And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, and the "current" helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of the _Glarus_, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log-line ran out from the trail and strained back as the ship worked homeward. We had never a mishap from the time we finally swung her about; and, considering the circumstances, the voyage back to San Francisco was propitious. But an incident happened just after we had started back. We were perhaps some five miles on the homeward track. It was early evening and Strokher had the watch. At about seven o'clock he called me up on the bridge. "See her?" he said. And there, far behind us, in the shadow of the twilight, loomed the Other Ship again, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were leaving her rapidly astern. Strokher and I stood looking at her till she dwindled to a dot. Then Strokher said: "She's on post again." And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast anchor off the "Front" our crew went ashore as soon as discharged, and in half a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors' boarding-house and in every seaman's dive, from Barbary Coast to Black Tom's. It is still there, and that is why no pilot will take the _Glarus_ out, no captain will navigate her, no stoker feed her fires, no sailor walk her decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She will never smell blue water again, nor taste the trades. She has seen a Ghost. THE GHOST IN THE CROSSTREES I Cyrus Ryder, the President of the South Pacific Exploitation Company, had at last got hold of a "proposition"--all Ryder's schemes were, in his vernacular, "propositions"--that was not only profitable beyond precedent or belief, but that also was, wonderful to say, more or less legitimate. He had got an "island." He had not discovered it. Ryder had not felt a deck under his shoes for twenty years other than the promenade deck of the ferry-boat _San Rafael_, that takes him home to Berkeley every evening after "business hours." He had not discovered it, but "Old Rosemary," captain of the barkentine _Scottish Chief_, of Blyth, had done that very thing, and, dying before he was able to perfect the title, had made over his interest in it to his best friend and old comrade, Cyrus Ryder. "Old Rosemary," I am told, first landed on the island--it is called Paa--in the later '60's. He established its location and took its latitude and longitude, but as minutes and degrees mean nothing to the lay reader, let it be said that the Island of Paa lies just below the equator, some 200 miles west of the Gilberts and 1,600 miles due east from Brisbane, in Australia. It is six miles long, three wide, and because of the prevailing winds and precipitous character of the coast can only be approached from the west during December and January.