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Updated: May 24, 2025
On an eminence above the town, solitary and aloof like a monastery, and nestling deep in its garden of lemon-trees, it commands a wide prospect of sea and sky. By day, the Pacific is a vast stretch of blue, flat like a floor, with a blur of distant islands on the horizon chief among them Muloa, with its single volcanic cone tapering off into the sky.
Three days in Muloa, under the shadow of the grim and flame-throated mountain, while I was forced to listen to Major Stanleigh's persistent questionnaire and Leavitt's erratic and garrulous responses all this, as I was to discover later, at the instigation of the Major's niece had made me frankly curious about the girl.
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.
Ostensibly, it was Major Stanleigh who was bent on locating this young Englishman Miss Stanleigh's interest in the quest was guardedly withheld and the trail had led them a pretty chase around the world until some clue, which I never clearly understood, brought them to Port Charlotte. The major's immediate objective was an eccentric chap named Leavitt who had marooned himself in Muloa.
With the Sylph at anchor, we lay off Muloa for three nights, and Leavitt gave us our fill of Farquharson, along with innumerable digressions about volcanoes, neoplatonism, the Single Tax, and what not. There was no keeping Leavitt to a coherent narrative about the missing Farquharson.
He was watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the shock he had given me. "It was not your intention to stop at Muloa," he observed, dryly, for the plight of the schooner was obvious. "We'll float clear with the tide," I muttered. "But in the meantime" there was something almost menacing in his deliberate pause "I have the pleasure of this little call upon you."
Her uncle, Major Stanleigh, had left me a few minutes before, and I was glad of the respite from the queer business he had involved me in. The two of us had returned that afternoon from Muloa, where I had taken him in my schooner, the Sylph, to seek out Leavitt and make some inquiries very important inquiries, it seemed, in Miss Stanleigh's behalf.
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.
Already it begins to seem like a horrid dream. And as for that island" her eyes looked off toward Muloa now impending upon us and lighting up the heavens with its sudden flare "it seems incredible that I ever set foot upon it. "Perhaps you understand," she went on, after a pause, "that I have not told my husband. But I have not deceived him.
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.
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