IN THE room, besides the people, there was a coffin and a black flag decorated with the skull and crossbones of buccaneers—or fictioneers. Every once in a while persons went down a ladder to a dim, smoky room where heads bumped the ceiling and where casks and kegs and straw-covered wine bottles stood and hung about in an ornamental sort of way. Mediterranean-looking servitors went to and fro in the subterranean crypt or chamber with great mugs of ginger ale. Visitors usually bent over the large, dark table in the centre whereon lay a carefully executed map—the map of “Treasure Island.” The men wore their hair long, the women wore theirs bobbed. Candles, the only light, threw grotesque shadows. Occasionally a waiter sang, “Pour, oh, pour the pirate sherry” from “The Pirates of Penzance” or “Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.” Somewhere in obscure darkness a parrot squawked. The sounds were favourably construed into cries of “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Mermaid, otherwise Mary Smiley, wore coiled upon her head such a magnificence of dark, red-gold hair as to[170] make her the target of envious glances from cropped young women all about her. Of these looks she seemed completely unaware, but they excited the amusement of her companion. Dick Hand did not fit in with the general Bohemian scheme of the place. He was in Greenwich Village but not of it. His proper environment was a certain office much farther down town in New York, on Broadway a little above Bowling Green. There, in the region of tall buildings at once rigid and supple and perfectly self-possessed as only skyscrapers can be, Dick worked by day. By night he pleasured about town. He was by no means addicted to the Pirates’ Den, nor to the Purple Pup, nor Polly’s, but Mermaid, in her last year of special study at Columbia, had expressed a desire to visit—or, rather, revisit—the Village. So they had come down on a bus to Washington Square and then fared along afoot. Mermaid had been expressing her satisfaction with the evening.

“How badly they do this sort of thing here,” she said, glancing again about her. “You and I, Dickie, wouldn’t be so unoriginal, I hope!”

Dickie, who had no instinct in these matters, asked, “Are they unoriginal?”

“Of course.” She smiled at him and two tiny shadows marked the dimples in her cheeks. “They have simply no ideas. Don’t you see how religiously they have copied all the traditional stuff and accepted all the traditional ideas of what a pirates’ den ought to be?[171] A real pirates’ den was never like this. Pirates lived in a ship’s fo’c’s’le or, on occasion, in a cave; or they went glitteringly along a white beach such as we have at home across the bay from Blue Port. They did not live in a litter of empty casks; an empty bottle was only good to heave overboard unless you had occasion to break it over a comrade’s head. Pirates never had a skillfully executed chart. Usually they had no chart at all; only certain sailing directions and a cross bearing. Robert Louis Stevenson, writing ‘Treasure Island,’ burlesqued an ancient, if not very honourable, profession.”

“Never thought about it,” responded Dick, carelessly. “You may be right. But what do you know about pirates, anyway. Where do you get all this stuff?”

“There are just as many pirates as ever there were,” asserted the young woman. “There’s Captain Vanton out home. He is a typical pirate. The pirates who visited the Great South Beach at one time or another are still there, off and on.”

“Oh, say, Mermaid. You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?”

“I don’t have to believe in them, Dickie, I have seen them.”

“On the beach, home?”

“On the beach, home, and here in New York, too.”

“What were they?”

[172]“Just people, Dickie. I don’t pretend they were flesh and blood. I don’t pretend they ever spoke to me or looked at me. They looked through me, sometimes.”

“But, Mermaid, you know it’s silly.”

“But, Dickie, I know it’s not.”

Young Hand finished his ginger ale and made a face at the mug. Then he asked: “Well, how do you account for ’em?”

“Have I got to account for them, Dickie?”

“I mean, why can’t I see them?”

“How do you know you can’t?”

“I never have.”

“That doesn’t prove anything—it doesn’t prove you never will. Dick, see here, go back to your mathematics. There’s the fourth dimension. All we can see and feel has only three dimensions—length, breadth, and thickness or height—but mathematics tells you things may exist which measure four ways instead of three.”

“But I can’t see ’em; neither can you or anybody else.”

“Of course. But you can see representations of them. A house on paper is not a house, but a picture of one. A ghost may only be a representation, a sort of picture, a projection of Something or Somebody that measures four ways. A house measures three ways and you can put it, after a fashion, on a sheet of paper[173] where it measures only two ways. Why can’t a ghost be a three-dimensional——”

“Tommy Lupton never saw a ghost,” interrupted Dick, with a smile. “Can you picture Tommy patrolling the beach at night as a dutiful Coast Guard and coming upon a projection of Captain Kidd?”

“Certainly. Tommy is extremely likely to meet Captain Vanton,” said Mermaid, promptly.

“You mean that Captain Van............