Hell's Hatches

"He wouldn't mention the other alternative—whisky—even then, and I simply didn't have the nerve to take advantage of the opening and suggest it to him outright. But I did what I thought was the best thing under the circumstances—waited for a stretch of open sailing, gave the wheel to a nigger, fished up a convenient bottle of whisky, and set it down just behind him against the cockpit rail. I didn't speak even then—just pressed his shoulder, tilted the neck of the bottle against his hand where it clutched the rail, and went back to the wheel.

"I had the feeling (and I still have) that I was doing the decent and humane thing, just as I did when I put old Recoil out of his misery; though the cases aren't quite parallel of course. But I knew it would force a crisis one way or the other, and that was what, in all sincerity, I thought was the kindest thing to do. If Bell drank (though it well might be that he would go on drinking until he fell in a stupor), it would surely save his life. What if he did get dead drunk? He wouldn't be any more useless in navigating the schooner than he was already. On the other hand, if he still refused to drink, the heightened temptation of the handy bottle would increase the tension and hasten the collapse of mind and body, which was now but a matter of a few hours at the outside. I think you'll agree with me, Whitney, that I did the kindest thing possible under the circumstances."

"I wouldn't venture an opinion on that offhand," I temporized; "but, in any event, it's the thing I would undoubtedly have done myself had I been in your place. There's no question in my mind on that point at least."

"I'm glad to hear you say that," he said warmly; "especially as there was one person—a rather important person to me—who didn't approve of my action.

"Bell's only acknowledgment of what I had done," Allen went on, "was a sort of disjointed muttering. 'Many thanks, ol' man. Nothin' doin'. Good intentions. Soba skippa to the fareyewell!' (I think that was the word). He shoved the bottle along out of easy reach, but didn't even make a bluff at throwing it over the side. I have an idea that the reason for his restraint on that score was due to the fact that he remembered I had told him that the supply was running low (I had been putting an awful crimp in it), and didn't want to deprive me of it. He was quite considerate enough to think of that sort of a thing, even with his senses toppling, as they must have been from the beginning of the watch.

"It was a moonless night, and heavily overcast, so that I could just make out the blur of Bell's head and shoulders against the deckhouse where he sat hunched up on the port rail of the cockpit. But there was a crack opening up in the beastly binnacle, and through it an inch-wide welt of light slashed diagonally across his tortured face. One eye, the side of his nose and half of his mouth were sharply lighted up. The rest was a shadowy blank. The vivid gash of light, like a magnet, kept drawing my gaze away from the compass. That one eye, wide and staring, never blinked in the bright beam. The nostril, distending and contracting jerkily, was red, like that of a horse that has been galloped to the point of death. The teeth looked to be clenched through the lower lip, and blood was trickling over the lighted streak of clean-shaven chin. Not all his sufferings had made him miss his morning shave. Almost like a rite with him, that was."

"Holdover from his Naval life," I suggested hastily, fearful less he should be tempted to digress upon irrelevant details.

"I don't know just when it was that the end came," Allen resumed. "I was expecting every moment that he would jump up and begin his restless pacings, as he had done on previous nights. But at six bells his position was still unchanged, and to blot out that beastly slash of light across his drawn face I threw a piece of canvas over the top and back of the binnacle, so that the beam from the crack was cut off. Just as the morning watch was called a nasty bit of a squall was threatening to bore in and give us a raking, though it finally passed astern of us and spun off down to leeward. My hands were full for some minutes preparing against the imminent onslaught, and it was not until the menace was past and I had taken over the wheel from Ranga (who had relieved me when I went for'ard to have a squint ahead for myself), that it struck me that Bell had been paying no attention whatever to all that had been going on—didn't appear to have shifted at all, in fact.

"I was just going to call to him to suggest that he go below and turn in for a spell, when the nigger on the lookout in the bows sung out 'breaka—dead ahead!' It was a near thing, but I managed to sheer off and avoid grounding on a patch of barely submerged coral, just becoming visible in the shimmer of the false dawn. As I knew that the main wall of the Great Barrier must be close at hand to lee, I was chary of letting her fall off very far in that direction. I had just ordered a man to stand-by to heave the lead at the first sign of shoaling water on the starboard bow, when the tail of my eye caught a glimpse of Rona stepping out on deck from the cabin companion way. (We had sulphured out the Agent's cabin and made it fairly comfortable for her use. It was out of the question her sleeping on deck, on account of the incessant squalls.) She headed straight for Bell, who was still hunched up on the weather rail of the cockpit, the outlines of his face just beginning to show in the ashy light of early morning.

"As her hand touched his shoulder she let out a shrill squeal and plumped down on her knees beside him. In doing this she must have bumped the whisky bottle, which had been rolling back and forth on the deck with the lurches of the schooner. It was with more of a hiss than a scream that she grabbed it up and flung it straight for my head. Oh, I should hardly say straight," Allen corrected himself, "for Rona evidently can't throw any better than the run of her white sisters. The bottle smashed against the wheel, deluged the cockpit with broken glass and one of my last half-dozen quarts of whisky. If I had not been pretty sure that Bell was already dead, the fact that the smell of the old familiar juice welling up from the deck didn't bring a twitch to his nostrils would have been enough to drive it home to me.

"Without waiting to observe the effects of her throw, Rona launched herself right on after the bottle—only a shade better aimed. Unluckily, the cross-cut she took to my throat carried her right over the wheel—and at the very instant that the appearance of a second line of foam down to leeward confirmed my fears about our desperately scant working room. The instinctive lifting of my right arm to block the girl's grab at my face came near to bringing disaster. I fended the clutch from my throat all right, but the weight of her body falling across the wheel tore the spoke from my left hand and threw the schooner up into the wind.

"Ranga's quick presence of mind was all that saved the situation. Jumping into the cockpit regardless of the broken glass cutting his bare feet, he grabbed the girl about the waist, disentangled her flying arms and legs from the wheel, and smothered her struggles against his side. I threw the wheel back an instant before she jibed, and then, for two or three seconds, things hung in the balance. Finally, very slowly, she filled away on the port tack again, and the immediate danger was over. Had the schooner gone about, nothing could have saved her from running onto the reef. There was not enough room left in which to wear her round.

"Bell must have given up the fight along toward the end of the 'graveyard' watch. I heard him muttering off and on for a while, but the last coherent words that came to my ears were, not unfitly: 'Nothin' doin'. Soba skippa to a fareyewell.'

"That rub with the reef was the nearest squeak we had—though I can't say that I remember much about the navigation that took us through the Barrier and on to Townsville. Drunken man's luck doubtless. I was sure drunk, and no mistake, though both my legs and my head were grinding right along to the finish—only ceased functioning when there was nothing more to do.

"The girl—when Ranga let her go again—went back and settled down by Bell's body. Wouldn't let anyone come near it. Only left it on the two or three further occasions that she took to fly at my throat when she thought I wasn't looking. I didn't want to lock her up (it was inviting the plague to force her to stay 'tween decks for too long), but managed to get around the difficulty finally by having one of the crew stand-by to push in and absorb the impact whenever she made a break in my direction. She gave up trying after that. Seemed to loathe the touch of a nigger. But with Ranga it was different. She grew quiet as soon as he picked her up—something like a kid with its nurse.

"The big fellow was wonderful, by the way. Always doing the right thing without waiting for an order, always cool and quiet, always good-natured. Spent his spare time sitting on the taffrail and peeping to the sea-gulls on a queer little Malay flute he always carried in his belt—some kind of hollow stem, full of little wooden balls that gave a weird sort of ripple to the notes. First and last, Ranga was the man to whom the bulk of the credit was due for taking the schooner through. I still feel a bit guilty that I didn't divide the whisky with him. But perhaps it was best to stow it where I did.... You never know how a yellow man or a black man will react to the stuff. It's hard enough guessing with a white man sometimes."

Allen smiled whimsically as he lighted a fresh cheroot. He was through with the worst of the story and seemed a good deal relieved. It was plain enough that he spoke the truth when he said that the memory of it was still a nightmare, and that he hated to have to speak of it. He said a few words more in explanation of why he had not buried Bell at sea, which appeared to have been mainly because he was afraid the girl would have followed the body over the side. He had no misgivings about keeping it aboard, he said, as he was quite certain that it carried no plague infection. He mentioned incidentally, that they had found a lot of stick brimstone among the stores, and that the thorough smudging they gave the after quarters with this was probably responsible for the fact that the plague had not reappeared there. It had been impossible to devise a way to disinfect the big 'midships hold where the labour recruits were housed, on account of the more or less crazy condition of all of the niggers.

Allen looked at his watch, but went on with his story as though in no particular hurry. "You're doubtless impatient to hear about the girl's turning up again," he said. "You've already heard of the rather remarkable escape she made from the Quarantine Station—Butler, one of the doctors, mentioned that he told you about it on your steamer. At the Station it was the theory that the girl had broken out so that she could kill herself on Bell's grave—that she was more or less off her head anyhow. That was a mistake, though a natural one. She had just one thing in view when she clambered out of the mad cell and over the wall: that was to lie low until I came out and then, watching her chance, try to make a better job of polishing me off than she had done on the schooner. She realized that they were on their guard against her at the Station, and that she might be kept under restraint indefinitely, or at least until I was out and gone beyond her reach.

"Her mind was working well enough to make her reckon that that Chinese shawl (which everyone would have noted) was the one garment she had that could not fail to be recognized. So—it must have been something of a wrench for her—she left it on the bank of Ross Creek and went to seek a hiding place.

"Luck was with her in the search. Locating the native quarter after wandering for a while, she circulated around until she came upon the signs—in Hindustani, I fancy—in front of the shack of an old East Indian drug seller and money changer. How she got around him I don't know; but at any rate she persuaded him to keep her there until I was out of quarantine. She even contrived to get the old rascal to spy out the refuge I had flown to—a bungalow just out of town, where I figured I would be a bit quieter than at the hotel. Then she took a hand in the game herself.

"It was on the second night after I came out, and I had turned in early. I had taken no precautions of any kind against attack. Never have bothered much with that kind of thing. The doors and windows were wide open. I had a servant—a Chino,—but he was sleeping in his own hut in the rear of the grounds.

"It was the window she came in by, though she could just as well have used the door. I was more than half awake (hadn't been sleeping very well any of the time since my two-day snooze after landing from the schooner), lying on my back under the mosquito net, with no covers over me. It was probably her intention to slip up quietly and get her hands under the net before disturbing me. She had no knife, by the way. They had taken that little Malay dagger away after she had tried to stick me at the Quarantine Station. As she would have had no difficulty in raising another through old Ratu Lal had she wanted it, I take it that she felt confident enough of doing the job with her hands. No idle dream that, either; you know something of the strength of them.

"I sat up in bed in a dazed sort of way as her shadow darkened the window. (There was a bit of a moon, shining on that side of the house.) It must have been my movement under the netting that made her change her plan. Very naturally, she counted on my shooting first and asking questions afterwards. It was the rational and proper thing to do, and it is probably what I would have done had my pistol been handy. But, not dreaming of an attack (this was the day before old 'Squid' Saunders turned up and took a jab at me), my gun was in my coat pocket. I have always carried it there—when I had a coat on—ever since I saw your little exhibition of pocket gunnery at Kai," he added with a humorous smile.

"As I was saying, the stir I made under the mosquito net forced the girl to speed up her schedule a bit. You saw the jump she made the time she caught up the schooner at Kai. Well, it must have been about that same kind of a spring over again. She never touched the floor between the low window ledge and my bed. Landed right on my chest, bringing down the net under her weight, and went to my throat with an instinct as sure as that of a fighting bulldog. She was choking me right through the net before I really knew what had happened.

"Of course, taking it for granted that she was dead, I didn't have the ghost of an idea it was Rona who was sprawling on my chest and shutting off my wind with steel fingers that seemed closing in to meet at the base of my brain. I didn't even know that it was a woman. In fact, the deadly pressure of that grip argued all the other way—that I was being throttled by a man, and a deucedly powerful one at that. If I did any speculating at all, I probably figured it as some kind of a thieving stunt. But a man fighting for his life—and that is precisely what I was doing—doesn't waste much time in conjecture. My immediate problem was a simple one. If that grip wasn't broken inside of a minute, it might stay there forever as far as my shaking it off was concerned. I had been choked before, and also done a bit of choking on my own account; so I knew to within a few seconds how long it is before the head of a man whose wind is shut off begins to reel.

"Still quite the master of myself, I tried on, very deliberately, the best thing I knew for breaking a strangle grip—that simple little jujutsu trick of thrusting your arms between those of the man choking you, and then throwing back your shoulders and expanding your chest. Stiffening the chest muscles, I mean—of course you can't expand it with air while your windpipe is closed. That never fails if you are both on your feet, and will sometimes work even when you are on your back. Here the tangle of the net blocked the up-thrust of my arms, and I failed to get enough leverage to break the hold on my neck.

"Then I tried my next best bet—that of turning over and over and sort of unwinding the grip on your throat. I was a shade less confident now. Time was getting short. I did some jolly active wriggling in trying to work along far enough to roll over the side of the bed, but again it was the net that defeated my effort. I was getting a good deal peeved with that bally canopy; and yet, in the end, it was the very thing that got me clear.

"Nine times out of ten a man being held down and choked by another man—that is, if the choker knows his job—has no chance of doubling up in a ball and kicking his assailant off by straightening out his legs. If the man choking you flattens his body closely enough against yours, you simply haven't the room to start doubling your knees. My assailant knew his business right enough, but the folds of the net (some of the corners of which were still clinging to its frame), prevented his flattening in close to my legs. The sag of the woven bamboo bed springs also gave me a few inches of leeway.

"There was nothing deliberate or confident in the jerk with which I began drawing my knees up against my chest. I had already failed twice with what I rated as decidedly better bets than that one, and the time limit was nearly up. My head was already beginning to swim. It was neck or nothing this heat. The sheer desperation of my effort won out for it. The push of my knees against the chest of the incubus did not lift it quite enough to break its hold, but it did enable me to squirm my right foot up and get it firmly planted in the pit of the creature's stomach. Then, with all the strength left in me, I straightened out in a terrific kicking push.

"In reverse, the flight of the muscular body that had been holding me down must have been fully equal to that opening jump from the window. Indeed, I am almost sure that it hit the further wall before it did the floor. The hold on my neck was the only point of contact that did not break readily, and there the result was—as you saw a moment ago. As those steel-claw fingers would not give an inch, they simply ripped out through the flesh. I can consider myself dead lucky that they didn't hook onto my windpipe or jugular. Both of them would have come right along with all the flesh and hide those unrelaxing talons took with them.

"It didn't occur to me for a few moments that I might have knocked out my assailant, and I was a good deal surprised when he neither returned to the attack nor made any break to escape. The laboured gasping in the darkness on the other side of the room quickly told me the reason, however. I had knocked the wind out of him with my mighty kick. I knew that spasmodic gasping for air meant that I wasn't going to be greatly troubled for a minute or two at least, so took my time about fumbling for my automatic and lighting the lamp.

"A bit dazzled by the light for a moment, I took the lanky yellow figure huddled up against the wall to be a Hindu coolie. The thin legs and arms were like those of the East Indian indentured labourers of the sugar plantations, and the two or three yards of white cloth trailing off along the floor suggested a Madrassi waist and shoulder rag. Presently—for that one rumpled wrapping was all she had worn—I saw that it was a woman; and then—but as a matter of fact I think that the girl spoke before I recognized her face.

"'"Slant,"' she piped out in that bird-like chirrup of hers; '"Slant," I guess I make a meestake. 'Scuse me, ple-ese, "Slant."'

"Could you beat that for cheek? Trying to tear a man's throat out one minute, and asking him to 'ple-ese 'scuse' her for it the next. And what do you think of a man who would tumble for it, especially after the way she had made me jump through and roll over at Kai? But that's Rona; yes, and that's me. I tumbled, and—I may as well admit it—I am still tumbling.

"Having the girl turn up like that—after I had been thinking of her as dead for a week or two—didn't give me quite the shock it would have if that voice had come out of the darkness without my seeing her first. It was a deuce of a surprise even as it was; but, when all is said and done, a pleasant one, in spite of the rather startling way she chose to—to re-materialize. I was glad to find that she was alive, whether it meant anything more to me than that or not.

"We didn't talk much that night—there wasn't much talk left in either of us as a matter of fact. Rona continued to croak and hiccup, while my own swollen vocal chords smothered every other word I tried to get past them. I managed to assure Rona that I quite understood her feelings against me (though I didn't entirely, and don't yet), and begged her to give me a chance to explain the way Bell had come to his finish. She admitted that she had begun to believe that she might have been hasty in her decision and action, and said she would be glad to hear what I had to say. She told me where she was in hiding and asked me to come there in the morning; also to do what I could to square her with the quarantine authorities for breaking out of the Station ahead of time, and on no account to let anything happen to old Ratu Lal for giving her refuge. She seemed to take it as a matter of course that I would do these things. You'd have thought I was some sort of a mayordomo taking orders.

"It was not very late and, luckily, the bungalow (which Ralston had occupied himself at times) had a telephone. I ordered a closed carriage sent out, and also got the Quarantine Station and arranged for one of the doctors—Butler, the chap you talked with on the steamer—to come to the landing and wait for me to pick him up. They had been very decent to me at the Station, and I wanted to avoid having to explain things to a strange doctor.

"Rona tied my neck up for me—very handily, too—and when the carriage came I bundled her in and gave the driver the direction which carried him along the edge of the 'foreign quarter.' I dropped her at a corner not far from Ratu Lal's joint, promising to look in on her early the next morning. Butler was waiting for me at the landing when I got there, and I told him about Rona's coming to life, and its sequel, as we drove back to the bungalow. After he had dressed my neck I told him what I wanted him to try to do for me and sent him back to the landing, where his boat had hung on for him.

"Rona was looking a bit white about the gills when I called the next morning, and complained that her stomach 'got mad' every time she sent food down to it. I told her that she still had the best of me, as I didn't expect to be able to get any food down to my stomach for a couple of days yet. That seemed rather to buck her up, and she had a good laugh over it. Then we got down to business, and had an hour's yarn in the drug-scented quiet of old Ratu Lal's back room.

"As my Malay is fairly good, we talked without difficulty. I told her more or less what I have just told you about Bell and why I had given him the whisky. She said, rather grudgingly, that she thought she could understand why I had done as I did. Then I said a few things about—well, about my personal feelings toward her. Finally, I asked her point-blank if she would go back to the Islands with me. Told her she could live anywhere she wanted, and in any way that she wanted. I didn't say that I was willing to marry her, because (since, if she has any religion at all, it's Hindu or Mohammedan) I felt that would make no difference to her one way or the other.

"Am I really willing to marry her?" (It was the lift of my eyebrows that suggested the query to Allen, for I did not speak.) "Well, yes, I think I am, if she made that a condition. But I don't think the question is one likely to arise.

"The girl took in the whole thing without giving away by word or look how it impressed her. When I had finished, she coolly suggested that I run along and square matters up with the quarantine people about her and Ratu Lal. She added that she would be obliged if I'd look up her Chinese shawl for her. She also started to speak about her dagger, but changed her mind and said to let that go for the present. As for what I'd been telling her.... Well, perhaps if I could see my way to dropping in again toward evening she might have an answer for me. High and haughty as a Sultana, she was, sitting cross-legged on a mat and pulling away at one of Ratu Lal's big 'hubble-bubbles.'

"I went to the Quarantine Station straightaway, and, in spite of the red tape tangling up a thing of that kind, managed to get them to agree to discharging the girl without anything more than a perfunctory call from a doctor to certify her free of plague. That done, the rest was easy. I told the story—omitting, of course, the girl's attack upon me—at the Police Station, and they agreed not to arrest Ratu Lal as long as the quarantine authorities were satisfied and lodged no complaint against him. They said they were only too glad of a chance to do me a favour. Then I got them to let me have the shawl, and begged them to keep the news of the girl's turning up quiet as long as they could.

"'Squid' Saunders's little diversion that afternoon gave the pressmen something else to take up their minds, and the matter of the missing girl was forgotten, at least for the remainder of my time in Townsville. The fact that she did not drown herself must have leaked out since, but they probably haven't been enough interested in it—now that the hunt has followed me here—to wire it south.

"When I broke away from the official reception committee and dropped in on Rona at the end of the afternoon—impatient enough, I can tell you—she gave no sign that the matter I had come for an answer about was in her mind at all. She grabbed the Chinese shawl out of my hand with a yelp of delight, but almost dissolved in tears when she saw how the embroidery had been smudged and ruffled in her scrambles over trees and walls and ditches the night she escaped from the Quarantine Station. You may remember that it was a big peacock that was embroidered on the shawl—pretty nearly life-size—rather a fine piece of work, it always struck me. Well, ignoring me entirely, she spread that old peacock out over her breast—something in the way she used to display it when she wore the shawl in Kai—and began chirping and crooning and muttering to it like a dove to its nestlings. She would nuzzle into the plumage, smoothing the ruffled feathers with her lips, just like she was the old peacock preening himself. Every little bit of torn floss she would try to put back where it came from.

"Stiff with funk, I sat quiet until she had gone all over the moulting old bird, but when she started in working down from his crest again, I thought it was time to remind her of my presence. I had never sat around waiting on anybody like that before, Whitney; even my old nurse couldn't make me do it. So I cut in and told her that I had arranged things at the Quarantine Station—that she wouldn't need to go there again; also that old Ratu Lal need not worry any longer about a visit from the Police. Incidentally, I mentioned that I was making him a present of ten pounds to show my appreciation of his consideration in not claiming the reward offered for her.

"She took no notice of anything I said. Just went on crooning and preening and stroking down the ruffled feathers, giving a little sob every now and then as she came to a place where they were badly mussed up. Then I went off on another tack, saying that I knew of a shop in the town that carried Chinese embroideries, and suggesting it was possible a skilled needle-worker might be found there competent to undertake the restoration of the bird's damaged plumage. She deigned to cock up an ear to listen to that, but her only reply was a disconsolate shake of the head, as though anything like proper restoration was a matter beyond all hope.

"That quieted me for a while, but after twirling my thumbs through ten or fifteen minutes more nuzzling and crooning, my patience gave out. I jumped up to the accompaniment of a good lively string of oaths, and asked her point-blank if she had made up her mind about the matter we had been speaking of in the morning. She broke into a ripple of smiles at that, and cooed sweetly: 'Ye-es, I think 'bout that plenty, "Slant."' Then she slipped into voluble Malay and laid down a perfectly simple and direct proposal, on the fulfilment of the conditions of which she was willing to return to the Islands with me. It was not what I had expected,—not what anyone would have dreamed of expecting under the circumstances; yet ridiculously easy of fulfilment in the event a certain third party fell in with the idea. That third party is you, Whitney. That's the main thing I have come to see you about. Everything is up to you now. Perhaps that will make it easier for you to understand why I rattled on for an hour or more in the hope of putting myself right with you about Bell. I've never tried to justify myself with any living man before, and probably will never do it again. But it had to be done this time, Whitney, and I hope I've been successful."

My nod might have meant almost anything, but I was not unwilling that Allen should interpret it in his favour. As a matter of fact, he had convinced me wholly that—after the abortive attempt at drugging in Kai—he had played straight with Bell. As for Rona—well, if he was also ready to play straight with her (and he had just about convinced me on that point, too), what was it to me? If she could forget Bell so easily, it was her own affair. If Allen were trying to carry her off against her will—that would be a different matter of course. But he was not. Plainly it was the girl herself who held the whip hand. The whole thing was a bit obscure yet, but what Allen had still to say might do something to clear it up. Without committing myself by more than that one nod, I waited for him to go on.

CHAPTER XII
A BAD MAN'S PLEA

The expression of nervous anxiety I had noticed several times since he came was on Allen's face again as he started to speak. "It's a queer enough proposition," he began. "You see, it's like ..." He hesitated, stopped, got up and walked to the window, where he stood for a few moments, frowning and biting the end of his cheroot. Suddenly he turned to me with: "Whitney, what do you say to a bit of a turn in the fresh air? I've been talking more than I'm used to, and this stuffy room of yours is getting on my nerves. We might walk out through the gardens to the Domain. I can tell you all that I have to tell out there."

I did not need to look at my watch to know that it was getting on toward five o'clock. Only the absorbing interest of Allen's narrative had prevented my becoming conscious of that fact before. My own nerves were less under control now, and the inevitable end-of-the-afternoon restlessness was surging strong upon me. But I was anxious to hear Allen out, and no reason occurred to me why it should not be in the open air. If there was any decision to be arrived at, that could be made on the morrow, or whenever I felt up to it.

"Right-o, Allen," I cried; "I'll be glad to get out myself. I shall want to be back in about half an hour though."

I was grateful for his restraint in not greeting that last with an indulgent smile, for I knew that he fully understood what it was that focussed my interest upon five o'clock. It was very evident that the man had retained all the finer instincts of a gentleman, little opportunity that he had had to exercise them in the last five years.

I got my hat and stick, and, feeling sure I would have no use for them, put both the revolver and the automatic pistol into the drawer of the table upon which they had been lying. I was rather glad of the chance to show Allen that I had confidence in him to that extent anyhow.

Anxious to avoid recognition, Allen pulled on a pair of dark spectacles and drew the brim of his Panama low down over his forehead. Turning out of crowded Pitt Street, he removed the spectacles, and as we passed the entrance of the Botanical Gardens took off his hat and fanned his brow with it as he walked. He had not spoken so far, but with the deep breath he inhaled as he felt the springy turf underfoot his restraint passed from him.

"It's a great relief to get clear of those damn walls and pavements," he said fervently, opening his coat to let the cool breath from the Bay strike his chest. "I can't get used to them again. I've been free of them too long now. But I'm finished with them for good, I hope." Then, as we came out upon a broad path: "Bear away to the left, if you don't mind. I want to take a squint at that bunch of palms as we pass."

As we came abreast of a big bed packed with a riot of dense tropical growths, he pulled up and appeared to be searching for something. "Ah, there she is!" he ejaculated presently, and pushed in close to a queer little dwarf palm, which straggled drunkenly on a half-dozen spindling legs set something like those of a camera tripod. Pulling up the stamped metal marker, he gave it a quick glance and then handed it to me with a grin. "The fruits of my first and only dip into botanical research," he remarked. "What do you think of it?"

"Pandanus Bensoni Allensis," I read in large letters, and below: "Habitat: Portuguese Timor. Very rare. The only other catalogued specimen is in the Royal Dutch Gardens at Buitenzorg, Java."

"So that Allensis stands for you, does it?" I said, not a little impressed, as I handed him back the metal disc. Then added: "And racing and polo cups weren't the only objects you collected."

"The merest accident," he replied. "I had always liked plants and flowers, ever since my nurse used to wheel me down this very walk in my pram. I suppose that gave me an interest in the tropical growths of the Islands, after they packed me off there. I thought this little fellow looked a bit on the unusual when I chanced upon it one morning in a low valley back of Deli; so I dug it up and shipped it to Sydney direct on the China Line steamer, which touches in there. It turned out to be a real find. Benson of Kew Gardens, the great authority on tropical palms, described it, and tacked my name on as the discoverer. The old cove's letter contained the only kind words addressed to me from the outside world in the last five years. And now look at them ..."

I had come to expect that note of bitterness in Allen's voice every time he spoke of the past, and especially of his "transportation" to the Islands. He evidently thought that he had been badly treated; too badly for even the present wave of frantic adulation to make atonement. He was through with it for good. Several little things he had let drop indicated that.

The incident of the palm was interesting in throwing an illuminative crosslight on the gentler human side of a man who had generally been rated as without either gentleness or humanity. So, also, was the very evident appeal to Allen's sense of natural beauty made by the matchless panorama of the Bay as it unfolded to us from the far end of the point.

We had skirted the Naval anchorage of Farm Cove, picked our way along the path below the ledges where benighted "sundowners" were wont to boil their "billys" and spread their "blueys" in the shallow wave-worn caves, and climbed up through the gums to the rocky lookout on the outermost tip of the sharply-jutting point. The clocks in the town behind us began chiming the quarters heralding the hour of five, and presently, on the first of the heavier strokes, the flotilla of trans-bay ferry-boats slid from their slips at the inner curve of the horseshoe of the Circular Quay and "fanned" out on their divergent courses to points on the opposite side of Port Jackson.

"That sight has never failed to quicken my pulses from the time I used to wait and watch for it as a kid down to today," Allen said with almost a thrill in his voice. "It is the one picture that has remained clearest in my mind all these years I've been—shut out from it. Did you ever read Henry Lawson's lines to 'Sydney-Side,' written from somewhere in the West, I believe? Something like this they go:

"A sentimentalist, too," I muttered to myself, the surprise of that revelation checking for a few moments the rising tide of my absinthe-hunger.

Allen led the way back to where a flat ledge of rock made a rough natural seat. "'Lady Macquarie's Chair,'" he explained, motioning me to sit down. "Named from the wife of a former Governor who was supposed to slip away out here and enjoy the view. The Domain runs right back behind the Government House, you know. I always used to mooch along out here for a look-see every time I got a chance, partly for the fine prospect of the Bay and partly for the comprehensive visualization it permitted of what I might call 'The Rise and Fall of the House of Allen.'

"Haven't you an expression in the States to the effect that it's 'three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves'? Well, here in Australia we put the same natural law of evolution in the form of a conundrum and answer. It goes: 'How long does it take for an arrow to become a boomerang?' The answer varies, but for the 'House of Allen' it is: 'Four generations.'

"The arrow, you understand, is the 'Broad Arrow' that marked the transported convicts, while the boomerang merely suggests something that rises, circles and returns to the point of departure. Well, from this place where we sit I can trace the full circle of the 'arrow-cum boomerang-cum arrow' of the Allen quiver. Look! I'll show you. Follow me closely.

"Over there," he said, pointing seaward and easterly, "are the Heads, in through which sailed the brig bearing Jim (alias 'Crab') Allen, convict, with a few hundred more of the scum of London, to the shores of Australia. That is, I've always liked to fancy my distinguished progenitor sailed in through the Heads, though it's quite possible that the brig beat around into Botany Bay direct. Now" (he pointed westerly to where the Paramatta wound out of sight between green hills) "at the end of that deep cove over there is the slaughter house where the convict's son, James Allen, dealt in hides and hoofs and horns and laid the foundation of the family fortune, the fortune that wasn't seriously dented when the convict's grandson gave a hundred thousand pounds to a drought-relief fund and drew down a Baronetcy. That big red-brick pile among the trees on Darling Point" (Allen was pointing east again) "is the mansion of the late Sir James Allen, Bart., and now owned by his eldest son, the New South Wales Agent in London. Old Sir James' second son, Hartley, was born in the south wing of that unsightly heap of red bricks.

"And here" (this time he turned and pointed south where a sharp dagger-blade of inlet plunged deep into the heart of Sydney's lowest slums) "is Wooloomooloo, where young Hartley Allen, descending from the soft refinements of Darling Point, found his level, organized his own 'push' of rock-throwing, head-smashing larrikins and completed the social circle. The cycle of metamorphosis had begun its round. I was the throwback, Whitney. Old 'Crab' Allen, the transported convict of Houndsditch, lived again in young Hartley Allen, whom most people thought of as a racing man and polo player, but who had all the natural qualifications of an out-and-out crook.

"I can trace all of my little moral obliquities, Whitney, back to old 'Crab,' and, everything considered, I think he would rate me as rather a credit to his name, whatever contempt he might have had for my comparatively law-abiding father and grandfather, to say nothing of my pillar-of-the-state elder brother. 'Crab' was transported as a consequence of his persistent disregard of his fellow townsmen's rights to their lives, wives and silver plate. I—well, I never did care much for silver plate."

All this would have been intensely interesting to me an hour earlier, but now the fervour of my longing for my "solitude à trois" (as I was wont to call my séance with the long green bottle and the glass of cracked ice) was getting beyond control. The flowing lines of the reaches of cove and inlet glowing in the slanting light of the declining sun were becoming jerky and jagged and intershot with dazzling little spurts of light like one thinks he sees after receiving a crack on the head. The evening breeze lapped clammily about my chest and I fumbled clumsily with the buttons of my coat, trying to shut out the chill.

"I ought to have been back at the hotel before this," I mumbled, getting to my feet. "You had something more to tell me, hadn't you? You can do it as we walk back. I've got to be going now."

By this time I wasn't in a state to observe things very carefully. Undoubtedly (as I've thought it over since) Allen had been stalling to gain time and screw his nerve up to advancing the plan he had in mind. This being so, it must have jarred him a bit to have me call the turn so suddenly. I don't remember whether his face showed consternation or not. The one thing I recall was the quick movement of his hand to that hump on his right hip.

I did not recoil an inch. I am sure of that, for I felt no apprehension. I was beyond apprehension—save over delay. But Allen's hand came back empty. "I'll tell you at once," he said brokenly. "But please sit down. Don't go just yet. We'll have to come to a decision straightaway." Then, seeing I was turning to go: "It's just this: Rona wants you to paint her picture—on the schooner—the Cora. Wants a picture done of the whole layout—ship, Bell, her, me, Ranga, niggers, everything. Says she'll pose for it on the schooner. Says I must pose too. Seems to be bitten with the idea of perpetuating the event for posterity, or something of the kind. Crazy scheme, but she's set her heart on it. Says when it's done, if she likes it, she may go back to the Islands with me. Nothing certain for me, but it's a chance and I've got to make the most of it. Will you do it, Whitney? She says you've always wanted to paint her picture, and now she's all for it. You won't turn it down, Whitney?"

The incongruity of "Slant" Allen in the rôle of a plaintive pleader struck me with scarcely less astonishment than his strange and unexpected request. I was, however, totally unfit to cogitate upon either just then.

"I'll think it over and let you know tomorrow," I said dully. "Got to go now."

"It has to be decided here and now, once and for all," Allen answered firmly. "Here!—" This time there was no hesitation in the movement of his hand to the hip-pocket hump. When it came back it was holding a fat stubby flask—one of the thermos type, just coming into general use at that time.

"I know what's calling you away, Whitney," he said steadily, unscrewing the top of the flask and pouring into it a bright green liquid with a familiar smell and sparkle. "On the off chance that we might be detained beyond the hour when you're used to depending upon it, I had this cooled at the Marble Bar—old hangout of mine—and brought it along with me. Don't use the stuff myself, but I know the hooks it throws into a man who does use it. Drink hearty!"

He handed me both the brimming screw-top and the flask itself. The contents of the former might have been drugged heavily enough to kill a horse for all I cared. It was absinthe beyond a doubt, and cold enough to frost the outside of the little nickled cup that held it. I gulped it down hungrily; replenished and repeated. The third cup I drank less greedily, letting my eyes rove slowly where the jerkily jagged zigzags of hill and headland and foreshore were smoothing into a softer fluency of contour. Sipping the fourth cup, I unbuttoned my coat to give more intimacy to the caress of the milk-warm evening breeze.

"Not bad stuff, Allen," I breathed at last. "Very good of you to think of it. What was it you wanted me to do just now?" Five minutes later I had promised to meet "Slant" Allen at the railway station in time to catch the nine-thirty train for Brisbane, en route Townsville.

It appeared that Rona's ultimatum had stipulated that Allen was to be back in Townsville with me, ready to begin arranging for the picture, inside of ten days. The only northbound boat, the Waga Tiri, which would arrive within the limit, had already left Sydney but could be overtaken at Brisbane by entraining at once. Allen had booked sleepers for the express and wired for cabins on the steamer before he called on me at the Australia. There was nothing left to do but throw together what things I wanted and get to the station.

It was rather a wrench, checking myself after getting all poised for flight with the "Green Lady," but not so hard as it would have been had I really "got off the ground." The contents of Allen's flask were hardly more than a strong bracer. Once I got back to the hotel and into my packing, it was easy going, especially as my enthusiasm was mounting for the work ahead. To have Rona for a model at last! And for such a picture!

The dramatic appeal of the thing grew on me with every passing minute. It was not, to be sure, quite the kind of a work I was best prepared to do. With my ambition to become a marine painter, I had gone in more for colour than for anatomy and drawing; but I was still confident that I could make good with anything that gripped my imagination strongly. And "The Saving of the Black-birder" (I had already given it a tentative name) fairly took me by the throat. I would not fail with it. Nay, more, I would triumph. Perhaps—why not?—Paris! Yes, "The Black-birder" should open a short-cut to my goal. The rails beneath the wheels of the speeding Brisbane Express were clicking black-bir-der—black-bir-der when I dropped off to sleep that night somewhere along toward the Queensland boundary.

That the morrow should bring some reaction from this fine frenzy was inevitable, but it was a comparatively slight one. That Allen had deliberately planned to draw me away and take advantage of my weakness for absinthe to gain my intervention in his favour was evident enough. Indeed, the consummate manner in which he turned the trick argued an almost pathological intimacy with the reaction of the insidiously subtle essence of wormwood upon the human brain. But I did not hold this heavily against him. It was plain that he had only done it to play safe in a matter respecting which he did not dare to take any unnecessary chances of failure. I could not but admit to myself that I would probably have fallen in with the plan ultimately in any event. There was no disloyalty to my friend in making him (as I intended to do) the central figure in a picture that I hoped would become famous in two hemispheres. On the contrary, what greater tribute was there I could pay to his memory? If Rona cared to flaunt that memory by going off to the Islands with Allen, it was her own kettle of fish. Besides, she had not gone yet; didn't even appear to have committed herself definitely in the matter.

To minimize explanations and the possibility of complications, Allen and I had agreed to defer wiring our Sydney friends of our departure until after we were aboard the Waga Tiri in Moreton Bay. His message to the Chairman of the Reception Committee, and mine to Benchley at my Exposition, went ashore on the tender that brought us off, and the steamer was under way before they could have been put upon the wires. It was not until the next northbound boat brought the Sydney papers to Townsville that we learned what a wave of surprise and speculation had been started by our joint hegira.

In the course of the voyage Allen told me some few further details of developments in Townsville. Before his departure he had managed to induce Rona, for her own comfort, to move her headquarters from Ratu Lal's joint to the Medical Mission of the London Bible Society. The head surgeon of the Mission he characterized as "a good old sport" he had knocked up against in the Straits and the Dutch Indies. He was just like an ordinary missionary to look at, but redeemed in "Slant's" eyes by a real love of horses, and even—very much on the quiet—a shrewd interest in racing. "It's in his blood. He can't help it," Allen explained laconically but comprehensively.

Explicit instructions had been left at the Mission that Rona was not to be worried about her spiritual future. She was to be just a "straight boarder" until Allen's return. She was well provided with money, as he had seen to having everything Bell had with him at the time of his death deposited to her account at a local bank. This had included eighty gold sovereigns, found in a money-belt around Bell's waist, and some hundreds of Chilean silver pesos he had brought off to the Cora in a canvas sack.

Ranga had been put up at the Sailors' Home. There had been a flat refusal to receive him at first, on account of his colour, but this was promptly withdrawn when it was found the request came from Allen, whom the town was going pretty strong on delighting to honour just at that juncture. Allen, who seemed very fond of the big fellow, also saw that the latter was comfortably provided with money.

Allen did not speak again of the proposed picture until the steamer was nosing up to her buoy in Cleveland Bay. Then, after inquiring if I had everything I needed to go ahead with, he intimated that he would probably find Rona fretting to get things under way. "She seemed to have some wild sort of an idea," he said, "that the whole thing would be done on the schooner—that we all might move out there, bag and baggage, and make it our head-quarters until the picture was completed. She even wanted me to go out to that plague-rotten wreck with her and look the ground over before I left. I had no time for it, of course, and am jolly glad I didn't. Can't see what the good of it would have been anyhow. I was hoping I had seen the last of the damned hulk, though I suppose I can stick it for an hour or two in a pinch. I fail to see what she's driving at, but whatever it is you may as well make up your mind that she will have her way about it."

I assured him that the picture would probably be mostly studio work as far as he was concerned, though I myself might want to sketch a few details on the schooner. It might save time, however, I suggested, if the whole lot of us went aboard before I began work so I could figure out a tentative grouping and get a general idea of the composition. Then I could make notes and sketches of whatever parts of the schooner would be included, and be ready to work on the individual figures as soon as I rigged up a studio.

CHAPTER XIII
THE SCENE OF THE FINAL DRAMA

We spent the night at the hotel and went together to call on Rona at the Mission the following morning. The change in the girl was startling, far too great to be accounted for by the baggy Mother Hubbard that had replaced the close-clinging sarongs and sulus in which I had grown accustomed to seeing her at Kai. Her face was thinner and the former peach-like bloom of her cheeks had given way to a dusky sallowness. The curve of her lips had flattened—and hardened; hard, too, was the fixed stare of her great sloe eyes. To a stranger the pucker of concentration between her eyebrows might almost have suggested sullenness. The lines about her eyes and mouth, which spoke to me of suffering, might have seemed to another as stamped there by hate. She was still beautiful, but in a new way. It was a wild, fluttered sort of loveliness that haunted rather than allured. The woman before me could never "sit Buddha," I told myself; those dreamy spells of repose had not punctuated her present life with intervals of Oriental peacefulness.

Decidedly reserved in her manner toward Allen, Rona tried to be warm in her greeting to me, but quickly showed signs of restraint and embarrassment. She became even more ill at ease when "Slant," after genial old Dr. Oakes invited him out to see a new saddle horse that had just arrived from Singapore, excused himself and left us alone. She sheered off so sharply from my first mention of the name of Bell, and became so palpably nervous at a couple of attempts I made to lead round to him by degrees, that I gave up trying to induce her to speak of him out of sheer pity. Even my inquiry after the health of "Peeky" of the embroidered shawl drew only a weary little smile and a sad shake of her riotous tumble of blue-black hair.

She was ready enough to talk about the picture, though even in that connection I was at once conscious of a lack of real enthusiasm on her part. She seemed anxious to get it started, however, and said she supposed we would be going to live on the schooner in a day or two. She even confessed to having worried a good deal for fear the Cora would be broken up by a storm before the picture was made. When I told her that we would not need to live on the schooner, and perhaps would not have to make more than one or two short visits to it, she appeared a good deal put out for a few moments. She scowled angrily and started to speak; then thought better of it, bit her lip and held her tongue. She appeared a bit mollified when I said we would make our first visit, to plan the picture, just as soon as the quarantine people would disinfect the schooner for us. (That this had not been done yet I had already learned through 'phoning to the Station the night before.) She observed impatiently that she thought disinfection was a needless precaution, and I had to explain that it was not a matter of precaution at all on our part; that it was against the law for anyone to board a ship that had carried plague until it was disinfected, and that if we tried it on the Cora the whole lot of us would probably be clapped in jail and quarantined afterwards.

She softened a little as I got up to go, and her "Next time I show you 'Peekie,' Whit-nee—'Peekie' is a ver-ee sick bird," sounded almost like old times. The hand she gave me was hot and dry but unshaking, and the almost cutting grip of it tense with nervous force. I noticed that her finger nails, though trimmed closer than of old and no longer stained, were still of unusual length.

I found Allen, his face flushed with enthusiasm, putting the doctor's new colt up and down the sward before the Mission chapel in sharp bursts of terrific speed. The animal, Oakes explained to me, had been given to him by a petty Rajah of the Federated Malay States as a token of his appreciation of the doctor's success in removing a troublesome appendix from a favourite dancing girl some months previously. It was a chunky bay gelding, only his small head, full neck and a certain trimness of hock bearing out Oakes' claim that he was out of a Mameluke imported direct from Bassorah by the Sultan of Johore. For the rest he favoured his Timor dam, and looked built for endurance and handiness rather than speed. The instant Allen was on his back, however, his sure instinct told him that the powerful little beast had swiftness as well as staying powers, and he was already itching to put his judgment to the test. A week later, having quietly entered him in the race of the day—the Planters' Handicap—at the Townsville midsummer meet, he rode the gelding himself and gave the local betting public the worst jolt in North Queensland track annals by winning at two-hundred-to-one. Every pound that the wily Allen cleaned up on the race went to build the good Doctor Oakes, shortly transferred to Fiji, the largest and best equipped Medical Mission in all of Polynesia. The full story of what the winning of that race meant to the game old missionary with the sporting blood has yet to be written.

My plan of visiting the Cora to make a preliminary study of the "Black-birder" met with an unexpected check. The quarantine people had readily consented to give the schooner a rough disinfection, one that would make it quite safe for us to board her as long as we kept clear of the holds, which would require more drastic treatment. Before the formaldehyde squad got away, however, several cases of smallpox were reported in the native quarter, and all the available disinfecting apparatus was called upon for use there. It would be at least a week or ten days, we were told, before an outfit would be free for the Cora.

Personally, I didn't mind the delay in the least; for one reason, because Rona's strange mood had quenched my initial surge of ardour for the picture, and, for another, because I had still to find a suitable place in which to work. Allen seemed to be worrying very little over the forced wait. "I've laid my bets to win or lose, and I'll be there to cash in after the finish," he said philosophically. He spent most of the time in the saddle, getting out mornings at daybreak to give the "Missionary Colt" (as he called the Oakes gelding) workouts on the quiet. As far as I could observe, he saw very little of Rona.

It was the girl who really chafed under the inaction of waiting. Two or three times she sent for me to urge that we disregard the quarantine regulations and go off to the schooner. Allen mentioned that she had also begged him to take her out for a look-see at the Cora on the quiet. How she spent her time I did not know. Oakes told me that she went out for long walks every day, sometimes going toward the hills and sometimes along the shore. I found freshly picked tiger-lilies on Bell's grave the day I visited it, and it occurred to me that the gathering of these might have furnished the motive for the solitary walks. But if she was still devoted to Bell's memory, why wouldn't she speak of him?—and why the plan to go off to the Islands with Allen? The girl's conduct was quite beyond my understanding. That was one thing I was sure of, at least.

Meanwhile I went ahead looking for a place I could turn into a studio. It had been Allen's idea that the suburban bungalow he occupied after coming out of quarantine would be suitable, but I was compelled to veto it on account of the poor light—a consequence of the dense tropical growth surrounding it. The same difficulty—light—ruled out a number of other attractive places that were offered me, and I was about to close with a rather squalid little shack near the beach as a last resort, when Allen got wind of a temporarily vacant house on a big sugar estate, some miles from town.

This little gem of a hillside bungalow had been built by the sugar people for a sub-overseer of the plantation, who had gone to Melbourne to meet and marry a girl from home. As the lucky chap had been given a three-months holiday for a honeymoon in New Zealand, the local manager of the sugar company decided that there could be no objection to my occupying the nest in the interim; in fact, he was sure his directors would be highly honoured to have their property used by so distinguished an artist, and for so laudable a purpose. He hoped I would not hesitate to call upon him for help at any time. He would see to it that the servants already hired against the return of Borton and his bride reported at once, and that Borton's trap and saddle horses were placed at my immediate disposal.

I was greatly pleased with my find for a number of reasons besides the fact that it had a large and well-lighted living-room that could be made all I could ask to work in. Not the least of these was its location. Several hundred feet above the sea, its wide verandas caught cool currents of the Trade wind that the sultry lower levels never knew. Infinitely refreshing, too—both in fact and in suggestion,—I found the splendid stream which circled close under the rear wall, forming, where a mossy ledge reared a natural dam, a deep, clear pool to which I could jump from my bedroom window. The revitalizing effect of an early morning plunge, I had found by long experience, was beyond comparison the best antidote against the insidious absinthe poisoning paralyzing body and brain at the end of the night.

A couple of hundred yards further down the stream took a swift run through a verdant tunnel of fern fronds and overhanging palm leaves, before it leaped in a fine compact spout of green and white over the verge of a creeper-clad cliff, to a lucent hyacinth-lined basin thirty feet below. From there, quieter of mood and mind after its hillside gambols, it meandered by pleasant reaches across a broad belt of shimmering sugar cane, beyond which it disappeared in tangled growth of primeval bush. By dark ways and devious, broadening and deepening in the lower levels, it finally lost itself in the mangrove swamp that fringed the sea fifteen miles to the northward.

I mention this stream particularly because of the part it was destined to play in the final act of the drama of the Cora Andrews. For a similar reason it may be in order to say a few words about the great flume, which took off from the stream at the pool below the waterfall and led down to the big central sugar mill on the shore of the first deeply indented bay north of Townsville. It was built, following the successful Hawaiian practice, for the purpose of floating the cut cane from the fields to the mill, a method which, wherever the natural conditions were suited to it, had proved both cheaper and more expeditious than the old system of transporting the succulent stalks by tramway and bullock carts.

The flume itself was built of imported Oregon pine planks, and was carried on a trestle of rough-hewn blue-gum and jarra trunks. In section, the box of the flume was about four feet wide by three feet deep. The water it carried—about a quarter of the normal flow of the stream that fed it—varied in depth according to its velocity. The latter, of course, depended upon the grade of the flume, this varying from two or three per cent. in the broad upper valley to all of fifteen per cent. in a couple of short steep pitches near the coast.

I was interested in this flume from the first time I saw it. In the course of a visit to Hawaii some years previously, I had found no end of sport in what was called "sugar-fluming"—riding from the mountainside plantations down to the mills seated on a water-propelled bundle of sugar-cane. On my inquiring of the local manager if the highly diverting stunt was practicable here, he had answered with a most emphatic negative. "You could go down the flume all right," he said, "but the volume of water is so great that you could not stop yourself by holding to the sides even where the grades are the slightest. On the sharp inclines, where the flume runs down to the mill, a team of bullocks couldn't hold you back. Only one man ever tried the feat deliberately, and we were picking fragments of him out of the bagasse for a month. Also spoiled a lot of sugar—everything from the juice in the vats to the unfinished article in the centrifugals had to be thrown away. Same thing has had to be done on the several occasions coolies have fallen into the flume while at work. Jolly costly accidents for the company. I hope that you're not contemplating...."

I hastened to assure him that, after what he had told me, I most certainly had ceased any contemplations I might have allowed myself to indulge in up to then. Still I couldn't help picturing in my mind what sport could be got out of the thing if only some sort of buffer were rigged up at the lower end. That prompted me, a day or two after I was settled in the bungalow and while time was still hanging on my hands, to put my horse down the bridle-path along the flume when I went out for a ride in the cool of the afternoon. After that I lost all interest in "sugar-fluming" as a sport. It was just conceivable that a man of great strength and agility might stop himself by gripping the sides of the flume at several points in the first five or six miles, but from where the sharp descent to the coast began I was inclined to agree with the manager's statement, that the drag of a man's body in the pull of the racing stream would take a team of bullocks off their feet.

I dismounted and leaned over the edge of the flume where it ran through a narrow cut in the rock at the brow of the great basaltic cliff that followed the curve of the beach of the bay. This was the upper end of the first of the two sharp drops and the water, which was running within a foot of the top of the flume a hundred yards above, and here flattened down to a scant six inches in the bottom, grey-green and solid like a great endless belt of flying steel. The butt of my riding-whip was all but jerked from my hand as I touched it lightly to the speeding water, and a curving fan of spray was projected up into my face and over the sides. The evidence of such a solidity of kick in running water seemed almost beyond belief, until I recalled having heard how a jet escaping from the pressure pipe of a hydro-electric plant somewhere in the American West had penetrated a man's body, cleanly, like an arrow.

My desire to ride the flume died then and there, though even yet I couldn't help regretting that there wasn't a level stretch above the jump-off, where a man could check his headway and crawl out. It would have been rattling good sport down to there, but beyond—sheer suicide. There was, it is true, a couple of hundred yards of perhaps five per cent. grade between the first steep pitch over the edge of the cliff, and a second one, even steeper, that seemed to run almost directly upon the roaring, churning mass of cane-crushing machinery that began at the upper end of the big mill. Even there the water was lightning-swift, however, so that a man, once over the edge of the first pitch, looked to be less than a thousand-to-one shot in bringing up before going on into the second. And that would have been—how was it the manager put it?—more "spoiled sugar"—another "jolly costly accident for the company."

The bridle-path I had been following continued on along the flume to the mill, but, desiring to strike the main highway to Townsville as quickly as possible, I put my sure-footed little Timor mare down what appeared to be an abandoned road graded into the face of the cliff. When I finally came out in the rear of what was plainly the remains of an ancient water-driven cane-crushing mill, I realized that the old grade by which I had descended must have been the bullock-cart road from the plantation. The mill was a picturesque old ruin, with its mossy water-wheel, crumbling roof and sprawling pier, and I made mental note of the lovely little cove as a place well worth returning to with paintbox and easel when opportunity offered.

Returning through the town, I had the good luck to be hailed from the sidewalk by my bluff old friend, Captain "Choppy" Tancred. He was southbound with the Utupua again, he said, but she was going to go to drydock immediately on arrival in Sydney and he was going to command the Mambare—a new steamer just turned out on the Clyde for the company—and start north the following day. It was hard luck missing his week at home with the wife and nippers at Manley, but his promotion to a ship on the Singapore run was some consolation. He would be back in Townsville again in a little over a week, and, as he had a lot of sugar to load for the Straits, hoped to have the time for a good yarn with me. It must have been more from habit than anything else (for the old boy should have read enough about me in the papers by this time to be convinced that I was not a fugitive from justice), that he repeated his injunction that I must not fail to let him know if there was ever anything he could do for me—"ye'll ken wha' I mean, lad." And, equally from habit, I assured him that I "kenned wha'," and would not fail to call upon him in my extremity.

As I had nothing but what I had brought with me on the steamer to move, and as the house was practically ready for occupancy, I was comfortably settled in my hillside bungalow at the end of the third day after our arrival from the south. A Chinese cook and house-boy, a Hindu groom, a couple of New Hebridean blacks as roustabouts, and Ranga as general factotum, gave me a very tidy and self-contained establishment. Ranga I had taken to at once. He was quick-minded and quick-handed, extremely good-natured, and ready to do anything at any time of the day or night. I resolved to keep him with me indefinitely as a personal servant—that is, if it fell in with his own inclinations after he had given me a fair trial.

I made a number of rather successful studies of Ranga by way of getting my hand in again, and that suggested that it might be profitable to put in the days of waiting by trying what could be done along the same lines with the others who were to figure in the picture. Allen, although busy with his secret training of the Oakes colt (all unknown even to the good missionary, by the way, who thought that "Slant" was merely borrowing the gelding for his morning ride), found time to come up and give me several sittings. It was easy to see that he hated the whole thing, and was only going through with it as a part of the bargain with Rona. The latter, after promising me faithfully to come, was reported missing on all of the three occasions I sent the trap for her. As her whim was at the bottom of the whole mad plan, I was not a little mystified at the girl's action. Also, as it was she whom I was most anxious to do full justice to in the picture, I was a good deal annoyed. Allen had no explanation or excuse to offer for her, saying the girl had him pocketed at every turn anyhow, but volunteered to try and round her up for me himself as soon as the Planters' Handicap was out of the way, and he had a bit more time on his hands. For all of his light way of speaking, I knew that he was as hard hit as ever, and had thrown himself into the training of the "Missionary Colt" only to give him something else to think about.