"We will not hope for either," said Wulfrey soberly, "for that means more deaths out yonder——"
A long shrill scream outside sent a creepy chill down his spine for a moment. He glanced apprehensively across at Macro in the flickering light of the fire, and saw his face livid, his eyes like great black wells, his jaw dropped.
"The spirits o' the dead!" jerked the mate. "There's a hantle o' them out there.... They're mebbe after me for these things...." and he rocked himself to and fro, where he sat on the floor, and muttered strange words,—"An ainm au Athar, 's an Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh,"—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
The weird shrieking waxed louder and shriller. Wulfrey got up and climbed the steps, and found the stormy twilight gray with that vast cloud of birds, all fleeing blindly before the gale and each one screaming its loudest.
It was a fearsome, blood-curdling clamour, an ear-splitting pandemonium, a whirling Sabbat, as if all the demons of the pit had broken loose and clothed themselves in wings and shrieks and deadly fear.
"It's only those damnable birds," he bent and shouted gruffly down to Macro, vexed with himself at his own momentary fright.
But the mate was not for accepting any such simple explanation as that.
"Man!" he said hoarsely. "Birds ye may think 'em, but I know better. It is spirits they are,—spirits of all the dead that ever died in this dread place,—a great multitude—their bones are white out there, but the spirits of them cannot rest. A Mhoire ghradhach! 'Twas under the Dark Star we were born, and here we'll die and leave our bones to whiten in the sand, and the spirits of us will go screeching and scrauchling wi' the rest. Come away, man, and shut the doors tight or they'll be in on us!"
Wulfrey had never seen anything like it. Those myriads of fluttering wings looked as though the whole gray sky had come tumbling down in fragments. It was like a snowstorm on a gigantic scale, every whirling flake a bundle of wildly screaming feathers.
He stood watching for a time and listening to the growing thunder of the rollers on the spit. He imagined their crashing in white foam-fury among the stark ribs of the dead ships out there on the banks.