“To send a landing party—­it is impossible—­impossible.  They will be poisoned, they will swell, they will swell up and abuse me and die.  It is totally impossible...  If we land, I must land alone, alone, in thick boots and with my life in my hand.  Perhaps I should live.  Or again—­I might not land.  I do not know.  I do not know.”

Holroyd thought he did, but he said nothing.

“De whole thing,” said Gerilleau suddenly, “’as been got up to make me ridiculous.  De whole thing!”

They paddled about and regarded the clean white skeleton from various points of view, and then they returned to the gunboat.  Then Gerilleau’s indecisions became terrible.  Steam was got up, and in the afternoon the monitor went on up the river with an air of going to ask somebody something, and by sunset came back again and anchored.  A thunderstorm gathered and broke furiously, and then the night became beautifully cool and quiet and everyone slept on deck.  Except Gerilleau, who tossed about and muttered.  In the dawn he awakened Holroyd.

“Lord!” said Holroyd, “what now?”

“I have decided,” said the captain.

“What—­to land?” said Holroyd, sitting up brightly.

“No!” said the captain, and was for a time very reserved.  “I have decided,” he repeated, and Holroyd manifested symptoms of impatience.

“Well,—­yes,” said the captain, “I shall fire de big gun!”

And he did!  Heaven knows what the ants thought of it, but he did.  He fired it twice with great sternness and ceremony.  All the crew had wadding in their ears, and there was an effect of going into action about the whole affair, and first they hit and wrecked the old sugar-mill, and then they smashed the abandoned store behind the jetty.  And then Gerilleau experienced the inevitable reaction.

“It is no good,” he said to Holroyd; “no good at all.  No sort of bally good.  We must go back—­for instructions.  Dere will be de devil of a row about dis ammunition—­oh! de devil of a row!  You don’t know, ’Olroyd...”

He stood regarding the world in infinite perplexity for a space.

“But what else was there to do?” he cried.

In the afternoon the monitor started down stream again, and in the evening a landing party took the body of the lieutenant and buried it on the bank upon which the new ants have so far not appeared...

IV.

I heard this story in a fragmentary state from Holroyd not three weeks ago.

These new ants have got into his brain, and he has come back to England with the idea, as he says, of “exciting people” about them “before it is too late.”  He says they threaten British Guiana, which cannot be much over a trifle of a thousand miles from their present sphere of activity, and that the Colonial Office ought to get to work upon them at once.  He declaims with great passion:  “These are intelligent ants.  Just think what that means!”