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About the lantern overhead there eddied a noiseless whirl of phantom moths. Gerilleau stirred in the darkness and sighed. "What can one do?" he murmured, and turned over and was still again. Holroyd was roused from meditations that were becoming sinister by the hum of a mosquito.
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.
He fired it twice with great sternness and ceremony. All the crew had wadding in their ears, and there was an effect of going into action about the whole affair, and first they hit and wrecked the old sugar-mill, and then they smashed the abandoned store behind the jetty. And then Gerilleau experienced the inevitable reaction. "It is no good," he said to Holroyd; "no good at all.
"What is there forward?" asked Gerilleau. The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese. He stopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg. He made some peculiar steps as if he was trying to stamp on something invisible, and went quickly towards the side.
Captain Gerilleau embarked upon speculations that Holroyd could not follow, and the two men disputed with a certain increasing vehemence. Holroyd took up the field-glass and resumed his scrutiny, first of the ants and then of the dead man amidships. He has described these ants to me very particularly.
He shook his fists, he behaved as if beside himself with rage, and the lieutenant, white and still, stood looking at him. The crew appeared forward, with amazed faces. Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some heroic decision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the deck of the cuberta. "Ah!" said Gerilleau, and his mouth shut like a trap.
Things came back to him that Gerilleau had gathered about these ants they were approaching. They used a poison like the poison of snakes. They obeyed greater leaders even as the leaf-cutting ants do. They were carnivorous, and where they came they stayed... The forest was very still. The water lapped incessantly against the side.
Dey try to go in de son, 'e goes in. De ants fight." "Swarm over him?" "Bite 'im. Presently he comes out again screaming and running. He runs past them to the river. See? He gets into de water and drowns de ants yes." Gerilleau paused, brought his liquid eyes close to Holroyd's face, tapped Holroyd's knee with his knuckle. "That night he dies, just as if he was stung by a snake."
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.
For the first time for many days came a spell of coolness, and Holroyd and Gerilleau sat late, smoking cigars and enjoying this delicious sensation. Gerilleau's mind was full of ants and what they could do.
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