"The Hon. Hartley Allen was found at an early hour this morning" (ran the telegram) "bound, gagged and lashed to the wheel of the schooner Cora Andrews, which has been aground for some time at a lonely spot on the beach of Cleveland Bay, several miles north of Townsville. Allen, who was taken to the General Hospital as soon as he was brought back to town, is a raving maniac and not expected to live out the day. From information in the hands of the police, there is no doubt that the worse-than-assassin was the ex-convict, 'Squid' Saunders, recently released from jail and deported to the Solomons through Allen's generous efforts on his behalf. He is known to have escaped from his northbound steamer at Cairns, stolen a fishing sloop, and is believed to have headed back to Townsville to carry out the dastardly act his disordered brain has evidently nursed for years. As the police seem likely to yield to the popular pressure to employ bloodhounds in running down the fugitive, his capture is probably the matter of but a few hours."
It was a fairly sane, reasonable-reading dispatch, that. None but a man who had felt his blood turn to ice-water at the sight the Herald man had looked upon that morning could appreciate how much credit he deserved for stating the facts so coherently. For myself, at the moment the launch brought us back from the Cora and put us ashore at the landing, I would have been incapable of writing my own name correctly. There was only one thing I could do—nay, would have had to try to do if the world had been disintegrating beneath my feet—and I did it. That is why so much of the next thirty-six hours is a blank in my mind.
It was on a Saturday that Allen had made his spectacular killing in winning the Planters' Handicap, and on Sunday afternoon, to escape the importunities of Townsville generally and the correspondents in particular, he had ridden up to pay me a visit at my hillside bungalow. I had missed the race (through another appointment for a sitting with Rona, which, like the others, she had failed to keep), and so took the occasion to get some account of it at first-hand from Allen. He was in high spirits over his success, but rather inclined to be put out with the impulsive Oakes for breaking down in church that morning and proclaiming to all and sundry the real source of the thirty-five hundred and odd pounds that had fallen at his feet like manna from the skies. What had come nearest to flooring Melanesia's leading bad man, I think, was that the missionary had publicly announced his intention of naming the new medical mission at Suva after the donor!
Allen also, somewhat to my surprise, was not averse to speaking of the "Squid" Saunders episode. "The only redeeming thing about the old ruffian," he observed, "is his affection for that girl of his—the red-haired one, I mean—the black-and-tans don't signify. Rather a remarkable girl, that one, Whitney. She was one of the kind that must either soar to the high places or wallow in the low ones, and I've been sorrier than I can tell that I was slated to—well, not to start her winging for the heights exactly. I really wasn't a lot to blame in the matter, but—that isn't either here or there. Old 'Squid' thinks I was, and will go on thinking so till his dying day—or mine. I tried to get the old reprobate to call it quits when I shipped him off the other day. Do you think he would? No fear. Not the 'Squid.' Indeed, considering the bother I had wangling him out of serving that Kalgoorlie sentence of his, he was rather nasty. He asked me if I was trying to buy him off for fear he'd get me in the end. There wasn't much I could say to that under the circumstances, so I just let him go. Now the purser of the Nawarika wires me from Cooktown to say that the 'Squid' slipped ashore at Cairns and failed to show up again before sailing time. Purser says he still has the hundred quid I gave him to slip Saunders when they put him off in the Solomons. I have turned the wire over to the police, but have asked them to sit tight unless Saunders shows up in this section again. I hate to drag the old fire-eater into a new mess, especially after all the trouble I had getting him out of the old one. So I hope he won't be fool enough to come mooching south again. Don't suppose he will, but—I'll be keeping an eye lifting just the same against the loom of a vitriol bomb on the weather skyline."
Allen tapped his coat significantly at those last words, and that reminded him that there were two or three little things about "pocket-gunnery" he wanted me to coach him up on. Nailing a foot-square of discarded canvas to the swelling bole of a bottle tree down by the stream, we put in a half-hour of "by-and-large" practice at it. Allen, thanks to his natural gift for judging distance and angle, proved a very apt pupil.
By way of return for his gunnery lesson, "Slant" volunteered to show me a few tricks of knife-throwing, in which he was reputed to have no equal in the Islands. "I'm about as much of a walking arsenal as you were the time you waited for me at the Australia, Whitney," he said with a grin, as he produced a broad-bladed dagger from a sheath slung unobtrusively on his right hip. "This knife, by the way," he went on, tilting it lightly across his forefinger, "is balanced especially for throwing. They are made in Lisbon, mostly for export to Brazil I understand, where they seem to go in for that kind of stunt a good bit. I bought it from the skipper of a Portuguese gunboat at Deli, who also taught me the principles of chucking it. First and last, I've had a lot of sport out of practising with it, and have an idea I would have an even break with the Capitano himself when my hand's in. I was very grateful to old 'Squid' for handing it back to me the other day. I only hope he won't be forcing me to pass it on to him again."
Allen's skill with the wicked-bladed facon was decidedly impressive. If anything, he was a shade more accurate in planting the point of it than I was with a bullet from my pocket. Little luck as I had in throwing it, I was quite as fascinated with the appearance and "feel" of the formidable weapon as Allen had been with my target revolver in Sydney. "I trust you won't have to part with it again, to Saunders or anyone else," I said as I handed it back to him.
Before he mounted for his ride back to town, I mentioned to Allen that Rona had left me in the lurch again the day before, and intimated that, unless she began to show more interest in the picture, I would have to consider packing up and going back to Sydney. As a matter of fact, the girl's perversity had already been responsible for effectually dampening down my first flush of enthusiasm, and I began seriously to doubt my ability to make a success of the picture when the way was clear to work at it. Allen begged me not to be discouraged, and assured me again that he would look up Rona himself on the morrow and see if he couldn't get some line on what she was sulking about. He also said he would see if the quarantine people couldn't be prodded along to get at the job of disinfecting the Cora.
Rona still failed to show up on the following day, and in the evening I was unable to get 'phone connection with Allen's bungalow in an endeavour to learn if he had seen her. Dr. Butler, whom I got on the wire at the Quarantine Station, said that Allen had rung them up that morning, urging them to get a move on with the Cora. They had told him that they were planning to send a squad off before the end of the week. As word had just come to them, however, that men were seen climbing over the schooner that afternoon, they had decided to clean up the job in the morning. As long as the ship remained in her present condition, he said, she would continue a possible spreader of disease. She should have been attended to before. If I cared to go off with them, he added, he would pick me up at the landing at eight o'clock. I thanked him and told him I would be glad of the chance to look things over before going to work.