Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

"The neck's doing very well, thank you," he was saying, "considering that its windpipe was closed for all of sixty seconds, and that most of the hide was clawed off from it all the way round."

That was really very interesting intelligence, but my mind, deep in another channel, was quite incapable of compassing the significance of it for the moment.

"So you've landed the girl after all," I said woodenly, cursing myself inwardly for the gallery play that had left both guns beyond my reach. For of course he had deliberately put Bell out of the running—shouldered him in the stretch.... Reviving suspicions brought also a realization of what it was up to me to do, now that there was no longer doubt....

"That depends very largely upon you." Allen's quick reply cut short further conjecture.

"Depends upon me?" I interrupted incredulously. "What do you mean by that? Oh, I see. Now that you've put Bell out of the way, perhaps you think that I, as his closest friend, ought to—to distribute his estate, so to speak. If that is the way you figure it, let me tell you that all the distributing you can count on me for will take the form of spraying lead over your worthless hide. You won't mind handing me one of those guns, will you? I don't mind which."

It would have been sheer madness—straight suicide,—that outburst, had Allen been moved by the least desire to get me out of his way. I have never been quite able to make up my mind as to whether it was my instinctive feeling that he had no such desire that prompted me to take more leeway than prudence—nay, the commonest motive of self-preservation—would have dictated; or whether I simply lost my head—let my feelings get away with me. It may well have been the latter, for shocks had been crowding pretty thick, and it was hardly to be expected that the gears of my self-control wouldn't slip a cog now and then under the strain.

Allen's brows drew together in a black scowl for a brief space, and his eyes contracted and grew hard as steel. Then, slowly, the scowl smoothed out, leaving only a deep flush behind it. It was not replaced by his former look of anxious embarrassment, however. Rather his expression was one of a serious, controlled determination.

"That matter of my putting Captain Bell out of the way, as you choose to phrase it," he said sharply, "is one of the things I called to talk with you about. Since you've stated so plainly what you intend to do about it—assuming it's a fact,—perhaps it would be in order to take it up before—before the other matter. As for these pistols.... Since they're yours, help yourself to both of them." Stepping back from the table, well out of reach of the guns, he added: "But I'd rather appreciate it if you could see your way to refraining from using them until I'm through with what I've got to say; after that ..." (he gave his shoulders an indifferent shrug) "it's up to you. Do what you think best with them. I don't want them—neither one of them."

"Of course not," I sneered. "Quite naturally, you'd prefer to use your own. Quite right, too. Get it out of your hip-pocket while you've got a chance. That's a new chum's way of carrying a gun, anyhow. I'm just a bit surprised to see a practised killer like Mister 'Slant' Allen resorting to it. No chance in the world to make an even break of it with a man with a gun in his side-pocket. Tail of your coat's always getting mixed up with your fingers just when you want to use them."

Allen had braced himself after my first taunt came so near to getting him going, and this second one—galling as it must have been—hardly moved him. Only the faintest flutter of a corrugation between the brows told that another scowl had been repressed. The half-surprised tap he gave to the bulge on his hip—a gesture that would most certainly have drawn a shot from me had I had a gun in hand—suggested that he really had forgotten that there was anything there. I am positive that I could have grabbed a revolver from the table and beaten him to it on the draw. A move so naïve on the part of an old gunman convinced me, even before he had spoken a word, that I had let my feelings send me off at half-cock.