"I represented myself as the sole survivor of a wrecked tramp-steamer, and was not questioned overmuch. I dared not tell my story to those sailors, lest they prison me as a mad-man. I asked them a few discreet questions, though, and received an answer to one that staggered me. For I was no longer in my own year, the year in which I had been seized there at Angkor. I was in a year three years later! Three years! And it had seemed only a few minutes to me. I had been carried on, that far, into time. "I took my place as one of the crew, on the voyage to Galveston, and worked my passage, though I was hard put to it to uphold my assertion that I was a seaman. We sailed on, forging across the Pacific and heading toward Panama. A night came when we were only a few hundred miles west of the canal. I was stretched in a forecastle bunk, vainly trying to sleep away the haunting fears that still filled me. The night was quite calm, with only the throb of the engines and the slap of waves on the hull breaking the silence. Then, faint and far, but sounding to me like the thunder of doom, came a distant, eery whistling, a piercing chorus that I knew well. "It grew, it waxed to a tumult of roaring winds, while I lay crouched in the bunk, trembling. It seemed to swoop down on the deck above, and there rang out a great scream, a shriek of horror that burned into my brain. The roaring winds began to lessen, to draw away. I ran up onto the deck and looked wildly around. To the north, a little above and beyond the ship, was a hazy mass that I glimpsed vaguely in the moonlight, and that suddenly disappeared, still heading straight north. And the whistling chorus of winds died away. "I sank down on the deck, sick at heart. For I knew what I had seen, knew that half-glimpsed thing to be the thing that had seized me at Angkor, and from which I had freed myself. Two of the watch, the only men on deck at the time, were missing, and all around me the sailors who had poured up onto the deck were speculating as to their disappearance, and the cause of the sudden, roaring winds. But I told them nothing. I knew well that the thing that had snatched me away before had come again to seize me, tracking me down, God knows how, perhaps by some mystic mark or brand that its grip had sealed upon me. I knew that it had come for me, and not finding me, had taken the two men on deck at the time. But I said nothing. "It was finally agreed by the ship's officers to report the event as the loss of two sailors, swept overboard by a sudden gale. It went down in the ship's log, thus, and we sailed on. But the crew was fearful, whispering.... "The ship came safe to Galveston, though. The wages due me as a seaman were enough to get me to New York. I came at once to your apartment, and the rest you know.