In all the history of great friendships there is nothing more touching and more noble than the beautiful bond which existed between Baahaabaa, the simple, primitive chief of the Filbertines and the white men who spent the happiest months of their lives on his island and then so strangely vanished. For several days after their departure he spoke no word. But every evening at sunset he took his place opposite an opening in the reef where the Kawa had first made her appearance and there he sat until darkness covered him. "Whom are you awaiting?" his chieftains asked him. He shook his head mournfully; memories in the Filberts are mercifully short. Then placing his hand over his heart he said, "I know not who it is, but something is gone—from here."
Three weeks later when this photograph was taken he was still keeping up his lonely vigil.]
We tried to help him. While the Captain pointed his astrolabe sunward and announced the figures Whinney and I, like tailors' assistants, took them down, Whinney doing the adding, I the subtracting and Swank the charting. The results were confusion worse confounded.
And then a dreadful thing happened.
The compass-plant sickened and died.
Whether some sea-water splashed into the shell or whether it was just change of environment, I do not know. But day by day it drooped and faded.
I shall never forget the night she breathed her last. With white faces we sat about the tiny brown bowl in which lay our hope of orientation. In Triplett's great rough paw was a fountain-pen filler of fresh water which he gently dropped on the flowerlet's unturned face. At exactly one-thirty, solar time, the tiny petals fluttered faintly and closed.
"She's gone," groaned Triplett, and dashed a tear, the size of a robin's egg, from his furrowed cheek. In that ghastly light we stared at each other.
We were lost!