As you can understand, I thought a lot about this shadow of a vessel. But, I am sure, for a time, my ideas must just have gone in an everlasting, blind circle. And then I got another thought; for I got thinking of the figures I had seen aloft in the early morning; and I began to imagine fresh things. You see, that first thing that had come up over the side, had come _out of the sea_. And it had gone back. And now there was this shadow vessel-thing--ghost-ship I called it. It was a damned good name, too. And the dark, noiseless men ... I thought a lot on these lines. Unconsciously, I put a question to myself, aloud: "Were they the crew?" "Eh?" said Jaskett, who was on the next chest. I took hold of myself, as it were, and glanced at him, in an apparently careless manner. "Did I speak?" I asked. "Yes, mate," he replied, eyeing me, curiously. "Yer said sumthin' about a crew." "I must have been dreaming," I said; and rose up to put away my plate. XIV _The Ghost Ships_ At four o'clock, when again we went on deck, the Second Mate told me to go on with a paunch mat I was making; while Tammy, he sent to get out his sinnet. I had the mat slug on the fore side of the mainmast, between it and the after end of the house; and, in a few minutes, Tammy brought his sinnet and yarns to the mast, and made fast to one of the pins. "What do you think it was, Jessop?" he asked, abruptly, after a short silence. I looked at him. "What do you think?" I replied. "I don't know what to think," he said. "But I've a feeling that it's something to do with all the rest," and he indicated aloft, with his head. "I've been thinking, too," I remarked. "That it is?" he inquired. "Yes," I answered, and told him how the idea had come to me at my dinner, that the strange men-shadows which came aboard, might come from that indistinct vessel we had seen down in the sea. "Good Lord!" he exclaimed, as he got my meaning. And then for a little, he stood and thought. "That's where they live, you mean?" he said, at last, and paused again. "Well," I replied. "It can't be the sort of existence _we_ should call life." He nodded, doubtfully. "No," he said, and was silent again. Presently, he put out an idea that had come to him. "You _think_, then, that that--vessel has been with us for some time, if we'd only known?" he asked. "All along," I replied. "I mean ever since these things started." "Supposing there are others," he said, suddenly. I looked at him. "If there are," I said. "You can pray to God that they won't stumble across us. It strikes me that whether they're ghosts, or not ghosts, they're blood-gutted pirates. "It seems horrible," he said solemnly, "to be talking seriously like this, about--you know, about such things." "I've tried to stop thinking that way," I told him. "I've felt I should go cracked, if I didn't. There's damned queer things happen at sea, I know; but this isn't one of them."