"Those are the facts, I tell you" said Nichols calmly "I have also verified this latter statement, through correspondence with the captain who picked him up. It really happened—and the dates were as I said. He was picked up just north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean by the ship _Vanguard_, and brought in to San Francisco. I was informed by the captain of the _Vanguard_ that he had been driven out of his course by meeting the northeast trade winds too far south, and had sighted Devereux adrift one morning in about 135° west and 2° north. The man was nearly dead from thirst, and was quite mad when they took him aboard; raved about an island nearby, said he’d been blown away from it, and begged them to cruise in search of it before they left the ground. There was no island in that vicinity, of course, nearer than the Marquesas. ’I was sorry for the poor fellow’ the captain of the _Vanguard_ wrote me ’but we couldn’t waste time in indulging his fancy. He quieted down after a day or two, and seemed to settle into a sort of dull melancholy’ "This castaway, giving his name as Devereux, claimed to have been mate of the _Evening Star_, lost in that same quarter of the Pacific the year before. The people on the _Vanguard_ had heard nothing of this disaster; in fact, the first report of it, brought in by the second mate, had just reached San Francisco from Callao when they got in. To corroborate the story, however, the whaleboat in which Devereux had been picked up had presented a battered and weather-beaten appearance, her paint peeling off and her bottom badly scarred, as if she’d been used a good while on the beach; and on her stern they had been able to decipher the letters—ENI-G —AR. Devereux claimed that his ship had touched a needle of rock and had sunk immediately; but no danger of that nature was laid down on the _Vanguard’s_ chart. A year later, as a result of these conflicting and sensational tales, the United States Government sent a gunboat to look for the rock, perhaps with secret instructions to keep a weather eye open for Devereux’s island; but nothing was to be found. Devereux couldn’t remember the _Evening Star’s_ exact latitude and longitude on the day before the disaster; his records and instruments had vanished along with his crew in the heart of a deep mystery. And the second mate, who alone came in in regular order, was a poor navigator, you’ll remember, and may easily have made an error about the place of his departure. At any rate, nothing was to be found. On the charts of the Hydrographic Office to-day you’ll see, in that position, a dotted circle, marked Evening Star Rock, with an interrogation point after the name.