Then those three deserted stars quiver and shiver and hide behind the wandering company of torch-bearers, and silently disappear, and a tired moon gives a vague uncertainty to sea and air.
In spite of the early morning mystery, all our efforts to reinstate the French Corsair, the black-hulled phantom, and the headless sailor, fail.
The decks of the ship are damp and empty and long. The ungainly deck chairs are locked together in gruesome lines like monstrous grasshoppers dying in winrows, and the great engines below beat and throb, and the water rolls past us in giant breathings, full of the sighs of dead men lying fathoms deep beneath our keel, and the stars sink lower and lower, and we are hurrying on toward the morning. Our eyes are still longing for sleep, and the little girls flutter down below, and we two after them. In the morning, after some strange dreams, we lie at anchor off the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
CHAPTER VIII.
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
I.
HAD he not come aboard, it is doubtful if even the “kirk-ganging habit” inherited from a long line of devout ancestors could have dragged us to the service. But there was an unforgettable something in his face which compelled us, in spite of the intense heat, to leave ship by a shore-boat on Sunday morning and inquire the way to the Parish Church.
