“No; not if I saw it a hundred times!” he roared out impatiently.
“Ah, seein’ is believin’, I says,” whined old Masters, not a whit shaken on the point, in spite of the skipper’s scepticism. “Master Haldane seed it, and I seed it, and poor Jackson seed it.”
“Indeed?” cried the skipper. “I did not know he had been on deck before the accident.”
“It wore arter that, sir, that he seed the ghost-ship,” said the old boatswain in reply to the implied question. “It were jist afore he died.”
“Just before he died!” repeated Captain Applegarth indignantly, as if he thought he was being made a fool of. “Why, man, the poor fellow was out of his mind then, and besides, never stirred out of his cabin!”
“Ah, but he had the warnin’ jist the same, for Weston, it was, told me as how Jackson seed the ship and cried out when he lay there a-dyin’. Bulkheads can’t keep sperrits out, sir.”
“Nor in, either, as I know to my cost,” returned the skipper drily. “Your friend Weston is pretty familiar with them, if they come in his way, I fancy! Stuff and nonsense, bo’sun; how can you believe such rubbish? The other night you imagined the reflection of our own vessel, when that meteor came by, to be a ghost-ship, as you call it in your absurd folly; and to-night, when that craft to win’rd passed and lit a flare-up, hanged if you aren’t at it again with your ghost-ship! By George, it makes me sick, Masters, to think that a grown man and a good seaman like yourself should be such a confounded ass!”
“Hass or no hass, there she wer’,” said the old fellow doggedly. “But here comes Mr Fosset, sir. He were on the poop aft when that vessel passed as I speaks on. Ax him what he thinks of her and if she weren’t the same full-rigged ship as Master Haldane and all of us seed?”
“I will,” replied Captain Applegarth promptly; and on the first mate approaching nearer, he hailed him. “I say, Fosset, what did you think of that ship just now?”
The other’s answer, however, bewildered the skipper more than Masters and I had done previously.