about the missing Farquharson. He was incapable
of it, and Major Stanleigh and myself had simply to wait in patience
while Leavitt, delighted to have an audience, dumped out for us the
fantastic contents of his mind, odd vagaries, recondite trash, and all.
He was always getting away from Farquharson, but, then, he was
unfailingly bound to come back to him. We had only to wait and catch the
solid grains that now and then fell in the winnowing of that unending
stream of chaff. It was a tedious and exasperating process, but it had
its compensations. At times Leavitt could be as uncannily brilliant as
he was dull and boresome. The conviction grew upon me that he had become
a little demented, as if his brain had been tainted by the sulphurous
fumes exhaled by the smoking crater above his head. His mind smoked,
flickered, and flared like an unsteady lamp, blown upon by choking
gases, in which the oil had run low.

But of the wanderer Farquharson he spoke with precision and authority,
for he had shared with Farquharson his bungalow there in Muloa--a
period of about six months, it seemed--and there Farquharson had
contracted a tropic fever and died.

"Well, at last we have got all the facts," Major Stanleigh sighed with
satisfaction when the _Sylph_ was heading back to Port Charlotte. Muloa,
lying astern, we were no longer watching. Leavitt, at the water's edge,
had waved us a last good-by and had then abruptly turned back into the
forest, very likely to go clambering like a demented goat up the flanks
of his beloved volcano and to resume poking about in its steaming
fissures--an occupation of which he never tired.

"The evidence is conclusive, don't you think?--the grave, Farquharson's
personal effects, those pages of the poor devil's diary."

I nodded assent. In my capacity as owner of the _Sylph_ I had merely
undertaken to furnish Major Stanleigh with passage to Muloa and back,
but the events of the last three days had made me a party to the many
conferences, and I was now on terms of something like intimacy with the
rather stiff and pompous English gentleman. How far I was from sharing
his real confidence I was to discover later when Eleanor Stanleigh gave
me hers.

"My wife and niece will be much relieved to hear all this--a family
matter, you understand, Mr. Barnaby," he had said to me when we landed.
"I should like to present you to them before we leave Port Charlotte for
home."

But, as it turned out, it was Elea