tree growing out of a vacant window space, and great creepers netted across
its vacant portals. Several flights of strange yellow butterflies with
semi-transparent wings crossed the river that morning, and many alighted on
the monitor and were killed by the men. It was towards afternoon that they
came upon the derelict _cuberta_.

She did not at first appear to be derelict; both her sails were set and
hanging slack in the afternoon calm, and there was the figure of a man
sitting on the fore planking beside the shipped sweeps. Another man
appeared to be sleeping face downwards on the sort of longitudinal bridge
these big canoes have in the waist. But it was presently apparent, from
the sway of her rudder and the way she drifted into the course of the
gunboat, that something was out of order with her. Gerilleau surveyed her
through a field-glass, and became interested in the queer darkness of the
face of the sitting man, a red-faced man he seemed, without a nose--
crouching he was rather than sitting, and the longer the captain looked
the less he liked to look at him, and the less able he was to take his
glasses away.

But he did so at last, and went a little way to call up Holroyd. Then he
went back to hail the cuberta. He ailed her again, and so she drove past
him. _Santa Rosa_ stood out clearly as her name.

As she came by and into the wake of the monitor, she pitched a little, and
suddenly the figure of the crouching an collapsed as though all its joints
had given way. His hat fell off, his head was not nice to look at, and his
body flopped lax and rolled out of sight behind the bulwarks.

"Caramba!" cried Gerilleau, and resorted to Holroyd forthwith.

Holroyd was half-way up the companion. "Did you see dat?" said the
captain.

"Dead!" said Holroyd. "Yes. You'd better send a boat aboard. There's
something wrong."

"Did you--by any chance--see his face?"

"What was it like?"

"It was--ugh!--I have no words." And the captain suddenly turned his back
on Holroyd and became an active and strident commander.

The gunboat came about, steamed parallel to the erratic course of the
canoe, and dropped the boat with Lieutenant da Cunha and three sailors to
board her. Then the curiosity of the captain made him draw up almost
alongside as the lieutenant got aboard, so that the whole of the _Santa
Rosa_, deck and hold, was visible to Holroyd.

He saw now clearly that the sole crew of the vessel was these two dead
men,