"Look here" said he, leading me to windward "Nichols knows the position of that island. He's trying to pass it..."
"Nonsense, Devereux!" I exclaimed "You mustn't credit such a thought. Nichols knows less about it than we do"
"He's always poring over the chart" said Devereux darkly "He tries to keep our position from me. Oh, I can see it in his eye!"
"But we aren't in that part of the world" I argued, like a man wrestling with the wind.
He passed a hand wearily across his eye. "It looks the same" said he. Suddenly he shot at me a piercing glance. "I don't know whether to believe you or not!" he snarled "You're all against me, every damned one of you!"
He quickly dropped the mood of suspicion, however, for that evening we had another long talk about the island. The next forenoon he took a notion to go aloft; spent a number of hours perched on the main royal yard. There we could see him steadily searching the horizon. We seized the opportunity to talk over his case at length in the cabin, but could come to no decision except to let affairs run their course.
"Good Lord, Nichols, suppose he really sights an island, up there!" I suddenly exclaimed. We bent over the chart, pricking off our exact position that morning; and breathed a sigh of relief to discover that, as we were going, we shouldn't sight any land till the following day.
It was in Macassar that we saw the first evidence of violent abberration in Devereux. The three of us had gone ashore for the day; after an early dinner, we were taking a short drive in the cool of the evening through a region of small rice and coffee plantations. Somewhere beyond the outskirts of the town, a native woman stepped from the road in front of us to make way for our horses. She drew back against a fringe of bamboo trees by the roadside, stretched out her arms to part the branches behind her, and stood there motionless, in sharp relief against the sunset, watching us pass by. Beside us, Devereux uttered a wild cry, some unintelligible name, and leaped from the moving vehicle.
We found him prostrate at the feet of the woman, babbling in a musical, strange tongue. The light on his face was the very madness of joy. The woman shrieked, drawing back among the bamboo stems. Nichols reassured her in the Bugis dialect.
"Devereux, come away!" he commanded sharply "You don't know her. For God's sake, come away!"