A crimson splotch just below the chest line told where the man's life blood had gone out. Measuring its location by sight with the height of the door's splintered panel, Lavelle ventured a deduction of how the Daphne's master and mate had been assassinated. The master had been asleep or, at any rate, he had retired. His apparel, his disturbed berth told that. He had heard the shot which did for the mate, or, perhaps, he might have gone to the door unsuspectingly to answer a knock or summons. His hand turning the knob had been the signal to the assassin on the other side of the door to send a bullet crashing through it into his midriff.
But how the skipper had come to have the log book in his room it was not possible to surmise unless, after being shot, he had had the strength to make his way to the mate's room and back again. Again he might have taken the keeping of the log into his own charge. Could he and the mate have quarreled? Asking himself this question, the searcher's eyes ran down the pages at which the book had lain open and stopped with a shock at three words:
"The second mate——"
That was the final entry.
It was written in a hand which had begun the formation of the letters in a tight style and ended in the scrawling of a schoolboy, a blot and a splattered dash. Where this dash finished there had death touched the fingers which held the writer's pen.
Whatever had happened aboard the Daphne it was the second mate who was responsible for it. Paul was convinced there was no escape from the indictment in those three words.
It was a P.M. entry under date of March 29. According to Paul Lavelle's account of time it was now March 31. Some time during the night of two days before—on the 29th—mutiny had lifted its red hands on the Daphne.
The log was written up to eight o'clock on the evening of the 29th. It must have been the last thing the fair-haired boy now lying cold forward had done before turning his lamp down for his eternal "watch below."
But as startling as was the tragedy which loomed so boldly out of the three simple words which have been quoted was the Daphne's position given as of noon of that day: "Latitude 32:30 north; Longitude 176:28 east."
This instantly destroyed Paul's idea of the island's position. The bark had drifted up on the island out of the southwest. Then, according to the most reasonable assumption, she had been to the southward of it when she was abandoned. That put the island between three and four hundred miles to the northward of where the castaways had believed it to be all the time. Its drift must have been to the north and east instead of the southwest. This explained the absence of the trades; the variable quality of the winds which had prevailed. The island had drifted across the spot, or within a short distance thereto, of where the Cambodia had found her grave.