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In five minutes he was near enough to the steamer to read her name. He pulled the starting-lever forward, stopping his headway; for he must be sure of his welcome.

“Say, boss,” he called faintly and hoarsely, “take me along, can’t you? Or else gi’ me some medicine. I’m blamed sick–I’ll die if I stay here.”

The noise of the windlass and chain prevented this being heard, but at last, after repeated calls on his part, a Spanish howl went up from amidships, and a sailor sprang from one of the boats to the deck, crossed himself, and pointing to the man in the water, ran forward.

“Madre de Dios!” he yelled. “El aparecido del muerto.”

Work stopped, and a call down a hatchway stopped the windlass. In ports and dead-lights appeared faces; and those on deck, officers and men, crowded to the rail, some to cross themselves, some to sink on their knees, others to grip the rail tightly, while they stared in silence at the torso and livid face in the moonlight on the sea–the ghastly face of the man they had marooned to die alone, who had been seen later dead on the beach.

“Take me with you, boss,” he pleaded with his weak voice. “I’m sick; I can’t hold on much longer.”

It was not the dead man’s body washed out from the beach, for it moved, it spoke. And it was not a living man; no man may recover from advanced yellow fever, and this man had been found afterward, dead–cold and still. And no living man may swim in this manner–high out of water, patting and splashing with one hand. It was a ghost. It had come to punish them.

“Por que nos atormentan asi, hombre, deja?” cried a white-faced officer.

“Can’t you hear me?” asked the apparition. “I’ll come closer.”

He threw back the starting-lever, and the thing began moving. Then a rifle-barrel protruded from a dead-light. There was a report and a flash, and a bullet passed through his hair. The shock startled him, and he lost his balance. In the effort to recover it his leg knocked down the blade lever, and the steel cylinder sprang forward, leaving him floundering in the water. Pointed upward, it appeared for a moment on the surface, then dived like a porpoise and disappeared. In five seconds something happened to the gunboat.

Coincident with a sound like near-by thunder, the black craft lifted amidships like a bending jack-knife, and up from the shattered deck, and out from ports, doors, and dead-lights, came a volcano of flame and smoke. The sea beneath followed in a mound, which burst like a great bubble, sending a cloud of steam and spray and whitish-yellow smoke aloft to mingle with the first and meet the falling fragments. These fell for several seconds–hatches, gratings, buckets, ladders, splinters of wood, parts of men, and men whole, but limp.

A side-ladder fell near the choking and half-stunned sick man, and he seized it. Before he could crawl on top the two halves of the gunboat had sunk in a swirl of bubbles and whirlpools.

A few broken and bleeding swimmers approached to share his support, saw his awful face in the moonlight, and swam away.

A few hours later a gray cruiser loomed up close by and directed a search-light at him. Then a gray cutter full of white-clad men approached and took him off the ladder. He was delirious again, and bleeding from mouth, nose, and ears.

* * * * *

The surgeon and the torpedo-lieutenant came up from the sick-bay, the latter with enthusiasm on his face,–for he was young,–and joined a group of officers on the quarterdeck.

“He’ll pull through, gentlemen,” said the surgeon. “He is the man Mosher lost overboard, though he doesn’t know anything about it, nor how he got on that sand-key. I suppose the Destructor picked him up and landed him. He found bread and water, he says. You see, the first symptoms are similar in Yellow Jack and relapsing bilious fever. I don’t wonder that Mosher was nervous.”