The vessel was making for the eastern coast, to a town called Dao, where it was to drop mail. It would then continue to Guindulman, whither both passengers were bound.
At Dao, the Captain said the passengers might go ashore; so Julie and Mr. Purcell went with him in a leaky row-boat into a cove of the harbor, which was bounded on both sides by long gleaming arms of beach dotted with palm trees, their heads bent like pensive thinkers.
A small village barely peeped out from under the foliage of the great tropical trees. A dusty primitive road ran down from the village to the rude pier. They climbed up to it by means of a flight of slippery green stairs, a heroic undertaking for Julie in her white clothes.
To her it appeared at once as an island of appalling silence. Even the sea out there was not so still. A primitive, all-pervading hush—the deepest she had ever known. A queer sensation came over her of having reached a point in the universe where time was not.
A crowd of natives had commenced quietly to gather. Two white men were approaching; one a young officer in a khaki uniform, with a sword hooked to his belt; the other nondescriptly appareled in an officer’s blouse devoid of insignia, a pair of bleached trousers that came considerably above his shoe tops, and a peaked straw hat.
As they drew near, these men looked at Julie in amazement. The Captain presented the officer as Lieutenant Adams. Julie noticed at once the deep shadow that rested upon his thin, troubled face. The other strange-looking gentleman was the Doctor. Outside of these two, the Captain remarked, there was only one white person on this side of the island. At this allusion, Julie noticed strained glances exchanged.
When Purcell got the chance, he whispered to Julie that this third person was the captain in command—perpetually drunk, and frequently insane with delirium tremens. He had been a fearless soldier, and had once performed a hazardous mission for the Government; and he had been put off here, with a one-company command, in the idea that he could do little harm. But this drink-maddened czar in his times of dementia maintained a reign of terror over his small domain that brought it always to the verge of mutiny. Only one thing stood between his brutality and disaster. This was young Adams, who interposed between the captain and his men—and who spent weeks in arrest or confinement for his pains.
“What lives you regulars lead!” Purcell exclaimed to the Doctor. “Do you think any volunteer organization would stand for that whiskey king? They’d take him out and twist his head off.”
Adams frowned. “Let go, before the natives, when the whole blooming show is at stake over here? We’re not just a company of infantry. We’re the Army! I’d have my own head twisted off first.”
“If it were not for Adams,” the Doctor said, shaking his head, “there’d be a holocaust, all right. It frequently occurs to me to take to the open sea. But I’d like Adams to go with me, and he keeps Nero so peeved by his altruism that the old monster locks him up; so he can’t get away. Miss Dreschell,” he continued, turning engagingly to her in his quaintly deranged hat and incoherent costume, “you must really pardon my clothes. As you may not have found it difficult to surmise, I haven’t any. I came here a thousand years ago, and never expected to encounter a lady again. I have written to a tailor regularly, enclosing at various times a roll of bills—impossible to send money orders, there being no post-office on this island; but that evil one simply disdains to reply. All the world, by some singular sort of erosion, seems to have receded from us. I shall eventually be reduced to fig leaves—though they are not indigenous to the island, and banana leaves, while dressy and expansive, will not bear needle and thread, nor glue together with any success.