“It is your duty,” said the captain, “to go aboard.  It is my instructions.”

The lieutenant seemed on the verge of refusing.  The head of one of the mulatto sailors appeared beside him.

“I believe these men were killed by the ants,” said Holroyd abruptly in English.

The captain burst into a rage.  He made no answer to Holroyd.  “I have commanded you to go aboard,” he screamed to his subordinate in Portuguese.  “If you do not go aboard forthwith it is mutiny—­rank mutiny.  Mutiny and cowardice!  Where is the courage that should animate us?  I will have you in irons, I will have you shot like a dog.”  He began a torrent of abuse and curses, he danced to and fro.  He shook his fists, he behaved as if beside himself with rage, and the lieutenant, white and still, stood looking at him.  The crew appeared forward, with amazed faces.

Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some heroic decision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the deck of the cuberta.

“Ah!” said Gerilleau, and his mouth shut like a trap.  Holroyd saw the ants retreating before da Cunha’s boots.  The Portuguese walked slowly to the fallen man, stooped down, hesitated, clutched his coat and turned him over.  A black swarm of ants rushed out of the clothes, and da Cunha stepped back very quickly and trod two or three times on the deck.

Holroyd put up the glasses.  He saw the scattered ants about the invader’s feet, and doing what he had never seen ants doing before.  They had nothing of the blind movements of the common ant; they were looking at him—­as a rallying crowd of men might look at some gigantic monster that had dispersed it.

“How did he die?” the captain shouted.

Holroyd understood the Portuguese to say the body was too much eaten to tell.

“What is there forward?” asked Gerilleau.

The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese.  He stopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg.  He made some peculiar steps as if he was trying to stamp on something invisible, and went quickly towards the side.  Then he controlled himself, turned about, walked deliberately forward to the hold, clambered up to the fore decking, from which the sweeps are worked, stooped for a time over the second man, groaned audibly, and made his way back and aft to the cabin, moving very rigidly.  He turned and began a conversation with his captain, cold and respectful in tone on either side, contrasting vividly with the wrath and insult of a few moments before.  Holroyd gathered only fragments of its purport.

He reverted to the field-glass, and was surprised to find the ants had vanished from all the exposed surfaces of the deck.  He turned towards the shadows beneath the decking, and it seemed to him they were full of watching eyes.

The cuberta, it was agreed; was derelict, but too full of ants to put men aboard to sit and sleep:  it must be towed.  The lieutenant went forward to take in and adjust the cable, and the men in the boat stood up to be ready to help him.  Holroyd’s glasses searched the canoe.