It is simply one of the hundred unsolvable mysteries and puzzles of the subtropic region.
In his jiu-jutsu instructions Brice had learned a rule which he had carried into good effect in other walks of life.
Namely to seem to play one's opponent's game and to be fooled by it, and then, taking the conquering adversary by surprise, to strike.

Thus he had fallen in with Standish's suggestion that he come to the island, though he had thought himself fairly sure as to the reason for the request.

Thus, too, he had let himself be lured into this storeroom, still smugly confident that he held the whip hand of the situation.
And as a result he was looking into the ghastly eyes of death.
Like an engine that "races," his fertile brain was unduly active in this moment of stark horror, and it ran uselessly.
Into his over-excited mind flashed pictures of a thousand bits of the past--one of them, by reason of recent association far more vivid than the rest.
He saw himself with four other A.E.F.officers, standing in a dim corner of a high-ceiled old room in a ruined chateau in Flanders.

In the room's center was a table.

Around this were grouped a double line of uniformed Americans--a court-martial.