"I won't," I said, with a sudden resolve to tell him everything. "I need someone to talk to, just as badly as you do."
"What does it all mean, then?" he burst out. "Are they real? I always used to think it was all a yarn about such things."
"I'm sure I don't know what it all means, Tammy," I answered. "I'm just as much in the dark, there, as you are. And I don't know whether they're real—that is, not as we consider things real. You don't know that I saw a queer figure down on the maindeck, several nights before you saw that thing up here."
"Didn't you see this one?" he cut in, quickly.
"Yes," I answered.
"Then, why did you pretend not to have?" he said, in a reproachful voice. "You don't know what a state you put me into, what with my being certain that I had seen it and then you being so jolly positive that there had been nothing. At one time I thought I was going clean off my dot—until the Second Mate saw that man go up the main. Then, I knew that there must be something in the thing I was certain I'd seen."
"I thought, perhaps, that if I told you I hadn't seen it, you would think you'd been mistaken," I said. "I wanted you to think it was imagination, or a dream, or something of that sort."
"And all the time, you knew about that other thing you'd seen?" he asked.
"Yes," I replied.
"It was thundering decent of you," he said. "But it wasn't any good."