towards the saloon to ask how poor Jackson was, uttering my thoughts unconsciously aloud as I reflected, and now that I considered their responsibility, thought how much poor old Mr Stokes, with his broken arm, and Stoddart and the others must have on their minds! "Hullo, who is that?"

It was Weston, the steward, who spoke.

"I wish you'd come and look at Jackson, sir," he said. "The poor chap wore all right when Mr O'Neil comed down jist now, and a sleepin' still as when you seed him awhile ago. But all of a sudd.i.n.k he starts up as he hears you a comin' down the companion-way, sir, and is jabbering away like anythink!"

"Oh, but," I exclaimed, "why did you leave him?"

"I wor afeard he'd jump overboard, or try to do somethink awful!"

"Nonsense! the very thing you are there for to prevent," said I, going into the cabin, where I saw the poor fellow trying to get out of the cot. Turning angrily to Weston I repeated again, "You shouldn't have left him for one moment in this state!"

"But, sir, I wanted to hail Mr O'Neil or somebody; I thought I oughter 'ave summun by to 'elp me, in case he becomed desperate-like, and I couldn't make no one hear on deck, and that's why I comed when I knowed you was a-pa.s.sing along, sir."

This was unanswerable logic, though Weston always had an answer for anything and everything.

Poor Jackson, though, did not look as if he would be "desperate" again in any shape or form.

That he was delirious I could see at a glance, for his eyes, great wild eyes, were wide open, staring at vacancy, fixed on the bulkhead that divided the cabin from the captain's, which was just beyond; and he was very much excited, sitting up in the cot and, gesticulating violently with both his hands, and waving his arms about as he repeated some unintelligible gibberish over and over again, that I could not make out.

Presently he looked at me very straight as if he recognised me, and afterwards spoke a little more coherently.

"Ah, yes, sir, I recollect now," he said at last. "You're Mr Haldane, I know; but--where's the little girl and the--the--dog?"

"Why, Jackson, old man," I said, speaking soothingly to him, "what's the matter with you? There's no girl or dog, you know, here. Don't you know where you are, my poor fellow?"

He got quite savage at this. There's no reason in delirium!

"Of course I know where I am," he screamed out, making a grab at Weston, as he writhed in torture from the internal and violent inflammation which must have set up. "I'm in--h.e.l.l. I--can--feel--I--am--I am-- burning--all over--inside me--here. And you? Oh, yes--I know you!"

This paroxysm left him again after a moment, and he lay back on his pillows, only to sit up the next minute again, however.

He now pointed his finger in the direction of the sea through the porthole, gazing earnestly as if he saw something there.

"The ship has come for me again--as--it did t'other night--you know--you know?" he said in agonised whispers. "There--there,--can't you see it now? sailing--along--as--Mister--Haldane--said,--there with a--a-- signal--of--distress--flying--the--flag--half-mast high! Why,--there it is,--now, as plain as--plain--can be; and, see--see they're--lowering-- a--boat,--look,--for me,--to take me aboard. Lend us a hand,--mate. I wants to halloo--to 'em and I--feels so bad--and--I can't, I can't--move myself. Hi,--there!--Ship ahoy! Wait--a--minute--can't you? Ship ahoy!--I'm--coming--I'm--comi-ing. I'm--"

Then, raising his eyes to heaven, and drawing a long deep breath, something between a sob and a sigh, a breath that was his last, poor Jackson fell back on the pile of pillows behind him, stone dead!

CHAPTER NINE.

WE SIGHT THE STRANGE CRAFT AGAIN.

"That's number one!" said old Masters, the boatswain, meeting me at the door of the saloon as I came out on deck, Weston having already told him the sad news. "Master Stokes'll foller next, and then you or hi, Master Haldane, for we be all doomed men, I know, arter seein' that there ghost-ship!"

I made no reply to the superst.i.tious old seaman's ominous prediction, but as I made my way forward to the bridge, to inform Captain Applegarth and the others of what had happened, I could not help thinking how strange it was that poor Jackson should have recalled, at the very moment the spirit was quitting his crippled body, the fact of my sighting the ship in distress, and the account I had given the skipper of what I had seen on board that mysterious craft!

Mr Fosset, or some of the hands who accompanied him, must have taken down the yarn to the stoke-hold, only just before the unfortunate man met with his terrible accident, though I had no doubt that he must have seen the man-of-war through the port hole of the cabin, which was right opposite his bunk, as she brought up under our stern to speak to us earlier in the afternoon, and the sight of _HMS Aurora_ had, somehow or other, amid the wanderings of his unconscious brain, got mixed up with the remembrance of what he had previously heard concerning the vessel I had seen at sunset the two days prior.

It was now getting dark, the evening closing in quickly, and, what with the dying man's queer talk and the boatswain harping on the same theme immediately afterwards, I confess I felt far from comfortable, my nerves being in a state of constant tension from the painful scene in the cabin that I had just witnessed, while the gloomy shades of the night that were fast enwrapping us, the dull roar of the ever-breaking sea and the groaning of the ship as she rolled, like a living creature in pain, all worked on my overtried fancy and made me almost afraid of my own shadow as I slipped and stumbled along the sloppy deck, my mind being in a complete whirl till I reached my goal--the bridge.

"What's the matther, me bhoy?" asked Garry O'Neil, who was speaking to the skipper, the two examining a chart in the wheel-house, the light from the doorway of which fell on my face. "Faith, ye look quite skeared, Haldane, jist as if ye'd sane a ghoast, sure!"