But it is not easy to explain why one should raise the sails of an
anchored ship during the night, and Ally Bazan grew very suspicious.
Strokher, too, had something to say, and in the end the whole matter
came out.
Trust a sailor to give full value to anything savouring of the
supernatural. Strokher promptly voted the ship a "queer old hooker
anyhow, and about as seaworthy as a hen-coop." He held forth at great
length upon the subject.
"You mark my words, now," he said. "There's been some fishy doin's in
this 'ere vessel, and it's like somebody done to death crool hard, an'
'e wants to git away from the smell o' land, just like them as is killed
on blue water. That's w'y 'e takes an' sets the sails between dark an'
dawn."
But Ally Bazan was thoroughly and wholly upset, so much so that at first
he could not speak. He went pale and paler while we stood talking it
over, and crossed himself--he was a Catholic--furtively behind the
water-butt.
"I ain't never 'a' been keen on ha'nts anyhow, Mr. Dixon," he told me
aggrievedly at dinner that evening. "I got no use for 'em. I ain't never
known any good to come o' anything with a ha'nt tagged to it, an' we're
makin' a ill beginnin' o' this island business, Mr. Dixon--a blyme ill
beginnin'. I mean to stye awyke to-night."
But if he was awake the little colonial was keeping close to his bunk at
the time when Strokher and Hardenberg woke me at about three in the
morning.
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