"Ay, that's it," he replied, putting his hand into his pocket for his
tobacco-box. "What's in the wind?--why, you'd have to be askin' of it
to learn, I fancy."

"Is there any more nonsense amongst the men forward?"

"There's a good deal of talk--maybe more than there should be."

"And what do they talk about? Tell me straight, Dan."

"Well, I've got nothing, for my part, to hide away, and I don't know as
they should have; but you know this ship is a dead man's!"

"Who told you that stuff?"

"No other than our second mate, sir, as sure as I cut this quid. Not as
yarns like that affect me; but, you see, some skulls is thick as
plate-armour, and some is thin as egg-shells: and when the thin 'uns
gets afloat with corpses, why, it's a chest of shiners to a handspike
as they cracks--now, ain't it?"

"Dan, this is the most astounding story that I have yet heard. Would
you make it plainer? for, upon my life, I can't read your course!"

He sat down on the edge of the skylight--long service had given him a
claim to familiarity--and filled his pipe from my tobacco-pouch before
he answered, and then was mighty deliberate.

"Plain yarns, Mister Mark, is best told in the fo'castle, and not by
hands upon the quarter-deck; but, asking pardon for the liberty, I feel
more like a father to you gentlemen than if I was nat'ral born to it;
and this I do say--What's this trip mean; what's in yer papers? and why
ain't it the pleasure vige we struck flag for? For it ain't a pleasure
vige, _that_ a shoreman could see; and you ain't come across the
Atlantic for the seein' of it, nor for merchandise nor barter, nor
because you wanted to come. That's what the hands say at night when the
second's a-talkin' to 'em over the grog he finds 'em. 'Where's it going
to end?' says he; 'what is yer wages for takin' yer lives where they
shouldn't be took? and,' says he, 'in a ship what the last skipper died
aboard of it,' says he, 'died so sudden, and was so fond of his old
place as who knows where he is now, afloat or ashore, p'r'aps a-walking
this very cabin, and not bringing no luck for the vige, neither,' says
he. And what follows?--why, white-livered jawings, and this man afeard
to go here, and that man afeard to go there, and the Old One amongst
'em, so that half of 'em says, 'We was took false,' and the other half,
'Why not 'bout ship and home again?' No, and you ain't done with it,
not by a long day, and you won't have done with it until you