"On deck!" said the American. "What d'you want? Are you there, Wall-eye? Que hay?"
There was no answer, but the shuffling steps drew nearer, slowly and falteringly, as though whatever made them was but indifferently capable of motion. There was also something unpleasantly suggestive about them, and Austin now sat very straight, while he saw that Jefferson's lips were pressed together. There was no apparent reason why they should shrink from what was coming, but Austin, at least, felt his nerves tingling. He was overwrought, and white men are apt to become fanciful when they work too hard in the fever swamps. It is a land where one realises the presence of influences beyond the definition of human reason, and he afterwards admitted that he was afraid.
"Mil diablos!" said Jefferson. "Ven aca! What are you after, outside there?"
There was still no answer, though a clatter of booted feet now rose from the iron deck. It drowned the other footfalls, and Austin found that clang of nailed shoes curiously reassuring. Then a figure that swayed from side to side emerged from the blackness and stood mowing in the stream of light.
"Good Lord!" said Jefferson, with horror in his voice. "Slam that door to. Keep it out!"
Austin rose with a sense of sudden sickness, but the figure had moved again, and now stood with one foot inside the room and a horrible hand on the door-jamb, leering at them. It had the shape of a man, but the resemblance ended there, for there was no sign of human intelligence in the awful face. The thing had no eyebrows, the hair had almost gone, and nose and cheeks were formless with corruption, while naked chest and arms were smeared with festering scars. Austin stood still, shivering, with one hand clenched hard on the table, until Jefferson snatched a glinting object from his bunk.
"Good Lord!" he said again. "It's coming in!"
The figure seemed to brace itself for another move forwards, and Austin saw Jefferson straighten himself slowly with a big pistol in his hand. He did not remember what his comrade said, but the negro seemed to recoil instinctively before his fierce ejaculation, and, lurching backwards, faded into a formless shadow in the gloom again. Then Jefferson's hand fell upon Austin's shoulder.
"Shake yourself! There's something to be done," he said. "They have a light forward, and we can't have—that thing—groping among them in the forecastle."
They went out, and as they did so a sudden glare of light sprang up. Tom, the donkey-man, had lighted the air-blast lamp he used when anything had to be done to pump or boiler at night, and its smoky radiance showed that Jefferson's shouts had roused the Spaniards. They were clustered, half dressed, about the head of the ladder which led to the bridge deck, with consternation in their shadowy faces, glancing at one another as though afraid to move a step further. Tom leaned against the rail, holding up the lamp, and the thing that had the shape of a man sat gibbering on a coil of hawser in the midst of the bridge deck. The eyes of all who stood there were fixed upon it, but nobody seemed anxious to come any nearer.