"There's a good deal of talk—maybe more than there should be."
"And what do they talk about? Tell me straight, Dan."
"Well, I've got nothing, for my part, to hide away, and I don't know as they should have; but you know this ship is a dead man's!"
"Who told you that stuff?"
"No other than our second mate, sir, as sure as I cut this quid. Not as yarns like that affect me; but, you see, some skulls is thick as plate-armour, and some is thin as egg-shells: and when the thin 'uns gets afloat with corpses, why, it's a chest of shiners to a handspike as they cracks—now, ain't it?"
"Dan, this is the most astounding story that I have yet heard. Would you make it plainer? for, upon my life, I can't read your course!"
He sat down on the edge of the skylight—long service had given him a claim to familiarity—and filled his pipe from my tobacco-pouch before he answered, and then was mighty deliberate.
"Plain yarns, Mister Mark, is best told in the fo'castle, and not by hands upon the quarter-deck; but, asking pardon for the liberty, I feel more like a father to you gentlemen than if I was nat'ral born to it; and this I do say—What's this trip mean; what's in yer papers? and why ain't it the pleasure vige we struck flag for? For it ain't a pleasure vige, that a shoreman could see; and you ain't come across the Atlantic for the seein' of it, nor for merchandise nor barter, nor because you wanted to come. That's what the hands say at night when the second's a-talkin' to 'em over the grog he finds 'em. 'Where's it going to end?' says he; 'what is yer wages for takin' yer lives where they shouldn't be took? and,' says he, 'in a ship what the last skipper died aboard of it,' says he, 'died so sudden, and was so fond of his old place as who knows where he is now, afloat or ashore, p'r'aps a-walking this very cabin, and not bringing no luck for the vige, neither,' says he. And what follows?—why, white-livered jawings, and this man afeard to go here, and that man afeard to go there, and the Old One amongst 'em, so that half of 'em says, 'We was took false,' and the other half, 'Why not 'bout ship and home again?' No, and you ain't done with it, not by a long day, and you won't have done with it until you drop anchor in Yankee-land, if ever you do drop anchor there, which I take leave to give no word upon."
"It's a curious state of things. You mean to say, I suppose, that there's terror amongst them—plain terror, and nothing else?"
"Ay, sure!"