Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

Before either of us spoke a firm, quick step sounded from the back of the house, and a moment later, following a light tap on the door, Ranga entered from my bedroom. If he was surprised at Rona's presence, or at her somewhat dishevelled appearance, he gave no sign of it. Nor was there about me—now that I was holding the knife behind my back—anything to suggest to the Malay that he had stumbled upon a situation in the least out of the normal.

Tuan "Slant" was sleeping heavily, he said, and so he had snatched the opportunity to come up for some of his own Borneo tobacco and a change of clothes. They had nothing in the hospital large enough for him. Tuan "Slant" was growing stronger in body, but—he finished by tapping his temple and shaking his head dubiously.

A heavier broadside of the gathering storm shook the house again, this time sending a shudder through its stout frame and wringing a vibrant ping from the tautened "hurricane cables" that guyed its windward corners. Out of the heart of that blast came the bell-mouthed baying of the nearing hound. He was still sounding his clear bugle notes as he swung in through the gate from the road, but down the driveway, with the incense of the burning trail conjuring visions of an imminent quarry in his brain, he began tearing his throat with harsh, savage yelps of eagerness. I was looking for his charge to come against the closed front door, but a sudden shower of claw-spurned gravel rat-a-tat-ing against the glass of the French windows told that he had wheeled in his tracks and was circling to the rear of the house. A yell and a clatter of saucepans from the kitchen, a scramble of slipping claws upon the hardwood floor of the back hallway, and in from the open door of my bedroom—drooling-fanged, bloody-eyed and bloody-minded—came dashing that black bolt of canine fury, closing on his cornered quarry for the death-grapple.

Ranga, on entering, had moved a step or two aside from the door, a survival doubtless of his training at sea, where an idle man blocking a companionway or a ladder is liable to be taught manners by a rap on the head. Rona was still in the corner to which I had hurled her. I was at the opposite corner, near the big canvas and twenty feet or more from the girl. The flying hound tried to check himself at the doorway, but the polished floor gave him no grip for his claws. Down on his haunches, with forefeet poked rigidly ahead, he slid the full width of the room, tobogganing on a smooth-running Samoan mat for the last half of the distance.

With the certainty of Rona's guilt fixed in my mind by her possession of Allen's knife, I had no doubt, from the moment the hound's baying indicated it had turned into the clearing, that it was hot on her trail. But even so, the brute's entry by the bedroom door had been so unexpected and so swift that I had not stirred from my tracks to the girl's defence when the snarling animal, shooting across the room, brought up against the wall close beside her. Even Ranga, leaping forward instantly as he had, was scarcely past the middle of the floor when the beast regained its balance and bearings almost at the girl's feet. Drawing back into the angle of the walls and crouching low like a cornered cat, Rona awaited the attack, while Ranga, barehanded, and I with the throwing-knife rushed in to her aid. Without an instant's hesitation, the savage beast spun to a full right-about and, brushing the girl's advanced knee as though it was no more than the piano stool, launched itself full at the throat of the yellow man.

Ranga's counter was swift, sure and terrible. He might have been fighting bloodhounds barehanded from childhood, for all the surprise and dismay he showed at the sudden attack. Where my own instinct (if I had not tried to side-step the charge completely) would have been to grapple for the brute's throat from beneath, he simply struck—or rather grabbed—down from above. The impact crushed the snarling beast to the floor, but when Ranga raised his arm again he was gripping his struggling canine adversary by the scruff of the neck. Or rather, I thought it was the scruff. In reality his grip was a bit more inclusive.

Holding the floundering black form at arm's length with no more effort than if it had been a terrier, Ranga suddenly tightened his hold. I saw the hound's red-lidded eyes grow slant and elongated like a Chinaman's as the skin of its scalp was drawn backward in the relentless vise closing from behind; then a grinding snick cut short an unearthly scream of pain, and the hound was dangling limp and lifeless with a crumpled spine at the end of a gibbet of knotted yellow muscle. Ranga tossed lightly aside what a moment before had been a flying bolt of wrath, and where the great head doubled under against a flowered chintz window-curtain I saw the sprawling outline of a tooth-torn ear, doubtless the scar of a fight with a luckier ending.

In its strangely terrible tenseness, the electrically charged silence that succeeded has no parallel in my experience. Not a word was spoken. The only sound was the banging of the wind-wrenched trees against the house and the nearing mutter of the thunder in the north. The significance of the fact that it was Ranga the dog had been trailing was lost upon neither Rona nor me, nor yet upon the big Malay himself. The latter met my questioning glance steadily for a moment, but it was the girl's piercing stare of fierce concentration that drew and held his troubled black eyes. While one might have counted fifty those two stood and (as I have since understood) communed with eye and mind. It was a sudden thunder-clap that broke the connection and checked the interflow of thought. Ranga had not winced at the blinding flash and close-following crash, but Rona's higher strung nerves fluttered for an instant, and the wire was down. But Ranga's words indicated that the message was about complete.

"Yes, I did it, Tuan," he said quietly, turning toward me as though answering my unspoken question. "It had to be, Tuan, and—yes, I did it."

It was not until afterwards I recalled that it was to Rona I addressed my protest. "But 'Slant' swore to me that he did not kill Bell; that he was in no way responsible for his death, first or last."