“At dawn I looked up to see the yellow jack fluttering from the masthead precisely as, not twelve hours before, I had seen the vision of it from the quay.”
Captain Williamson stopped, glanced at his burnt-out cheroot, threw it away, and selected another one carefully from his case.
“Well, Professor, what do you make of that?” he asked, as he struck a match.
The professor assumed an air of wisdom superior to any mystery.
“Of course,” he said, “there is no doubt what happened. Captain Strong was probably infected with yellow fever coming up the river. Years before, he had instigated a native girl to rob that Buddhist temple on his behalf, and finding himself back at the place he was impelled—it is a common psychological phenomenon in criminals—to revisit the scene of his crime. The ex-priest saw him and recognized him, and, wishing to make quite sure whether he still possessed the sacred jewel, he hypnotized him by chaining his conscious attention on his little conjuring trick at the café, and then suggested to him the vision of the jewel by outlining it with his subject’s finger on the table. Captain Strong’s exclamation and his gesture would be sufficient that he still wore it.
“As for the scene in the saloon, it was hypnotism on a large scale, induced by the use of the drugs with which the atmosphere was filled. Captain Strong’s subconscious mind came to the top and lived once again through the episodes of the robbery and the death of his agent, seeing them, as is the habit of the subjective mind when released from the control of the objective surface consciousness, like actual present facts. The hallucination of the girl as a living presence in the cabin is, of course, explained by the silent suggestion of the priest acting on the already highly excited subconsciousness of the guilty man. Just as I can make a hypnotic patient believe that you are someone else and see you as someone else, so the conjurer himself, under cover of the vision he had suggested, approached the wearer of the sacred jewel and snatched it from his neck. The emotional crisis undergone by Captain Strong would, of course, hasten the onset of the yellow fever already in his body.”
“H’m,” objected Captain Williamson, “but that doesn’t explain why I should share these visions.”
The professor was nothing daunted.
“Of course,” he said, “you were in close propinquity to Captain Strong and were doubtless what is known as en rapport with him. The vision of the yellow flag—the not uncommon hallucination of a death-symbol produced by the subconsciousness of a doomed person—was communicated to you when the captain gripped your shoulder——”
“Have a whisky-and-soda, Professor,” interrupted the planter, coarsely, “and don’t spoil a good story.”