"Doesn't seem real, does it?" said Greer in a low tone, drawing a long
breath in the heat. "I keep listening."
Madden shook himself. "It seems as if someone ought to be aboard." He
broke away from the spell: "I wish they had left us some provisions--we
need 'em."
The hot heavy silence fell immediately after the remark, like a curtain
that was heavy to lift.
"Let's look through the hold and see if there _isn't_ someone
here!" suggested Greer uneasily.
With a feeling that they were likely to encounter some being, human or
spectral, at every turn, they went below. The farther they went the more
inexplicable became the _Minnie B's_ desertion. Her engines were in
perfect order, her furnace so new that the grate bars were still
unsealed from heat; the maker's name-plate was still bright on the
boilers; her hull was quite dry, with less than six inches of water in
her bilge. She had no cargo, except four or five tons of raw metal
ingots used as ballast. The coal in her bunkers was nearly exhausted.
Indeed she was riding so light that heavy weather would upset her like a
chip. It seemed as if the crew had looted the _Minnie B_ in a
thorough and extraordinary manner, and then had simply vanished. Every
now and then in their search the two would find themselves standing
motionless, open-mouthed, listening intently to the brooding silence.
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