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With a strangled cry the sailor cast the shirt from him and rolled in agony upon the ground. "You fool!" cried Trendon. "Stand back, all of you." Opening his medicine case, he bent over the racked sufferer. Presently the man sat up, pale and abashed. "That's how poisonous volcanic gas is," said the surgeon to his commanding officer. "Only inhaled remnants of the dust, too."
Presently it shone forth from the funnel, showing that the explorer had reached the inner open space. Captain Parkinson dropped down and peered in, but the evil odour was too much for him. He retired, gagging and coughing. Trendon was gone for what seemed an interminable time. His superior officer fidgeted uneasily. At last he could stand it no longer. "Dr. Trendon, are you all right?" he shouted.
"Take notice," said Trendon, good-naturedly, "that I'm the botanist of this expedition." "Oh, you can have the flowers. All I want is what they grow in." Loosening a handful of the dry soil, he brought it down and laid it with the explosives.
"I suppose you were aboard," said Barnett, and Trendon made a quick gesture of impatience and rebuke. "No," said Slade. "Left three four don't know how many nights ago." The officers looked at each other. "Go on," said Trendon to his companion. "We put a crew aboard in command of an ensign," continued Barnett, "and picked up the schooner the next night, deserted. You must know about it.
Before him lay a paper covered with jotted notes. Trendon slouched low in the chair on Slade's right. Captain Parkinson had the other side. Convenient to Darrow's hand lay the material for cigarettes. As he talked he rolled cylinder after cylinder, and between sentences consumed them in long, satisfying puffs. "First you will want to learn of the fate of your friends and shipmates," he began.
It was broken by a scream of terror from forward. The quartermaster who had been at the wheel came clambering down the ladder and ran along the deck, his fingers splayed and stiffened before him in the intensity of his panic. "The needle! The compass!" he shrieked. Barnett ran to the wheel house with Trendon at his heels. The others followed. The needle was swaying like a cobra's head.
"It's dynamite, isn't it?" "Something of the same nature. Joveite, it's called." Still the surgeon stared at him. Barnett laughed. "Oh, you've got the high explosives superstition," he said lightly. "Dynamite don't go off as easy as people think. You could drop that stuff from the cliffhead without danger. Have I got to come down for it?" With a wry face Trendon tossed up the package.
He reports marks on the lock as if somebody had been trying to pick it before him." There was no further entry. "Dr. Trendon is right," said Barnett. "Whatever happened and God only knows what it could have been it happened just after the squall." "Just about the time of the strange glow," cried Ives.
The Marie Celeste." "Got what? What about her?" "Parallel case," said Trendon. "Sailed from New York back in the seventies. Seven weeks out was found derelict. Everything in perfect order. Captain's wife's hem on the machine. Boats all accounted for. No sign of struggle. Log written to within forty-eight hours." "What became of the crew?" "Wish I could tell you. Might help to unravel our tangle."
"Maybe they died fast and the last survivor, after the bodies of the rest were overboard, got delirious and jumped after them." "Not if the galley fire was hot," said Dr. Trendon, briefly. "No; pestilence doesn't work that way." "Did you look at the wheel, Billy?" asked Ives. "Did I! There's another thing. Wheel's all right, but compass is no good at all. It's regularly bewitched."
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