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He became more and more impressed by the fact that a great if minute and furtive activity was going on. He perceived that a number of gigantic ants–they seemed nearly a couple of inches in length–carrying oddly-shaped burthens for which he could imagine no use–were moving in rushes from one point of obscurity to another. They did not move in columns across the exposed places, but in open, spaced-out lines, oddly suggestive of the rushes of modern infantry advancing under fire. A number were taking cover under the dead man’s clothes, and a perfect swarm was gathering along the side over which da Cunha must presently go.

He did not see them actually rush for the lieutenant as he returned, but he has no doubt they did make a concerted rush. Suddenly the lieutenant was shouting and cursing and beating at his legs. “I’m stung!” he shouted, with a face of hate and accusation towards Gerilleau.

Then he vanished over the side, dropped into his boat, and plunged at once into the water. Holroyd heard the splash.

The three men in the boat pulled him out and brought him aboard, and that night he died.

III.

Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen and contorted body of the lieutenant lay and stood together at the stern of the monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed behind them. It was a close, dark night that had only phantom flickerings of sheet lightning to illuminate it. The cuberta, a vague black triangle, rocked about in the steamer’s wake, her sails bobbing and flapping, and the black smoke from the funnels, spark-lit ever and again, streamed over her swaying masts.

Gerilleau’s mind was inclined to run on the unkind things the lieutenant had said in the heat of his last fever.

“He says I murdered ‘im,” he protested. “It is simply absurd. Someone ‘ad to go aboard. Are we to run away from these confounded ants whenever they show up?”

Holroyd said nothing. He was thinking of a disciplined rush of little black shapes across bare sunlit planking.

“It was his place to go,” harped Gerilleau. “He died in the execution of his duty. What has he to complain of? Murdered!… But the poor fellow was–what is it?–demented. He was not in his right mind. The poison swelled him… U’m.”

They came to a long silence.

“We will sink that canoe–burn it.”

“And then?”

The inquiry irritated Gerilleau. His shoulders went up, his hands flew out at right angles from his body. “What is one to do?” he said, his voice going up to an angry squeak.

“Anyhow,” he broke out vindictively, “every ant in dat cuberta!–I will burn dem alive!”

Holroyd was not moved to conversation. A distant ululation of howling monkeys filled the sultry night with foreboding sounds, and as the gunboat drew near the black mysterious banks this was reinforced by a depressing clamour of frogs.

“What is one to do?” the captain repeated after a vast interval, and suddenly becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burn the Santa Rosa without further delay. Everyone aboard was pleased by that idea, everyone helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it, and dropped the boat and fired her with tow and kerosene, and soon the cuberta was crackling and flaring merrily amidst the immensities of the tropical night. Holroyd watched the mounting yellow flare against the blackness, and the livid flashes of sheet lightning that came and went above the forest summits, throwing them into momentary silhouette, and his stoker stood behind him watching also.

The stoker was stirred to the depths of his linguistics. “Saueba go pop, pop,” he said, “Wahaw” and laughed richly.

But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoe had also eyes and brains.

The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but–what was one to do? This question came back enormously reinforced on the morrow, when at last the gunboat reached Badama.