She was endeavouring to get trace of a man named Farquharson, as I was permitted to learn a few days later.  Ostensibly, it was Major Stanleigh who was bent on locating this young Englishman—­Miss Stanleigh’s interest in the quest was guardedly withheld—­and the trail had led them a pretty chase around the world until some clue, which I never clearly understood, brought them to Port Charlotte.  The major’s immediate objective was an eccentric chap named Leavitt who had marooned himself in Muloa.  The island offered an ideal retreat for one bent on shunning his own kind, if he did not object to the close proximity of a restive volcano.  Clearly, Leavitt did not.  He had a scientific interest in the phenomena exhibited by volcanic regions and was versed in geological lore, but the rumours about Leavitt—­practically no one ever visited Muloa—­did not stop at that.  And, as Major Stanleigh and I were to discover, the fellow seemed to have developed a genuine affection for Lakalatcha, as the smoking cone was called by the natives of the adjoining islands.  From long association he had come to know its whims and moods as one comes to know those of a petulant woman one lives with.  It was a bizarre and preposterous intimacy, in which Leavitt seemed to find a wholly acceptable substitute for human society, and there was something repellant about the man’s eccentricity.  He had various names for the smoking cone that towered a mile or more above his head:  “Old Flame-eater,” or “Lava-spitter,” he would at times familiarly and irreverently call it; or, again, “The Maiden Who Never Sleeps,” or “The Single-breasted Virgin”—­these last, however, always in the musical Malay equivalent.  He had no end of names—­romantic, splenetic, of opprobrium, or outright endearment—­to suit, I imagine, Lakalatcha’s varying moods.  In one respect they puzzled me—­they were of conflicting genders, some feminine and some masculine, as if in Leavitt’s loose-frayed imagination the mountain that beguiled his days and disturbed his nights were hermaphroditic.

Leavitt as a source of information regarding the missing Farquharson seemed preposterous when one reflected how out of touch with the world he had been, but, to my astonishment, Major Stanleigh’s clue was right, for he had at last stumbled upon a man who had known Farquharson well and who was voluminous about him—­quite willingly so.  With the Sylph at anchor, we lay off Muloa for three nights, and Leavitt gave us our fill of Farquharson, along with innumerable digressions about volcanoes, neoplatonism, the Single Tax, and what not.  There was no keeping Leavitt to a coherent narrative about the missing Farquharson.  He was incapable of it, and Major Stanleigh and myself had simply to wait in patience while Leavitt, delighted to have an audience, dumped out for us the fantastic contents of his mind, odd vagaries, recondite trash, and all.  He was always getting away from Farquharson, but, then, he was unfailingly