Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 06 (1929-06).djvu/95

thing similar to the cocky little hats that French sailors wear in port. He was terribly thin, and stooped, and old.

He returned with a cup of coffee, which I drank without sugar or cream. It warmed me deliciously, and I forgot the raging wind and the rain for a moment or so. Sailor Jack seated himself in the other chair and lighted his knotty black pipe.

"Bloody night," he said between puffs. English, was Sailor Jack.

"Bad storm," I said.

"They don't last, though," he said, staring into the fire. "Be all over betimes the dance goes on."

I stared at him rigidly. "The dance?" I queried.

There was within the cabin only the puffy sound of his thin old lips over the stem of the black pipe and the licking whir of the flames on the logs of the hearth. Sailor Jack gazed abstractedly into the brightness of the fire and spoke as if he were not talking to me but only reiterating some thought that haunted him and must have utterance. It had grown quite dark outside; the lightning threw the windows into shimmering, dazzling flame at each forked bolt.

"The dance," said Sailor Jack. "The dance of the dead of the bark Greta. You must be a stranger to Pineville, else you would have heard ere now about how the men who perished when the Greta foundered off-shore near here more than fifty years ago come back each dark of the moon to dance and drink above the grave. Always at the hour of 9 at night they come whimpering out of their sea graves to dance upon the grave of Naika. Always at 9 because that was the hour at which we buried her; 9 o' the night when the moon was dark."

A heavy blast of the wind tore the door from its fastenings and the rain swept into the room. Sailor Jack got to his unsteady feet and together we shut the door and tied the leather thong more securely.

"Tonight is the night for them. Be a wild night, but what do the dead care? Aye, what do they care? It is the living who suffer."

"Is there a story?" I asked.

"Aye, lad, well you ask if there is a story! A story of goblins and the sea-dead. A body never rests beneath the waves. All will tell you that. The earth is a man's proper burial ground, and the poor spirits of the dead doomed to a watery grave are never at rest. I hear 'em coming up across the savannahs, to dance their monthly rituals. Always at Naika's grave, too. I know where she was buried; I helped cover her wasted body."

"When—where——" I began, drawing my chair closer to the fire.

"Of course," he said. "You're wantin' to hear, an' it's me as would be tellin' yo' about the night we buried the poor brown body of the dead Naika. She's never at rest, and the ship's crew, it never rests.

"This all happened, lad, more than fifty years ago when I was a strapping lad myself, and mate o' the bark Greta, keeled at Bedford by Derwood who was one o' the best o' the builders in those old days. A sweet ship, she was, as easy to handle with dry sticks up above as when she was all plain sail with heavy jib and spanker. Sweet to the helm as a brood mare. A bird of a ship, lad. She'd never ha' foundered off the savannahs if three-fourths o' the crew had not been down with the fever—the tropic fever as Naika give 'em.

"But you don't know about Naika, do ye? Naika was mine in the beginning. I found her at the wharf at Pameti an' she begged me to bring her home with me. I did, or I started with her. I smuggled her aboard at night and she kept herself stowed away for three days after we pulled anchor from the harbor. She was a beauty, lad—brown, seductive, limbs