The boat had not gone far when a curious animate thing that seemed neither man nor beast burst from the narrow cabin. The thing began roaring and dancing about the deck like a baboon attacked by hornets. On the creature’s shoulders was something four times the size of a man’s head. The upright body was quite as strange as the head. As the boat continued its course the great round head rolled off and a smaller one appeared. This small head bobbed about and roared prodigiously, but all to no purpose. The little black boat had moved straight on to pass at last from sight into the night.
Then, and not until then, did the wisp of white, which, as you know, was Petite Jeanne, glide forward and vanish. She burst excitedly into a dark cabin.
“I heard chains rattle,” Jeanne repeated, standing still in the cabin doorway. “One of the men spoke. They looked up at me. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. My—my feet wouldn’t budge!”
She began dancing around the small cabin in her excitement.
“What happened then?” Florence, a large, ruddy-cheeked girl in knickers, demanded. “What did they do?”
“They—why, it was queer! They seemed in an awful hurry. They untied their boat and—
“Of course,” she added as an afterthought, “there was Dizzy. He let out a most terrible scream, and laughed. How he did scream and laugh! Three times—one, two, three. They shoved off, those men did, as if their very life depended on it!”
“Thought you were a ghost,” Florence chuckled. “Can’t be any question about that. Who’d blame them? Look at you!”
“And then,” Jeanne went on, “then some queer thing with two legs came out and danced wildly about the deck. He had an enormous head. Bye and bye his head tumbled off, at least the awful big part, and I heard him roaring at the other men.”
“Him?”