Burns, on watch at the companionway, ran forward with his revolver, and narrowly escaped being brained—Adams at that moment flinging down a marlinespike that he had carried aloft with him.
I heard the crash and joined Burns, and together we went over the deck and, both houses. Everything was quiet: the crew in various attitudes of exhausted sleep, their chests and dittybags around them; Oleson at the wheel; and Singleton in his jail-room, breathing heavily.
Adams’s nerve was completely gone, and, being now thoroughly awake, I joined him in the crow’s-nest. Nothing could convince him that he had been the victim of a nervous hallucination. He stuck to his story firmly.
“It was on the forecastle-head first,” he maintained. “I saw it gleaming.”
“Gleaming?”
“Sort of shining,” he explained. “It came up over the rail, and at first it stood up tall, like a white post.”
“You didn’t say before that it was white.”
“It was shining,” he said slowly, trying to put his idea into words. “Maybe not exactly white, but light-colored. It stood still for so long, I thought I must be mistaken—that it was a light on the rigging. Then I got to thinking that there wasn’t no place for a light to come from just there.”
That was true enough.
“First it was as tall as a man, or taller maybe,” he went on. “Then it seemed about half that high and still in the same place. Then it got lower still, and it took to crawling along on its belly. It was then I yelled.”