"'Oh, it was only a Dutchman, you know. But he had a bad dream that night, had Andreas. All the dead men came to fetch him, and he ran from them and got right out on the bowsprit, and there he sat and yelled, while the dead men stood on the forecastle. And the one with his broken thigh-bone in his hand was foremost, and he came crawling out, and wanted Andreas to put it together again. But just then he wakened. We were lying in the same berth, you see, Andreas and me, and I sat up in the berth and laughed, listening to him yelling. I wouldn't waken him, not I. I thought it was fun to hear him getting paid out a little.' "'It was bad of you, Peter, to have any part in that horrid plundering of dead bodies.' "'Oh, I never did anything to them, you know. Just once I broke up a coffin to get wood to make a fire for our coffee; but when we opened it the body just fell to pieces. But it was juicy wood, that, better to burn than the best fir-roots--such a fire as it made!' "One of the others now remarked, 'Wasn't it the devil that used a skull for his coffee-cup?' "'Well, he hadn't anything else, you see, and he just happened to find one. There was no harm in that, was there?' "Then Jacobsen began to hold forth: 'It's not at all such an uncommon thing to use skulls for shooting at, either because people fancy them for targets, or because of some other reason; they shoot in through the eyeholes,' etc., etc. "I asked Peter about 'Tobiesen's' coffin--if it had ever been dug up to find out if it was true that his men had killed him and his son. "'No, that one has never been dug up.' "'I sailed past there last year,' begins Jacobsen again; 'I didn't go ashore, but it seems to me that I heard that it had been dug up.' "'That's just rubbish; it has never been dug up.' "'Well,' said I, 'it seems to me that I've heard something about it too; I believe it was here on board, and I am very much mistaken if it was not yourself that said it, Peter.' "'No, I never said that. All I said was that a man once struck a walrus-spear through the coffin, and it's sticking there yet.' "'What did he do that for?' "'Oh, just because he wanted to know if there was anything in the coffin; and yet he didn't want to open it, you know. But let him lie in peace now.'"