Hell's Hatches

CHAPTER VII
RONA COMES ABOARD

Well, I still think I was right on the score of the futility of further words. Nothing more that I could have said would have changed the situation; but was there nothing more that I could have done? Rona answered that question, so far as she herself was concerned, then and there, though hardly in a way that I had the wit or the will to profit by.

Bell's answer to the girl's anxious appeal that she be allowed to join him had been no less brusque and decided than that he had made to mine. "Sorry, honey. No 'commodations fo' ladies this voyage. You wun't intended to nu'se niggas, anyhow. Can't be done, honey." Then, to me: "Time to be shovin' off now, Whitney. Tide's already on the tu'n. Right sorry to have to hurry you-all this way." Not a word of farewell.... Navy training would not down.

"Bel-la, leesten to me!" There was more threat than entreaty in Rona's voice now. Beyond doubt, he had never crossed her before. That she was hurt and angry showed in every line of her tense figure, as she balanced precariously with her left foot on the outrigger and her right on the port weatherboard. "Bel-la, by crackee, I say I go with you! If you let me come on schoona, all good. If you say no, by crackee, I—I sweem! I sweem afta you. You know I good sweema, Bel-la."

Swim! I knew the girl well enough to know it was not a bluff, and Bell must have known even better. I had heard him speak many a time of her absolute lack of fear. Also, although at that moment his imagination was not quickened (as mine was) by the drunken roll a black cadaver under the counter gave as a questing nose pushed into it from below, he must have known what shrift a swimmer would have in those shark-infested waters.

Bell's mouth twitched at her words (I could just see his head and shoulders where he conned ship with a foot on the starboard rail and a hand in the shrouds of the mainmast), but he made no reply. Doubtless he counted on my doing what I could to fish her out before anything happened. Sweeping his eye fore and aft, he noted how the turning tide had swung the schooner so that she headed directly away from the passage, with the fluky puffs of the freshening trade wind coming over her port quarter. Then, cautioning the men standing by at the fore and main sheets to "take in sma't" as she gathered way, he bellowed the order to "Heave away!"

The ululant surge of the bêche-de-mer anchor chantey floated aft as the blacks resumed their rhythmic tramp around the capstan.

I have often wondered if the frank invitation in the swinging lines might not have been the inspiration of Rona's astonishing action.

The obligato of the incoming chain grinding through the hawse-pipe had accompanied the chantey for only a stave or two, when Allen's clear, ringing voice (he had not needed to be told where a mate belonged when a ship was getting under way) announced from the forecastle: "Anchor broken out, sir!"

"Walk lively! Get catted 'fore she hits the passage!" Bell roared back, anxious lest the great length of chain still out would make trouble where the lagoon shoaled at its seaward entrance. A moment later he came aft and relieved the man at the wheel, ordering the latter to stand by to keep the mainsheet from fouling the nigger wire. It was the gigantic Malay, Ranga-Ro, bulking mightily against the purpling eastern twilight sky, who responded with a deep-rumbling "Ay, ay, su!" and sprang to the starboard rail to clear the sagging lines running back from the unstable-minded main boom. Then the amazing thing befell.

As the schooner gathered way and began gliding ahead under the impulse of the half-filled mainsail, Rona had crouched as though for a spring at the towing whaleboat. The painter of the latter, however, made fast on the port side of the taffrail, brought the yawning double-ender too far away for anything but a creature with wings to bridge the gap. Seeing it was impossible to jump to the whaleboat, she straightened up again, swaying undulantly as the dugout bobbed about in the gently heaving wake of the schooner.

"Bel-la, I come!" There was more of anger than despair in that steel-clear cry; more indignation than resignation in the hair-trigger poise of the reed-slender figure. The instant that she hesitated on the chance that this final threat might soften Bell's resolve was all that prevented what at best could not have been other than a nasty mess for the both of us. There was no possible chance for me to intercept her before she jumped, and, once in the water, I knew she was quite equal to upsetting the canoe rather than be dragged back into it. As for help from the schooner—Bell had determined upon his course, and his eyes, like his mind, were directed ahead, not astern.

It was Ranga-Ro (deftly fending the slack of the mainsheet from the nigger wire), not Bell, who turned at the sound of Rona's cry. Whether or not he had glimpsed her during the previous ten minutes, I am not sure; but for the girl (whose eyes had been on Bell from first to last), I was certain that the big Malay had not impinged upon her vision before. Recognition of his racial characteristics must have been instantaneous. They were written for even an ethnic novice to read in the giant's straight black hair, high cheek bones, wide mouth, with its betel nut-stained teeth, and the light golden yellow skin clothing the monstrously muscled limbs. The peculiar twist of the loosely-looped sarong and a wisp of rolled leaf behind an ear would have located him even more definitely; but to Rona the fact that there was an indubitable Malay staring into her eyes from the nearest rail of the receding schooner, made the incidental of his being a Moluccan—a Spice Island man—of little moment. She was used to handling big golden-yellow men.... They had proved a deal more manageable than a certain white man she could mention.

I heard, without understanding, the swift run of her tripplingly-tongued Malay, and only the sibilant hiss of "Lekas! Lekas!" at the end told me that what she had ordered done was to be done "quickly! quickly!" Her next order—to me—was no less insistent. "Paddl' catch'n schoona, Whit-nee! Paddl' lak hell!"

The girl's imperious mood brooked no delay. My work was cut out clear for me, and, everything considered, I am not at all sure that the yellow man—on the score of zeal, at least—outdid the white man in carrying out the orders he had received. Slipping back to the stern to even up the down-by-the-head trim Rona's presence in the bow gave the cranky dugout, I plied the stubby paddle with all the strength and skill at my command. The crazy craft rode higher now with Allen out of it, but even so the speed with which I drove it threw a wave inches above the hole in the crumbling bow. The up-curling water poured through in a steady stream. My race, I saw, was against that rising flood in the bottom of the canoe quite as much as against the schooner.

There were only eight or ten yards to make up on the still slowly moving Cora, and, barring swamping or a collision with a shark or a floating nigger, I felt that I could do it easily. But what to do when we had caught her up? Ah, there was where the yellow man was to come in. Ranga was just as busily carrying out his orders as was I. "Clear away the nigger wire and stand by to pick me up," had plainly been the drift of that swift stream of Malay Rona had directed at him. Superbly disdainful of the sharp barbs that were slashing his bare palms to ribbons, he forced the whole savage entanglement down to the deck with no more apparent effort than a child would have used in collapsing a string-strung "cat's-cradle." Rove through steel stanchions set at close intervals along the rail, the wire could not be torn entirely clear. So the direct and simple-minded Ranga did the next best thing—gave a mighty heave and brought three or four of the nearest stanchions down to the deck in the tangle of wire they had supported.

An order from Bell at this juncture would probably have stopped this wholesale destruction of his protective entanglement; or perhaps I should say possibly rather than probably. One cannot be sure just how strong a force Rona had lashed into action. It has since occurred to me that the man must have been gripped with something very closely akin to the madness of amok to handle that wire with his naked hands as he did. It may be that the only one from whom he would have brooked interference was the one who had fired that savage train of energy—Rona. These points were not to be put to the test, however. From first to last Bell—although, from the wrecking of the wire almost under his very eyes, he must have known what was going on—never looked back.

What with the settling of the half-swamped canoe and the accelerating speed of the schooner, it was touch-and-go at the end. I had gained by feet at first; then by inches; and finally, with but a couple of yards more needed to bring the bow up even with the schooner's counter, I realized that I was no better than holding my own. It was the last ounce of reserve in my aching frame that I called upon for that final spurt. Rona must have sensed that I was going my limit, for she said no word ... only crouched, tense as a waiting wild-cat, for the moment of her spring.

For the first few seconds the gap closed quickly as the canoe gathered increased headway from the impulse of my wildly driven paddle; then more slowly and more slowly, until, again, I was no better than holding even. Another foot, and the jump would be safe. Bending low to make the most of my expiring strength, my eyes wandered from the goal for an instant. It was a shuddering gasp of consternation from the bow that brought them back again. The swooning mainsail, filled by the freshening puffs, was beginning to make its pull felt in earnest. The gap had widened. Instead of gaining a foot I had lost two. That dished me completely. "No good, Rona—I'm—all in," I groaned, and slid limply down into the bottom of the canoe, where the water now lapped level with the thwarts.

Half fainting though I was, the picture of that super-simian spring of Rona's is indelibly etched upon my memory. Save for that one quick gasp, she made no sound. The jump was an impossible one ... sheerly impossible. And yet— Only a swift gathering of muscles—very like the final quivering hunch of an ape that leaps from tree to tree—heralded action. Then, with a back-kick that forced the already half-submerged bow right under, she flashed up to her full height and launched her body into the air.

It was a good jump,—a wonderful one, indeed, considering the unstable take-off—but of course she missed the rail—and by feet. That didn't surprise me.... I had seen it was inevitable. But what I had not reckoned upon was the astonishing length of Ranga's mighty left arm. Standing by with a bight of the mainsheet gripped in his right hand to keep from overbalancing, he had sprung to the top of the rail as Rona jumped, leaning out at all of an angle of forty-five degrees, probably more. It was into the solidly pliant muscles of his great corded left wrist, extended to the full reach of the arm, that Rona clawed with the last half inch of her out-stretched fingers—clawed and held. I say clawed into, not clutched or seized. The girl's hold on Ranga's wrist was not that of an acrobat grabbing over the bar for which he has jumped (her leap was short by an inch at least of giving her a chance to do that), but rather that of a flung cat clawing into the limb or the trunk of a tree. With less strength of fingers or length of nails her hands would merely have brushed the outstretched arm and missed a hold.

Under the impact of that flying hundred and twenty pounds (in spite of her slenderness, Rona must have weighed quite that) of bone and muscle, striking, as it did, just where the greatest leverage would be exerted, Ranga was all but swung round and thrown from his footing. The hastily-seized mainsheet was hardly a scientifically-run guy for the leaning tower of his stressed frame, nor did the wreck of the barbed wire entanglement writhing over the rail offer the solidest of foundations. Back and forth he swayed, like the half unstepped mast of a grounded sloop; then steadied, quiveringly, up to his original tense slant.

The acrobatic miracle wrought by Ranga in swinging Rona's precariously hanging form inboard was the most perfect feat of strength and balance I ever saw, or ever expect to see. It looked as sheerly impossible as the jump had looked—and was accomplished scarcely less quickly. The drawing up of the extended left arm (what a marvellous rippling and bunching of golden muscles that was!) brought the girl's pendant form close in against the corrugated bulge of the giant's chest, reducing the terrific leverage by a good half. A similar doubling up of the right, with a sudden tug on the mainsheet at the end of it, did the rest. For an instant the great rangy rack of corded muscles balanced erect in the midst of the wire-tangle festooned over the rail; then jumped lightly down beyond and deposited its burden on the deck.

Hardly ten seconds could have elapsed from the instant of Rona's jump to the one in which Ranga plumped her down beside Bell at the wheel. The gap between the canoe and the schooner had widened to hardly twenty yards. I could see both the Malay and the girl quite distinctly as, with the latter still looped in the crook of his fingernail-torn left arm, he poised for a moment on the rail. Neither appeared to have turned a hair. Neither seemed in the least flustered ... might have been in the habit of doing that sort of thing every day for all the excitement they showed about it.

The first thing Ranga did, as the dropped mainsheet gave him a free hand, was to reach to the knot of his sarong and satisfy himself that the little bamboo flute tucked in there had ridden out the storm. And Rona—her first move was to gather up and stow an amber-streaming corner of the peacock shawl, which was threatening to catch in an uprearing strand of the nigger wire. Those two funny little incidentals complete my recollections of that breathless quarter-minute. Whether Rona, or Bell, or anyone else on the schooner waved good-bye in my direction I do not recall. Ranga was taking in the slack of the mainsheet when I looked again, and Bell, peering up at the flapping headsails, was grinding away at the wheel. Two or three shots rang out following a commotion forward—probably fired to check a fresh up-surge of the blacks from below.

As Bell brought her round in a wide circle, the Cora's sails were flattened in and she began to beat up toward the entrance of the passage in a series of short tacks. As she headed in past the quay, I heard a burst of cheers roll up from a knot of humanity blurring the beach in front of Jackson's. It was just a big, full-throated general whoop, that first one, but it was quickly followed by a number of other volleys of "huroars" that seemed to carry suggestions of control and leadership. The last of these was a hearty "three-times-three," topped off with a "tiger." "Cheering the parting heroes by name," I muttered to myself, and wondered who that last rousing "tiger" was meant to speed. I was still speculating when the sharp whish of a heeling dorsal, as a sheering shark avoided the submerged outrigger by a hair, awakened me to a rude realization of the fact that the swift tropic night had all but fallen and that I was drifting out with the tide in a holed and barely floating dugout.

Of all the ebbings of the tide of courage that my sorrily spent life had known, and had still to know, those next few minutes—with the Cora dissolving into the swimming dusk as she beat out through the passage, the weirdly green wakes of the sharks lacing the oily-black water with welts of phosphorescence as they assembled for their ghastly banquet, and my swamped canoe teetering in balance between positive and negative buoyancy—registered low-water mark. I have never heard of a despairing absinthe slave trying to break his bonds at the end of the day. It is invariably at the end of the night that he makes his break for liberty—at the beginning of the day he has not the courage to face. But it was the shame of the yellow in me, rather than the green, that held empire now. Rona had brooked no refusal of her demand to be taken on the Cora. Why had I? She had been ready to swim for it. Why should not I? Surely the sea, better than anything else, would wash that yellow stain from my honour and leave it white at the last. I didn't even have to screw my nerve up to the point of jumping over. Listing heavily to starboard as the half-capsized dugout was, one little inch edged to the right, and not even the leverage of the outrigger could keep it from overturning. Just the inclination of my shoulders would do the trick.... I would not even have to take the initiative to the extent of edging along. Surely—

With a quick gasp, I slid sharply to one side—but it was to the left—the outrigger side. The great starshaped welter of green luminescence, where a half-dozen wallowing man-eaters nuzzled into a bobbing witch-fire-streaked shape of unreflecting opacity, proved too much for my last unbroken filament of nerve—all that I needed to make my honour white. I had always dreaded sharks, and it was my horror of them now that checked the worthiest impulse that had stirred me that day. The momentarily eclipsed image of the cooling green bottle took shape again before my eyes, and, after that, there was nothing to do but make the best fight I could to reach it.

Proceeding with infinite caution to avoid the upset which I now feared above everything in the world, I crawled forward along the outrigger side and stopped the hole in the bow with my folded drill jacket, as a necessary preliminary to beginning to bail out with my waterproof sun-helmet. But before I turned to on what could have hardly proved other than a hopeless task, the sound of oars and voices reached my ears, and presently the bow of a hard-pulled whaleboat came pushing up out of the darkness. It was old Jackson whose strong arm reached out and dragged me in over the gunwale. When they got back their breaths lost in cheering the departing schooner, he explained, after depositing my limp form in the stern sheets, Doc Wyndham bawled over to them from "Quarantine" that some cove had been left behind in a foundered canoe. Jackson himself reckoned that the Doc was beginning to go off his nut and see things; but as several of the others seemed to have hazy recollections of something of the same kind, it was thought best to put off and investigate.

"'Ow'd you 'appen to miss c'nections?" Jackson asked sympathetically. "I spotted you paddlin' the canoe off, an' we was so sure the Skipper 'ad signed you on that we give a speshul w'oop in your 'onour. 'W'at's the matter wiv W'itney?' I bellered ('member the night you learned us that one?—time the looted fizz from the Levuka was on tap); an' the boys cum back wiv: ''E's all right!—you bet!—Ev'ry time!'"

"That wasn't the big 'three-times-three' at the end, was it, Jack?" I asked, my face burning with shame at the thought.

"Well, no; 'ardly that un," was the half-apologetic reply. "That ripsnorter was in 'onour uv 'Slant' Allen. Long time pal uv all uv us, 'e is. Slash-bangin' finisher, li'l ol' 'Slant.'... Trust 'im allus to be on 'and w'en they're liftin' 'ell's 'atches."

I knew then that I wasn't going to be tumbling over myself to tell "Slant's" friends on the beach that his volunteering to go with the Cora had been just a shade less voluntary than they reckoned. He had not pulled up dead at his first hurdle as I had, anyhow. No, until I knew more of what had transpired earlier in the day, I was not going to give the man away; and not to his old friends in any case. I would do at least that much homage to his nerve.

Seeing how dead beat I was, Jackson waved back the crowd at the quay and headed me straight for home. He knew what I needed, and I was as grateful for the bluff old outlaw's unspoken sympathy as I was for the help of his sustaining arm. With rare delicacy, he avoided being a witness to my assault on the green bottle by leaving me at the door. Like all the rest of those rough, red-blooded roysterers of Kai, Jackson felt that habitual absinthe drinking was degenerate, almost immoral.... All right for a "Froggy," of course, but not for a proper white man.... A thing that a real self-respecting beach-comber would never allow himself to be guilty of. The fact (which could not be concealed for long) that I was known to be addicted to the habit had taken even more living down than my painting, especially when they learned I was straight Yankee and not a "We-we."

I drank hungrily at first—gulping glass after glass of the cool green liquid,—but stopped just as soon as I found my nerves were steadied and before the first stage of "elevation" was entered upon. (A seasoned drinker takes some time to reach the latter.) Unspeakably tired physically, I dropped off to sleep almost as soon as the absinthe relaxed the tension on my nerves. My rest was dreamless and untroubled—or comparatively so.

CHAPTER VIII
I LEAVE THE ISLAND

Rolling out of bed at the end of twelve straight hours of sleep, I found the Trades blowing fresh and strong again, and the air—after the soddenness of the past week—almost bracing. A plunge from the reef and a piping hot breakfast of fried clams and duck eggs—my first solid food in over thirty-six hours—bucked me up astonishingly. For almost the first time since I came to the island, I was out before ten o'clock—and well in hand, too. I had to be.... There was much that it was up to me to learn—and perhaps to act upon.

That which I most desired to get some line upon was what Allen had been driving at in drugging Bell, or even, possibly, trying to poison him. What was kor-klee? (of which Rona appeared to be so terrified), and how did it act? were questions which I wanted especially to find the answers to. Was it a drug with a delayed action, following a preliminary stupefaction of comparative mildness? If so—no, there was nothing that could be done for Bell in that case; but, as a friend of his, I might do what I could to square the account later on. There was no lack of confidence that morning. The reaction (which had eluded me completely the day before) was strong upon me, and I felt quite equal to any situation that might arise. I still blushed with shame at the thought of the contemptible figure I had cut from dawn to darkness of the day previous, but I was ready to make such atonement as was humanly possible. It was merely one of my "high" moods coming three or four hours ahead of time. I could have slung my colours with telling effect that morning, if there had been a chance for me to get at canvas.

From one and another at Jackson's I gathered a fairly connected account of what had happened during the hours I was away on the leeward side of the island. The salient incidents of this I have already set down. None of them knew much of anything about kor-klee, but all agreed that Doc Wyndham would be sure to be an authority upon it. I dropped the subject for the moment, as I did not care to be pressed for an explanation of why I sought the information. The next day I slipped quietly over and had a long-distance interview with the learned Wyndham.

The Doc had buried the Cora's recruiting agent the night the schooner sailed, doing everything except the digging of the grave with his own hands. He had then returned home and shut himself in for his ten days of solitary quarantine. Solitary is hardly the word, though. Wyndham was far from being alone. Unlike Bell, he was a "spree drinker" rather than a speedy tippler. It was his habit (as he put it himself) to accumulate aridity during five or six months of the most rigorous teetotalism, and then blow up the dam and make the desert blossom like the rose under the stimulus of a generous flood. The breaking up of the Monsoon and the culmination of Doc Wyndham's biennial sprees were bracketed together in the Islands' list of seasonal disturbances.

The desert was hardly due for its wetting at this time, but Wyndham, shaken by his unsuccessful fight to save the Agent's life, was loath to face the ordeal of the confinement ahead of him without company. So (as he explained after he had halted me a dozen paces from his door with a revolver flourished from the window) he called in the only dead sure plague-immune he knew—his old friend John Barleycorn—and raised the floodgates. The last thing he had impressed upon his brain before putting Barleycorn in charge was that he must rigidly confine his desert reclamation project to his own wastes. On no account was he to leave his own house, and, on no account, was anyone to be allowed to enter it. "Strict quarantine's the word," he had repeated to himself many times before he started drinking, and "Strict quarantine's the word" was the greeting—and the warning—I heard when I stepped into the shadow of the big breadfruit tree in front of his door.

Solemn as an owl, Wyndham had been catching purple shrimps (or something of the kind) with a butterfly net and putting them under his microscope for examination. The big brass instrument was set upon a table pulled up to the window, while the shrimps were being harvested from the bosky depths of a patch of elephant-eared taro just outside. It was his favourite hunting and fishing preserve, that taro patch, the Doc had confided to me once, and the rarity and variety of the specimens captured there were rather remarkable. I don't remember many of them, but a sea-cow and a sabre-tooth tiger were among the commonest he had made slides of. Everything went under the microscope, of course. His captures were small in size during the first few days, starting with mere animalculae, but bulked steadily bigger as the desert blossomed to a jungle. It required a microscope with a great latitude of adjustment to handle such a wide range of subjects—but his was a most excellent instrument ... most excellent. Thus the Doc.

Pretending to ignore my approach completely, Wyndham continued squinting through the eye-piece of his microscope until I crunched over the dead-line he had established. Then he flourished the revolver, barked out his quarantine formula, and asked what I wanted. "When I replied that I had come to inquire respecting the effects of a drug called kor-klee, his manner changed instantly. By some queer psychological process quite beyond me to fathom, he started at once speaking French, or rather what he thought was French. It was a weird jargon he had picked up in the Marquesas, where he had spent a year in research work when he first came to the Islands, and where (it was said) only his passion for collecting pearls—other people's—had prevented his winning to international fame for his all-but-successful efforts to isolate the bacteria responsible for the dread fe-fe or elephantiasis.

"Kor-klee—mais oui, mon ami. Je comprend him fella kor-klee too much. Parfaitement. C'est la liqueur essential de la ficus—ficus—nom d'un chien—ficus what-dyucalum. C'est la aphrodisique le plus exquite, le plus fort, en tout le monde. Prenez vous comme ca—whouf!"—and he made a great pretence of inhaling the contents of his shrimp net to show how the drug was administered for that particular purpose.

"Encore—quand—quand eat'm like kai-kai!" he floundered on learnedly; "quand eat'm kor-klee il fait—mak'm mort—dead—tres vite."

Here he interrupted himself to ask for which purpose it was I intended to use the stuff.

"Neither," I denied stoutly. "I was merely asking out of curiosity."

"Parle that talkee a la marines," he scoffed. "Le meme chose talkee parle 'Slant' Allen. Je voudrais connoce ou—ou in hell you fella catch'm kor-klee. I'd like to get my fist on some of the blooming elixir myself," he trailed off into English.

Save for that one lapse, Wyndham, in spite of my reiterated appeals that he speak straight English, rattled on in his impossible Franco-bêche-de-mer from first to last. That which I have tried to render does it scant justice. Most of it was quite unintelligible. At the end of a rather trying half-hour (though it would have been amusing enough had I been less anxious for information that might throw light on the mystery I had set myself to unravel), about all that I had been able to gather was that kor-klee was the name given in the Dutch Indies to several preparations made from the latex of the wild fig of New Guinea. A crude infusion of it was employed by the Papuans in stupefying fish in their rivers. More elaborated extracts were distilled for their narcotic and other properties. One of these, vapourized and inhaled, was much prized by the Rajahs of Malaysia as a quickener of the languid pulse, a restorer of youth. Another—the most powerful extract of all—was a deadly poison—very neat and incisive in its action.

I also understood Wyndham to say that the use of the drug in any form acted as a great exciter of the cravings for alcohol and narcotics on the part of those addicted to these habits. "If that's the case," I said to myself as I turned home, "God pity poor old Bell's teetotal resolutions! It would have been hard enough without anything further in the way of a 'thust aggravata.' I'm afraid he'll be having to exchange rôles with 'Slant' after all—to let the latter be the 'soba Mate of a drunken Skippa.'" Now that I had a chance to think about it, I didn't have any great faith in Bell's ability to refrain from drink for any length of time—certainly for not more than a day or two at the outside. He'd probably see the thing through, I admitted, but not as a "soba Skippa."

Turning over all I had picked up at the end of a couple of days, I felt that I could come pretty near to reconstructing in my mind those scenes of the drama of which there had been no witnesses save the actors themselves. Allen's infatuation for the girl had undoubtedly got the better of him the instant the turn of events suggested a plan which promised to give him undisputed possession of her. To this end he had plotted to get Bell off on a voyage from which there was no more than a negligible chance of his ever returning, while he himself remained behind to enjoy the spoils.

Considering that Allen's plan was evolved upon little more than a moment's notice, there could be no question that it was laid with consummate cleverness and carried out without a hitch—save, of course, for that final fatal slip-up which undid all the rest. To make sure of Bell and disarm his suspicions, Allen had assured the American that he himself would also go on the Cora. That he had tried to poison Bell, I had my doubts. I had not learned enough of how the drug acted to make my speculations on that point of much use. At any rate, with Bell unconscious on the schooner, it had clearly been the Australian's plan to return to the beach and remain there until she sailed, at the turn of the tide. That the Cora should get under way at that time had already been arranged between the unsuspecting Ranga and himself. The pretence that he had missed the schooner while engaged in getting his own and Bell's kits together would save his face with his friends on the beach. This latter consideration, it appears, was something the rascal never lost sight of. In the improbable event that Bell ever returned—but that bridge need not be crossed until it was in sight.

Allen's cropper at the last jump was directly due to his cool assumption (natural enough, considering his success with South Sea ladies generally) that the girl, once Bell was out of the way, would fall into his lap like a ripe mango. That, and his long-curbed passion for her, led him to rush in search of Rona the moment he landed from his first visit to the schooner, and, missing her then, to return before the Cora had got her anchor up. The consequences of his finding her in on this latter occasion I had seen something of myself. How that slip of a girl got the drop on the most notorious bad man in the Islands I could only conjecture. Probably, with Allen, it was the old story—prudence going out of one door as passion entered at the other. I didn't reckon that Rona had ever read the story of Delilah; yet I felt pretty confident that the point of that little Joloano kris had found its way to the pulse of "Slant's" jugular some time after the girl's arm had gone round his neck in what he thought—for a second or two at least—was a warm embrace. Rona's uncanny faculty for getting away with everything she went after—from having her peacock shawl dry-cleaned to boarding a schooner which was all of "two jumps" beyond her reach—had greatly impressed me. And well it might have....

Even allowing that Allen had not tried to poison Bell outright, the fact remained that he had played the worst kind of a low-down trick on the American in treacherously attempting to railroad the latter out of the way and deprive the girl of his protection. That much was plain, and it was dead against the shifty Australian. In "Slant's" favour was the game manner in which he had stood the gaff at the last, when Bell left the way wide open for him to return ashore without even going over the side of the plague-infested schooner. He had not hesitated an instant in staking his life in what he had very fairly characterized as the short end of a hundred-to-one shot. There must be redeeming qualities in a man who could do that, no matter how shot through with infamy his past record had been. It occurred to me as just possible that Bell's magnanimity had struck a responsive chord in Allen's sense of sportsmanship—that the latter was going to play whatever remained of that grim game on the square. If the Cora was lost, or if Allen and Bell and the girl all died of the plague (one or both of which contingencies seemed practically inevitable), the whole slate would be wiped clean anyhow. If not—if the Cora won through with any of those three surviving—some hint of what had transpired on the voyage would certainly be obtainable at Townsville, or whatever port the schooner succeeded in making. In any event, I told myself, it was up to me to get on to Australia at the earliest possible moment.

The fact that my Exhibition would be sure to have opened in Sydney by the time I reached Australia, really had nothing to do with my decision. In spite of the bluff I had tried to put over on Bell, I had had no intention of leaving Kai for a number of months to come. Nor, even after I began getting ready to go, did I attempt to ignore the fact that there might be duties for me to carry out in Townsville, the performance of which would be more likely than not to interfere seriously with my freedom of action for a good deal longer than the art world of Sydney would be inclined to pay homage to my marines.

No, my coming show had nothing to do with my resolve to hurry south, although, naturally, I fully intended to take it in if things shaped so as to make it possible. Since my daubs had been making good with the connoisseurs of Kai—men who knew at first hand the things I was trying to paint,—I had little fear that the more sophisticated critics of civilization would not fall for them. I hadn't any worry on that score. I knew I had been doing good work. But—well, an artist who isn't interested in the way his work will react on his fellow-beings is lacking in a very important stimulus to success.

Kai manifested its usual sympathetic interest in my preparations for departure, but, with characteristic delicacy, asked no questions. Well off the steamer routes, and with only the most infrequent comings and goings of pearling and trading craft, the problem of reaching Australia with any dispatch seemed, at first, a hopeless one. For a while it looked like the best I could do would be to accept "Slim" Patton's kindly offer to run me over in his pearling sloop to Thursday Island, where I could count on getting a south-bound China-Australia liner inside of a fortnight. As Patton was known to be in bad for several little things at Thursday Island, his offer did more credit to his heart than to his head, and I was a good deal relieved when Jackson figured out a plan that promised to make it possible for me to reach my goal by another route. After thumbing a greasy sheet of Burns, Phillip sailings for the best part of an afternoon, the old outlaw suddenly announced he had found reason to believe that, with luck, a cutter getting away from Kai that night could intercept the Solomon-Australia packet at Samarai, off the easternmost tip of New Guinea. To be sure that the thing was done properly, he would take one of his own cutters and sail her himself. As my impedimenta consisted of little beyond a few changes of drills and ducks, my painting kit, and a case of absinthe, and as Jackson used neither paint nor absinthe and wore a flowered sulu in place of ducks and drills, we had little difficulty in getting away on schedule.

Jackson's carefully tabulated calculations—you can do that kind of thing in those latitudes when the southeast Trades are blowing steady and you know your boat—were only wrong by an hour. That is to say, we would have missed the Utupua by something like that had we pushed right in to Samarai. Old "Jack," however, sighting a bituminous smear trailing off above the tufted tops of the coco palms that line the inner passage, promptly shook out all his reefs, hauled up four or five points, and headed away on a course calculated to converge with that of the outgoing steamer a couple of miles to seaward. It was only after an abrupt greening of the tourmaline depths of the passage we had been threading suggested a sudden shoaling that it occurred to him to unroll and study his chart.

"Five 'undred fathom—three 'undred fifty fathom," he read laboriously as his tarry forefinger cruised along the tiny rows of dots and figures indicating soundings. "Three 'undred fathom—two 'undred fifty fathom—one bloody fathom! By Gawd, W'itney, we're 'igh an' dry already! This bally chart says they's only one fathom uv water on this kerblasted coral patch, an' the cutter draws two feet mor'n that."

But he never luffed her, never altered her course a fraction of a point. "More she 'eels the less she draws," he muttered philosophically, sitting down on the weather rail of the cockpit and starting to whittle at the end of a stick of tobacco with his clasp-knife. "Save a lot of wig-waggin' if we do pile up," he continued presently, rolling the shaved-off blackjack between his palms. "Ol' 'Choppy' Tancred never giv' the go-by to even a nigger dugout he could len' a han' to." Then he lighted his pipe, whoofed two or three whirling jets of blue smoke to leeward as he brought it to a proper draw, and settled comfortably back in puffing contentment. Ten minutes later he unrolled the chart again, produced a greasy stub of pencil from the band of his koui-leaf hat, and wrote with great care the letters "P.D." across the dotted expanse where curving lines of figure "1s," like the graphic representation of telegraph lines on a bird's-eye map, indicated six feet of water where the eight-feet-draught cutter had just crossed without a bump.

"As I figger it," Jackson observed drily, rolling up the chart and tossing it down the companionway as a thing whose usefulness was ended,—"as I figger it, a bloke's only manifestin' proper conserv'tism w'en 'e marks as 'Position Doubtful' a reef that ain't tangibl' enuf to stop 'im w'en 'e 'its it." Then, presently, between puffs, as he stretched himself and sidled along to take the wheel as the cutter began to close the slowing steamer: "Wonder 'oo the bally cove'll be 'oo bumps a mis-charted reef w'en 'e thinks 'e's got four 'undred fathom uv brine 'tween his keel an' the bottom uv the Pacific." The notorious inaccuracy of the South Sea charts is a continual source of amusement or wrath—according to whether a misplaced shoal or passage has spelt comedy or tragedy to him—for the man who sails their reef-beset waters.

It was Captain Tancred himself who came tumbling down from the Utupua's bridge to greet me as I clambered up the Jacob's ladder thrown over from the forecastle head. Hearing of him often before, this was the first time I ever set eyes on one of the best-loved characters in the South Pacific. He was a red-faced, blue-eyed, sandy-haired Scot, with a heart as big as his fist, and as soft as his voice was rough. Square himself as his own broad shoulders, and strictly law-abiding personally, he was credited with an amiable weakness for befriending every man who had run afoul of the statutes. I had heard them yarn by the hour at Kai of the way he had smuggled this one out of Australia, and that one into New Guinea; of how he had all but bumped South Head while standing-off-and-on in a "Southerly Buster" one night, on the off chance of picking up a jail-breaker, whose only claim upon Tancred had been that the latter had once before performed a similar service for the reprobate when he had forced his way out of the jug in Suva. Several of the push at Jackson's claimed actually to owe their lives to the bluff old Scot; many of them their liberty. "Choppy" Tancred—so called from his sun-washed red-brown mutton-chop side whiskers—was the nearest thing to a patron saint Kai ever had—that is, until the Rev. Horatio Loveworth hove up on their skyline some years later and converted the lot of them (just about) with the knuckles of his brawny fists.

The last thing Jackson had said, as he steadied the ladder for me to swarm up the Utupua's side, was to the effect that I ought to consider myself dead lucky to be stacking up with "Choppy" Tancred; "or, leastways," he qualified, "you would be if you was in any kind uv a mess 'e could fish you out uv."

"Don't give up hope, Jack," I chaffed back, clawing round a projecting ventilator; "I may land in a mess yet."

"Then don't be forgettin' ther'll allus be a refooge for the errin' on the banks an' brays uv Kai Lagoon," he sang back, taking in the mainsheet as the cutter came up to the wind; "an' that 'Choppy' Tancred'll be the cove to give you a first leg-up on the way back there."

Except for his very evident disappointment over the fact that I disclaimed any need of his help in getting ashore in Australia, Captain Tancred seemed not in the least put out over being stopped and boarded so high-handedly. He had carried many queer birds in his time, so that a man eccentric enough to take a case of drinkables with him on the return trip from the Islands didn't worry him as much as it might have some others. He was also kindly charitable about my "exclusiveness" of evenings (when all normal beings expand and grow sociable at sea), and even good-naturedly tolerant of my weakness for having breakfast in my cabin. I made it up to him to the best of my ability in my "quickened" hours of the afternoon, and we became good friends.... Really good friends. I felt that I could count upon him in a pinch.

The grounding of the company's Port Moresby steamer somewhere along the Barrier Reef was responsible for the fact that the Utupua, this voyage, had been ordered to pick up freight at both Cooktown and Cairns, instead of proceeding direct to Townsville on her regular schedule. This set her back two days, and brought us into the offing at Townsville twenty-four hours after—instead of twenty-four hours before—a sun-blistered, foul-smelling labour-recruiting schooner, with a dead Captain and a score or more of dying niggers, was brought to anchor off the Quarantine Station by the Mate, who, immediately the hook was let go, collapsed on the deck and went to sleep. The empty hulk of the Cora Andrews, swinging lazily to the turning tide, was one of the first things to catch my eye as the Utupua steamed in and tied up to her buoy.

CHAPTER IX
A GRIM TALE OF THE SEA

I have often tried to figure just what effect on the succeeding train of events my earlier arrival in Townsville might have had. I have never come to any very definite conclusions in that connection. There were two or three things that were pretty well bound to happen, and if they hadn't come about one way, there is little doubt that they would have done so in another. Had I been there when the Cora arrived, it is probable that I would have learned definitely at once (instead of somewhat tardily) that Bell had not died of the plague. Certainly, on learning that fact, my impulse would have been to try to force Allen to an immediate showdown—to insist on his proving that the dope he had put in the American's whisky at Kai had not been the direct cause of the latter's death. Such a showdown would have been impossible to bring about at the time, however: for one reason, because Allen had been put into quarantine immediately, and, for another, because, completely played out by thirty-six hours at the wheel without relief, he had sunk into a sleep from which he had not rallied for over two days. Similar considerations would have prevented my seeing Rona. Besides being in quarantine she was in a state of raving delirium, which would have made it impossible for her to convey coherent information. Even Ranga, unaffected in mind and body though he was, I would hardly have been permitted to talk with when he landed, any more than I was two days later. No, everything considered, I fail to see where my earlier arrival would have made much difference in what happened. It must have been slated anyhow, I think—just bound to come off however the incidentals shaped.

Still askance at what he rated as my temerity in making an open landing in Townsville, Captain Tancred had somewhat reluctantly granted my request for a boat to take me ashore as soon as the quarantine officials were through with the ship. I couldn't, of course, go off in the quarantine launch, but one of the doctors lingered a few minutes to tell me what he knew of the Cora. Although her captain had died twenty-four hours before the schooner anchored, his remains had not been buried at sea. This, it appeared, had been largely due to the protests of some sort of a Kanaka girl the Skipper had had with him. According to the Bo'sun's statement (fine upstanding fellow that looked like some kind of a Java man), she had gone plumb off her chump. Tried to knife the Mate first, and then plumped down by the Skipper's remains and threatened to stick the first man to touch it. The Mate, endeavouring to humour her, had not insisted on the burial—a reprehensible weakness on his part.... Common prudence demanded that the dead on a plague ship should be scuppered as soon as the breath was out of their bodies. That is, with a white man; with a nigger it did no harm to anticipate that event by an hour or so—as long as you were sure the fellow was going to whiff out anyway.

The funny part of it was, though (the Doctor went on), that the Skipper had not died of the plague at all. They had not, it was true, made any post-mortem in the rush of things; but it was certain, nevertheless, that his body had not displayed even the preliminary evidences of infection—no swelling of the glands of the groin or under the arms. Magnificent physical specimen the chap was, but plainly a man who had punished an ocean of booze in his day. And yet—confound it all!—there was no evidence that the fellow had drunk himself to death, either. Now if it had been the Mate—he was exuding alcohol from every pore—absolutely reeking with it. Almost made a man drunk to breathe the air down to leeward of him. Seemed to have been on one glorious spree all the way from—somewhere up Solomon-way, he thought it was. Harried the niggers like a fiend, according to the Bo'sun. Clubbed three or four of them to death for not stepping lively enough to his orders. Lucky thing the Skipper had scuppered all but one of the guns the first day out. But not all the booze he had soaked up had effected the nerve of the Mate. Kept his head and his legs to the last, finishing up with a straight twenty-four-hour trick at the wheel. Said none of the crew knew the Barrier Reef as well as he did. Had one nigger holding a parasol over him, another playing a concertina, another waiting handy with a bottle of whisky, and a fourth standing by to block any rushes from the Kanaka girl with her knife. Funny thing it never occurred to him to have her disarmed and tied up, or shut up. Grabbed the bottle of whisky and started to brain the Bo'sun with it every time the latter tried to push in and relieve him at the wheel.

A chap of terrible determination and iron nerves, that Mate was, observed the Doctor. But no wonder.... Think who he was! Allen! The Honourable Hartley Allen! The great Allen! Son of old Sir Jim Allen! Melbourne Cup winner! Best horseman in all Australia! Crooked as they make 'em—but how he could ride! Sent off to the Islands four or five years back for raising some sort of hell. His old Ticket-of-Leave had given him away when they came to strip him for a bath. No possible mistake about it. One of the doctors at the Quarantine Station had set a broken collar-bone for him once after he had fallen in a steeplechase at Coolgardie. Found the marks of the old compound fracture still humping up on the clavicle—the left one....

It was not without difficulty that I brought the excited young medico round to speaking of Bell again. The astounding fact that he himself, with his own hands, had actually helped to put the great and only Hartley Allen to bed, was proving almost too much for him. It was certainly not less than three separate times that he assured me that it was his own silk pajamas that were encasing the limbs of the resurrected hero. He switched subjects reluctantly, rising to go to his waiting launch.

"Nothing in the world the matter with the big fellow—not even too much drink," he said as he began shuffling his health sheets together. "He must have passed away from the sheer mental strain of the stunt he had tackled. Intense nervous strain—that was the one thing written all over the man. Face was starting to bloat a bit from the heat by the time I saw it first; but, even so, it still showed the lines of the most terrible mental suffering. Seemed to have gone out fighting hard to pull himself together—shoulders hunched up, finger-nails clenched deep into palms, lower lip bitten clean through."

"May not those—those things you mention have been caused by physical rather than mental agony?" I asked, speaking very slowly to hide the agitation aroused by this significant intelligence. "Isn't that about the way a man would repress his feelings if he was racked with—with stomach cramps—if he had eaten something that disagreed with him?"

"Possibly so," admitted the Doctor, with the air of a man weighing an idea that had not occurred to him before; "but somehow that wasn't the suggestion they carried to me—nor to any of us. Fact is, though, we didn't give the matter very much attention. That chap was dead—finished,—while the other white man and the girl—to say nothing of forty or fifty niggers—were alive. Then, with the excitement of finding we had the great Hartley Allen on our hands—and, on top of that, having the girl run amuck and give us the slip complete,—there was enough else to think about. The only—"

"The girl gave you the slip?" I interrupted. "How was that? You didn't mention it before."

"Bolted and drowned herself in the creek," he replied; "or at least there's every reason to believe she drowned herself, though they haven't found her body yet. She wasn't going to leave the Skipper, even when we started to take his body away for burial.... And of course we couldn't allow her to leave the Station until her period of quarantine was over. Had to take her away from the body by main force. She fought the whole lot of us with tooth and nail and a wicked little curly-bladed dagger. Stood us all off, too, and looked like getting ready to use the knife on herself when the big Malay (who chanced to be there, but had taken no part in the shindy up to that moment) stepped in, caught her wrist and took the nasty little toy away from her.

"The big yellow man seemed to have rather a quieting effect on the girl. Blind mad as she was, she didn't try to stick him. It seemed to steady her a good deal when he talked to her in her own lingo. She was panting like a cat coming out of a fit when we left her, but was quite over her raving—wasn't even sobbing aloud. She was coming out of her hysteria—getting rational again. Her eyes, though still wild and almost throwing off sparks of anger, were quite free of the crazy look. It looked like our trouble with her was about over, but, to be on the safe side, we locked her up in one of the 'mad' rooms. That was the last anyone has seen of her alive—or any other way, for that matter.

"You wouldn't have believed the thing possible!" he ejaculated feelingly, turning back from the door and slapping the table resoundingly with his portfolio. "That room was made to confine dangerous lunatics in, and it had fulfilled its purpose, too—up to night before last. To make it perfectly secure, it had been constructed without windows—nothing but a two-by-two hole up against the twelve-foot-high ceiling admitted light and air. There were no beds or chairs to be broken up when the occupant had tantrums.... Just sleeping mats, a sheet, a blanket and a mosquito net. No more. Even the wash basin was brought in and taken out by the attendant.

"In locking the girl in, no precautions were omitted except that of strapping her in a strait-jacket, and we had never resorted to that save in violent cases. The window—or rather air-hole—was so high and so small that it had never been considered worth while to put bars on it. But as it was the only conceivable way she could have got out (the attendant is absolutely trustworthy, and the key was not in his hands more than a minute or two anyway), we would have been forced to conclude that the girl had reached it with wings—had not we found the lower four or five feet of wall marked with the prints of the toes and balls of the bare feet which had apparently been violently projected against it. That led us to get a ladder and light and examine about the window more closely. For a foot or more below it the wall was splashed with blood and slightly scratched, where lacerated fingers had clawed at the narrow ledge.

"It did not take us long to figure that, taking the whole length of the room to get going in, the girl had flung herself up the wall something in the way that a terrier will run six or eight feet up the side of a house for a ball or handkerchief fastened there. That's the only way we could account for the toe-prints on the wall, though it is quite possible that, after failing to pull off the trick in that fashion—it's a stunt that looks dead hopeless for anything but a monkey,—she managed it with a straight spring, high enough to get her fingers over the ledge. Even from there, not one woman in a million could pull herself up. But we had already remarked on the extreme wiriness of the girl (a regular human ape she was for agility), and so found it a bit easier to accept the evidence of our eyes. In some way or another she had managed it.

"The air-hole opened out under the eaves of the sheet-iron roof," the Doctor went on, forgetting his waiting launch in the interest of the story, and seating himself again at the table. "It must have taken some jolly snaky wriggling to crawl through the hole, out over the eaves and on top of the roof; but she did it, else she could never have jumped across the big banyan, where we found some twigs broken at the point she hit, and some wisps of silk floss. The other side of that banyan—a hundred feet from the wall of the hospital—spreads until it comes to about fifteen feet from the station wall. The wall is ten feet high, has broken glass on the top of it, with three or four strands of barbed wire above that.

"Swinging to the ground by a pendent air-root on the side she had landed in, the girl crossed under the tree—the marks of her bare feet showing plainly in the soft earth—and used a similar ladder with which to mount on the other side. To be sure of clearing the barbed wire, she had climbed to a firm perch fully twenty-five feet from the ground, and made her final jump from there. Luckily for her, the cane field on the other side of the wall had been flooded but a day or two before—though I don't doubt she would have jumped just the same if it had been to a cobblestone pavement.

"We found the deep prints of her feet, knees and hands where she had sprawled on striking. Her tracks down to the edge of a sprouting row of seed-cane, and the marks where she had crawled up out of a deep irrigating ditch to the road, were all we had to indicate the direction she had taken. As she had seemed plumb daft about the dead Skipper, we figured that she had probably broken out with the idea of going to his grave, and perhaps making an end of herself there. If that was it, she failed. There were no signs whatever of her having been near the fresh mound we had tucked the big fellow away under. It was some distance away from the Station, and, in the night, it isn't likely she would have met anyone to ask the way of. The only grave she found was her own, and not a very restful one at that, I'm afraid.

"We had noticed that she seemed to set great store by a big yellow shawl she wore—rather a fine old piece of Oriental work it looked, with a dragon or some other kind of wild animal embroidered on it. Well, when we found that lying on the bank of Ross Creek, just a bit inland of the town, we felt so sure that it marked the jumping-off place for her in more ways than one. For that reason, what search has been pressed since has been in the form of shooting alligators, and seeing if one of them appears to have enjoyed anything extra-special in the way of tucker lately."

An impatient toot from his launch carried the Doctor to the door again, where he paused long enough to assure me for the third or fourth time that it would be most unlikely that permission would be granted me to see the Mate or the Boatswain of the Cora until their spell of quarantine was over. If I was really anxious about it, he would gladly put in a word for me with the Chief. I would have to show good reason for my request, of course. Perhaps, if it chanced that I was able to shed any light on how the schooner came to get into such a mess—I cut him short by saying that I might call at the Quarantine Station when I came ashore a little later. What I knew about the sailing of the Cora from Kai happened to be the one thing I didn't care to confide to anyone—just yet. Asking the Mate to order my boat to stand by for me a few minutes longer, I went to my cabin to be alone while I turned the fresh developments over in my mind.

I had been prepared to await the coming of the Cora indefinitely. In fact, what I expected above anything else was that the final news would be a report that she had been found piled up on any one of a thousand reefs that spread their coral claws all the way from the Louisiades to the Great Barrier. And in case she did get through, I was quite prepared to learn that both of the white men and the girl had succumbed to the plague. But to be told that, after the schooner had avoided disaster, and all three of them the plague, that the two upon whom my interest and affection had centred were gone—dead,—was just a bit staggering. It was now up to me to determine upon a definite course of action, and, since it was now out of the question attempting to follow my first impulse of going to Allen at once and forcing a showdown, I wanted time to think.

What the Doctor had told me of the way Bell appeared to have died had instantly reawakened my suspicions of Allen. Had the kor-klee, working with a recurrent effect, finally proved fatal? Or had Allen, perhaps, administered a second and stronger dose? He would have had a hundred opportunities to do that had he desired to. Rona's attacks on the Mate, indicating the deadliest hatred, seemed to prove that her first suspicions of him had not weakened during the voyage—more likely, indeed, had hardened to a certainty. The belief I had been entertaining that Allen had made up his mind to play the game out on the square was not very deeply grounded.

My sense of personal loss in the passing of Bell and Rona was not a thing I cared to let myself dwell upon for the moment. There was no question that the news of Rona's death had shocked me even more than that of Bell's. Not that there was anything more between us than I have already told. I had never let myself think of her in terms of physical possession, though the sheer animal attraction of the girl was beyond anything I had ever experienced in a woman. But her appeal to the artistic side of me had been stronger even than that. Just as the thrill I felt at the first sight of her bathing in the pink-lipped bowl of the reef had made the very world itself seem more wonderful and beautiful, so now the depression that filled me on realizing that I was never again to have sight of her made the world seem emptier and drearier.

Another thing: there was no denying that Bell, splendid fellow that he was, had shot his bolt. A real come-back with him was too much to expect. The most that could have been hoped for was that he would "finish in style," and that I was assured he had done, no matter in what agony of soul and body his brave spirit had taken flight. But Rona's bolt was still unsped. The girl had hardly begun to finger Life's bowstring. It was almost as hard to think of the flaming, soaring spirit of her as quenched, as it was to believe that the matchless perfection, the supple gracefulness of her body—shooting alligators to see if any of them had been enjoying anything extra-special in tucker lately! I could not pursue that line of thought any further. I agreed with the Doctor that the fact that the girl had parted with her beloved shawl indicated that she had reached a jumping-off place—a point where she had no further use for it. I could not picture her—living—without its amber-bright flame streaming about her limbs. The wonder was that she had not kept it for a shroud. As I came out upon the deck to go to my boat, the intermittent crack of rifle shots along the shore told me that the "search" had not been abandoned.

Beyond deciding to go ashore and see if anything further could be learned, I had made no plans. It seemed that about the best I could do would be to wait in Townsville until Allen and Ranga were out of quarantine, and then let things shape as they would; but always assuming that, in case the former could not satisfy me he was innocent of Bell's death, I should do what I could to settle the reckoning with him. That would be my atonement—to Bell and to myself—for my sorry failure to "measure up" the day the Cora Andrews came to Kai Lagoon.

Captain Tancred, who had never quite settled it in his own mind how a man who openly admitted he had been living in the Kai colony for months would not have to be smuggled ashore on the quiet if he expected to avoid arrest in Australia, met me at the gangway.

"Best to leave the luggage aboard, lad," he began genially; "then that'll be ain less thing ye'll hae to bother wi' if ye're haen' to cut an' run for it. If ye're not back ag'in by the time I'm gettin' awa', than I'll be sendin' it in for ye on the Company's launch. But ye'd best be hangin' on wi' me a bittie, an' tak' me to see them pictur's ye've been tellin' me aboot in Sydney toon."

My pictures! The Exhibition had slipped my mind completely, driven out by the news of the Cora and the anxieties that had followed in its train. I had told Captain Tancred something of my coming show, but had hardly convinced him. He was far too considerate to say outright that he didn't believe me, but my Kai origin could not be ignored. If I was to have an exhibition of paintings in Sydney, then why was I stopping off in Townsville? On that point—since I didn't want to go into the Cora affair with anyone until I knew how things were going to shape—I had hardly been able to reassure the old sceptic. I might be an artist all right enough—I don't think he had any serious doubts on that score,—but I must also be some kind of a crook. He was plainly convinced in his own mind that I was trying to slip into Australia on the quiet, and was rather hurt because I would not take him into my confidence and let him help me.

But why not take in the Exhibition? In nine days, with any luck in connections, I could go to Sydney and back, with a day or two to spare. Even if the trip ran over that time, it was not likely that the man I wanted to see would be getting away immediately.... And, in any event, I would know how to find him, whether in Australia or the Islands. Further, it could not but have a salutary effect on my nerves to get quite beyond the attraction I felt that Quarantine Station would have for me if I lingered within physical reach of it. Nothing but absinthe, and more absinthe, and then more absinthe, could be depended upon to relieve my nerves once they were fully wrought up, as I knew they must be if I remained in Townsville in enforced inaction, fretting my heart out with impatience. And too much absinthe would mean only one thing—that I would begin the day on which I was to meet "Slant" Allen for a final showdown in a condition of mind and body precisely similar to that in which I had entered upon another day of accursed memory—and, doubtless, with equally shameful consequences to myself.

These thoughts flashed through my mind in a fraction of the time I have taken to set them down. My reply to Captain Tancred followed close upon his suggestion that I leave my luggage aboard.

"I think I'll be going through to Sydney with you, Captain—or at least as far as Brisbane," I said, motioning to the steward to bring up the bags he had already stowed in the waiting boat. "I know no one whose opinion on my daubs I'd rather have than yours. But I'll pay my little visit ashore here just the same, counting on you to get my kit landed in the unlikely event of my not being aboard again when you get under way this afternoon."

I was not long in coming to the conclusion that there was nothing new to be learned ashore, that is, with respect to what had happened on the Cora in the course of her voyage from Kai. This was not because the story was not on everyone's lips.... Quite to the contrary, indeed, the town was agog with the dramatic suddenness of the arrival of the plague ship and its astonishing sequel. But as no one had been allowed to see any of the survivors, such accounts as were current were only those which had been passed out by the quarantine people, and about all the latter knew I felt that I had already gathered that morning from the Doctor on the Utupua. Bell's name was not mentioned, and not a man I talked with knew that the dead white man had been the Skipper.

For Townsville—for all of Australia—the overwhelming appeal of the event was in the fact that a black-birding schooner had been brought into port by an ex-Ticket-of-Leavester, who had volunteered to risk his life in an attempt to save those of half a hundred plague-stricken niggers. That one circumstance in itself was wonderful enough, but when, on top of it, the announcement was made that the hero was none other than the former idol of sporting Australia, the Hon. Hartley Allen, popular imagination was stirred as rarely ever before. What man in all the Antipodes had not envied Allen, the supremely successful owner, rider and sportsman? What woman had not been intrigued by the romantic dash of him? What boy had not dreamed of growing up in his image?

Townsville, delirious with the dramatic appeal of this splendid act on the part of a man who had tasted the wine of adulation as he had drunk the dregs of infamy, was but a microcosm of Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, to all of which the news had been flashed by wire. Every town and hamlet, from Cairns to Hobart, from Perth to Woolongong, were dispatching telegrams of congratulation to a man who was still muttering in his drunken sleep behind the walls of the Townsville Quarantine Station. Sydney was competing with Brisbane for the honour of being the first to bestow the "Freedom of the City" upon the man both of them had had some share in transporting. A special from Sydney to the local sheet, hinted darkly of what might happen to the misguided official who attempted to revive any of the old charges against the man "whose sublime courage had emblazoned his name upon the tablets of undying fame.... A hand that is raised today against the Hon. Hartley Allen is a hand that is raised against the noblest traditions of Australia."

I had to elbow through half of a densely packed block to read that last on the bulletin in front of the Trumpet's office. The mob cheered wildly as the message was chalked up on the blackboard—cheered the stirring sentiment and growled ominously at the suggestion that any hand would dare to be raised against the Hon. Hartley Allen and the noblest traditions of Australia. As I elbowed my way out again, I wondered just what the Charters Towers miner, who had manifested his exuberant approval by slapping me on the back, would have thought—nay, what he would have done—had he known that the hand fingering the guard of the revolver in the right side-pocket of my shooting jacket (I had brought the useful little weapon on the off chance that it might be needed) was rather more likely than not to be raised against at least one of those cherished institutions he was so anxious to uphold.

I began to perceive that the line between dealing out retributive justice to a blackguard of a murderer and assassinating a national hero in cold blood might easily become too hairlike in its tenuousness for a red-eyed Australian jury to admit the existence of it. For it was nothing less than a national hero that "Slant" Allen was becoming, even before he roused from the heavy sleep which had held him ever since he collapsed over the wheel as the Cora came to anchor. That circumstance, I told myself, complicated my task beyond measure, though I couldn't, of course, allow it to make any difference in my program in the event Allen wasn't able to satisfy me that he was guiltless of the murder of my friend. But if things should transpire which might make Allen anxious to put me out of the way—if he, not I were the attacking party—that would simplify things greatly. I began to ponder that felicitous possibility.