Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

That was good news. The best I could have hoped for. It confirmed my growing belief that I was not going to have to do much, if any, seeking in order to meet my man. And it was a hundred to one that the doctor with whom I had talked on the Utupua had told Allen of the conversation as soon as the latter came out of his long sleep, I was even inclined to the opinion that his decision to go south as soon as he could had been influenced by a desire to find out once and for all what attitude I was going to take toward him. This was all to the good. There was no need of my hurrying back to Townsville now. I could stay in Sydney and enjoy my triumph while watching that of the Hon. Hartley Allen develop. With a lighter heart than I had known since the rumble of the Cora's anchor chain awakened me on that day of hateful memory in Kai, I tumbled out of bed, took a cold bath, and went down to the dining-room for breakfast—the greatest burst of early matutinal energy I had shown in years.

The avidity of the interest of the public in the Hon. Hartley Allen increased day by day as the time approached for the hero to come south. All of the important papers had special men on the job in Townsville, and every scrap of news bearing the least relation to the man of the hour was instantly put on the wires and rushed into print. Save for that one announcement that he intended visiting Sydney, Allen himself gave out nothing. The correspondents had to confine themselves to reports of his continued improvement in health, as passed out to them by the doctors, and to speculation—columns of it—as to what effect Allen's return might be expected to have upon racing. His elder brother—Sir James, who was now in England—had allowed Hartley's stable to run down a good deal after the latter had been shipped off to the Islands. There were a few good horses left after the best of the string had been sold to pay off debts, and these would form a nucleus which could not fail to develop quickly into a factor to be reckoned with in the meets of next season. There was no limit to the discussion of this phase of the affair, Melbourne and Sydney racing experts devoting even more space to it than the special men in Townsville.

Of the story of the Cora Andrews there was nothing new whatever being brought out. If Allen was telling the doctors at the Quarantine Station anything, it must have been in confidence, for these professed to have learned nothing further every time the correspondents pressed them for details. The schooner herself, it was reported, had broken from her mooring during a gale and been driven upon the beach of Cleveland Bay, some miles from the town. A hole had been stove in her bow and it would be impossible to get her off before considerable repairs were carried out. As she had not been disinfected since the removal of the plague victims, there would probably be some delay about the repairs, especially as the question of her ownership was in doubt. She had belonged to the man who sailed her in the labour-recruiting trade, and he was dead. So was the Skipper who had taken her over in the Louisiades. It looked like the Hon. Hartley Allen had the most valid claim to her, but that was a matter to be adjusted by the courts in any event. In the meantime, the schooner, as she was lying in fairly quiet water, was probably safe until the next gale. Thus the papers.

When Allen finally came out of quarantine it transpired that he would have a wait of three days on his hands before there was a steamer departing for the south. The delay was unavoidable, although an enthusiastic Sydney paper had suggested that the Admiral commanding the Australian Naval Station should detach a gunboat to bring the hero home. Allen, it appeared, had actually tried to avoid meeting the newspaper men, and consented to do so finally only on the condition that he would not be expected to give out anything in the way of an interview in respect to his past, present or future. As they had no alternative in the matter, the correspondents accepted the ultimatum, but only—as most of them confessed—in the hope of getting it modified when action was joined. They were doomed to disappointment.

Allen received them on the veranda of a house that had been put at his disposal by a prominent local shipping man—a detached bungalow in the grounds of the latter's home on the outskirts of the town. They reported him looking rather soft—a good two stone heavier than his former riding weight. He was heavily browned from the tropical sun, showed a tinge of yellow—doubtless from malaria and dengue,—and his face was deeply lined about the eyes and mouth. He looked to have aged rather more than the five years of his absence: but life in the Islands was hardly the rest cure most Australians fancied it. No, not by a long shot.

Except for his refusal to tell anything whatever of the story of how he had brought the plague ship through the Great Barrier Reef, Allen had been very courteous and agreeable to the pressmen. They all agreed that he was in good fettle—quite full of beans. Indeed, it was Allen who did all of the interviewing. Persistently refusing to answer any questions about himself, he was avid of interest concerning all that had happened in the racing world during his absence. What were the real facts behind the breakdown of the Colchester filly after she had won the Victoria National so handily? Who was that colt Ballarat Boy out of?—the one that had upset all the dope in the spring meet at Adelaide. Were Tod Sloan and Skeets Martin still piling up wins in England? What was the secret of their success? Was there any chance of these or any other of the Yank jockeys coming to Australia?

Answering such questions as these for an hour was the way that bunch of high-salaried feature writers interviewed the Hon. Hartley Allen. And when, as one of them put it in somewhat mixed simile, they were "pumped dry as a last year's dope sheet," the hero announced that the interview was over.

Disappointed in their endeavours to pry any pearls from the oyster into which Allen (for reasons best known to himself) had metamorphosed himself, the correspondents made the best of a bad job by playing up the modesty of the man they had been sent a thousand miles or so to interview. Modest was an adjective that—in the light of what most of them knew of Allen's past—it hadn't occurred to any of them to use before. Now, however, they made up for lost time. The modest hero did this, or the modest hero said that.... There was modesty in the way he stroked his chin, in the shrug of his shoulders, in the way he crossed and uncrossed his legs when sitting. His habit of looking sideways when speaking was rated as a sign of modesty; so was the trick of stroking his cheroot between thumb and forefinger as he smoked. Modest—hero—those words became permanently wedded in my mind during the week that I was reading leaders written with them for an inspiration, the report of sermons preached with them as a text. I cannot hear the one of them to this day without thinking of the other. Modest hero! In the estimation of the public "Slant" Allen, whom I had always thought of as the most egotistic man I had ever known, remained that to the—until public estimation ceased to interest him.

There was one little item of news telegraphed from Townsville which I read with a good deal of grim amusement. The day before his departure Allen was given some kind of a send-off in the Town Hall. As he was riding down the main street on his way to this affair, a man ducked under the rope holding the crowd back at the curb, rushed at the open carriage and aimed a blow at the breast of the hero with a knife. No whit perturbed, the latter had coolly deflected the thrust by striking up the assailant's elbow with his left hand. Then, seizing the ruffian's wrist with his right hand, he had brought it sharply down on the edge of the carriage door, shattering the bones and causing the knife to fall from the relaxed fingers to the pavement. Infuriated by the dastardly attack, the crowd had set upon the would-be assassin, who was only saved from being mauled to death through the interference of none other than Allen himself.

The correspondents were much impressed, not only by the behaviour of the generous-hearted hero in intervening to save the life of the man who had just tried to take his own, but also—and especially—by a curious little circumstance in connection therewith. It was observed, in short, that, while Allen had defended his own body most effectually with his bare hands, as soon as he saw that the man who had attacked him was on the verge of being killed by a bloody-minded mob, quite beyond police control, he whipped out a revolver and used the menace of it to clear a space around the trampled body of his late assailant. The correspondents all thought that was rather fine; indeed, I was inclined to think so myself.