But when no one had come on deck in answer to the bull-throated hail of the whistle, he had called the master.

Swinging, they had come back, easing up close aboard her to windward and blanketing her sails. When no one came on deck then, with the headway off her and the mainsail slatting idly as she came about, they had acknowledged there was something ominous about it. Backing down fast on the engines to remain there and hold her captive, they had put over the work boat to investigate. There was no need to launch a lifeboat. It had been flat calm for days, and the slight breeze which had sprung up in the afternoon was scarcely enough to ripple the gently heaving pastures of the Gulf.

Freya, of San Juan, P.R., it said under her stern, and the master of the tanker studied her curiously while he waited for the mate to come back to the bridge. She was a long way from home. He wondered what she was doing this far to the westward, in the Gulf of Mexico, and why a small boat from Spanish Puerto Rico should have been named after a Norse goddess.

The mate came up on the bridge carrying the big ledger and the satchel. “Sick?” the captain asked. “Or dead?”

“Gone,” the mate said, with the air of a man who has been talking to ghosts without believing in them. “Just gone. Like that. Remember the Celeste?

“Two of ’em, as near as I can figure it,” he went on, sketching it tersely. “A man and a woman. One or both of ’em was there not over an hour ago.”

“Well, as soon as you get that line on her we’d better go back and see,” the captain said. “Anything in the log?”

“Gibberish,” the older man replied. He passed over the book, and then the satchel. “Take a gander in that, Cap. Whatever was botherin’ ’em, it wasn’t financial trouble.”

The captain pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he opened the bag to stare briefly and incredulously at the bundles of currency. He looked outward at the Freya, where the men were making the towline fast, and frowned thoughtfully. Then he opened the big journal at the page the mate indicated and read the last entry.

He frowned again.

The rapture … the rapture.

Something nudged gently at his mind. He groped for it, and found it. He was a studious and reflective seafaring man who had read Conrad, and the thing which had struck him was the odd, reverse-English similarity to Kurtz’s agonized death cry in The Heart of Darkness. “The horror. The horror.”

Flipping back, he hurriedly read the last five or six pages of the handwritten journal. Then he closed it gently and walked to the wing of the bridge to stand looking down.

“When you get your men aboard,” he said slowly, “you can resume your course, Mr. Davidson.”

“We’re not going back?” the mate asked incredulously.

The captain shook his head. “There’s nothing to go back for.”

“But, Cap— That coffee was still warm. And she couldn’t have been logging over two knots. We might find ’em.

“No.” The captain gazed back over the flat surface of the sea that was red now in the afterglow. “No.