By this time a number of the watch on deck had gathered about the main-hatchway, and stood in a huddle in the obscurity, listening to what was going forward. On a sudden a fellow leapt out of the group and sprang into the main rigging.
He hove some curses under his breath at the seaman, who continued to hang in the shrouds, and went aloft, hand over fist, as good as disappearing to the eye as he climbed into the big main top. The other man put his foot on to the rail and dropped on to the deck, where some of the sailors began eagerly in hoarse hurried whispers to question him.
‘Well, what d’ye see?’ shouted Mr. Cocker, sending his voice fair into the full heart of the high glooming topsail.
There was no answer; but a few seconds later I spied the dark form of the man swing off the rigging on to the topmast backstay, down which he slided in headlong speed. He jumped on to the poop ladder and roared out: ‘By holy Moses, then, sir, it’s the devil himself! There’s no man to be seen, and yet a man there is!’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Why,’ he cried, wiping the sweat off his brow, ‘Blast me, here he is again!’
The brief pause that followed showed the captain as well as the second-mate, to be not a little astonished. In fact, the fellow was one of the boatswain’s mates, a bushy whiskered giant of a sailor, assuredly not of a kind to connive at any Jack’s horse-play or tomfoolery in his watch on deck and under the eye of the officer in charge. The captain sent one of the midshipmen for his binocular glass, the second mate meanwhile staggering back a few paces to stare aloft. But there was no magic in the skipper’s lenses to resolve the conundrum. Indeed, I reckoned my own eyes to be as good as any glasses for such an inspection as that; but view the swelling heights as I would, going from one part of the deck to another, that no fathom of the length of the yards should escape me, I could witness nothing resembling a human shape, nothing whatever with the least stir of life in it.
‘Well, this beats my time!’ said Mr. Cocker, drawing a deep breath.
‘What sort of voice was it?’ demanded Captain Keeling, letting fall the binocular with which he had been sweeping the fabric of spar and sail, and coming to the brass rail overlooking the quarter-deck.
The first of the two men who had been terrified cried out from the group near the hatchway, before the other could answer: ‘It was exactly like the voice of Punch, sir, in the Judy show.’