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One night about a year ago a hideous row broke out in the baroness' shack. Scullion Lorenz took shelter with the neighboring Wittmers for several months. After a while he returned to the baroness.
In March there was another row at the baroness'. Scrambling down a rocky path to investigate, the Wittmers found wild-eyed Rudolph Lorenz standing by a deserted disordered shack. There had been a fight, said he, and the baroness and Philippson had gone off "on an American yacht" to start another colony in the South Seas.
The Post Office of Charles Island is an empty barrel on the seashore. In this barrel Lorenz posted a notice begging to be taken off by the first passing ship.
Until the finding of the two starved corpses on Marchena Island, 160 miles north of Charles Island, that was all the outside world knew. The baroness had vanished. Radio Revivalist Phillips Lord ("Seth Parker"), cruising offshore, reported by wireless that he had dined with the Wittmers only the week before, that the second body could not be Mrs. Wittmer's. Soundest theory seemed to be that Rudolph Lorenz (who may or may not have murdered the baroness) was picked up by the Norwegian fisherman Nuggerud for the trip to San Cristobal Island where Lorenz could take schooner passage to the mainland; that Lorenz was taking with him some letters Mrs. Wittmer wanted posted and some of her baby's clothes as size samples for the purchase of more on the mainland. Nuggerud's fishing boat, the Dinamita, was wrecked and he and Lorenz managed to make the shores of waterless Marchena Island where they died of thirst.
All this should have been investigated last week by the Ecuadorean Government, but Galapagos seemed too far away. Meanwhile yet another Galapagos expedition prepared to sail last week from Los Angeles. Its chief was Dr. Waldo Schmitt, curator of marine invertebrates at the Smithsonian Institution. Tiny crabs, polyps and miniscule sponges are Dr. Schmitt's specialty but he bravely promised to do his best as detective as well.