Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

"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."