set, and sometimes it
twitched oddly when he was at the wheel, and he would turn his
head round sharp to look behind him. A man doesn't do that
naturally, unless there's a vessel that he thinks is creeping up
on the quarter. When that happens, if the man at the wheel takes
a pride in his ship, he will almost always keep glancing over his
shoulder to see whether the other fellow is gaining. But Jack
Benton used to look round when there was nothing there; and what
is curious, the other men seemed to catch the trick when they
were steering. One day the old man turned out just as the man at
the wheel looked behind him.

"What are you looking at?" asked the captain.

"Nothing, sir," answered the man.

"Then keep your eye on the mizzen-royal," said the old man, as if
he were forgetting that we weren't a square-rigger.

"Ay, ay, sir," said the man.

The captain told me to go below and work up the latitude from the
dead-reckoning, and he went forward of the deck-house and sat
down to read, as he often did. When I came up, the man at the
wheel was looking round again, and I stood beside him and just
asked him quietly what everybody was looking at, for it was
getting to be a general habit. He wouldn't say anything at first,
but just answered that it was nothing. But when he saw that I
didn't seem to care, and just stood there as if there were
nothing more to be said, he naturally began to talk.

He said that it wasn't that he saw anything, because there wasn't
anything to see except the spanker sheet just straining a little, and
working in the sheaves of the blocks as the schooner rose to the short
seas. There wasn't anything to be seen, but it seemed to him that the
sheet made a queer noise in the blocks. It was a new manilla sheet; and
in dry weather it did make a little noise, something between a creak and
a wheeze. I looked at it and looked at the man, and said nothing; and
presently he went on. He asked me if I didn't notice anything peculiar
about the noise. I listened awhile, and said I didn't notice anything.
Then he looked rather sheepish, but said he didn't think it could be his
own ears, because every man who steered his trick heard the same thing
now and then,--sometimes once in a day, sometimes once in a night,
sometimes it would go on a whole hour.

"It sounds like sawing wood," I said, just like that.

"To us it sounds a good deal more like a man whistling 'Nancy
Lee.'" He started nervously as he spoke t