He signalled to the “Gairloch,” which was still standing by, that he was able to carry on, and with a farewell hoot of her siren she rolled off again on her homeward road. Soon her smoke was lost to view in the gathering dusk. The derelict was on her own now, for good or ill.
Kavanagh set his crew to work at once heaving the deck-load over the side, and himself went below, accompanied by one of his few “sail” men, a young seaman named Rawlings, to investigate matters below.
The sense of desolation which always pervades any place inhabited by man when man’s presence is removed was strong upon him as soon as he began to descend the companion which led to the saloon. That he had looked for, however, and silence he had also looked for: so that it was with an unpleasant sensation of shock that he became suddenly aware of a strange voice speaking in rapid and monotonous tones, and in some language, too, which he could not at all make out.
There was someone on board all the time, then! And yet—it was a peculiar sort of voice—a voice with a strange, a hardly human ring in it—unnatural, uncanny. Kavanagh stopped short half-way down the companion. His scalp crept; indeed, he felt convinced that his cap must be standing at least a quarter of an inch off his head. He restrained, not without difficulty, a primitive impulse to bolt up on deck again—an impulse which the consciousness of Rawlings’ round eyes and open mouth just behind him helped him to check.
The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence which followed it was worse than the sound.
“Wot the ’ell is it?” came the hoarse voice of Rawlings.
“Sounds like someone crazy,” pronounced Kavanagh; “sick, perhaps, and they couldn’t get him away——”
He pulled himself together with an effort, and they completed the descent into the saloon.
They stood together, Rawlings and he, in the little saloon, panelled with bird’s-eye maple in the style once considered the last word in elegant ship decoration, with its shabby padded settees, its mahogany table marked with the rings of many glasses, its spotted and tarnished mirrors, and its teak medicine chest in the corner.
It was a sorrowful, haunted little place. A smell of stale cigar-smoke hung about it. The air was chilly, yet stuffy. The uncanny silence of the deserted ship was all around—a silence only intensified by the monotonous booming and crashing of the seas, and the occasionally spasmodic thrashing of a loose block on the deck overhead.