The girl listened a moment, and then started up.  “I hear voices—­somewhere,”

“Voices?” I strained my ears for sounds other than the insistent ferment of the great cone above our heads.  “Perhaps Leavitt——­”

“Why do you still call him Leavitt?”

“Then you’re quite certain——­” I began, but an involuntary exclamation from her cut me short.

The light of Williams’s lantern, emerging from behind the bamboo palings, disclosed the burly form of the boatswain with a shrinking Malay in tow.  He was jabbering in his native tongue, with much gesticulation of his thin arms, and going into contortions at every dozen paces in a sort of pantomime to emphasize his words.  Williams urged him along unceremoniously to the steps of the veranda.

“Perhaps you can get the straight of this, Mr. Barnaby,” said the boatswain.  “He swears that the flame-devil in the volcano has swallowed his master alive.”

The poor fellow seemed indeed in a state of complete funk.  With his thin legs quaking under him, he poured forth in Malay a crazed, distorted tale.  According to Wadakimba, Leavitt—­or Farquharson, to give him his real name—­had awakened the high displeasure of the flame-devil within the mountain.  Had we not observed that the cone was smoking furiously?  And the dust and heavy taint of sulphur in the air?  Surely we could feel the very tremor of the ground under our feet.  All that day the enraged monster had been spouting mud and lava down upon the white tuan who had remained in the bungalow, drinking heavily and bawling out maledictions upon his enemy.  At length, in spite of Wadakimba’s efforts to dissuade him, he had set out to climb to the crater, vowing to show the flame-devil who was master.  He had compelled the terrified Wadakimba to go with him a part of the way.  The white tuan—­was he really a god, as he declared himself to be?—­had gone alone up the tortuous, fissured slopes, at times lost to sight in yellowish clouds of gas and steam, while his screams and threats of vengeance came back to Wadakimba’s ears.  Overhead, Lakalatcha continued to rumble and quiver and clear his throat with great showers of mud and stones.

Farquharson must have indeed parted with his reason to have attempted that grotesque sally.  Listening to Wadakimba’s tale, I pictured the crazed man, scorched to tatters, heedless of bruises and burns, scrambling up that difficult and perilous ascent, and hurling his ridiculous blasphemy into the flares of smoke and steam that issued from that vast caldron lit by subterranean fires.  At its simmering the whole island trembled.  A mere whiff of the monster’s breath and he would have been snuffed out, annihilated in an instant.  According to Wadakimba, the end had indeed come in that fashion.  It was as if the mountain had suddenly given a deep sigh.  The blast had carried away solid rock.  A sheet of flame had licked the spot where Farquharson had been hurled headlong, and he was not.