Jones kept me too busy in the galley to allow me time to speak to Tom Bullover and Hiram Bangs, when they turned out to relieve the port watch; but, later on, when the decks had been washed down, and the sun was getting well up in the eastern horizon, flooding the ocean with the rosy light of morning, I had an opportunity of telling my friend the carpenter of what I had seen in the cabin.
Much to my disgust, however, he laughed at my account of Sam Jedfoot’s ghost having appeared, declaring that I had been dreaming and imagined it all.
“No, Charley, I wouldn’t believe it if you went down on your bended knees an’ swore it, not save I seed Sam with my own eyes, an’ even then I’d have a doubt,” said Tom, grinning in the most exasperating way. “Why, look there, now, at the skipper on the poop, as right as ninepence! If he’d been in the state you say, an’ were so orfully frightened, an’ had seed Sam’s sperrit, as you wants to make me swallow, do you think he’d look so perky this mornin’?”
I could hardly believe my eyes.
Yes, there was Captain Snaggs, braced up against the poop rail in his usual place, with one eye scanning the horizon to windward and the other inspecting the sails aloft, and his billy-goat beard sticking out as it always did. He looked as hearty as if nothing had happened, the only sign that I could see of his drunken fit of the night before being a cut across the bridge of his long hooked nose, and a slight discolouration of his eye on the port side, the result, no doubt, of his fall on the cabin floor.
Tom Bullover could read my doubts in my face.
“You must have dreamed it, Charley, I s’pose, on account of all that talkin’ we had in the fo’c’s’le about ghostesses afore you went aft an’ turned in, an’ that’s what’s the matter,” he repeated, giving me a nudge in the ribs, while he added more earnestly: “And, if I was you, my boy, I wouldn’t mention a word of it to another soul, or the hands ’ll chaff the life out of you, an’ you’ll wish you were a ghost yerself!”
Tom moved off as he uttered these last words with a chuckle, and accompanied by an expressive wink, that spoke volumes; so, seeing his advice was sound, I determined to act upon it, although the fear struck me that Jones, the steward, would mention it even if I didn’t, just to make me the laughing-stock of the crew.
However, I had no time then for reflection; Captain Snaggs, as if to show that he had all his wits about him still, calling out for the hands forward to overhaul the studding-sail gear and rig out the booms; and, by breakfast time, when the steward and I had to busy ourselves again in the galley, the Denver City was covered with, a regular pyramid of canvas, that seemed to extend from the truck to the deck, while she was racing through the water at a rate of ten knots or more, with a clear sky above and a moderate sea below, and a steady nor’-nor’-west wind after us.
At noon, when the captain took the sun and told us forward to “make it eight bells,” we learnt that we were in longitude 8 degrees 15 minutes West, and latitude 49 degrees 20 minutes North, or well to the westward of the Scilly Islands, and so really out at sea and entered on our long voyage to California.