Old Vandermeulen turned to me.
“Then it’s not St. Lucia, young man,” he said. He picked up Geoffrey’s transcription. “Well, now, Captain Higgins, is there any place thirteen-twenty-four North, eighty-one twenty-seven West?”
The skipper reflected a moment.
“No place of importance, certainly. I’ll get the chart.”
He returned with it, spread it out on the saloon table, ran his forefinger across it.
“Here you are!” he said. “A small island called Old Providence. It belongs to Colombia.”
Geoffrey, who was peering over his shoulder, uttered a startled exclamation.
“And look!” he cried. “There’s your Katalina!” He pointed to a small islet just north of Old Providence, a mere dot on the chart. “Santa Katalina!—My hat! that is weird!”
It certainly was. From whatever stratum of Pauline’s consciousness her writing had emanated, it was an amazing thing that she should have written down the exact latitude and longitude of a tiny island off the Nicaraguan coast and named it correctly. Even I could not help feeling that it was more than a fortuitous coincidence, that it was uncanny. The others surrendered themselves straight away.