"You think, then, that that—vessel has been with us for some time, if we'd only known?" he asked.
"All along," I replied. "I mean ever since these things started."
"Supposing there are others," he said, suddenly.
I looked at him.
"If there are," I said. "You can pray to God that they won't stumble across us. It strikes me that whether they're ghosts, or not ghosts, they're blood-gutted pirates.
"It seems horrible," he said solemnly, "to be talking seriously like this, about—you know, about such things."
"I've tried to stop thinking that way," I told him. "I've felt I should go cracked, if I didn't. There's damned queer things happen at sea, I know; but this isn't one of them."
"It seems so strange and unreal, one moment, doesn't it?" he said. "And the next, you know it's really true, and you can't understand why you didn't always know. And yet they'd never believe, if you told them ashore about it."
"They'd believe, if they'd been in this packet in the middle watch this morning," I said.
"Besides," I went on. "They don't understand. We didn't … I shall always feel different now, when I read that some packet hasn't been heard of."