Two unostentatious acts of kindness on the part of Allen in the course of the week which followed added fresh refulgency to his halo of popularity. Townsville had gone madder than ever about him following his sudden and unexpected return from the south, and the same appeared to be true of the rest of the country. In all sincerity, he had tried to do both of the things I have referred to strictly on the quiet, and that they became public was only a consequence of the zeal of the fresh army of "war correspondents" that had been rushed north again to camp upon the hero's trail.
One of Allen's little kindnesses was an appeal, in his own name, to the Governor of Western Australia to have dismissed the proceedings that had been instituted to bring "Squid" Saunders back to be locked up for the twenty-three and a half years which still remained to be served of his original twenty-five-year sentence. This appeal was accompanied by a promise to send the ex-convict, immediately he was released, back to the Islands at Allen's expense.
Doubtless the momentary magic of Allen's name had something to do with the Westralian Governor's complaisance. In any event, "Squid" Saunders was out of jail and off as a first-class passenger on one of the Solomon Island boats inside of a week. Allen, the correspondents were not long in learning, had bought the ticket, footed all of the very sizable telegraph bills, and given the purser of the steamer a hundred pounds in gold to be handed to "Squid" when he was disembarked at Bougainville. The correspondents, long baulked of any real "Allen stuff," went to that story like hungry hounds.
But scarcely was the "Squid" Saunders story onto the wires before it was followed by the news of Allen's astonishing win of the Planters' Handicap with the rank outsider, Yusuf, at two-hundred-to-one. That win was spectacular enough in itself, but when, on the heels of it, was flashed the word that not only the thousand-guinea purse hung up for the race, but approximately twenty-five hundred pounds paid to Allen by the "tote" as well, had been donated to the owner of Yusuf to forward the realization of his long-cherished dream—the erection of a modern medical mission in Fiji—the climax was capped. Australia echoed anew with acclaim of the "philanthropist hero" (it was now), and press and pulpit moralized and maundered afresh on the Hon. Hartley Allen's goodness of heart and greatness of soul. The clamour of the people of the country to see their idol in the flesh fused the Townsville wires from every direction. It was all very well that the incomparable heroism of the saving of the Cora Andrews should be perpetuated upon canvas, but why should the pushful American artist drag the hero off before his own people had a chance to do him homage? Let the artist rise to the occasion with a display of that famous "Yankee hustle" they had heard so much about and get the job over "right quick." It was the man himself they wanted; let the picture wait if it couldn't be finished straightaway!
CHAPTER XIV
HELL'S HATCHES OFF
That may give some hint of the state of mind of Australians when, waiting on the tip-toe of expectancy for word of the next dashing act of their hero, they received a message of quite another tenor. It was the Sydney Herald man who sent the message that swept the country like the blast of a hurricane. He wired just the bare facts and no more. His imagination, even his reasoning faculties, as he confessed in a later dispatch, were numbed for the moment, temporarily paralyzed by the staggering shock of the horror he had looked upon.
"The Hon. Hartley Allen was found at an early hour this morning" (ran the telegram) "bound, gagged and lashed to the wheel of the schooner Cora Andrews, which has been aground for some time at a lonely spot on the beach of Cleveland Bay, several miles north of Townsville. Allen, who was taken to the General Hospital as soon as he was brought back to town, is a raving maniac and not expected to live out the day. From information in the hands of the police, there is no doubt that the worse-than-assassin was the ex-convict, 'Squid' Saunders, recently released from jail and deported to the Solomons through Allen's generous efforts on his behalf. He is known to have escaped from his northbound steamer at Cairns, stolen a fishing sloop, and is believed to have headed back to Townsville to carry out the dastardly act his disordered brain has evidently nursed for years. As the police seem likely to yield to the popular pressure to employ bloodhounds in running down the fugitive, his capture is probably the matter of but a few hours."
It was a fairly sane, reasonable-reading dispatch, that. None but a man who had felt his blood turn to ice-water at the sight the Herald man had looked upon that morning could appreciate how much credit he deserved for stating the facts so coherently. For myself, at the moment the launch brought us back from the Cora and put us ashore at the landing, I would have been incapable of writing my own name correctly. There was only one thing I could do—nay, would have had to try to do if the world had been disintegrating beneath my feet—and I did it. That is why so much of the next thirty-six hours is a blank in my mind.
It was on a Saturday that Allen had made his spectacular killing in winning the Planters' Handicap, and on Sunday afternoon, to escape the importunities of Townsville generally and the correspondents in particular, he had ridden up to pay me a visit at my hillside bungalow. I had missed the race (through another appointment for a sitting with Rona, which, like the others, she had failed to keep), and so took the occasion to get some account of it at first-hand from Allen. He was in high spirits over his success, but rather inclined to be put out with the impulsive Oakes for breaking down in church that morning and proclaiming to all and sundry the real source of the thirty-five hundred and odd pounds that had fallen at his feet like manna from the skies. What had come nearest to flooring Melanesia's leading bad man, I think, was that the missionary had publicly announced his intention of naming the new medical mission at Suva after the donor!
Allen also, somewhat to my surprise, was not averse to speaking of the "Squid" Saunders episode. "The only redeeming thing about the old ruffian," he observed, "is his affection for that girl of his—the red-haired one, I mean—the black-and-tans don't signify. Rather a remarkable girl, that one, Whitney. She was one of the kind that must either soar to the high places or wallow in the low ones, and I've been sorrier than I can tell that I was slated to—well, not to start her winging for the heights exactly. I really wasn't a lot to blame in the matter, but—that isn't either here or there. Old 'Squid' thinks I was, and will go on thinking so till his dying day—or mine. I tried to get the old reprobate to call it quits when I shipped him off the other day. Do you think he would? No fear. Not the 'Squid.' Indeed, considering the bother I had wangling him out of serving that Kalgoorlie sentence of his, he was rather nasty. He asked me if I was trying to buy him off for fear he'd get me in the end. There wasn't much I could say to that under the circumstances, so I just let him go. Now the purser of the Nawarika wires me from Cooktown to say that the 'Squid' slipped ashore at Cairns and failed to show up again before sailing time. Purser says he still has the hundred quid I gave him to slip Saunders when they put him off in the Solomons. I have turned the wire over to the police, but have asked them to sit tight unless Saunders shows up in this section again. I hate to drag the old fire-eater into a new mess, especially after all the trouble I had getting him out of the old one. So I hope he won't be fool enough to come mooching south again. Don't suppose he will, but—I'll be keeping an eye lifting just the same against the loom of a vitriol bomb on the weather skyline."
Allen tapped his coat significantly at those last words, and that reminded him that there were two or three little things about "pocket-gunnery" he wanted me to coach him up on. Nailing a foot-square of discarded canvas to the swelling bole of a bottle tree down by the stream, we put in a half-hour of "by-and-large" practice at it. Allen, thanks to his natural gift for judging distance and angle, proved a very apt pupil.
By way of return for his gunnery lesson, "Slant" volunteered to show me a few tricks of knife-throwing, in which he was reputed to have no equal in the Islands. "I'm about as much of a walking arsenal as you were the time you waited for me at the Australia, Whitney," he said with a grin, as he produced a broad-bladed dagger from a sheath slung unobtrusively on his right hip. "This knife, by the way," he went on, tilting it lightly across his forefinger, "is balanced especially for throwing. They are made in Lisbon, mostly for export to Brazil I understand, where they seem to go in for that kind of stunt a good bit. I bought it from the skipper of a Portuguese gunboat at Deli, who also taught me the principles of chucking it. First and last, I've had a lot of sport out of practising with it, and have an idea I would have an even break with the Capitano himself when my hand's in. I was very grateful to old 'Squid' for handing it back to me the other day. I only hope he won't be forcing me to pass it on to him again."
Allen's skill with the wicked-bladed facon was decidedly impressive. If anything, he was a shade more accurate in planting the point of it than I was with a bullet from my pocket. Little luck as I had in throwing it, I was quite as fascinated with the appearance and "feel" of the formidable weapon as Allen had been with my target revolver in Sydney. "I trust you won't have to part with it again, to Saunders or anyone else," I said as I handed it back to him.
Before he mounted for his ride back to town, I mentioned to Allen that Rona had left me in the lurch again the day before, and intimated that, unless she began to show more interest in the picture, I would have to consider packing up and going back to Sydney. As a matter of fact, the girl's perversity had already been responsible for effectually dampening down my first flush of enthusiasm, and I began seriously to doubt my ability to make a success of the picture when the way was clear to work at it. Allen begged me not to be discouraged, and assured me again that he would look up Rona himself on the morrow and see if he couldn't get some line on what she was sulking about. He also said he would see if the quarantine people couldn't be prodded along to get at the job of disinfecting the Cora.
Rona still failed to show up on the following day, and in the evening I was unable to get 'phone connection with Allen's bungalow in an endeavour to learn if he had seen her. Dr. Butler, whom I got on the wire at the Quarantine Station, said that Allen had rung them up that morning, urging them to get a move on with the Cora. They had told him that they were planning to send a squad off before the end of the week. As word had just come to them, however, that men were seen climbing over the schooner that afternoon, they had decided to clean up the job in the morning. As long as the ship remained in her present condition, he said, she would continue a possible spreader of disease. She should have been attended to before. If I cared to go off with them, he added, he would pick me up at the landing at eight o'clock. I thanked him and told him I would be glad of the chance to look things over before going to work.
I drove down early in the morning, taking Ranga with me on the chance that Allen and Rona might care to go off and plan a tentative grouping. A black boy cutting weeds with a sickle in front of Allen's bungalow told me that "white marster stop townside" for the night and had not yet returned. At the Mission I found Oakes a good deal perturbed. The day before, he said, Allen had called just after lunch, talked with Rona a few minutes, and then borrowed Yusuf and gone off for a ride. He had not returned at dusk, but during the night the horse, dangling a broken bridle rein, had come galloping back to his stable. The missionary was fearful the rider had been thrown and stunned, and had been lying all night on the road. He had sent out boys to search soon after daylight. He was not sanguine of an early report from them, as Allen on his rides always avoided the metalled main highways to save his horse's feet. No, Yusuf's knees showed no signs of his having stumbled. He was as sure-footed as a goat and as gentle as a kitten. Not in the least given to shying or bolting. Besides, the colt wasn't foaled that could unseat Hartley Allen. Of course, he must have struck his head against a low-hanging limb in galloping some bush path, but that was unlikely. Hartley had his wits too much on the alert to be caught like that. He was beginning to be just a bit suspicious of foul play. Had I heard that "Squid" Saunders had left his steamer at Cairns and was believed to have sailed south in a stolen fishing-boat? He was just about to call up the Police Station and tell them of Allen's disappearance when I came.
Rona had been off on one of her long walks the previous afternoon, Oakes said in answer to my inquiry, and was not yet up. He had spoken with her through her window, just after Yusuf came back, in the hope that she might be able to give him some hint of the road Allen had taken. The latter had not mentioned where he was going, she said. She herself had been "away inland"—Oakes had encountered her on his weekly round through the plantation villages. She was a tireless walker, and very restless—altogether a strange character. I did not disturb the girl, as I reckoned there was no use in taking her off to the schooner until Allen was along to talk our plans over.
It would have seemed that this word of Allen's disappearance, taken in conjunction with the fact that men had been seen on the wreck of the Cora the previous day, might have given me just a shade of preparation for what I saw as I followed Butler and the Herald man over the schooner's side an hour later. But it was not so, probably because my mental faculties were at their dullest at so (for me) unwontedly early an hour. If the news had come to me in the afternoon, possibly I would have traced some connection between the two events, and so have been at least slightly braced and stiffened for the coming shock. As it was, I bumped into it all unset, and the staggering impact of it came near to bowling me over.
It had been Dr. Butler's theory, propounded as the launch put away from the landing, that the figures descried on the Cora the afternoon before were those of blacks or coolies, attracted to the hulk by the hope of loot. As a matter of fact, he said, they would doubtless have made quite a haul, as nothing but the ship's papers had been taken ashore on the day of her arrival. Considerable "trade" and all of the personal effects of her former officers had been left for removal after disinfection.
As we came out into the bay the coast to the northward began to open up, and presently the wreck of the Cora, heeled sharply to port with the foremast over the bows, became visible against the deep green of the mangroves a couple of miles distant. Butler studied the hulk closely through his glasses as we closed it.
"Looks as though I had another guess coming," he remarked finally, lowering the binoculars with a puzzled air. "Someone aboard her now. Seems to be jiggering the wheel. Can't be a pirate stunt, can it? Wouldn't be possible to drop a petrol engine into her, block up the hole and get off to the Islands on the quiet? But of course not. That's a drydock job—'count of the propeller and shaft."
At a quarter of a mile he raised his glasses again. "Chap at the wheel's the only man in sight," he reported. "He don't seem to have spotted us yet. Must be deaf, not to hear the explosions of our exhaust. Ah, perhaps that accounts for it! He's an old cove—big shock of white hair. 'Bout time he was getting his helmet on, though, with this sun beginning to bore into the back of his neck. Ahoy, there!..."
But there was no reply. The lone white-haired figure was still jiggering at the wheel when the launch, nosing in cautiously in the up-boil of reversed propellers, slid past the Cora's stern and the loom of her counter cut it off from our view.
A moss-shiny Jacob's Ladder hung over the starboard side amidships, where a section of the "nigger-wire" had been cut away, doubtless when the labour-recruits were disembarked. Butler climbed up first, then the Herald man (who had come off on the Doctor's invitation to see the ship made famous by the great exploit of the Hon. Hartley Allen), and then myself. Butler lingered at the ladder for a few moments, giving orders to his men about bringing the disinfecting paraphernalia aboard; so it was given to the newspaper man to be the first to go aft and discover that the moving, gibbering white-haired wretch lashed to the wheel of the schooner represented the sum total of the mental and physical remnants of the man whose doings he had been detailed to chronicle.
The horrified reporter uttered no sound—simply froze and stood rooted to the deck in amazed consternation. It was as though the basilisk stare of the maniac's eyes had turned the flesh and blood of his rangy frame to stone. When he stirred finally, it was to tip-toe softly back two or three paces to where I, in turn, had frozen in my tracks. It was his hand on my shoulder and his white face thrust close to mine that broke my own trance. Then the both of us must have retreated another step or two, until we bumped into Butler, similarly petrified with horror.
I am almost certain that not one of the three of us made any outcry, or even uttered a word, so paralyzing was the effect of the apparition at the wheel. The first sound I definitely recall as breaking in upon those muffled mowings from the cockpit was a booming gasp as Ranga's mighty chest sucked in a lungful of air, and then the big Malay's quiet "'Scuse me, Tuan," as he started to shove past between me and the deckhouse.
The yellow giant had seen too many men, white and black, lose their minds and their lives on that reeking old schooner to let the snapping of one more brain, or the parting of one more life-line, ruffle unduly his solid Oriental composure. He had been fond of Allen, however, and I could see that he was shaken, though not, like the rest of us, unnerved. There was a rumble of concern and anxiety even in that respectful "'Scuse me, Tuan," as he started to push past the blockade the cowering forms of three lesser men had made in the narrow passage.
Ranga's steadiness was good for the rest of us. Butler checked the Malay with upraised hand and, muttering something about his duty as a doctor, started aft, the Herald man and I pushing in his wake. If it had been possible for the fear-distorted features of the wreck of "Slant" Allen to express extremer terror, that heightened degree was registered when Butler extended his opened clasp-knife to begin severing the lashings. I have no wish to attempt to describe that hell-haunted face. Indeed, there will be scant need of my doing so, for there can be few readers of this record who are not already familiar with its tortured lineaments. It seared itself into my brain with a white heat of intensity that left no room for any other image. At the moment it seemed as though it must be blazoned there as long as my body was quick with the spark of life, or at least until my reason recoiled at the horror of it and tottered from its throne. A little later, when the dread face itself had been hidden from my sight, a light seemed suddenly to flash out in the distance, and in groping toward it I found relief.
The ghastly shadow of the Hon. Hartley Allen was standing wedged in between the wheel and the binnacle-stand, his wrists lashed to the spokes of the former and a maze of tangled line binding his knees to the latter. The lashing was a length cut from the taffrail-log-line, another piece of which had been used to secure a gag of wadded oakum. The only wound visible (save for the wrists chafed through to the white cords of their tendons in his desperate tuggings to tear free) was a half-inch-wide incision on the right inner side of the neck, evidently made by the point of a knife pressed in close to the swell of the jugular vein. As this cut was hardly more than a deep prick, it seemed probable that the knife had been used, not to inflict injury, but rather to compel the victim to remain quiet while he was being secured.
As the wrist lashings fell away, Allen lurched savagely forward with a throaty "g-rrr" and did his best to claw Butler's throat with his fingers. His strength was spent by his night-long struggles, however, and Ranga easily smothered the attack in the crook of his interposed arm. The removal of the gag did not, as might have been expected from the way the chest had been labouring, release a frantic scream. The passages of the throat, although the neck revealed no evidences of having been choked—recently, that is,—appeared to be swollen almost shut. The windpipe would carry air to the lungs, but every effort to expel it violently seemed to clap a sort of automatic muffler on the vocal chords.
Allen collapsed limply into Ranga's arms when his leg lashings had been cut, but he would not swoon. The dread of the damned continued to stream from his staring and unbelievably dilated eyes; those hoarse heavings of throat-throttled shrieks continued to issue from his gaping mouth; every time a hand or foot was freed, he continued to strike or kick with it to the limit of his pitifully drained strength.
Butler said that the only hope of saving the man's mind, and probably his life as well, was to rush him to the hospital and put him under an opiate as quickly as possible. Ranga picked up the tortured body carefully, as he might have handled a struggling kitten, and passed it down to the launch. Butler had the forethought to have us all sprayed with the disinfectant before we went over the side, so as to minimize the chances of our carrying off any plague germs.
Just as the launch was about to shove off, Ranga begged the coxswain to hold on for a moment, and went clambering back up the latter. He ran aft, picked up something from the deck, and came back tucking his little Malay flute into the waistband of his dungarees. He had dropped it in the cockpit, he explained.
About all I can recall of the run back to the landing was the interminable number of times the Herald man insisted on telling us that he had been talking to Hartley Allen all the while the latter had been shifting into his jockey togs for the Planters' Handicap, and of how Butler, each time, replied: "And he slept in my pajamas all the time he was in quarantine." Possibly I said equally trivial things; but I don't recall them. I was conscious of a great pity for the plight of the man for whom I had come to have a genuine liking, and a dull sort of wonder as to how the tragedy might have happened and who was responsible for it. But the haunting horror of that fear-stricken face hung like a curtain in front of my mind, dimming or blanking everything behind it.
At Butler's suggestion, he—with Ranga to help—took a carriage at the landing and drove direct to the hospital with Allen, while the Herald man and I went in my trap to the Police Station to report to the Chief. The latter had recently come to his present job from Charters Towers, where he had made something of a name for himself by breaking up a gang of outlaws who had long been doing pretty much as they pleased in that rough and ready bonanza town. He was a chap of great determination, energy and courage, but of little subtlety—rather the type of a Western American sheriff than a city police chief. I had met him at the Club two or three times, and liked him for his steady eye and open straightforwardness.
The Chief was a little impatient at the Herald man's repetitions of the togs-shifting episode, and possibly also of my own wooden silence; but he got to the salient facts readily, and was no less forward with his deductions therefrom.
"'Squid' Saunders beyond a doubt," he pronounced decisively. "His sloop was sighted twice between here and Cairns, the last time only fifty miles to the north'ard. He could have landed night before last easy. Any of the lagoons running back into the Caradarra Swamp would hide his sloop. That would have given him all day yesterday to scout for Allen. Why the schooner I don't quite twig. But the 'Squid' was always adding devilish little embroideries to his jobs, and leaving a man to rot on a plague ship has all of his ear-marks. Never mind, I've had two launches patrolling the north coast for him since yesterday morning. He must have landed before they got there. But they'll nab him if he pulls out with the sloop again, and if he doesn't, I'll nab him. I hate to do it with a white man, but I'm going to put Rawdon's 'nigger-chasers' on his trail. I've got 'Squid's' old suit of clothes—the one he threw away when Allen bought him a new outfit—stowed away here, and I fancy a sniff of it will be enough to put them on the scent with. If I don't miss my guess, Mr. 'Squid' Saunders will be enjoying our bed and board again before another twenty-four hours has gone by."
The Chief dropped his professional manner for a few moments as we arose to go. "Allen was a good friend of yours, Mr. Whitney," he said, laying a kindly grip on my shoulder. "I don't wonder that you're a bit dazed by the thing. Rather puts a damper on the picture, I'm afraid. Going up the hill now, are you? Good—a bit of a rest will steady you no end. Ring up this evening and we'll give you the news. It won't be long before we have our man."
The Herald man, with the Chief's approval, rushed off to the telegraph office to dispatch his wire. I drove round to the hospital to pick up Ranga and inquire for news of Allen. Butler came down to see me in the reception-room and reported that it had taken an astonishing quantity of morphine to have any effect upon the patient, but that he was at last beginning to grow quieter. His heart action was very irregular and there was no saying yet what turn things might take. He asked me to let Ranga remain at the hospital for a day or two. They were short of orderlies as a consequence of the smallpox epidemic, and the big Malay was a very useful attendant on account of his strength, quietness and good sense. As they were trying to avoid the necessity of putting Allen in a strait-jacket, they wanted someone in the room able to handle him if he became violent again on coming out from his opiate. I told him to keep Ranga as long as he was needed.
CHAPTER XV
THE FACE
The Chief of Police's allusion to the picture had started a nebulous idea in my head, but it took it several hours to crystallize. Driving alone up the hill, my mind gravitated dully to the matter of the identity of the perpetrator of the unspeakable outrage. I found myself speculating as to whether or not the Chief of Police, had he known of Rona's previous attacks upon Allen, would have been as ready as he was to attribute the guilt to "Squid" Saunders. And would he—had he known of them—been able to trace any connection between Rona's repeated attempts to induce Allen to go off to the schooner with her and the fact that the crime had been committed there? And didn't it look just a little as though Rona's whole strange plan for having a picture painted was only a subterfuge to open the way for a carefully plotted revenge? And yet, if she had done all this, she surely must have had—or thought she had—a good reason for doing it. But had not Oakes established a clear alibi for the girl when he met her "away inland" the same afternoon men had been reported to have been seen on the schooner? Probably, but not certainly. Oakes himself had said that she was "a great walker" and "very restless."
It was conceivable that the girl might have doubled back and waylaid Allen on the road. Or perhaps she had met him by appointment. He had admitted that he was becoming increasingly subject to her will. But how could she have induced him to go off to the schooner, and how had they gone? No boat had been sighted along the beach (we had looked for one through Butler's glasses on our return to the landing), and none was reported missing from the harbour. The Chief had inquired on that latter point while we were with him at the Station.
And how had Rona, or anyone else for that matter, been able to get the better of such a man as Allen, fully armed and on the alert as I knew him to have been, and noted for his resourcefulness in emergency? That train of thought reminded me that we had found no arms on Allen when we released him. His right coat-pocket was empty, and so was the knife-sheath on his right hip. But his pocketbook, containing a considerable amount in notes, had not been taken.... It was all too much for my tired brain, which, ready enough to suggest questions, was quite incapable of grappling with them. When I drove into the home clearing I was wondering whether the broken glass I had noticed in the bottom of the cockpit was that from the whisky bottle Allen had told me Rona had thrown at him the morning Bell gave up the fight.
I was horribly tired, both in mind and body, and hoped that, with a glass or two of absinthe to relax my nerves, I might be able to sleep at least through the heat of the noonday. Shifting into my pajamas,—after telling Suey, my China boy, that I would not want lunch and not to disturb me until I sent for him,—I crawled under the mosquito-net and tried to drop off. But it was no use. No sooner would I begin to doze than the expiring images of my thoughts would shuffle up and sharpen with a steel-clicking suddenness into the dread likeness of The Face, with its dilated eyes boring me to the spine.
At the end of a couple of hours of fevered tossing, I gave it up, threw off my pajamas, stepped to the low back-window ledge and took a header into the cool green pool below. The Face dissolved as the thrill of the refreshing embrace of the water ran through my blood, but only to return when, after donning a fresh suit of drills, I began a restless pacing of the floor of the big living-room—my studio. Always it flashed a pace or two ahead of me, floating backward as I advanced upon it and swinging with me at the end of the room. I could not wheel swiftly enough to lose it, and it made no difference whether my eyes were opened or closed. I tried it both ways.
It was in the course of an experimental lap I was trying with my hands over my eyes that I bumped into the big rectangle of canvas I had prepared in advance against the day I should be ready to start work on "The Saving of the Black-birder." Ten seconds later I was pawing over my colours with feverish haste. The idea swimming in my head had crystallized. It was, in effect: Put The Face on canvas and it will cease to haunt and harrow your mind. That sounded reasonable. Certainly The Face couldn't be in two places at once, and if I once got it anchored to the canvas I could cover it up when I wanted to get away from it. It would all depend upon how faithfully I did my work, something told me. If the face on the canvas was a replica of the other to a hair, to a line, to the fear in the hell-haunted eyes, then the phantom face would enter into it and become subject to my control. If not—then I would never know sleep nor peace while I continued to live.
No artist can ever have approached a task under empire of the flaming intensity I threw into this one. I was painting to save my reason, perhaps my life. That is not a figure of speech. I mean it quite literally, for I am convinced to this day that I stumbled upon the only path that would have led me clear of complete mental and physical collapse.
There was a rather remarkable coincidence in connection with the way I started to work. Nothing told me that those first nervous slashes of my brush signalized the beginning of a picture the fame of which was destined to reach the outposts of the civilized world before the year was out. All thought of "The Black-birder" was erased from my mind. I had no idea of a picture in my head. I was not even beginning to work upon a figure. I was only conscious that I was going to put all I had into the task of reproducing—recreating, if that were possible—with coloured pigments a phantom of my brain—a face—The Face.
I had no thought, I say, of beginning a picture. I sketched nothing in, not even the outline of the haunting shadow I was going to try to capture. A very few minutes after I began squeezing out colours onto my palette I was smearing them upon a patch of the big six-feet-by-ten expanse of woven cotton in front of me. The coincidence I have mentioned became apparent some weeks later, when I discovered that, of all the sixty square feet of canvas before me, the something less than one square foot upon which I concentrated my paint and energies for the next thirty hours chanced to be in exactly the place it had to be for the result of my effort to assume its proper place in a somewhat intricate composition. I will tell of that in due course.
Save for the strain of the terrible tension under which I worked, the task to which I had set myself proved absolutely the simplest I ever attempted. It seemed that I could not go wrong. It was not like painting a face from memory, nor yet like painting one from a model. It was more like colouring a photograph, for the image, terrible as life, was right there on the canvas at the end of my arm. At first, as I tried to visualize it at shorter range than the five or six feet at which it had been floating, it was a bit hazy; but presently my intense concentration of mind had its reward. The dreadful phantom drew nearer, increased in detail, and finally sharpened into clear focus at the tip of my brush. After that I became just a meticulously faithful retoucher, working in a trance.
It was toward the middle of the afternoon when Suey came in to ask if I was going to be home for dinner. He was becoming used to my queer ways, and, when I failed to take any notice of his reiterated query, came over and touched me on the shoulder. I "came out" with a start, but gathered my wits quickly. I told Suey that I should probably be working steadily for the next day or two and would want nothing to eat until I was finished. If he would bring me a bowl of cracked ice every hour and see that no one was allowed in to bother me, it would be all I should want of him. He replied with a laconic "Can do," and backed out toward the kitchen as though I had asked for curry-and-rice for dinner, or ordered something else equally rational and matter-of-fact.
I settled back into my spell of tranced concentration with scarcely an effort, working swiftly and surely, with never a pause. The "drawing" was all done for me, and even in the matter of colours there was no hesitation. Exactly the proper shade or tint drew my brush like a magnet; and always it was applied with telling effect.
The sunset shadows of the western hills were driving their black wedges across the satiny sheen of the light-flickering levels of the waving sugar-cane when I became aware that a sound I had been conscious of for some time had suddenly changed and intensified. If my mind had tried to catalogue the clear notes that had been floating in through the north window, it was probably to credit them to a certain bell-bird friend of mine who was in the habit of ringing his vesper chimes from a leafy chapel in the big bottle tree toward the end of the afternoon. But there was nothing bird-like in the quick staccato of eager yelps that had been responsible for bringing me, with ears and interest a-cock, out of my trance. "Dogs closing in for a kill," I muttered to myself, realizing that it had been the distant baying of hounds on a hot scent that I had confused with the more imminent chiming of my Austral bell-ringing neighbour. The sounds came from a long way off—probably from somewhere in the dense bush beyond the farther borders of the cane fields. It was a northerly hauling of the wind that brought them down to me so clearly. The air had been charged and electric all day, and the breaking up of the trade wind indicated that a hurricane was mustering its forces somewhere up among the Islands. I had not looked at the barometer on the veranda, but knew that it must be registering a considerable fall.
The crack of a single shot drifted down the wind as the yelping reached its climax. Then all was quiet in the distance, with only an occasional cackling guffaw of a "laughing jackass" ripping across the silence that brooded nearer at hand. I didn't know what there was to hunt in that particular neck of Queensland, but thought it might be kangaroos or dingoes. It wasn't of enough interest to waste time in speculating upon it, just then in any event.
Daylight had given way to twilight, and twilight to moonlight, before I stopped work again, this time to respond to an insistent ringing of the telephone bell. Oakes' deep voice came excitedly over the wire. "I thought you would be interested to know that Rawdon's dogs tracked down 'Squid' Saunders this afternoon," it said. "He has just been brought in. Bullet through his shoulder, but not a serious wound. The report went around that he had confessed to the attack on Hartley Allen, and the town went wild. Only the Chief's nerve prevented a lynching, and there may be trouble yet. Never saw the people so excited." In response to my inquiry about Allen, Oakes said that he had been drugged to sleep early in the afternoon, and that there was no use trying to forecast what turn things would take until he came out.
"That clears Rona, at any rate," was my thought as I drained a glass of iced absinthe and picked up my brush again. I found it just a shade harder materializing The Face than it had been at first, but managed it at the end of a minute or two of close concentration. Save for an occasional pause for a sip of absinthe, I worked steadily on through the night.
To make clear what transpired the following day, it will be well to set down at this point a few things which I only learned in a conversation with the Chief of Police after the last act of the drama was played to a finish and the curtain rung down. Contrary to the understanding of Dr. Oakes, and all the rest of the people of Townsville with the exception of the Chief of Police and a couple of his assistants, "Squid" Saunders had not confessed. From what he had said in the presence of all his captors, however, it was easy to see how the story had originated. He admitted quite freely to Rawdon, after the latter had called off his dogs and was lending a hand to plug up the puncture in "Squid's" shoulder, that his one purpose in returning had been to settle his account with "Slant" Allen. He also said that he would rather be strung up straightaway than to be sent back to West Australia and begin, at sixty, serving out a twenty-odd-year sentence.
That was about all Saunders said at the time of his capture, but later, after expressing himself to the Chief of Police to similar effect, he went a little further. He averred frankly that curiosity had always been one of his most pronounced characteristics, and, while he entertained only the kindliest feelings for whoever it was that had been responsible for tying up "Slant" Allen and leaving him alone to meditate upon his past, he couldn't help wondering about the identity of a man able to pull off such a cleverly thought-out and executed piece of business. Might he not suggest to the Chief that the latter try to find some trifle that this bright-minded and quick-handed cove had left behind on the schooner, and see if those sharp-nosed—yes, and sharp-teethed—dogs of his couldn't be put on the owner's trail. They appeared a very likely lot of hounds, especially that big black-and-tan brute with a chewed ear, who had broken away from the ruck and fastened his teeth in the "Squid's" calf.
This all struck the straightforward, open-minded Chief as entirely reasonable. It was only fair to Saunders, too, and since saving him from the mob that afternoon the Chief had come to take a sort of proprietary interest in his prisoner. Going off to the schooner in the morning he found a small fragment of red rag in the cockpit, which, though it was greasy and dirty, did not show signs of exposure to the weather, and must, therefore, have been left comparatively recently. It was a six-by-eight-inch piece of flowered red calico, of the kind used by the natives of all parts of the South Seas for waist-cloths. Even if he wasn't able to locate the particular sulu from which it was torn, the Chief reckoned that it would give the dogs something to go by.
Rawdon's "nigger-chasers" were of a foxhound-bloodhound cross that the old ex-bushranger had bred especially for the purpose of chivvying down runaway blacks from the sugar plantations. The swart sextette displayed a very encouraging interest in the greasy rag the Chief brought them to sniff; so much so, indeed, that they were far from drained of enthusiasm at the end of a bootless day's nosing up and down the coast for tracks that gave back the same ingratiating aroma. It looked quite good enough to warrant going on with the game the following morning, Rawdon pronounced, as he started back on foot for his kennels on the southwest outskirts of town. (The old chap had some kind of a theory about its being destructive to a hound's keeness to tote him around on wheels: also, he had stumbled upon many trails where he least expected them, even in the town.)
Rawdon was striding a couple of blocks ahead of his two helpers when, crossing the town end of the main westerly highway to the hills, the dog he was holding in leash—the big black-and-tan with the chewed ear, by far his keenest-nosed hound—broke away and set off up the side of the road in full cry. As there was no hope of trying to overtake him on foot, Rawdon waited for the other dogs to come up and catch the scent, cautioning his men to hold them well in leash and not to hurry until he rejoined them. Then he ran back a quarter of a mile to the Police Station to summon the Chief and get a horse.
This was about seven o'clock in the evening of Wednesday, the day after we had found Hartley Allen bound to the wheel of the Cora Andrews.
At the moment the big black-and-tan hound tore his leash out of Rawdon's hand and started to burn up the footpath beside the westerly hill road, I had been streaking a small patch of canvas with coloured pigments for something like thirty hours in a desperate endeavour to drive a phantom out of my brain. I was near to the end of my labours and—I could sense it already—close to victory. I had made a hard fight for it and I deserved to win. Using absinthe sparingly—as a fuel and a food rather than as a stimulant—and drawing upon my nerves for everything the drug would not provide, I had kept going steadily and was finishing strong.
There had been but one interruption since the night before. Early in the forenoon Captain "Choppy" Tancred had called up to say that he had brought his new command to anchor in the harbour the previous evening, and that, as he had a good twenty-four hours' loading to do, he hoped that we could find time to foregather for a bit of a yarn in the course of the day. Would I come down and have lunch with him at the hotel, or would he drive up to me? He would rather prefer the former, as the barometer was down and he ought to remain where he could get off to his ship in a hurry if it came on to blow. I made the best excuse my wandering wits could frame, and hung up. The old boy's voluble protests were still clicking in the receiver as I returned it to its hook.
I had a hard time materializing my "model" again after that break, and it was fifteen or twenty minutes before I was sure enough of it to resume work. For a while, in the back of my brain, there was a flutter of apprehension that old "Choppy" would take it into his head to come up anyhow, and I was desperately afraid that I might not be able to "connect" again after another interruption—that I would fail to focus The Face at the one moment of all when I most needed it. There would have been comfort in that thought twenty-four hours earlier, but by now a desire to finish the portrait for its own sake seemed to have entered into me.
But my fears were groundless. "Choppy" was properly rebuffed, and had no intention of poking in where he "wasna weelcom'." (He told me so himself later.) There was no further interruption, save the negligible one of Suey and the cracked ice, sharp on every hour. As the sunset faded and the twilight flooded the valley with luminous purple mist, I was finished—or nearly finished. The Face was all but complete on the canvas now, and all but erased from my brain. It had taken an intense effort of concentration to hold it while I put the last touch on that writhen lip, as it curled back in a snarl from the bared teeth. But I did it. And now—just a stroke in that whorl of iris to accentuate the abnormal dilation, to fix the horror in that ghastly stare! Slowly the image sharpened in my brain. Again the fear-haunted eyes held my own. Now! I was just darting my delicately poised brush forward when the sound of voices from the veranda arrested the colour-daubed tip a hair short of the blurring eye its touch would have made a hopeless smudge. "Maskey—no can do!" came in Suey's brusque pidgin; and then, following a sudden scuffle and the sharp click of the latch, a familiar chirrup floated to my ears. "Let me in, Whit-nee! Hur-ree, ple-ese, Whit-nee!" was what it said.
CHAPTER XVI
A SUDDEN VISITOR
As a rider reins in his stumbling horse, so did I rein in my stumbling nerves. It was now or never, I told myself. If those final touches were not given before I stirred from my tracks, they would never be given. I closed my eyes and my ears—not with my hands but by a sheer effort of will—and then, inch by inch, as though I were dragging it by the throat, brought the phantom prototype back and forced it to merge with the face on the canvas. The tip of my brush flashed twice, thrice. Then I relaxed the tentacles of my will, and as the phantom face, receding, blurred to blankness, it left behind, where a wisp of green-smeared camel's hair had touched the canvas, an expression of hell-haunted terror streaming from the unnaturally dilated eyes of the completed picture-face.
I was breathing heavily, like a coolie who throws down his back-breaking burden at the end of a hard climb, when I tossed aside my brush and palette, but no wretch of a human pack-mule ever knew the depth of relief that was mine. A carrier could only experience the physical satisfaction of feeling his back was freed of a load: mine was the spiritual ecstasy of knocking off the shackles that had threatened to bind my soul. And now I was free to rush to the arms of the "Green Lady"! No more need of rationing my absinthe. I spilled the remaining contents of the bottle at my elbow in the bowl of half-melted cracked ice, and wolfed it greedily over the tilted brim.
"Ple-ese, Whit-nee, I have the great hur-ree." Again came the click-clack of the imprisoned latch and the thud of a knee or shoulder against the door.
"One moment, Rona!" Steadied and alert, I set down the emptied bowl, threw a hastily-snatched couch-cover over the canvas so that the space upon which I had worked was hidden, and stepped to the door. Already I felt the exaltation and relief of having banished the dread phantom. And the picture face on the canvas—how easy it was to blot out! The hanging corner of an old steamer-rug....
Rona pushed in eagerly as I swung back the door, Suey relaxing his restraining grip and backing away noiselessly at my reassuring nod. All the old verve showed in the girl's high-flung head and flashing eye. Sullenness, depression, sadness alike were gone, replaced by an air of eagerness, of suppressed excitement. She was still wearing the baggy holakau the lady missionaries had wished upon her, but with it—looped over her breasts and under her shoulders sarong-fashion—was the peacock shawl, outlining softly the lithe curves of shoulder and hip and flowing clingingly in folds of amber and scintillant opalescence below her knees.
"Whit-nee, I come to make the good-bye," she gushed cooingly, catching her breath. "Tonight I take boat go Seengapo. Whit-nee, I come here to tell you I ver-ree sor-ree I make you troubl' 'bout the pick-yur. I tella you lie, Whit-nee. I cannot—make—the pick-yur. Bel-la, he say—"
At that instant a strange thing happened. Two or three times since she entered the room, Rona's eyes, as though drawn there irresistibly, had wandered from mine to what could have appeared to her no more than a corner of plaid rug hanging over a broad blank of tightly stretched canvas. She had done this again as she started to speak, and it was a slight widening of her eyes that caused me to turn and follow her glance. The hastily-flung rug was slowly slipping back off the easel. The fringed corner hanging down in front was rising. Possibly a draught from the open door had started the movement, or perhaps the swishing blows a wind-lashed tree was dealing the side of the house. Whatever was the cause, the effect was that of an invisible hand slowly drawing up a curtain.
Rona's tongue framed the sentence that was in her mind, but the words came brokenly as her puzzled wonderment increased. As her double-syllabled rendition of Bell's name fell from her lips the accelerating slide of the curtain quickened to a run, and, with a flirt of green fringe, the masking corner disappeared over the top of the frame. The Face—"Slant" Allen's hell-haunted face, tortured and terrible—glared out at her from the broad white field of the canvas.
There was sheer amazement in the down-drop of the girl's lean jaw and a suggestion of terror in the gasp with which she filled her deflated lungs. But the piercing "ey-yu" with which that air was forced out again was a battle-cry. Fortunately, I was standing a couple of paces nearer the canvas than was she; but even with that handicap in my favour it was a near squeak. I caught the gleam of a flashing blade and a quick grab sunk my crooked fingers deep into the flesh of a thrusting arm. Hurling the arrested figure back toward the door, I stooped and picked up a knife—that beautifully balanced Portuguese throwing-knife that Allen and I had been flinging at the swelling bole of the big bottle-tree the previous Sunday. To this day I do not know whether Rona thought she was attacking a reincarnation or a ghost, or was only bent on destroying an uncannily life-like portrait that awakened savage memories.
I swished the fallen rug from under the easel and rehung it—evenly this time—before turning to confront Rona, where she was readjusting—with raised elbows and twinkling thumbs—the hitch of the peacock shawl in the opposite corner of the room. She had scrambled to her feet again, but gave no sign of returning to the attack. Her eyes were snapping with anger and excitement, but I did not have the feeling that she entertained any especial personal resentment against me for the rough handling I had given her.
"So it was you after all," I said slowly, fingering the tapering blade of the tell-tale knife.
Her lips moved as though in reply, but if she said anything coherent it was drowned in the roar of a sudden gust of wind that buffetted the bungalow at that moment. I turned to the girl again after closing the north windows. Her eyes were fixed on vacancy now, and her head, with the clean-cut chin slightly elevated, was turned sideways in an attitude of listening. As the banging of the trees died down my own duller tympana registered a new vibration—and yet not quite new—something that I had heard very recently. Ah, now I had it! The baying of a hound, very near and very eager. A red-hot scent beyond doubt, I told myself. But why were Rawdon's "nigger-chasers" running at that hour, and into the teeth of a rising hurricane? There was questioning in both our glances as the girl's eyes met mine, but in hers certainly no hint of fear.
Before either of us spoke a firm, quick step sounded from the back of the house, and a moment later, following a light tap on the door, Ranga entered from my bedroom. If he was surprised at Rona's presence, or at her somewhat dishevelled appearance, he gave no sign of it. Nor was there about me—now that I was holding the knife behind my back—anything to suggest to the Malay that he had stumbled upon a situation in the least out of the normal.
Tuan "Slant" was sleeping heavily, he said, and so he had snatched the opportunity to come up for some of his own Borneo tobacco and a change of clothes. They had nothing in the hospital large enough for him. Tuan "Slant" was growing stronger in body, but—he finished by tapping his temple and shaking his head dubiously.
A heavier broadside of the gathering storm shook the house again, this time sending a shudder through its stout frame and wringing a vibrant ping from the tautened "hurricane cables" that guyed its windward corners. Out of the heart of that blast came the bell-mouthed baying of the nearing hound. He was still sounding his clear bugle notes as he swung in through the gate from the road, but down the driveway, with the incense of the burning trail conjuring visions of an imminent quarry in his brain, he began tearing his throat with harsh, savage yelps of eagerness. I was looking for his charge to come against the closed front door, but a sudden shower of claw-spurned gravel rat-a-tat-ing against the glass of the French windows told that he had wheeled in his tracks and was circling to the rear of the house. A yell and a clatter of saucepans from the kitchen, a scramble of slipping claws upon the hardwood floor of the back hallway, and in from the open door of my bedroom—drooling-fanged, bloody-eyed and bloody-minded—came dashing that black bolt of canine fury, closing on his cornered quarry for the death-grapple.
Ranga, on entering, had moved a step or two aside from the door, a survival doubtless of his training at sea, where an idle man blocking a companionway or a ladder is liable to be taught manners by a rap on the head. Rona was still in the corner to which I had hurled her. I was at the opposite corner, near the big canvas and twenty feet or more from the girl. The flying hound tried to check himself at the doorway, but the polished floor gave him no grip for his claws. Down on his haunches, with forefeet poked rigidly ahead, he slid the full width of the room, tobogganing on a smooth-running Samoan mat for the last half of the distance.
With the certainty of Rona's guilt fixed in my mind by her possession of Allen's knife, I had no doubt, from the moment the hound's baying indicated it had turned into the clearing, that it was hot on her trail. But even so, the brute's entry by the bedroom door had been so unexpected and so swift that I had not stirred from my tracks to the girl's defence when the snarling animal, shooting across the room, brought up against the wall close beside her. Even Ranga, leaping forward instantly as he had, was scarcely past the middle of the floor when the beast regained its balance and bearings almost at the girl's feet. Drawing back into the angle of the walls and crouching low like a cornered cat, Rona awaited the attack, while Ranga, barehanded, and I with the throwing-knife rushed in to her aid. Without an instant's hesitation, the savage beast spun to a full right-about and, brushing the girl's advanced knee as though it was no more than the piano stool, launched itself full at the throat of the yellow man.
Ranga's counter was swift, sure and terrible. He might have been fighting bloodhounds barehanded from childhood, for all the surprise and dismay he showed at the sudden attack. Where my own instinct (if I had not tried to side-step the charge completely) would have been to grapple for the brute's throat from beneath, he simply struck—or rather grabbed—down from above. The impact crushed the snarling beast to the floor, but when Ranga raised his arm again he was gripping his struggling canine adversary by the scruff of the neck. Or rather, I thought it was the scruff. In reality his grip was a bit more inclusive.
Holding the floundering black form at arm's length with no more effort than if it had been a terrier, Ranga suddenly tightened his hold. I saw the hound's red-lidded eyes grow slant and elongated like a Chinaman's as the skin of its scalp was drawn backward in the relentless vise closing from behind; then a grinding snick cut short an unearthly scream of pain, and the hound was dangling limp and lifeless with a crumpled spine at the end of a gibbet of knotted yellow muscle. Ranga tossed lightly aside what a moment before had been a flying bolt of wrath, and where the great head doubled under against a flowered chintz window-curtain I saw the sprawling outline of a tooth-torn ear, doubtless the scar of a fight with a luckier ending.
In its strangely terrible tenseness, the electrically charged silence that succeeded has no parallel in my experience. Not a word was spoken. The only sound was the banging of the wind-wrenched trees against the house and the nearing mutter of the thunder in the north. The significance of the fact that it was Ranga the dog had been trailing was lost upon neither Rona nor me, nor yet upon the big Malay himself. The latter met my questioning glance steadily for a moment, but it was the girl's piercing stare of fierce concentration that drew and held his troubled black eyes. While one might have counted fifty those two stood and (as I have since understood) communed with eye and mind. It was a sudden thunder-clap that broke the connection and checked the interflow of thought. Ranga had not winced at the blinding flash and close-following crash, but Rona's higher strung nerves fluttered for an instant, and the wire was down. But Ranga's words indicated that the message was about complete.
"Yes, I did it, Tuan," he said quietly, turning toward me as though answering my unspoken question. "It had to be, Tuan, and—yes, I did it."
It was not until afterwards I recalled that it was to Rona I addressed my protest. "But 'Slant' swore to me that he did not kill Bell; that he was in no way responsible for his death, first or last."
A spasm of passion twisted the girl's face to the seeming of an ape's as she caught the drift of my words, and her reply was almost a scream. "Not ke-el Bel-la? 'Slan' do worse than ke-el. He—"
The chorus of the leashed pack that checked her words came from so close at hand that it made itself heard above the now unbroken roar of the storm. There was the clang of shod hoofs on a metalled road, too, and I thought I could distinguish the shouts of men. The hunt was closing in for the kill.
"I think I go now, Tuan. I like the better to fight outside." Ranga's voice was as quiet and controlled as when he had told me the news from the hospital a few minutes before; but there was the lust of battle in his flashing eyes, eagerness for action in the quick heave of his chest.
There was no time to debate and decide the question as to who had committed the outrage upon Hartley Allen, or of what justification there might have been for it. One thing only was clear to me, and that was that I was not going to throw either Rona or Ranga to the dogs—no, nor to the law either—if there was any way of avoiding it. My mind—as was always the case when I had fasted long and drunk absinthe sparingly—worked with lightning swiftness.
"Don't fight unless you have to," I said, stepping closer to Ranga as the wind and thunder threatened to drown my voice. "Follow down the stream over the falls. Jump won't hurt you—plenty of water at the bottom. That'll throw off the dogs. Then follow the path by the flume down to the sea. The rain'll kill your trail for the dogs. It ought to be starting any minute now. Wait for me on the pier by the old sugar mill. I'll come for you in a boat as soon as I can."
Baring his teeth in a quick grin of comprehension, the big fellow wheeled and started for the front door. I caught his arm and checked him just in time. "This way!" I shouted. "Through my bedroom window. Beat it! Lekas!"
Again that intelligent tooth-flash of understanding. Ranga's foreshortened bulk was making a blurred blot against the blue-green lightning flash playing across the rear bedroom window as I turned to answer a heavy banging at the front door. Everything considered, I have always felt that I got away fairly well with the situation with which I now found myself confronted. It was Harpool, the Chief of Police, who staggered into the room, bracing back against the push of the still rising wind. The flutter of the lightning revealed two or three horses in the driveway, and three or four men following a bunch of howling dogs around the corner of the house.
I was on the point of opening up at the Chief with a facetious sally about the way he was sending his hounds around to frighten my lady visitors, when I chanced to glance to the corner where Rona had been, and lo—I had no lady visitor! The girl was gone, but whether under the couch or out of one of the windows I could not guess. So I only gaped rather stupidly and said nothing, leaving the Chief to open the attack. I was glad the face on the canvas was covered, and only wished there had been time to throw something over the crumpled remnants of the big black-and-tan.
"I am quite satisfied it isn't you we want, Mr. Whitney," Harpool began, with a shade of embarrassment, I thought. "But the fact remains that Rawdon's hounds have followed a live scent straight to this house, and I have every reason to believe they are on the trail of the man who tied up Hartley Allen. Perhaps you can explain—"
"I think I can," I cut in, anxious to gain time for the fugitive, but realizing that no end would be served by trying to conceal his identity. "You're right that it was a hot scent. Just a few degrees too hot for your canine deputy there in the corner. It's the end of his trail, I'm afraid."
The Chief strode over to the limp corpse and turned it with his foot. "Who killed this hound?" he demanded angrily, regarding me suspiciously for the first time.
"Not I, Chief," I replied jauntily; "but can't you guess? You can see for yourself that he hasn't been shot—or clubbed—or poisoned. Well, then—look at that neck. Do you know of more than one man in these parts capable of snapping a bloodhound's spine between his thumb and forefinger?" (I added that little thumb-and-forefinger touch with malice aforethought, for I wanted to impress upon Harpool—for whatever it might be worth—that it was no old broken-down of a "Squid" Saunders that he was going to try to run to earth out there in the darkness.)
The Chief's honest eyes opened with amazement as the answer dawned upon him. "You don't mean the big Malay?" he ejaculated incredulously. "Why, he has been tending Allen like a sister for two days. Everyone in the hospital has been speaking about his devotion."
"No other," I answered. "Ranga came up from the hospital less than half an hour ago to get a shift of togs. Five minutes later that hound came tearing in through the back entrance and flew at his throat—right here in my studio. You see the result. That fellow can drop a horse with his fist—a dog is no more than a flea to him."
"I can hardly believe it," said the Chief, shaking his head; "but the fact remains that if the hound went for him, he's our man. I hope we won't have to shoot him.... But Rawdon will never stand by and see his dogs pinched out like that. This fellow was his best hound by a mile. Drive him crazy when he finds it's been dished. Gawd, that neck might have been run over by a steam tram! What in hell—"
A bedlam of howls and yells and savage oaths rising from the rear of the house at this juncture broke in upon the Chief and caused him to bolt on the double through the door of the corridor leading to the kitchen. The unearthly racket, with the rattle of pistol shots spattering through it, made me certain that Ranga had run afoul of the hunt at his first jump. Shuddering at the thought of the terrible fight that must ensue, I pushed on after Harpool, reaching the further end of the corridor just in time to catch his reeling form as he staggered back from a bullet that had burned his scalp the instant he opened the kitchen door. Astride the sill of a kicked-in window sat old Rawdon, his bearded face distorted with fury and pain, coughing, sneezing, cursing, and firing impartially at all parts of the long, low room. Under the sink, almost at Rawdon's feet but quite out of pistol range, crouched Suey, blinking blandly and rubbing his almond eyes. He it was who was the author of an unpremeditated diversion which was the only thing in the world that prevented Ranga being nabbed at the outset.
The late black-and-tan, in following Ranga's trail, had entered the kitchen by snapping his way through the light screen door. To prevent his lines being thus penetrated a second time, the foxy Celestial, when he heard the main pack rallying to the attack, closed and bolted the heavy outside door of his domain and, with a little surprise packet in his hand, took station beside the little swinging window above the sink. Waiting with true Oriental restraint till the clamouring enemy was compactly bunched upon the porch outside, Suey gently raised the screen and emptied the contents of a can of red pepper into their midst. The paprika appeared to have been pretty fairly divided between three of the most oncoming of the dogs and their equally forward master. The hounds quit for the night, then and there, but the old bushranger's fighting spirit urged him on to make the best stand he could with his automatic. Considering the way he was being racked with coughs and sneezes, and that he only blazed away at the creak of an opening door his streaming eyes could not locate, his shot that welcomed the Chief was by no means uncreditable. It cut a neat furrow through Harpool's stubby pompadour and even drew a drop or two of blood.
The Chief's fervent swearing stayed Rawdon's murderous hand just as he had finished fumbling a fresh clip of cartridges into his emptied "thirty-eight" and was about to start fusillading anew. Roaring mad as he was, his first thought was for the dogs. "Get a wet rag round the muzzles o' Dingo an' Jackaroo 'fore you let 'em inter this 'ell 'ole," he growled between sneezes. "Our bloke's somew'ere in this 'ere 'ouse," he went on, laving his smarting eyes at the water-tap of the sink above Suey's jack-knifed form. "Don't let 'im slope by the front door, Chief, now we've got 'im in 'is 'ole."
"Sloped already," snapped Harpool laconically, adding that most of the sloping had been done while Rawdon was setting his dogs on a "bally Chink cook." In a few terse sentences the Chief explained the way things stood, giving it as his opinion that their man would be trying to follow the stream right across the plantation and down through the belt of bush to the mangrove swamps. The loss of the big black-and-tan was so great a calamity for the old bushranger that it had the effect of sobering rather than further exciting him. His red rage burned white and flamed inwardly rather than outwardly. "I'll know 'ow to even up for 'im killin' Starlight w'en I gets that bloody wombat in a patch o' dry bush. Nice bit o' a torch that greasy 'ulk o' 'im'll make. Come along! We'll 'ave a better chance o' makin' a quick bag if we get 'im in sight 'fore the rain starts."
There were still left two dogs with undamaged "noses." Fearful that these, if they took the bridle-path down the right side of the creek, might pick up Ranga's trail where he would have left the stream at the pool, I made bold to suggest a plan calculated to carry them wide of that danger point. "Why don't you ford here," I said, "and push straight across the plantation to the end of the big loop the stream makes round the nigger village? Your man will be all of an hour making that point if he wades by the stream. You can make it through the cane in twenty minutes and be waiting there to bag him."
The Chief was inclined to favour the plan—until Rawdon cut in sarcastically with: "An' wot's to pervent the bloody bloke's givin' us the slip a 'undred times 'tween 'ere an' there? One hound down each side o' the stream—that's the only way to be sure o' clappin' our 'ooks inter 'im."
That was sound reasoning of course—from Rawdon's standpoint,—and I didn't dare urge my plan any further. Ten minutes later, when a sudden eager baying came down the wind from the direction of the waterfall, I felt sure my worst fears were realized. It was, therefore, with only the faintest hopes of success, that I pulled myself together to take the first step in making good my promise to pick up Ranga at the pier of the old sugar mill.
The priceless Suey had crawled out from under the sink as the sounds of the hunt grew faint, and turned to tidying the kitchen as though cleaning up after a pack of bloodhounds was just a pleasant little incidental of the day's work. When I ordered him to get me out a fresh bottle of absinthe he did not even forget the cracked ice. I told him I should probably be away for most of the night, and that if Rona showed up in the interim to see that she was made comfortable till my return. "All lightee girl-ee. Otha fell-ee too much peppa can have," he said decisively. I told him to do what he liked to Rawdon, but to give the Chief a shake-down if he asked for it.