seaweed anywhere! I don't understand you!"
"Let it pass," I said. "When did you last visit the sentries last night?"
"Just before midnight, sir."
"And were all of them at their post of duty?"
"Yes, sir."
"And what about the bells?"
Again the sergeant's puzzlement was so genuine that I knew he did not understand my meaning. How much of my experience had been real, how much fantasy? I tried another tack.
"Did you make a round of the sentries after midnight?"
The sergeant shook his head sheepishly—it is one of the rules of guard duty that one visit to all sentries must take place between midnight and morning.
"Then the guard hasn't been mustered this morning? Is everyone present? You don't know? Then go at once and find out!"
Ten minutes later the sergeant returned, chalk-white of face, to report that two of the guard were missing, and could not be found anywhere aboard. He told me their names—and instantly my mind went back to the night of uncanny happenings just past, and the two nude bodies brought back from the deep in the arms of—whom? Or what?
I never knew, and to this day the questions I have propounded have never been answered.
But this I know: there are strange things, and sounds, in the sea near the hundred and eightieth meridian, a thousand miles north of Honolulu—and this is the strangest incident in my night of terror: the clothing which I donned next morning was entirely dry; but my hair was stiff with salt water, and there was the tang of sea-weed in my room when I awoke!
I looked, too, at the glass which covered the port-hole beside my bed
Outside that glass were the smudged prints of thin lips, the blur above them which told of a face pressed against the glass from outside—as though somebody, or something, had tried to peer in, between nightfall and morning!
And the bells? I still can hear them, in memory, when sometimes I waken at sea after midnight, and the rolling and the plunging of the ship tell me that a storm is making.
