Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

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.