HELL'S HATCHES

NEW FICTION

THE CURTAIN
By Alexander Macfarlan
THE SYRENS
By Dot Allan
OLD MAN'S YOUTH
By William de Morgan
THE PURPLE HEIGHTS
By M. C. Oemler
HAGAR'S HOARD
By George Kibbe Turner
THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK
By Richard Dehan
IN CHANCERY
By John Galsworthy
SNOW OVER ELDEN
By Thomas Moult
EUDOCIA
By Eden Phillpotts

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

21, Bedford Street, W.C. 2

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I A Reputation Questioned [1]

II Hard-Bit Derelicts [10]

III The Girl Herself [25]

IV "Slant" Allen Retires Again [38]

V A Ship of Death [50]

VI Compulsory Volunteering [65]

VII Rona Comes Aboard [80]

VIII I Leave the Island [93]

IX A Grim Tale of the Sea [106]

X Art and Suspense [124]

XI A Hero's Homecoming [142]

XII A Bad Man's Plea [180]

XIII The Scene of the Final Drama [193]

XIV Hell's Hatches Off [206]

XV The Face [220]

XVI A Sudden Visitor [231]

XVII Down the Flume [255]

XVIII The Masterpiece [268]

XIX After All [282]

HELL'S HATCHES

CHAPTER I
A REPUTATION QUESTIONED

"Slant" Allen and I, between us, had been monopolizing a good share of the feature space in the Queensland and New South Wales papers for a week or more—he as "the Hero-Ticket-of-Leave-Man" and I as "the gifted Franco-American painter whose brilliant South Sea marines have taken the Australian art world by storm"—and now that it was definitely reported that he had left Brisbane on his way to connect with the reception the boyhood home from which he had been shipped in disgrace five years before had prepared for him, I knew it was but a matter of hours before he would be doing me the honour of a call.

He simply had to see me, I figured; that was all there was to it: for with Bell and the girl dead (that much seemed certain, both from the newspaper accounts of the affair and from what I had been able to pick up in the few minutes I had been ashore during the stop of my southbound packet at Townsville) I was the only living person who knew he was not the hero of the astonishing Cora Andrews affair, the audacious daring and almost sublime courage characterizing which had touched the imagination of the whole world; that, far from having volunteered to navigate a shipload of plague-stricken blacks through some hundreds of miles of the worst reef-beset—and likewise the most ill-charted—waters of the Seven Seas on the off chance of saving the lives of perhaps one in ten of them, he had been brought off and forced to mount the gangway of that ill-fated schooner at the point of a knife in the hands of a slender slip of a Kanaka girl.

To be sure, two or three of the blacks who were hanging over the rail at the end of that accursed afternoon may have been among the survivors (for it could have been only the strongest of them that had been able to fight their way up to the air when Bell chopped open the hatches they had been battened under ever since the Cora's officers had succumbed who knows how many hours before); but, even so, their rolling, bloodshot eyes could have fixed on nothing to have led them to believe that the greasy shawl of Chinese embroidery the girl appeared to have thrown affectionately over the shoulder of the belated passenger in the leaking outrigger concealed the diminutive Malay kris whose point she was pressing into the fleshy part of his neck above the jugular.

No, there could be no doubt that I was all that stood between "Slant" Allen, "Ticket-of-Leavester," beachcomber, black-birder, pearl-pirate and (more or less incidentally to all of the foregoing) murderer, and the Hon. Hartley Allen, second son of the late James Allen, Bart., racing man, polo player and once the greatest gentleman jockey on the Australian turf. Pardon for the comparative peccadilloes—a "pulled" horse or two, a money fraud in connection with a "sweep," and the rather rough treatment of a chorus girl, who had foolishly asked for "time to consider" his proposal that she come to him at once from the Queensland stockman who was only just finishing refurnishing her George Street flat—which, cumulatively, had been responsible for his being packed off to "The Islands," was already assured, and it looked as though more was to come—that his "spectacular and self-sacrificing heroism" was going to wipe out the unpleasant memories that had barred him from sporting and social circles even before the law stepped in. A sporting writer in that morning's Herald had speculated as to whether or not he would be seen again riding "Number 1" for the unbeaten "Boomerang" Four, with whom he had qualified for his handicap of "8," still standing as the highest ever given an Australian polo player; and the racing column of the latest Bulletin had devoted a good part of its restricted space to a discussion of the possibility that the weight he had put on in his years of "easy life in 'The Islands'" might force him to confine his riding to steeplechases. Of the record which had made the name of "Slant" Allen a byword for all that was desperate and devilish from Port Moresby to Papeete, from Yap to Suva, little seemed to be known and nothing at all was said. But then, that old beach-combers' maxim to the effect that "What a man does in 'The Islands' don't figure in St. Peter's 'dope sheet,'" was one from which even I myself had been wont to extract no little solace.

With nothing but my fever-wracked and absinthe-soaked (I may as well confess at the outset that I was "in the grip of the green" at this time) anatomy standing between, on the one hand, and Allen more despicable than even I, who was fairly familiar with the lurid swath he had cut across Polynesia, had ever dreamed he could be, and, on the other hand, an Allen who might easily become more the idol of sporting (which is, of course, the real) Australia than he had ever been at the zenith of his meteoric career as a turfman and athlete, it was plain enough that he would not—nay, could not—ignore for long my presence in a city that was standing on tiptoe to acclaim him as a native son whose deed had done it honour in the eyes of the world. It was something like that the Telegraph had it, I believe.

Where a word from me (and Allen would know that my friendship for Bell, to say nothing of the girl, would impel me to speak it in my own good time) would dash him from the heights to depths which even he had not yet sounded—there were degrees of treachery which "The Islands" themselves would not stand for—it was only to be expected that a man of his stamp would make some well-thought-out move calculated to impose both immediate and eventual silence upon me. If we were still "north of twenty-two" I would have had no doubt what form that "move" would take, and even here in the heart of the Antipodean metropolis—well, that I was leaving no unnecessary loop-holes of attack open was attested by the fact that I was awaiting his coming wearing a roomy old shooting jacket, in the wide pockets of which a man's fingers could work both freely and unobtrusively. I had shot away a good half-dozen patch pockets from that old jacket in practising "unostentatious self-defence," and when a man gets to a point where he can spatter a sea-slug at five paces from his hip he really hasn't a great deal to fear from the frontal attack of anyone—or anything—that hunts by daylight.

Yes, though I hardly expected to have to shoot Allen, at least on this first showdown, I was quite prepared to do so if he gave me any excuse at all for it; indeed, I may as well admit that I was going to be disappointed if he did not furnish me such an excuse. There need be nothing on my conscience, that was sure, for, if the fellow had had his deserts according to civilized law, he would have been put out of the way something like twenty times already. I had heard him make that boast himself one night in Kai, just before he went under Jackson's table as a consequence of trying to toss off three-fingers of "Three Star" for every man he claimed to have killed. Moreover, I had a sort of a feeling that old Bell would have liked to have seen his score evened up that way, for he, more than almost anyone I could recall, had marvelled at what he called the tricks I had tucked away in my "starboard trigger pocket." But—I may as well own it—my principal reason for hoping for a decisive showdown straightaway was that I felt sure I could see my way through an affair of that kind, even with so cool and resourceful a hand as I knew Allen to be. As an absinthe drinker, what I dreaded was to have the crisis postponed, knowing all the while that during only about from four to six hours of the twenty-four would I be fit in mind or body to oppose a child, let alone a man who, for five years and among as desperate a lot of cut-throats as the South Pacific had ever known, had lived up to his boast that he drew the line at no act under heaven to gain his end.

It had struck me as just a bit providential that Allen almost certainly would be coming to see me in the early afternoon—the very time at which, physically and mentally, I would be best prepared for him. It varies somewhat with different addicts of the drug, but with me the "hour of strength"—the interval of the swinging back of the pendulum, when all the faculties are as much above normal as they have been below it during the preceding interval of depression—was mid-afternoon. From about ten in the morning I was just about my natural self—just about at the turn of the tide between weakness and strength—for three or four hours; but from about three to five, when the renewed cravings began to stir and it had long been my custom to pour my first thin trickle of green into the cracked ice, I was preternaturally alive in hand and brain. The rigorous restriction of my painting to these brief hours of physical and spiritual exaltation must share with my colours the credit for the fact that I had already done work that was to win me a niche distinctively my own as a painter of tropical marines. How much absinthe—or the reaction from absinthe—had to do with my earlier successes was conclusively proven by the way my work at first fell off when those colourful years I was later to spend with the incomparable Huntley Rivers in the Samoas and Marquesas began to bring me back manhood of mind and body and to rid me—I trust for good and all—of the curse saddled upon me in my student days in Paris. But that is neither here nor there as regards the present story.

I had ascertained that Allen's train was to arrive from Brisbane at ten in the morning, and that he was to be taken directly from the station to the Town Hall to receive the "Freedom of the City." Then, out of consideration for the fact "that the hero" (as the Herald had it) was "still far from recovered from the terrible hardships he had endured as a consequence of his unparalleled self-sacrifice," the remainder of the day was to be left at his disposal to rest in. The further program—in which His Excellency the Governor-General himself was to take part—would be arranged only after the personal desires of the "modest hero" had been consulted.

A 'phone to the gallery where my Exhibition was on—or an inquiry of almost anyone connected with the show at the Town Hall, for that matter—would apprise Allen that I was staying at the Australia, and there I knew he would come direct the moment he could shake himself free from his entertainers. Someone was to take him off to lunch, to be sure, but—especially as it was reported that he was already dieting to get back to riding weight—I felt sure this would not detain him long. "It will be about three," I told myself, and left word at the office that any man asking for me around that hour should be brought straight to my rooms without further question. I also 'phoned Lady X—— and begged off from showing her and a party of friends from Government House my pictures at four, as I had promised a couple of days previously. Being borne off to the inevitable and interminable Australian afternoon teas—or to anything else I could not easily shake myself free from very shortly after five—was one of the worst ordeals incident to the spell of lionizing that had set in for me from the day of my arrival in Sydney. What did I care for Sydney, anyhow? Paris was my goal—gay, cynical, heartless Paris, who took or rejected what her lovers laid at her feet only as it stirred, or failed to stir, her jaded pulses, asking not how it was made or what it had cost. Paris! To bring that languid beauty fawning to my own feet for a day—even for an hour, my hour—that would be something worth living—or dying—for. For many years I had been telling myself that (between three and five in the afternoon, of course) and now—quite aside from my nocturnal flights there on the wings of the "Green Lady"—it seemed that the end so long striven for was almost in sight.

I lunched lightly—a planked red snapper and a couple of alligator pears—in my room, and toward two o'clock (to be well on the safe side) slipped into the old hunting jacket I have mentioned, and was ready; just that—ready. My nerves were absolutely steady. The hand holding the palette knife with which (to kill the passing minutes) I began daubing pigments upon a rough rectangle of blotched canvas on an easel in the embrasure of the windows, might have adjusted the hair-spring of my wrist-watch, and the beat of my heart was slow and strong and steady like the throb of the engines of a liner in mid-ocean. If either hand or nerve inclined more one way than the other, it was toward relaxation rather than tenseness. Tenseness—with a man who has himself in hand—is for the moment of action, not for the interval of waiting which precedes it. My whole feeling was that of complete adequacy; but then, the sensation was no new one to me—at that time of day.

Exhausting the gobs of variegated colour on my palette, I went to a table in the bathroom and started chipping the delicately tinted linings from the contents of a packing case of assorted sea shells, confining my attentions for the moment to a species of bivalve whose refulgent inner surface had caught and held the lambent liquid gold of sunshine that had filtered through five fathoms of limpid sea-water to reach the coral caverns where it had grown. Powdering the coruscant scalings in a mortar, I screened them from time to time, carefully noting the gradations of colour—ranging from soft fawn to scintillant saffron—as the more indurated particles stood out the longer against the friction of the pestle. At this time, I might explain, I was in the tentative stage of my experimentation to evolve and perfect a greater variety of media than had hitherto been available with which to express in colour the interminable moods of sea and sky and sunshine. The value of my contribution to art—not yet complete after five years—will have to be judged when I pass it on to my contemporaries and posterity. Of the part these colours played in my later and more permanent success (to differentiate it from the spectacular but transient spell of fame upon the threshold of which I stood at the moment of which I write), I can only say that had I been confined to the pigments with which my predecessors had been forced to express themselves, I should never have risen above the rating of a second or third class dauber of sea-scapes.

CHAPTER II
HARD-BIT DERELICTS

With Allen and his coming in the back of my brain, it was only natural that my thoughts, as I ground and sifted and sorted the golden powders, should turn to Kai and the train of events leading up to the ghastly tragedy of the Cora Andrews, so distorted a version of which had gone abroad as a consequence of the fact that Allen was alive and Bell was dead, and that I, so far, had not told what I knew of the circumstances under which the one and the other had been induced to board the stricken "black-birder."

It must have been, I reflected, its comparative remoteness from all of even the least-sailed of the South Pacific trade routes that was responsible for making Kai Atoll, a barely perceptible smudge on the chart of the Louisiades, the unofficial rendezvous for the most picturesque lot of cut-throats, blackguards and beachcombers that "The Islands" had known since the days of "Bully" Hayes and his care-free contemporaries. Like had attracted like after the original nucleus gathered, safety had come with numbers, and at the time of my arrival no man whose misdeeds had not made him important enough to send a gunboat after needed to depart from that secure haven except of his own free will.

Among a score of hard-bit derelicts whose grinning or scowling phizzes flashed up in memory at the thought of that sun-baked loop of coral, with its rag-tag of wind-whipped coco palms and its crescent of zinc and thatch-roofed shacks, only three—or four including myself—occupied my mind for the moment. Allen—reckless daredevil that he was—had come to Kai from somewhere in the Solomons for the very good and sufficient reason that it was the only island south of the Line at the time where his welcome would not have been either too hot or too cold to suit his fastidious taste. Bell had come, in a stove-in whaleboat, because Kai was the nearest settlement to the point where he put the Flying Scud—the trading schooner that was his last command, if we except the Cora Andrews—aground on Tuka-tuva Reef. The girl, who arrived with Bell in the whaleboat, came because he brought her. The tide-rips of Kai passage and the Devil's own toboggan were all the same to Rona—at this stage of the game, at least—so long as the big, quiet, masterful Yankee was bumping-the-bumps with her. And even afterwards—but let that transpire.

I, Roger Whitney, artist, formerly of New York and Paris, and, latterly, man-about-the French-colonies, with no fixed abode, had been landed at Kai by a French gunboat from the Noumea station. I packed myself off from that accursed hole because the suicide of a couple of officers in whose company I had been drinking absinthe at the Cercle Militaire for some weeks had reminded me altogether too poignantly of what I might, in the ordinary course of things, expect to be doing myself before long. A change of scene and, if possible, a modification of habits was the only hope. I would never have had the initiative to tackle even the first had not the feeling persisted that I was on the verge of doing something worth while with my painting. I went to Kai because the archipelago thereabouts was reputed to have the most gorgeous sky and water colouring in Polynesia.

Neither the promised beauties nor the reputed badness of Kai stirred me greatly in anticipation. With a bitter smile I told myself that every night I was seeing sights more lovely than anything my eyes were likely to rest on short of Paradise, while the Chamber of Horrors in which I awoke every morning was a veritable annex to the Inferno itself. No, it was out of the question that Kai could unfold in realities, whether to delight or shock, things to outdo those that were already mine in dreams that had themselves become more real than realities. Well, it turned out that I was only half right, or wrong, whichever way you want to put it. While, on the one hand, I found the bluff, open badness of Kai rather more refreshing than shocking; on the other hand, it was hardly more than a week before I was ready to swear that not the most ethereal houri that ever laid her cool green hand upon my fevered brow was of a class to run one-two-three with a flame-quivering slip of a nymph whom I had surprised at her bath in a beryline pool inside the windward reef. I began to pull myself together from that hour. Rona, the very sight of whom threw most men out of hand, had quite the opposite effect upon me. I knew she was not for me, and the thought that the world actually held such loveliness in the form of flesh and blood had a sort of reassurance about it, like the knowledge that one has an ample income from government bonds.

Because I had landed from the Zelee, and also, perhaps on account of my rig-out (especially the brimless Algerian sun-helmet), the "beach" of Kai put me down at once as a "We-we," and, therefore, a creature quite apart. The only Frenchmen on the island were a couple of escapes from the convict settlement of New Caledonia, and because neither of them could ride or shoot or fight with their fists, they had no standing with the predominant Australian "push," most of whom were more or less handy at all three. It was, indeed, the fact that, in spite of all my years in Paris and the French colonies had done to make a physical wreck of me, I still retained something of the quickness of eye and hand and foot which had conspired to make my Harvard record as an all-round-athlete one that only two or three men have equalled even down to the present day, that gave me such easy sledding in making my way with the "best people" of Kai.

It took just three minutes—the length of the first round of the "friendly bout" I fought with "Heifer" Halligan, ex-welter-weight champion of Victoria, at Jackson's pub one afternoon—to change Kai's openly expressed contempt for me to something very near respect. I thoroughly appreciated the attitude of that breezy lot of sport-loving rascals toward a Frenchified Yankee artist, especially one that did not appear to be a fugitive from justice, and so took the first opportunity to win a standing with them which would at least incline them to let me go my own way when I wanted to. Notwithstanding my wretched condition, I outpointed my chunky opponent a good three to one in that opening round; indeed, the "Heifer's" excuse for the foul which put me to sleep in the Second was that both his "bloomin' peepers" were so nearly swelled shut he couldn't see "stryght." But it was my swelling groin and battered hands, rather than "Heifer's" bruised optics, that came in for first attention from deft-fingered Doc Wyndham—once of Guy's, on his own admission. The next day I was waited upon by a delegation sent from "Jackson's Sporting Club" to urge me to put myself in training for a go-to-the-finish with "Shark-mouth" Kelly of Suva, the Fiji open champ. My speed would dazzle a cow-footed dolt like "Shark-mouth" was, they said, and he would be easy picking for me. They further urged that we could clean up all the loose money west of the "Hundred and Eightieth"—what odds would Fiji not give in backing a fourteen-stone stoker against an artist that only weighed ten stone and looked half dished with the "green" besides? Moreover, I could keep the whole purse for myself; all they wanted out of it was the sport. God bless the scalawags, it was more than half true, that last.

The funny thing about it was that the project actually tempted me at the time, principally, I think, because there seemed a chance that the hard exercise of training—the very thing, indeed, that helped work the miracle a few years later—might effect me at least a temporary separation, if not a permanent divorce, from the "Green Lady." I was still temporizing with "delegations" when the Cora Andrews dropped her hook in Kai Lagoon and gave us something else to think about.

If the little cunning I had left with my fists won me the respect of the "beach," it remained for my proficiency with the revolver—something which I had never allowed myself to grow rusty in—to give me real prestige. My father had been only less famous as a pistol shot than as a builder of steel bridges, and from my birth it had been his dream that I should carry on the tradition in both lines. If it had broken the old boy's heart when I turned my back on engineering for art—insisting on going from Harvard to Beaux Arts instead of to Boston "Tec" as he had planned—he at least had nothing to complain of on the score of my aptitude for the revolver. He admitted that I had bred true in hand and eye, even on the day that he called my "art tomfoolery" a throwback from my French grandmother. I have always thought that the one circumstance which prevented the Governor from cutting me off in his will when he finally had definite proofs of the depths to which I had sunk in Paris, was the fact that, on my last visit to the old home on the Hudson, I had beaten him, shot for shot, with his own pistols, and at his favourite distance.

They were rather free with their gun play during my first fortnight at Kai, each little affair having been followed by one or two more or less ceremonious burials in the coral-walled cemetery on the south lip of the windward passage. It was merely as a precautionary measure—on the off chance that they should be tempted to draw me into something of the kind at a time when I might not be quite on edge for it—that I took early opportunity to uncover a trifle of what I had crooked in my trigger-finger. A casually winged gull or two, and a few plugged pennies (not a miss at the latter, luckily, even when they tried to spin them edge on to my line of fire) effected all that was necessary. After that, though they were continually sending for me to come down to Jackson's and shoot the wire off champagne corks (fizz, loot of some kind, was the freest flowing drink on the island at the time), or perform some other equally useful and spectacular gun stunt, not the roughest of the gang but took the most meticulous care not to press his invitation the instant it sank home to him that my mood of the moment wasn't of a kind calculated to blend smoothly with the free and easy spirit of a beach-combers' carousal.

It was hardly to be expected that they would ever quite understand why a man who could "blot out a cove's blinker as easy wiv his fist as wiv his gun" (as I was told that "Reefer" Ogiston, penal absentee and pearler, put it one day) and who "'peared mo' than comfitabl' heeled fo' coin," should be "light an' looney enuf tu go roun' smearin' smashed barnculs on sail cloth"; and yet it was on that very score—or at least to their quick comprehension of what I was driving at in my pictures—that the "beach" of Kai rendered me a priceless service. Almost from the outset they began to "twig" my marines, to feel the living atmosphere I was striving to paint into them. They were all men who had lived by the sea, on the sea; yes, and not a few of them had worked under the sea. Well, when I began to see those deep-set, wrinkle-clutched eyes squint to a focus of concentration, and, presently, the quick heave of a hairy chest as the message of the canvas flashed home, I knew that I was on the right track. Nothing less than that would have given me the courage to go on working, as I had set myself to do, on a steadily decreasing allowance of absinthe, a certain supply of which, of course, I had brought with me from Noumea.

So much for me and my relations to Kai at the time of which I am writing. Now as to Bell....

"Who is that tall, square-jawed chap who looks as though he was not quite sober?" I had asked a day or two after I landed.

"Yank—calls himself Bell," Jackson replied laconically; adding that he was "not quite sober" when he tried to take a cross-cut over Tuka-tuva Reef with the Flying Scud, that he was "not quite sober" when he hit the beach in a busted whaleboat, that he had been "not quite sober" all the time since, and that there was no doubt that he would still be "not quite sober" when the time came for him to leave the island, whether he went out with the tide in an outrigger canoe or shuffled off up the Golden Stairs. "Allus been pickled and allus goin' to be pickled," Jackson continued; then, qualifyingly: "Course I don't know he was pickled when he kum int' the world, but I'm willin' to lay any odds that he'll be pickled when he shuffles out of it."

Just about all of which was, or proved to be, "stryght dope."

After quoting this terse summing of Jackson's, it may sound a little strange when I say that Bell was a gentleman—not had been, understand (that could have been said with some truth about a dozen or more of us at Kai), but was a gentleman. Though undeniably never "quite sober," the fact remained that no one on the island had ever seen him "quite drunk." And no matter how much liquor he had stowed "under hatches," no one could say that it interfered either with his trim or his navigation. His even rolling gait was always the same, whether it was the glow of his eye-opening plunge at dawn that lighted his face, or the flush of twelve hours of steady tippling that darkened it at twilight. Nor was he ever known to omit that gravely courteous, almost "old-fashioned," bow which, with the flicker of smile that was more of his eyes than his mouth, was the invariable greeting he bestowed upon friend and stranger alike. The mellow drawl of his "It's suah goin' to be a fine mawnin'," had made it easier for me to weather dawns that—in my inflamed imagination—menaced monstrously in jagged lines like a cubist's nightmare. If drink had any effect on his speech, it was to incline him to reserve rather than garrulity. His temper appeared to be under quite as perfect control as his legs. Even when he broke "Red" Logan's jaw with a swift short-arm jolt the time that sanguine Lochinvar tried to nip Rona off his arm as they passed on the beach in the twilight, they said that Bell hardly raised his voice as he "guessed that'd hold the varmit fo' a while." And when, a few days later, Doc Wyndham told him with a grin that "Red" wouldn't be screwing a diving helmet on his block for some weeks to come, it was said there was real regret in the Yankee's voice as he hoped that the injury wouldn't be "pumanant."

Yes, before I had been a week at Kai I felt that there was a little addition I could safely make to Jackson's comprehensive estimate. I knew that Bell had been born a gentleman, and—whatever lapses there may have been, or might be—I knew he was going to die a gentleman. And that also (had I put it on record) would have proved pretty nearly "stryght dope."

What stumped me at first was trying to reconcile the remarkable control Bell maintained over all his faculties in spite of his hard drinking with the fact (apparently fully authenticated) that he had run aground—through drunkenness—every ship he had ever commanded, beginning with a U. S. gunboat. He cleared up that matter for me himself one afternoon, however, by casually observing—at the moment he chanced to be watching me trying to transfer to canvas the riot of opalescence between the lapis lazuli of the barely submerged reef and the deep indigo where a hundred fathoms of brine threw back the reflection of the sinister core of cumulo-nimbus in the heart of a menacing squall—that the sea had always acted as a tremendous stimulant to him, especially when he trod a deck.

"If I could just have managed to cut out the whisky at sea, all would have been smooth sailin'," he said in his deep rich Southern drawl. "On land—heah ... anywheah—kawn jooce is lak food to me; mah body convuts it into ene'gy just lak an engine does coal. But with a schoonah kickin' undah me—we'ell, I guess theah's just one kick too many, something lak mixin' drinks p'raps. It suah elevates me good an' plenty ... and when I come down theah's natchaly some crash. My ship an' I gen'aly strike bottom at about the same time. But, s'elp me Gawd" (a tensing timbre in his voice) "on mah next command—"

It was the one sure sign that Bell was beginning to feel the kick of his "kawn jooce" when he spoke of his "next command." Unless that kick was beginning to carry a pretty weighty jolt behind it he knew just as well as everyone else on the beach did that he would never get his Master's Certificate back again, and that even if he did there was no house from Honolulu to Hobart that would trust a ship to a man who had already beached a half-dozen.

Kai was glib to the last detail—rig, tonnage, cargo, insurance, owner and the like—respecting the several merchant craft Bell had piled up in the course of his downward career; but the extent of local "dope" in the matter of the gunboat episode was to the effect that it happened "up Manila-way," and that "that was the bally smash that started him goin'."

Personally, I took little stock in the naval part of the yarn—that is, at first. Then, one morning—it was the day after the tail of a typhoon had sucked up the end of Ah Yung's laundry shack and left everyone on the beach short of clothes—Bell came out in a suit of immaculate starched whites. It was the cut of the jacket and the way he wore it that drew and held my puzzled gaze; that its shoulders were "drilled" for epaulettes and that its thin pearl buttons barely held in buttonholes that had been worked for something thicker and wider I did not notice till later. Steady-eyed, lean-jawed, square-shouldered, ready-poised—not even a flapping Payta sombrero could quite disguise, nor five years of heavy tippling quite obliterate, the marks of type. Then I understood why it was that Bell, all but down and out though he might be, was, and would remain to the last, a gentleman. There are things the Navy puts into a man that not even a court-martial can take away.

The only allusion Bell ever made to his remoter past was drawn from him a few days later, when—he was watching me paint again—I chanced to mention that I had spent a fortnight in the Philippines on my way south from Saigon to Australia. Glancing up at the sound of his sharp intake of breath, I saw his jaw set over the questions that leapt to the tip of his tongue, to relax gradually as a faraway look came into his wide-set grey eyes and a wistful smile of reminiscence parted his lips.

"Did you heah the band play on the Luneta in the evenin'?" he asked eagerly, "while the spiggoties in their calesas wuh racin' round the circle, an' the kiddies an' theyah nusses wuh rompin' on the grass, an' the big red sun was goin' down behind Mariveles beyond the bay? An' did you know the Ahmy an' Navy Club—not the new one ... the ol' one ovah cross the moat inside the wall?"

"Put up there all my time in Manila," I replied. "A very comfy old hangout, especially considering what the hotels were."

"An'—did you—" (he gulped once or twice as though the question came hard) "did you evah heah them speak at the Club of a chap called Blake ... Lootenant-Commandah Blake? He was a son of Captain Blake, who helped Sampson polish off Cervera, an' a gran'son of Adm'al Blake. Ol' naval fam'ly."

"You mean the man who pulled off that coup when Wood was cleaning up the crater of Bud Dajo? Some kind of a bluff on his own with one of the little old gunboats Dewey captured after the Battle of Manila Bay, wasn't it? Scared some Jolo Dato into giving up a bunch of our men he already had lined up against a wall to bolo, didn't he? Of course, I remember perfectly now. General X——" (mentioning the Military Governor of Mindanao by name) "told me the yarn himself the night I dined with him in Zamboanga. He said no one but an old poker shark would ever have thought of the stunt, much less had the nerve to bluff it out. Incidentally he mentioned that the chap was the best poker player in the Navy, as he was also the speediest baseball pitcher ever graduated from Annapolis; that he had been missed almost as much for the one as the other since he dropped out of sight several years before. Some difficulty about—"

"Tryin' to push Corregidor out of the entrance to Manila Bay with the nose of his gunboat," Bell cut in harshly, the hell in his soul glowing through his eyes as the glare of the coal-bed welters beyond a stoker's lifted furnace flap. That, and a single sob sucked through his contracted throat as the vacuum in his chest called for air, were the only outward signs of the intensest spasm of throttled emotion I ever saw assail a human being. Then the square jaw tightened, the cords of the muscular neck drew taut, and what would have been another body and soul racking sob was noiselessly absorbed in the buffer of a flexed diaphragm. The fires of agony behind the eyes paled and died down like an expiring coal. The corrugations of the brow smoothed out as a smile—half amused, half wistful—relaxed the set lips. The old controlled Bell (I shall continue to call him so) was in the saddle again.

"So they still remembah mah ball-playin'," he drawled musingly, his left hand digits gently massaging the bulbous swelling remaining after some red-hot drive had telescoped the middle finger of his right. "Ye'es, of co'se they'd miss mah wing in the Ahmy-Navy game at Ca'nival time. But mah pokah—we'ell I reckon a few of 'em did find mah pokah hand about as bafflin' as mah baseball ahm. But it was straight deliv'ry, tho'—both of 'em. An' they wouldn't be callin' me a fo'-flushah, etha. No, you didn't heah any of 'em say that, I'm right suah."

A smile more whimsical than bitter twitched his lips twice or thrice in the minute or two he stood alone with his thoughts. "So I've sort o' dropped out o' sight to 'em?" he said finally. "We'ell, I guess that was about the best thing to happen for all consuned. But, just the same, if you evah go back Manila-way I won't be mindin' it if you tell 'em that, tho' the ol' wing's tuhn'd to glass from long lack o' limberin', an' tho' I don't play pokah down heah fo' feah o' bein' knifed fo' mah luck, I'm still hittin' true to fohm in mah own lil' game of alterin' the sea map with the noses of ships. I reckon they'll know the reason why."

There was another interval of silence, but, unlike the other, not charged, electric. Bell's blow-off through the safety-valve of frank speech had taken the peak off the pent-up pressure within, and when he spoke again it was merely to quote what the Governor of North Carolina had said about its having been a long time between drinks. "Great thust aggravateh, the Sou'east Trade." Would I mind—ahem—hiking home with him and lubricating my tonsils with a drop of "J. Walkah"? That was simply his delicate way of pretending to ignore my slavery to absinthe, a habit which not even the most whisky-saturated sot of an Anglo-Saxon can ever quite forgive one of his race for falling a victim to. I wouldn't? "We'ell, hasta manyanah."

With a crunch of coral clinkers under his feet and a stave of "Carry Me Back to Ol' Virginny" on his lips, Bell, disdaining the smooth path by the beach, swung off through the pandanus scrub on what he called a "bee-line for home"! He had a weakness for taking "short-cuts" on land as well as at sea. Never again—not even in the moment of his great decision—did he lift for me or any other man the "furnace flap" of iron reserve that masked the fires of his innermost soul.

Their saving "sense of sport," which was the golden vein in the rough iron of the "beach push" of Kai, made it inevitable that they should have a substantial sense of respect for a man of Bell's stamp, and this might easily have ripened to an active popularity had not the American's quiet but inflexible reserve prevented their knowing him better. They suspected that he was no novice in handling the big Colt's that was flopping on his hip when he landed, they knew that there was a weighty punch behind his long arm, and they were frankly outspoken in their admiration of the manner in which he stowed and carried his booze. But what had impressed them more than anything else was the way in which he had taken the devil out of a vicious imp of a Solomon Island pony on the beach one morning. "Hellish hard-handed," "Slant" Allen had said, as his steel-blue eyes narrowed down to slits in the intensity of his interest and admiration; "but a seat like he was screwed to the brute's backbone. Old cross-country rider—hundred to one on it. Man in a million in a steeplechase on a horse strong enough to carry the weight. Gawd, what a seat!"

All in all, indeed, there was only one thing the "beach" held against Bell, and that was Rona, or rather his possession of her. There was nothing personal in this, of course. They merely regarded the big American in the same light they had always regarded a man with a chest of pearls or anything else of value that their simple, direct natures made them yearn for the possession of. There was this difference, however. Where the "push" of Kai would have combined to a man to get away with a box of pearls or a cargo of shell, the annexing of a woman was essentially a lone-hand game, and—well, Bell was hardly the kind of a "one-man job" any of them cared to tackle. I feel practically certain that, but for the disturbance of the even tenor of Kai's way incident to the Cora Andrews affair, his "rights" in Rona would never have been challenged.

CHAPTER III
THE GIRL HERSELF

As for the girl herself, words fail me in trying to picture her, just as my brush and pencil (save perhaps for that one rough memory sketch, done at white heat while still gripped in the exaltation that first glimpse of her splashing inside the reef had thrown me into) have always failed. This is, I fancy, because, unbelievably beautiful though she was, there was still so much of her appeal that was of the spirit rather than the flesh—something intangible which had to be sensed rather than seen. She was compact of contradictions, physical as well as mental. So slender as almost to suggest fragility at a first glance, there was still not a straight line, nor an angle, nor a hint of boniness, from the arch of her instep to the tips of her ears. Again, pixie-like as she was in the dainty perfection of her modelling, there was yet a fairly feral suggestion of suppleness and strength underrunning the soft fluency of contour. The strength was there, too, held in reserve in the flexible frame like the power of a coiled spring. I saw her unleash it one morning when, impatient of the slowness of a clumsy Fijian who was launching a very sizable dugout for her, she yanked him aside by the hair of his fuzzy head and did the job herself. I can still see the run of muscles under the olive-silk skin of arm and ankle, and the bent-bow arch of her slender back, as she gave a last push to the cranky outrigger. Indeed, my mind is full of pictures like that—paddling, swimming, leaning hard against the buffets of a passing squall, with a lock of wet hair streaking across her glowing face and her drenched garments clinging to her lithe limbs; and yet, as I have said, the buoyant, flaming spirit of her always escaped my brush and pencil as it now eludes portrayal by my pen.

But the most baffling, as it was also the most fascinating, of Rona's contradictions was the combination she presented of inward intensity and outward calm. The fire of her was, perhaps, the first thing one was conscious of. Even I, with my blood thinned and cooled with the ice of absinthe, could never watch her movements without a quickening of my jaded pulses; to the sanguine combers of Kai the sight of her (whether the rippling undulations of arms and shoulders as she drove a canoe through the water, or the hawk-like immobility of her as she poised on a pinnacle of reef waiting for a chance to cast her little Dyak purse-net) was palpably maddening.

So much for the flaming appeal of the girl in action, or suspended action, which was, of course, about the only way in which she was ever revealed to the "beach." Now picture the same creature (as Bell—and occasionally myself, his only intimate friend on the island—so often saw her) seated cross-legged on a mat, her sloe-eyes, set slightly slant, fixed dreamily on nothingness, like a sort of reincarnated girl-Buddha. The sight of her thus never failed to awaken in my nostrils the smell of smouldering yakka sticks, and to set my ears ringing with the throb of temple bells.

To my hyper-sophisticated (I will not say degenerate) senses this Oriental side of the girl made a subtle appeal that was like an enchantment. The passion to paint her—always burning within me when I saw her in action—never assailed me when she fell into one of those contemplative calms. Rather the peace of her soothed me like an opiate and made me content to sit and dream myself. It was the one thing (until I got the habit by the throat years afterward) that ever held my nerves steady when the "absinthe hour" drew near at the end of the afternoon. As long as Rona would continue to "sit Buddha" I had myself completely in hand, even till well on after sunset. But if she moved, or spoke, or even showed by her eyes that she was following Bell's words (it was he—less sensitive to this phase of her than I—who did most of the talking at these times), the spell was broken. The haste of my bolt for home was almost indecent. I have sometimes thought that a few months alone with Rona at this time might have effected very near to a complete cure in me—by a sort of involuntary mental therapeutic treatment on her part, I mean. But perhaps the other side of her—the "unreposeful" one—might have complicated the case.

Both the fire and the repose of Rona—the passion and the peace of her—were reflected in the olive oval of her face, the one by the full, sensuous lips and the sensitive nostrils, and the other by the smooth, low brow. The low-lidded blue-black eyes were "debatable territory," now in the hands of one, now the other. So, too, that infallible "gauge of temperament," whose dial is the pucker between the eyebrows. With Rona, this "passion-pressure index" was a corrugated knot of intensity or an olive blank according as to whether her inner fires were flaming or banked.

Bell knew little of the girl's origin and said less. "Rona's trousseau consisted of huh peacock sca'f an' this heah baby bolo," he said in his slow drawl one afternoon when he had borrowed the exquisite little dagger to show me how the Jolo juramentado executed his favourite belly-ripping stroke; "an' I reckon they'll comprise 'bout the sum total of huh mo'nin' at mah fun'ral." That, and "I guess Rona knows no mo' 'bout mah past reco'd than I do 'bout huhs," was all I recollect his ever having said on the subject. He was content to let it rest at that.

It was old Jackson who told me that he had seen the girl at Ponape, where she had been brought by an "owl-eyed" (referring to horn-spectacles rather than to the almond orbs themselves, I took it) "chink" when he came back to the Carolines after buying bird-of-paradise skins down New Guinea-way. She was dressed "Java-style" at the time, and was said to have been picked up at Ternate or Ambon in the Moluccas. Although the wily old Celestial kept the girl practically under lock and key from the first, customers of his shop occasionally glimpsed her, and she them, it would seem. Among these was the Yankee skipper of the trading schooner, Flying Scud. The coming together of those two must have been like the touching off of a ku-kui-nut torch, Jackson opined, adding that he supposed I "twigged that thar was no snuffin' uv ku-kui, onst aflar."

Just how the sequel eventuated no one in Ponape save the old Chinaman knew, and he never told. With only half her copra discharged, the Scud was heard getting under way at midnight, shortly after which the silhouette of her, close-reefed, was observed to blot out the moon three or four times as she beat out of that "hell's craw" of a passage in the teeth of a rising sou'wester. The girl was never seen in the Carolines again. Neither was Bell nor the Scud, for that matter, as it was but a few days later that he attempted his disastrous short-cut across Tuka-tuva Reef.

The next morning the Chinaman waited on his customers with his neck heavily, obscuringly swathed in bandages. He kept these on for a fortnight or more, and when they were finally dispensed with replaced his loose shirt with a close-buttoned jacket having an unusually high-cut neck. Even the latter, however, could not entirely conceal a number of parallel red cicatrices which, beginning on his fat jowls, ran down, slightly converging, onto his puffy yellow throat. Jackson felt sure that the point where those red furrows came to a focus must have been "fairish messed up."

On the beach of Ponape opinion was fairly divided as to whether the big, close-mouthed Yank had "strong-armed" the Chinaman and carried off the girl bodily, perhaps against her will, or whether she had made the get-away unaided, going off to the Scud on her own. In Jackson's mind there were no doubts.

"I see them welts wi' my own peepers," he said, "an' they wan't the marks uv a man. They wuz scratches. That lanky Yank don't scratch ... 'e wallops. But that gal—s'y, did y'u ever tyke a squint at 'er taloons? Them's the ans'er. She kum to 'im; an' she's stickin' lika oktypus."

Again I must credit old "Jack" with handing me pretty near to the "stryght dope."

Yes, I had indeed noticed Rona's wonderful fingernails; likewise the astonishing amount of care she lavished on them. One could not have helped noticing them. A quarter to half an inch long, meticulously manicured, and stained a maroon-brown (rather darker than the rich sang du bœuf of henna), she was always polishing them—those of one hand on the palm of the other—even when "sitting Buddha" with dreaming half-closed eyes. I inferred the habit of letting them grow was acquired in the course of her association with the Chinese. She cut them just short of where they would begin to curl and be a nuisance. A fraction of an inch longer, and they would have been as useless as the tusks of an old boar that had curved back more than a half circle. As they were....

One man's guess was as good as another's in the matter of Rona's racial origin. Kai, though agreeing that she came from "somewhere Java-side," always spoke of her as a Kanaka, just as they did of all the rest of the "beach" women who were not palpably Jap, Chinese or white. I doubt very much, however, that she had a drop of real Polynesian blood in her veins. Flaring with temperament though she was, there was still nothing about her of the happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care sensuousness of the Caroline or Samoan, the only women of the Islands to whom she bore even the faintest resemblance in face or figure. If she had come from Marquesas-way—but no, not even an admixture of old Spanish pirate blood would have accounted for either the spirit or the body of Rona.

The girl's practice of wearing her sulu (Kai used the Fijian name for the inevitable South Sea waist-cloth which the Samoans call lava-lava and the Tahitians pareo) Malay-fashion—looped over the breasts and secured by a hitch under the left arm—indicated that her outdoor life at least had been spent somewhere in the Insulinde Archipelago. Her very considerable English vocabulary, however, and especially her fluency in "pidgin," could hardly have been acquired save through some years of residence in the Straits Settlements or the Federated Malay States. I was inclined to favour Singapore, especially as she had once let slip something about a fling at fan-tan at Johore. But even had she been born in that amazing island melting pot, her unmistakably Hindu cast of features and mould of figure were hardly accounted for. The Madrassi Tamils of the Straits were coolies, and Rona radiated caste from her slender pink-tipped toes to her crown of indigo-black hair coils.

In my own mind I harboured the theory that the girl was a "by-product" of the harem of one of the innumerable petty Sultanates of Malaysia, among which I knew were to be found girls of all the tribes and races of the Moslem world. In no other way could I account for the flaming spirit and the physical perfection of her. Not even descent from that strange Hindu remnant of the lovely island of Lombok, just east of Java (a theory which I had also turned over in my mind), quite satisfied on both these scores. As to what sort of a centrifugal impulse might have operated to spin her forth to the clutches of the currents of the outside world, I had not speculated very deeply. But—well, I knew something of the strange currencies in which Malaysian potentates paid their debts to Singapore rug and jewel merchants!

In spite of the increasing warmth of Bell's friendship for me, my way to Rona's confidence proved far from easy sledding. This was partly because I had got in bad at the outset by starting to sketch that capricious lady at her reef-side bath in the face of her very outspoken disapproval of anything so unseemly, and partly because she was slow in making up her mind that I did not necessarily classify with the predatory males against whom her whole life had unquestionably been an unrelieved defence. Obsessed by the desire to paint her, I had not improved my standing with the girl by asking Bell (after she had refused me pointblank) to intercede to get her to sit for me. Indeed, that faux pas on my part seemed to have put an end for good to any chance I might have had of getting her to pose. Rona was openly indignant that I should have presumed to regard her own decision as other than final in the matter, while Bell, though perfectly good-natured about it, was no less decided in his disapproval.

"No, sah, I'm not fo' it in the least, ol' man," he drawled decisively. "Lil' Rona's 'bout the neahest thing to a true, lovin' an' lawful wife I evah had, awh evah will have, fo' that mattah. So you must see that it doan quite jibe with mah sense o' what is right an' propah unda the ci'cumstances fo' me to aid an' abet a proceduah that might culminate in huh appeahin' on the wall o' somun's bathroom as a spo'tin nymph awh a wallowin' mumaid. Nothin' doin', ol' man; not with mah blessin'."

That ended it, of course. From then on I had to content myself with the hopeless "sketches from memory," in not the best of which was I able to catch more than a suggestion of what I sought. I could not have failed more utterly had I set myself to do a "character portrait" of the "Green Lady" herself.

But on the personal side it was not long before I began to make an appreciable gain of ground with Rona. First she ceased avoiding me when I dropped in for a mid-afternoon yarn with Bell; then she began to assume a sort of "benevolent tolerance" by coming and sitting on the mat as we talked; finally she started taking an active interest in the conversation, coming out of her Buddha-like trances every now and then to cut in with some trenchant comment in fluent bêche-de-mer jargon, or perhaps a shrewd question phrased in carefully chosen and enunciated English.

At last, one memorable afternoon, she came (quite on her own initiative, he assured me) with Bell to call at the little thatch-roofed, woven-walled hut I was calling home at the time, wearing in honour of the occasion her most treasured possession, the "peacock" shawl. It was this astonishingly fine piece of Cantonese embroidery which Bell had mentioned as having made up, with the little Malay kris, the sum total of the dower Rona had brought him. It was the first time I had had a chance to examine it at close quarters and I saw at a glance that, however it had come into her possession, it had once been a priceless thing, a real work of art, a treasure fit for the trousseau of a princess.

The body of the shawl was amber-coloured silk of so close a weave that it would have shed water as it stopped light. A rubber blanket would not have thrown a blacker shadow when held against the sun. Yet so sheer and fine was the fabric that a twist of it streamed from one hand to the other as brandy pours out of a flask. The peacock itself, done in a thousand tints and shades of delicate floss, was all of life-size in body and something more than that in tail. Stitching and matching, stitching and matching—you could almost see the artist growing old before your eyes as you thought of the years he must have bent above his glacially-growing masterpiece.

With this rainbow-bright rectangle of shimmering silks worn folded over the shoulders in the ordinary way the peacock must have been considerably telescoped and distorted. It was doubtless for this reason that Rona always wore it Malay-fashion, as the Javanese women wear their sarongs. This displayed the jewel-gay bird in all his pride, the bright breast swelling over Rona's own and the coruscant cascade of tail (you could almost hear the rustle of it) falling about her limbs like the feather mantle of an early Hawaiian queen.

I have said that this shawl had been a priceless thing. As a matter of fact it still was such. So lovingly had it been cared for, not only by Rona but by the many owners it may well have had before her (for Canton had done no such work as this for half a century at least), that not a corner was frayed, not a one of its countless thousands of stitches started. In texture it was scarcely less perfect than the day it was finished. The only thing wrong with it was that the colours were a good deal dulled, not by age (for the old Cantonese dyes are as deathless of hue as ancient Phœnician glass), but by grease. This had happened, I suspected, largely during Rona's stewardship, for the tiare-scented coco oil she used so freely as a hair-perfume often found its way to her arms and shoulders—and so to the shawl. All the latter needed to restore it to its pristine freshness and refulgency was a good "dry-cleaning."

"Even Rona does not dream of the brilliance of colour under that grease," I said to myself. "Oh, for a can of naphtha!" Then the fact that my benzine would do the same trick flashed into my mind. I was all but out of it, I reflected, with replenishment uncertain; but I could at least contrive to spare enough to make a start with. Pouring a teacupful of the pungent solvent out of the scant pint I found still on hand, I saturated a clean rag with it and, without a word of explanation to the girl, walked up to her and started washing the bird's face and hackle. For an instant she stiffened angrily, evidently under the impression that my solicitude for the embroidery was only a thinly veiled excuse for chucking her under the chin. (Indeed, she confessed to me later that "gentlemen" could always be counted on to employ such indirect methods of approach, and that she found them rather more difficult to combat than the straight cave-man stuff of the less sophisticated beach-comber). But as the first glad flash of brightening colour caught the corner of a suspiciously-lowered eye, the innocence—even the laudability—of my purpose shot home to her quick mind. With a twirl of thumbs and a twist of shoulders, she came out of the shawl as a golden moth spurns its cocoon, and, leaving it in my hand, darted over to a peg and purloined an old smoking-jacket to take its place.

"Bath heem good, Whitnee," she chirruped, giving her slipping sulu a hitch with one hand as she thrust the other into an arm of the jacket. "Makee heem first-chop clean. He too much dirtee long time."

That she lapsed thus into "pidgin" was a sure sign of the girl's ecstatic excitement. Usually her English—especially when she had time to ponder and polish it in advance, as when she put questions—was much better than that.

Sopping gently to avoid pulling the delicate stitches, I managed to "bath heem good" from his saucy crest, down over the royal purple hackle, and well out upon his comparatively sober-coloured breast before my benzine came to an end. A slightly more vigorous dabbing beyond the embroidery line "alchemized" a patch of clouded amber to a halo of lucent gold, against which the bird's haughtily-held head stood out like the profile of a martyred saint on an old stained-glass window. Thus far would the precious contents of that teacup go, and no farther.

Rona was in raptures. What though there was a blotchy high- (or rather low-) water mark where the dabbing had ceased near the base of the erupting splash of tail-feathers, what though the magic liquid had come off second best in its bout with an indurated gob of egg-yolk drooling across one wing, what though the worst of our Augean labours—the cleansing of the mighty green tail—had yet to be tackled—just look at the glory already wrought!

Crooning with pleasure, the girl stroked and petted the renovated iridescence of the lordly neck—until I called her attention to the fact that the still unevaporated benzine was dissolving her finger-nail stain. It was an ill-advised remark on my part, for it turned her attention to the still unreclaimed tail and set her begging for "just nuff fo' one-piecee featha, Whitnee; he need it vehry ba-ad."

She had her way, of course, and would have finished my benzine then and there had not Bell come to my rescue. Laughing and muttering something about "thustiness" (not drinking whisky myself, I had none in stock), he took Rona by the arm and started off on the homeward path. Strutting and preening she went, the very reincarnation of the royal bird upon her bosom, the very living, breathing spirit of "peacock-iness."

She might just as well have finished the job—or rather the benzine—at once, though, for she got it all in the end. Every day or two—sometimes with Bell, sometimes alone—she began paying calls. Always she was in gala dress and always, after more or less "finessive" preliminaries, she made the same plea.

"Just one mo' featha, Whitnee," she would coo ingratiatingly, putting a long-nailed finger-tip on the "eye" of the particular quill next in line for renovation. "Ple-ese, Whitnee.... 'Peakie' has been one veh-ry good fella bird too-dayee. Pu-retty ple'ese, Whitnee."

Of course that always got me, and incidentally the benzine—as long as it lasted. I had remarked to Bell once or twice how his soft Southern drawl was beginning to creep into Rona's English, and how fetching a combination it made with her "pidgin-bêche-de-mer" blend. Getting wind of this, the sly minx played the card to the limit. That "one mo' fetha, Whitnee," had me fated, and she knew it. I was completely out of benzine for three weeks, and at a time when I was in especial need of it in connection with my experiments in colour-mixing; but Rona's friendship was cheap at the price. When I finally got hold of a five-gallon can of naphtha from Suva (sent up to Bougainville by Burns, Phillip packet, where one of Jackson's cutters picked it up), the dry-cleaning the two of us gave old "Peakie" was the best fun I'd had since I used to scrub my Newfoundland pup as a kid.

CHAPTER IV
"SLANT" ALLEN RETIRES AGAIN

Although "Slant" Allen had "retired" to Kai on three or four occasions previous to my arrival, his latest sojourn—the one which ended with his enforced departure on the Cora Andrews—began about a month after I took up my residence there. Two questions which Jackson asked of the man who told him "Slant" had landed on the beach the night before have always struck me as especially illuminative. One was: "Did 'e fetch a 'awse?" and the other—even more laconic—was: "Gin, Kanak, Jap or Chinee this croose?"

And equally illuminative was his comment when told that Allen had come across in a catamaran, bringing neither girl nor horse. "Then 'e musta sloped in a 'ell uv a rush," said the old trader with finality.

Kai was frankly disappointed that "Slant" had come without his "stable," for the "beach race meets" which had made his name a byword throughout the Islands were always productive (it was universally agreed) of no end of sport and excitement. Allen, it was claimed, had transported ponies about the South Seas by every known craft that plied their waters, from a steam packet to a Papuan head-hunting canoe. Once, in Fiji, he had even swum a horse across the flooded Rewa in order to get it to Suva in time to run for the "Roku's Cup." Of course he won out. "Slant" always did that—by hook or by crook—whether with a horse or a woman. Thus Kai, in discussing Allen's advent.

It was characteristic of that hard-hit bunch of "gentlemen and sportsmen" (a phrase often on the lips of the post-prandial speakers at their "race-banquets") that they should hasten to tell me that Allen had once owned a Melbourne Cup winner—"came jolly near riding the gelding himself, too"—while the fact that he had killed more of his fellow-creatures than any man of twice his age in the South Seas was only a matter of casual mention. You had to credit the frank minded and mouthed rascals for running true to form in that touch of naïveté, though. To them the Melbourne Cup was the greatest thing in the world beyond any possible comparison: a human life was just about the least. But they were quite as careless about their own lives as of those of others, and that alone always raised them in my eyes far above the pettiness of lesser if more conventionally moral men.

Although there was not a horse on the island at the time of Allen's arrival, within a week he had wangled it somehow to have a bunch of Solomon ponies brought over from Malaite, and at the end of a fortnight had pulled off the first Kai "Grand National." "Slant" called it that, he said, because, like the great Liverpool classic from which he borrowed the name, it was to be a steeplechase. The half-wild little beasts were brought over on the deck of a trading schooner, travelling in such restricted quarters in the waist that they had to be thrown and held down to let the foreboom go over every time she was put about.

A bit stiff in the knees but uncurbed of spirit, the vicious quartette clambered out on the beach, shook off the water soaked up during their swim from the schooner, laid back their ears and stood ready to fight all-comers with tooth and hoof. As a consequence, naturally, the preliminaries of the "Grand National" were more in the character of broncho-busting contests than speed trials, and it was in one of these that the mighty Bell had won the plaudits and the respect of the "beach" by breaking the spirit of a wild-eyed lump of a cayuse which had just managed to give the momentarily overconfident "Slant" a nasty spill.

The "Grand National" was run round the curve of the beach, with two "water-jumps," the "stonewall" of the quay, and three hurdles in the form of old dugout canoes to be negotiated. Bell declined to accept a mount, and, in any event, his weight would have told prohibitively against him in competition with any one of at least a dozen lighter men, all of whom had had more or less actual racing experience.

Allen was the only one to go the full route at the first running of the "National," all three of his rivals falling out at the water-jumps. When one of the defeated riders limped in and started to attribute "Slant's" win to the fact that he had picked the best-broken if not the speediest mount, that imperturbable sportsman cheerfully agreed to ride the race over mounted on any one of the ponies the judges cared to designate. Again he had a walkaway. It was all a matter of sheer horse-mastership; the speed of the beast had little to do with it.

Finally, just to prove that the running was all on the square, "Slant" rode the race on each of the two remaining ponies, one of which had strained a tendon and rasped most of the hide off one side of him in trying to jump through the coral blocks of the quay instead of over them. We gave the laughing centaur a great ovation when he brought even the cripple—dripping blood and sweat it was, but still responsive to the magic of the hand that imposed its will at the pressure of a bridle rein—under the wire a half-breach-length winner.

And still more wildly we cheered him when "Quill" Partington—a broken-down and broken-out (from jail, I mean) newspaper writer, late of Melbourne and formerly of Calcutta and London—chivvied up an ancient tortoise that Jackson used to keep around his shop as a pet, and, mounting "Slant" on the ridge of its shell, offered to back the pair at catch-weights against anything on the island. "Quill," a most engaging character, was the poet and minstrel of Kai. He did not, however, figure in the Cora Andrews affair, save that he later wrote some rather spirited verses in celebration of it, or rather of what little he knew of it.

If the feeling in Kai had been one of disappointment when it was first reported Allen had landed without a horse, that awakened by the still more astonishing intelligence that he did not have a girl with him was somewhat different—rather more akin to apprehension, it seemed to me. "Slant" was no more of a laggard on the love-path than the race-track, and the gay gossip of his amazing amours was sipped with the tea of effete Apia and Papeete with scarcely less gusto than when it sauced the salt-horse of the pearling fleets of Port Darwin and Thursday Island. The lightning of his love was likely to strike anywhere, you were told, sometimes in the most unexpected places. There was that vixen of a gin—a straight Australian aboriginal black—whom he had risked his life for in cutting across a corner of the "Never-Never" when he ran away with her, only to have her turn and knife him later in Deli out of jealousy of a half-caste Portugee Timorese who had caught his fickle fancy. And—to take the other extreme—there was that little golden-haired doll of a niece of the Governor of Fiji, who fell heels over head in love with "Slant" after seeing him play polo in Suva, and who, when they packed her off for home to break up the disgraceful affair, made what was described as a really sincere attempt to go over the rail of the Auckland-bound Union packet. Then there was "Slant's" affair with that notorious pearl-pirate "Squid" Saunders' girl—the one the missionaries adopted and tried to reclaim, and who promised for a while to be such a credit to their teaching—with its ghastly sequel. And so it went.

It was said that "Slant" boasted of having a son (he never kept track of girls, he said) and a saddle in every group west of the "hundred and eightieth." I daresay this was true, though those who put it island instead of group doubtless exaggerated. I had landed at several islands myself where I had been unable to borrow a saddle.

Most of the little unpleasantnesses that disturbed the dolce far niente atmosphere of Kai had their roots in the fact that the male population of the island was always a good jump ahead of the female, that there were not, in short, enough girls to go round. Under these conditions the advent of so notorious a "feminist" as Allen could not but be provocative of a certain anxiety, especially on the part of those who were (to use Jackson's terse if inelegant expression) "'arborin' 'igh-class 'ens."

"Don't you coves make no mistake," Jackson was quoted as saying; "'Slant' 'll be tykin' a myte stryght aw'y. Only question is 'oo's myte 'e's goin' to tyke. If it was any bloke but that squar'-jawed Yank w'at 'ad 'is grapplin' 'ooks slung into the plumage uv that perky peacock pullet, I'd 'ave no doubt w'at bird 'Slant' ud be baggin' an' draggin' 'ome to broil. But—layin' low as 'e is fer a bit—I'm thinkin' it ain't that presarve 'e'll be gunnin' in just yet aw'ile."

"Stryght dope" again from old "Jack." Allen had his own reasons for not wishing his presence in Kai to be called too forcibly to the attention of the authorities in the British Solomons, where his latest escapade (something to do with the forcible recruiting of blacks) came pretty near the line where they were likely to ask for a gunboat from the Sydney station to aid in bringing him to book. Allen was by no means inadept of his fellow men, and he must have known that a showdown with a man of Bell's stamp—even though he had the best of it and copped the most desirable thing he ever set eyes on for his very own—could hardly fail to prove a clash that men would like to talk about, the inspiration of a tale that would shudder itself from Yap to Tasmania in delirious beach-comber jargon, setting tongues wagging about him at a time when publicity was quite the last thing that he wanted.

Pipped as he was by the pullet's pulchritude (his own expression—he admitted as much to Jackson offhand) the cool-headed if hot-blooded Allen evidently decided to ride a waiting race for at least the first half or three-quarters, and so have something to draw on for the straightaway. "Easy starter but a hell of a finisher," was the popular appraisal of "Slant's" way of winning with a horse, and it was but natural that he should pin his faith to similar tactics where a woman was in the running. There's a lot in common between the two, and it is rarely indeed that a man who has a way with the one comes a cropper with the other.

It has occurred to me, too, that a very wholesome respect for Bell as a man may have had a good deal to do with Allen's failure to force the running at the start in the matter of Rona. The steel of his own hard purposefulness could not have but struck sparks on the flint beneath the American's mask of suave reserve at their first meeting, and the Australian was far too intelligent not to sense that in Bell's Jovian spirit there was a force more compelling than anything in his own. Moreover, at riding, fighting and shooting—all that carried much weight when they judged a man in the Islands—Allen must have known that if the balance inclined either way, it was in the American's favour.

It may well have been the sheer rugged, manly forcefulness of Bell that gave Allen pause, at least in those early weeks before the Australian's infatuation for the girl became an obsession in which his reason had no part. For years he had been taking life and property out of downright contempt for his victims. "I'm the better man, and therefore the more deserving," was sufficient excuse in his own mind for his most high-handed outrages. But in Bell—for almost the first time perhaps—he had met a man who had an "edge" on him—even his soaring ego could not prevent his recognizing that. This must have been plain to him even when he measured the Yankee with the yardstick of his own primitive code. Yes, I really think that Allen, in his innermost mind, rated Bell as a man who, like himself, had a "right" to the best of everything. I am even convinced that, for a while at least, he even tried to respect Bell's right to Rona.

But do not let me leave the impression that there was one iota of physical fear of Bell in this attitude of Allen's. From what I had seen, and was to see, of the cool-eyed Antipodean that was unthinkable, even though he knew that the powerful ex-athlete could come pretty near to staving in his ribs with a single punch, and though he may have suspected that the Yankee was the deadlier man on the draw. I honestly believe that "Slant" Allen had no fear in his heart of anyone or anything under heaven. At that time, I mean; what came to him later is another matter.

"Slant" ran true to Jackson's "dope sheet" in the matter of "tykin' a myte," though, but it was done quite decently and in order—that is, as such things go in the Islands. He put up with "Quill" Partington (an old pal) for a fortnight, and then, when "Quill's" lyric spirit led him to run over to Malaite in search of a queer native banjo that someone had told him the bush niggers of the interior of that island made, strings and all, from the wild boar, "Slant" simply stayed on to "look after the pigs and chickens" (as he told them at Jackson's) and, incidentally, Mary Regan. Mary came from Norfolk Island, and claimed lineal descent from the mutineers of the "Bounty." Certainly she looked the part—of a descendant of mutineers, I mean. She had specialized in unhappy love affairs, and showed it. She had a thin, bony, angular frame, a voice like the wail of a cracked fog-horn, and a temper "calid enough for cooking purposes," as "Quill" described it. "Quill," who had developed a taste for curries and hot seasonings while living in India, claimed that the reason he had put up with Mary for so long was because of the saving she enabled him to effect in paprika.

How "Slant"—straight meat-eating and unpampered of palate as he was—hit it off with the mercurial Mary no one seemed to know. At any rate, I feel sure that he found her "condimental" disposition useful as a counter-irritant against the rising fever of his passion for Rona, something which, though he kept it under astonishingly good outward control, had been burning with increasing heat from the very first time he saw her. He confessed that to me later. Curbed passion, like wounded pride, if it cannot find outward expression, bites inward. With all his despicable record well in mind, I still cannot help thinking with a certain admiration of the game bluff the rascal put up during those six or eight weeks that the enchantment of Rona worked within him, of the gay, devil-may-care smile that so successfully masked the writhings of his racked spirit. First and last, there was something about the fellow—I think it must have been his flaming courage—that attracted me strongly in spite of all that I knew, and all that I came to hold, against him.

Since Kai held no regular intercourse with any of the surrounding islands, the news that the plague—a pernicious form of bubonic—had broken out and was making terrible ravages among both the bush and saltwater niggers of the Solomons was received with no especial interest on the beach, save perhaps by those who were wont now and then to take a flyer in "black ivory." The labour-recruiting trade—itself almost the only medium through which the pest had been spread—was hard hit of course; indeed, had there been anything like adequate control of the pernicious traffic at this time, it would have been suspended entirely until all of the islands from which blacks were being taken, or to which they were being returned, were able to present something approximating clean bills of health.

Since this was not done, however, the only check on the movement of blacks—infected or otherwise—was the possible reluctance of the masters of ships engaged in the trade to take the risk of carrying them. And since the average black-birding skipper lived as a matter of course with a gun in one hand, his life in the other, and the devil's tow-line between his teeth, it was hardly to be expected that a little thing like the spectre of the "Black Death" looming up on the windward horizon was going to make him reef much canvas. The "Black Death" in another form would ambush him sooner or later anyhow. With niggers waiting to settle accounts with him in every bay it was only a matter of time at the best. Why worry about a few cases of a disease that might not kill him even if he did get it? Heave in and get under way! That was about the way the black-birder looked at it, and he went right on scattering infected niggers around the South Seas like a cook stirring raisins into a pudding.

But in the secluded and peaceful haven of Kai lagoon they reckoned that they had little to fear from the epidemic whatever happened elsewhere. Let the plague and the heathen rage for all they cared. They were their own quarantine officers, and, until the "Black Death" ceased to stalk in the neighbouring islands, "No Visitors" was the order of the day. All very simple and efficient—in theory. Covered every possible contingency—just about.

I had spent several colourful days once—getting about from island to island in the New Hebrides—with red-haired old Mike Grogan on the Cora Andrews, and had heard from that hard-fisted giant's own lips something of the grim balances checked against his life in practically every black-birding island of Melanesia. A black's home bay holds a labour-recruiting skipper responsible for the man's safe return at the end of his contract time, and if he does not come back they figure that the only fair way to even up the score is by killing the captain of the ship which took him away. Grogan calculated that he would have to be killed something like one hundred and forty times to make a clean sheet of all the accounts thus reckoned against him. He took a sort of grim pleasure in running over the items of the various tallies, but always ended with: "B'gorra, the devils'll be gittin' me yit!" He was convinced that it would be a "cutting-out" party that would do for him in the end, and I have no doubt that he fought over in his mind that final bloody showdown every night he stood the "graveyard" watch alone. A sudden volley from the bush, his whaleboat caught in a swarming rush of blacks, his crew disabled or deserting, and himself alone battling it out single-handed with the niggers at the last.... It was something like that he expected for a grand finale, and all the "fighting Irish" in him yearned for it as a sunflower turns to the setting sun.

"An' it ain't as if I won't be givin' the spalpeens a run for their money, me bhoy," he had cried one afternoon, clapping me on the shoulder where I swayed with him to the plungings of the Cora in a nasty cross-swell. "An', b'gorra, it's a way to die after a man's own heart—shootin' an' clubbin' into a mob o' niggers out under God's own sky!"

Full as my mind was of other things on that accursed day of which I am about to write, I could not help but think of these words when they told me at Jackson's that old Mike's fighting spirit had passed on a windless midnight, and while Mike himself was jack-knifed over the Cora's wheel, spitting blood and curses, and imploring the devil to quit tying knots in his tortured guts with a red-hot pitchfork.

What little we heard of how things came to go wrong with the Cora in the first place fell from the blackening lips of her "Agent" (as the recruiter is called), who managed to reach the beach of Kai in a whaleboat, and who did not go into a delirium until a half-hour before he died that evening. She was packed to the hatches with "return" boys from Samoa. Although the plague had been claiming a very heavy toll among the Melanesian blacks of the coco plantations of Upolou, Grogan decided to take a chance at making the Solomons with a load which, on account of the risk, was offered him at double rates. They would have made it all right, the Agent thought, had not the southerly gale which blew them a long way out of their course been followed by many days of calms and alternating winds. Grogan's softness in trying to doctor the first case of plague—instead of following the customary practice, cruel but effective, of shooting the infected black (doomed anyhow) and throwing the body to the sharks—was probably responsible for the ghastly sequel. The blacks fell sick by dozens, until at last the Skipper—doubtless already in the first throes of the disease himself—ordered every living man except the surviving members of the crew driven below and battened under hatch. Grogan died that night and the mate the following morning.

The only white man remaining was the Agent, and he, obsessed with a life-long horror of being buried at sea, steered the best course he could for the nearest island. The Cora, luckily heading into the treacherous reef-beset passage at the turn of the tide, dropped her hook in Kai lagoon in the first flush of the dawning of the next day.

CHAPTER V
A SHIP OF DEATH

With a good many days of my life to which I cannot look back without a blush of shame, I write deliberately when I say that the one ushered in by the raucous grind of the Cora Andrews' chain running through its hawse-pipe as she let go anchor a couple of cables' lengths off Kai beach, stands alone in the horror and the painfulness of its memories. It is characteristic of all but the most degraded of beach-combers—doubtless their general contempt of life has much to do with it—that "once in a while" they "can finish in style"; that, on a showdown, they are usually there with the goods. I had always felt sure that, in a pinch, I could force myself to come through in the same way—the thought had gilded many a slough of despond for me. Well, this day, I had my chance and funked it—funked it clean, as a yellow dog slinks from a fight with its tail between its legs, as an underbred hunter refuses a jump. Oh yes, I had an excuse. "Seeing green" is next thing to "seeing yellow." Almost anyone knows that. But I had thought that there was enough red blood left in me to make it possible for me to take the bit in my teeth and finish like a thoroughbred at the last. But there was not. That was the thought which had made the ghastly tragedy even more tragical to me, which made a mockery of the triumph which I might otherwise have felt when, first Australia and then Europe, acclaimed me as the greatest marine painter of the decade.

For several days previous to the coming of the Cora Andrews I had been slipping up pretty badly on my "absinthe reform" program. It was largely the fault, I think, of a positively infernal spell of weather. The ozone-laden trade winds, falling light after a spell of low barometer, had finally failed altogether. Kai was lapped in sluggish moisture-saturated airs that clung like a wet blanket. The Gargantuan popcorn-like piles of the trade clouds were replaced by strata of miasmic mists which awakened all the latent fevers in a man's body and mind. The sea, slatily slick of surface, heaved in oily, indolent smoothness, sliding over the reef without sound or foam. The brooding, ominous sullenness was all-pervading, oppressive with sinister suggestion.

Everyone on the island was drinking heavily, and mostly alone. No tipsy choruses boomed out from under the sounding-board of Jackson's sheet-iron roof. Even "Slant" Allen failed to appear for his wild end-of-the-afternoon dashes up and down the beach. Rona dropped in languidly one afternoon to say that Bell was tilting the bottle more frequently than she had ever known him to do before, and that for three days he had missed his early morning plunge from the reef.

"Too much walkee with Jo'nnee Walkah, Whitnee," she punned in a feeble flicker of pleasantry. "I veh-ry much worree along Bel-la."

She needn't have worried, though. He, at least, had the stuff in him for a proper finish.

It was only to be expected that I should seek solace in a time like this by snuggling closer than ever into the enfolding arms of the "Green Lady." That fickle jade was at her best—and her worst. Never had she winged me to loftier pinnacles of sensuous delight; never had she dropped me to profounder depths of horror and despond. The night before the Cora came marked a new "high"; also a new "low." I dropped like a plummet straight from a pea-green grotto full of lilies of the valley, maiden's hair ferns and ambrosia-breathed houri to the fire-scorched cliffs ringing the mouth of the Bottomless Pit. I knew that Pit of old. Most of the early hours of my mornings for the last five years had been spent in trying to keep from being pushed into it.

But this time, though, it looked as if they were going to get away with it. Failing to break my grip (I always managed to hang on somehow), they had tried new tactics. They were pushing in the side of the Pit itself so as to carry me with it. I felt the relentless creeping of the ledge on which I struggled to maintain precarious footing. If I could only push back into the rock ... through it ... out to the air! Nothing could stand against the mighty heave I gave with my shoulders. The cliff parted with a great rip-roar of rending, and I reeled back, back, straight through—the pandanus siding of my hut. An instant before a nigger had knocked off the shackle of the Cora's anchor chain. The unchecked run of forty-odd fathoms of rusty iron links through a hawse-pipe is very like in sound to the rending of a rocky cliff—that is, to a man in an absinthe nightmare.

That violent awakening did not bring me straight back to normal by any means. You never come out of the "green horrors" that way, unless, of course, you fall into water, or set fire to the house, or do something else that calls for instant action. You usually come out by gradual stages, each successive one marked by a shade more of the earth-earthy than the last.

In this instance my fall only changed the spirit of my nightmare. I was by no means out of the woods, either. I had backed away from the Mouth of the Pit all right, but what brought that Ship of Death—black and sinister she was against the bloody redness of the infernal sunrise—unless it was to take me there again? I knew that it was a real ship. I knew those black things festooned along its rails were real dead men. I knew that the horrible reek which presently came pouring in over the oily water to penetrate my contracted nostrils was the real smell of rotting flesh. I knew that I was looking out at Kai lagoon, and from the door of my own hut. I knew these things, just as I knew it was real blood I saw and tasted when I bit my finger to prove that I knew them.

But it was still as in a dream that I became aware of an erratically rowed whaleboat pulling away from the Death Ship and making for the beach. It was with an agreeable sense of relief that I noted that it was apparently heading for the quay rather than in my direction. Drawing near, it sheered away from the weed-slippery landing and went full-tilt for the beach. A man—a big man, bare of legs and of chest, wearing only a red sulu—ran down to meet it. It seemed no more than a perfectly natural development of the ghastly pantomime that the big man should raise a revolver and shoot one of the black rowers when the latter jumped over the gunwale of the whaleboat and started to bolt up the beach. I saw the flash from the revolver, saw the fugitive crumple and fall, and the sharp report, impacting on the side of my sheet-iron rain-water tank, slammed against my ear-drums with a shattering "whang."

That close-at-hand shot had the effect of shocking me back a notch or two more nearer normal; but, nerve-shattered as I always was at the end of a night, it was something very akin to the abject terror that gripped me as I backed away from the Brink of the Pit which now impelled me to "back away" from the new menace. Seizing my painting things from sheer force of habit, I slunk off through the long early morning shadows of the coco palm boles, not to stop until I came out upon the broken coral of the steep-shelving leeward beach of the island. It was as far as I could go without swimming.

Here Laku, my Tonga boy, found me toward noon. The coffee from the flask he brought was the first thing to pass my lips since I had poured my last drink the night before. It steadied me somewhat, but my nerves still refused to react. The shock of the morning had been too much for them. I realized that Kai had a mighty knotty problem on its hands with that shipload of dead and dying niggers in the lagoon (Laku had told me it was the Cora, and something of what the trouble was), and it took a lot of screwing before I got my courage up to a point where I could force my reluctant feet to carry me back to shoulder my share of the responsibilities.

I was still streaking and dabbing at my canvas at three o'clock, and it must have been nearly an hour later before I packed up and started back toward the village. I burned that bizarre rectangle of colour-slashed canvas on the very first occasion (which was not until a day or two later) that I had a chance to stand off and look at it objectively. There was revealed in it too much of the utter unmanliness which marked my conduct on this most shameful day of my life to make it a pleasant thing to have around. For me to have kept it would have been like a man's framing and hanging the excoriation of the judge who had sentenced him for some despicable crime.

What had transpired in the village up to the moment of my return at the end of the afternoon I must set down as I learned of it later. Everything considered, it seems to me that Kai—with one or two notable exceptions—behaved very creditably in an extremely trying emergency. Awakened when the Cora's anchor was let go, a number of men had run out to the beach, from where their glasses quickly gave them a pretty good idea of the state of affairs aboard the luckless black-birder. Then they got together at Jackson's—the lot of them in their pajamas or sulus, just as they had tumbled out of their sleeping mats—to decide what was to be done. The majority at first seemed inclined to stand by their predetermined plan of shooting the first, and every man from a plague-infested ship that tried to land on the beach. But at this juncture Doc Wyndham, calling their attention to the fact that a whaleboat had already put away from the Cora, suggested that they wait and learn just how things stood before starting off gunning.

"I'm with you as far as shooting any nigger that tries to break quarantine goes," he said, "but I'm dam'd if I'll stand by and see anyone take a pot shot at Mike Grogan, or any other sick white man, for that matter. Old Mike nursed me through a spell of 'black-water' once at Port Darwin, and if he is in that boat I dope it it's up to me to tote him home to my shack and do what I can for him. If he can't clamber out I'm going to wade in and carry him back to the beach, so you'll have to shoot the two of us if you shoot at all. But I don't think you will. I'm not asking any of you chaps to have anything to do with the stunt. You needn't touch him. I'll take him home and swear not to budge from there till the thing's over one way or the other. After that I'll put myself in a ten-day quarantine. Moreover, I won't be expecting attention from any white man or nigger on the island in case the luck goes against me and I catch the pest myself. It's my own little game and I won't stand for any interfering in it."

That was the gist of Doc Wyndham's remarks as Jackson outlined them to me the next day. They met with hearty assent from all of the dozen or more present, except on the score of letting the Doc have the job all to himself. He turned down every one of the volunteer nurses, however, saying it was his own kettle of fish and that he'd have to stew it in his own way. He even insisted on meeting the boat alone, urging that there was no use in multiplying the points of possible "plague contact."

So it must have been the distinguished surgeon from Guy's that I saw shoot the bolting black that morning. Had I continued to watch, instead of bolting myself at that juncture, I would have seen him wade out, lift a man tenderly from the stern-sheets of the whaleboat, and start carrying the limp body up the beach to where a spreading bread-fruit tree shaded the door of the sheet-iron shack which he was wont humorously to refer to as his "professional, social and domestic headquarters for Melanesia." Following that, I would have seen a bunch of motley-clad figures prance down and start menacing the irresolute boat-pullers with flourished revolvers, forcing the frightened blacks to back off and begin splashing their wobbly way out to the Cora.

Wyndham's conduct all through struck me as rather fine, especially for a man who was a convict of three continents and two hemispheres. Disappointed in finding his friend Grogan in the whaleboat, on learning that the latter and his mate were already dead, Doc just as cheerfully set about paying to the Agent the debt he felt he owed to old Mike. Before entering his house, he called to his girl—a saucy little Samoan named Melita, who had gone right on sleeping through all the racket—ordering her to make a hurried departure by the back door and not to return until he sent for her. The Doc was never a man to let sentiment interfere with business, Jackson opined.

Making the doomed man as comfortable as possible in his own canvas folding bed, Wyndham deferred giving an opiate until he had gained such information as he could of how things were on the Cora. Then, after communicating (from a safe distance) what he had learned to a delegation from executive headquarters at Jackson's, he nailed a red sulu to his front door as a danger signal and disappeared behind the bars of his self-imposed quarantine.

I may as well state here that Wyndham—thanks, doubtless, to the precautions which he, as a medical man, would have known how to take—side-stepped the plague completely, quite as completely, indeed, as he sidestepped the Thursday Island customs authorities a year or so later, when a half season's shipment of pearls from Makua Reef, Limited, disappeared as into thin air.

Of the information Wyndham gleaned from the Agent before giving the latter a shot of morphine to relieve his agony and mercifully hasten the inevitable end, the most important as affecting Kai's action was that something over a hundred blacks had been battened down in the schooner's forecastle and 'midships hold for seventy-two hours, with nothing but a couple of stubby wind-sails feeding them air. The dead had all been cleared out before this was done, but there were a lot of bad cases among the living who were driven or thrown down the hatches. By the stench, the Agent knew that some of these had already died; but that many still had life in their bodies he judged by the unabated vigour of the howling.

The most reassuring news passed on by the dying man was that Ranga-Ro, Grogan's gigantic Malay Bo'sun, had remained in charge of the Cora, and that he appeared to have the black crew (only three or four of them, luckily, had succumbed to the plague so far) well in hand. That brightened the outlook a good deal, for what Kai had feared above all else was a general breakout and stampede, which might inundate the island with plague-infected niggers, crazy beyond all possibility of control.

Ranga, who claimed to have had at one time or another every tropical disease on record, was—or believed himself to be—a plague immune. He was not in the least worried over the responsibilities that had fallen on him, and could be counted upon, the Agent thought, to see the game through. The only trouble was that he couldn't navigate, so that if the Cora was going to be taken to a port where any real relief could be obtained, she would have to have at least one competent white officer. Would Kai furnish that officer? was the question up before the meeting called at Jackson's to decide what should be done with the ill-fated black-birder.

This was rather a larger assemblage than the one which had gathered at dawn, called up by the rattle of the Cora's anchor-chain. The latter was mostly made up of the "inside push," "Jackson's Own," as they were sometimes alluded to, and that they were a dead game bunch of sports was attested by the way in which they had volunteered in a body to nurse for Doc Wyndham. The later and more representative meeting was hardly up to the earlier one on the score of quality. There were a few out-and-out rotters on the island, and about the worst of these was a typical Wooloofooloo larrikin from Sydney, whose name I have forgotten. As foul of tongue as of face, he was as sneaking and cowardly as a wild Malaite pup reared in a black-birder's galley. He it was who, with a smirk on his tattoo-defiled face, got up and suggested that the simplest way out of the difficulty was to "blow up an' burn the bloomin' 'ooker w'ere she lies. Cook the bloody niggers to a frizzle, pleg an' all." Give him a few sticks of dynamite and he'd pull off the bally job himself.

The leering wretch, in his eagerness, pushed right out in front of gaunt-framed old Jackson, who was "presiding." "Wi'out battin' a blinker," as he told me later, that old Kalgoorlie outlaw took the proper and necessary action. His straight-from-the-hip kick doubled the miscreant up, breathless, speechless, upon the floor—the only floor of sawed boards in all Kai. He rather favoured that method when he had to throw a man out, Jackson explained, on account of the convenient parcel it made of him when lifted by the back of his belt.

When Jackson called the meeting to order again and explained what word Wyndham had sent as to the lay of things on the Cora, "Froggy" Frontein, one of the escapes from Noumea, his Gallic soul aflame, popped up and volunteered to sail her to any non-French port in the Pacific. That brought a cheer for "Froggy," but the enthusiasm died down a bit when it transpired that the only ships the gallant ex-counterfeiter had ever boarded in his life were the steamer which deported him from Marseilles and the cutter in which he—buried under copra in its hold—had escaped from New Caledonia.

More competent volunteers were not lacking, however, and several of these were trying to urge their respective claims at once when "Slant" Allen's magnetic glance drew the eye of the chairman and he was given the floor.

Calling several of the more insistent of the volunteers by name, "Slant" asked if it had occurred to them that the nearest port which had quarantine facilities equal to handling more than a dozen cases of infectious disease was in Australia—probably Townsville, but possibly Brisbane. They admitted that they hadn't thought that far ahead.

"In that case," Allen cut in with, "it may be in order for me to point out that there's not a one of the whole mob of you young hopefuls that wouldn't be pinched and clapped in the brig just as soon as they saw your face and recollected what it was you sloped for in the first place."

That shot made some impression, though "Crimp" Hanley seemed to think he had countered not uneffectively when he asked: "Who in hell thinks he's going to last long enough to get her there?"

What "Slant" had got up to say, he went on without deigning to engage the logical "Crimp" in argument, was that there was one first-class sailor in Kai against whom nothing was booked in Australia, a man, moreover, who had been known to be looking for a command for a number of months. He referred to Captain Bell, who, he regretted to say, had not been summoned to their meeting. If it was agreeable to those present, he would be glad to wait upon Captain Bell and acquaint him with the facts in connection with the emergency which confronted them all. In the event that Captain Bell should see fit to assert his claim to this place of honour, as he had no doubt would be the case, he—"Slant"—was in favour of giving that claim precedence over all others, both because of Captain Bell's well-known ability as a navigator (his late slip, they would all admit, was due to circumstances quite beyond his control), and because he was the only competent man available who would not have to step out of the frying pan into the fire on making port in Australia. What was more, in case Captain Bell felt that he needed a mate for a voyage which could not but be beset with much danger and many difficulties, he—"Slant"—wished to take the occasion to put in his claim for that berth. He had been in bad in Sydney, he had to admit, but it was nothing very serious, and he felt assured that, in a pinch, there were certain influences which could be counted upon to get him clear. No fear that he would not be seen in the Islands again in due course.

Considering what "Slant" was really driving at, you'll have to admit that this was put with consummate adroitness. The meeting voted by acclamation to allow him to carry out his suggestion, adjourning in the meantime to await developments. It was significant, in the light of what transpired later, that Allen flatly refused the offer of Jackson and two or three others to go along to Bell's with him and "make a delegation of it."

No suspicion was aroused by the fact that Allen, on the way to Bell's shack, stopped in at his own for five or ten minutes. Indeed, nothing that he did at any time awakened anybody's suspicions—among the beach push, I mean.

When "Slant" came out of Bell's at the end of half an hour, he was accompanied by the American, the latter apparently leaning heavily on the Australian's shoulder. This occasioned little surprise, as Bell, who had hardly been seen for the last three days, was believed to have been drinking heavily. Instead of returning round the curve of the beach to report at Jackson's, as it had been assumed he would, "Slant" led the way to a little dugout canoe lying in the shade of the coco palms in front of Bell's and started pulling it down to the water's edge. When it was seen that the slender Australian was doing most of the tugging, while the big American seemed to be blundering about to small purpose, it was remarked at Jackson's that Bell, for the first time since he hit the beach of Kai, appeared to have stowed enough booze to submerge his "Plimsol" and affect his trim. At the same time it was admitted that the Yankee was a wonderful "weight-carrier"—nothing like him ever seen in the Islands. It was thus that they mixed nautical and racing idiom at Jackson's Sporting Club.

When the little canoe was finally launched, Bell, helped by Allen, stumbled forward and slithered down in the bow. The Australian plied his paddle from the stern. It was remarked that the dugout's progress was very slow, but "Slant's" leisurely paddling was attributed to the care he had to take on account of the trim Bell's lopsided sprawl gave the cranky craft.

By the time the canoe slid in alongside the Cora, Bell appeared to have collapsed completely. Lifting carefully by the shoulders, Allen was seen to raise the inert body in the bow enough for a hulking yellow giant—easily recognizable as the lusty Ranga-Ro—to throw a mighty arm around its waist. Then, with his other arm looped round a stanchion, he swung his burden high above the rail and into the arms of two of the black crew. Thereafter nothing was seen of the Cora's new skipper for an hour or more.

"Doosed smart loadin'," was Jackson's laconic comment on the teamwork Allen and Ranga had displayed in hoisting Bell's husky frame out of a wobbling canoe and up over the Cora's four feet of freeboard topped by five strands of "nigger wire."

Allen did not go aboard, but continued to lie alongside for ten or fifteen minutes, evidently giving extended orders to the Malay bos'n. Immediately the canoe pushed off, great activity was observable among the crew, who were evidently rushing preparations for getting under way before the ebb began to race through the passage.

The rate at which Allen paddled back to the beach was in marked contrast to his leisurely progress on the way out. Grounding the canoe on the beach near where it had been launched, he made directly for the door of Bell's house and bolted inside. Reappearing almost immediately, he came on along the beach at a more deliberate gait.

At Jackson's he told them that Bell had jumped at the chance of taking the Cora to Townsville.... Said it might be the means of getting his master's certificate back in case he pulled it off all right. But he—"Slant"—couldn't allow a white man to tackle a job like that alone. He had only landed to pick up his kit and a few things Bell wanted. He was going to get back aboard the Cora before they began to shorten in. It was going to be a ticklish job, fetching the passage from where she lay in those fluky airs.

Leaving Jackson's, Allen went to his own (or rather "Quill" Partington's) house, where, according to what I heard from Mary Regan a couple of days later, he took several drinks but did not do anything toward throwing his things together. A half-hour later he was seen hurrying along the beach to Bell's again, and when he came out from there it was in the company of a girl—plainly the "Peacock." Paddled by a third party, who came upon the scene at this juncture, these two went off to the schooner, boarding her just as she filled away on the first tack of the almost dead beat to the entrance of the narrow seaward passage. For all they knew on the beach, Allen was carrying out his program (with the little incidental of Rona—doubtless taken along at the last moment by way of a surprise for Bell—thrown in), just as he had outlined it to them. They were not hurt by his failure to say good-bye. They were not strong for the gentler amenities in the Islands, anyhow.

CHAPTER VI
COMPULSORY VOLUNTEERING

As a matter of fact, however, there had been a very considerable slip-up in "Slant's" carefully doped slate. That was plain from a number of little things which sunk into even my absinthe-addled brain in the few minutes I spent in his and Rona's company while paddling them off to the Cora. How staggering a slip-up it must have been for him I was not able to figure until I got my nerves under control the following day.

I was still far from pulled together when I came back to the village after my day of hiding (for that's what it amounted to) on the other side of the island. With my head twanging like an overstrung banjo, I was feverishly anxious to get home and seek relief in the only thing I knew would relax the tension of my breaking nerves. I had told Laku to "putem littl' fella pickaninny in rock-a-bye belonga him" just as soon as he got back to the shack. This was a long-standing joke between us, and I knew that he would interpret aright this bêche-de-mer order to "put the baby in its cradle" as a strict injunction to lay a certain long green bottle in a little basket of porous coco husk, which, dampened and hung in a draught, answered the purpose of a crude refrigerator. The vision of the slender green trickle I should shortly pour from the dewy fresh lip of that bottle was drawing me on as the thought of the oasis with its fountain draws the thirsting desert traveller.

Between horrors fancied and real—from my struggle at the mouth of the Bottomless Pit to the coming of the Ship of Death—my nerves had suffered a number of trying shocks since the dawning of that accursed day; but the one that came nearest to bowling me over I had still to receive. I had known there was a Bottomless Pit; I had known there was a Death Ship; I had known they were shooting niggers on the beach. As each of these horrors was projected upon my vision in turn I had accepted their reality as a matter of course. Didn't I see them with my own eyes? Didn't I continue to see them after I had bitten my finger? But Rona, with her arm and her peacock shawl thrown over "Slant" Allen's shoulder, coming out of Bell's house.... No, that wouldn't do.... That was one thing they couldn't put over on me. My eyes must be playing tricks on my brain. I must be in even worse shape than I thought. Never before had my fancy conjured up a thing so utterly, impossibly absurd. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, I pulled up and started kicking the shin of one foot with the toe of the other. That was another little trick I had of proving whether or not I saw what I "saw."

At the clink of the broken coral under my shuffling feet the girl turned her head in my direction, but, far from releasing "Slant's" neck from her embrace, she only drew the lanky Australian closer with her right arm, while with her left she beckoned me imperiously.

"Whitnee, come alonga this side, washy-washy!" Her thin clear voice cut the air like the swish of a rapier.

It was, strangely enough, the fact that she lapsed into the vulgarest of bêche-de-mer, rather than the eagerness of her gesture, that drove home to my wandering wits the fact that Rona was confronted with difficulties, that she needed help. Verging on nervous and physical collapse as I was (and as I knew I would continue to be until I had gulped my first steadying draught from the cool green bottle), the realization that something concrete was demanded brought me instantly out of the half-trance in which I had walked since dawn. Still a sorry enough specimen, I was at least sufficiently in hand not to need any more finger-bitings or shin-kickings to know the difference between what seemed real and what was really real. Letting my easel go one way and my paint box the other, I hastened forward in answer to Rona's summons.

"Katchem washy-washy one piecee boat," Rona began as I came up, her heaving breast, flushed face and flashing eyes revealing the emotion that held her in its grip.

"Man-man; my word, what name this fella thing you do?" I interrupted between breaths, blurting mixed pidgin and bêche-de-mer English of a brand to match the vile blend the girl had discharged at me.

"I too much cross this fella 'Slan','" she started to explain. "Him too much—"

"You'd think she was cross with me, Whitney, if you could see the way she's sticking me in the neck with her hat pin," Allen cut in, the half-sheepish, half-amused grin he had worn from the first broadening as he spoke.

That was the first "straight" English to be spoken, and the words had the effect of reminding Rona that she had been speaking nothing but low jargon from the outset. For weeks she had been taking the greatest pains to avoid both of the weird volapuks in all her chats with me. Pulling herself together with an effort, she strove again to be a purist.

"'Scuse me, Whit-nee," she chirruped, paying "Slant" for his sally with a prod that made him duck like a prize-fighter avoiding a straight-arm punch; "'scuse me, but I'm veh-ry mad. This bloody boundah he put kor-klee in Bel-la's drink. He take Bel-la to schoonah. Now we all go off to schoonah. If Bel-la he dead, then I keel this boundah, 'Slan'.' You will do us the paddl'?—ple-ese, Whit-nee."

There was a deal more that I would fain have been enlightened about, but my brain was clear enough now to understand the urgent necessity of getting off to the Cora without delay. A drugged man (or a poisoned one—it was not until later that I learned how that strange essence of the wild Papuan fig might be expected to act) on a plague-infested black-birder looked like just about the last word in hopelessness; but (I told myself) if there was anything I could do for my friend, it was up to me to try to do it. Rona seemed to have some sort of plan in her head, though just what she was taking Allen along for I didn't quite twig at the moment.

The funny part of it was that the Australian didn't seem particularly averse from going off to the schooner. Indeed, it was he who cut in to call Rona's attention to the fact that they were rushing preparations on the Cora for getting under way, adding: "If you don't want to be left at the post I might suggest you whip up a bit." Even as he spoke the throbbing wail of a chantey came to our ears across the water, and I could just make out the blur of motion on the forecastle where a knot of niggers was circling round the capstan.

"Washy-washy! Quick! quick! Whit-nee," implored Rona, leading the way, with Allen's head still in the crook of her arm, to the canoe; "we must make the great hur-ee."

Luckily, the dugout, although Allen had left it pulled well up on the beach when he landed, was half awash through the rising of the tide, now just about to ebb. I launched it without difficulty. Still with her knife at "Slant's" neck, Rona made him enter ahead of her and crouch in the bottom of the canoe, well forward, while she seated herself on the sinnet-wrapped thwart immediately behind his hunched shoulders. When the unabashed rascal coolly leaned back and started to make himself comfortable with an arm thrown over her knee, the girl stiffened with a start of repulsion. It was more than a prick she gave him this time, for I saw the sudden swell of his jaw muscles wipe out the lines of his grin as his teeth set over a repressed oath.

Pushing off, I slid gingerly along the port weatherboard until the canoe heeled just enough to bring a gaping hole in the starboard bow clear of the water that started to pour through it, and began to paddle cautiously inside the outrigger, the only place I could get at from where I sat. Our progress was, of course, slow as to speed and wobbly as to direction. Even at that, a good deal of water kept slopping in, and I couldn't blame Allen, who was sitting in it, for asking Rona if she minded if he baled a bit with his sun-helmet.

Her only reply was another prod with the needlepointed kris. (I knew it was the little Jolo dagger, for I had seen it as she adjusted her shawl on sitting down). "Hur-ee, Whit-nee," she urged, quiveringly tense, and continued to keep her flaming gaze riveted on the schooner, where the latter, foot by foot, was moving up on her shortening chain.

About halfway out Rona gave a start and a glad little cry. "I see Bel-la," she laughed. "He stand up by wheel. By jingo, he look—he look like he lick his weight in wile cats!"

That had been the big Southerner's favourite expression when, glowing with the reaction from his deep, eye-opening dive from the reef, he would come prancing back to his door of a morning. The sight of his bare muscular torso, white as marble against the dingy folds of the half-hoisted mainsail, must have called up in the girl's mind the picture of Bell breezing in from his bath, and brought the tersely quaint phrase to her lips. As a matter of fact, there was no saying at that distance how Bell looked; but it was good to see him on his feet, at any rate. Probably Rona had been mistaken about the poisoning.

"I told you he was all right," Allen remarked drily, shifting a few inches to get clear of the water that was beginning to swish about his knees. "He was drunk—dead drunk; that's all. He began to buck up an hour ago. Looked through my glass and saw them dousing him with water. First thing he did was to take a drink (plenty of it aboard)—saw him tilt the bottle. Then he must have made them open up the hatches. There's more than the crew lining the rail there for'ard; besides—you don't think the slop-chute from the galley spills out the bait that's drawing those black fins, do you? I won't need to tell you they don't belong to chambered nautili out for an afternoon sail. There's a man-eating shark under every one of them. Can I lend you my binoculars?"

He started to slip the strap of the powerful racing glasses over his neck, but desisted when Rona refused to clear the way by lifting the point of her dagger. Save for maintaining that one important little point of contact, she ignored him completely, and "Slant" seemed rather to resent the latter more than the former.

"Well, if you don't want to use it, I suppose you won't mind if I have a bit of a look-see," he went on in half-assumed petulance. Rona replied with the usual prod, but interposed no further objection when he raised and began focussing the glasses.

"Clubbing niggers on the fo'c'sl'," he commented presently, as signs of commotion were visible forward. "Skipper don't want 'em too thick on deck while he's getting under way, most likely."

Then, a minute later: "Looks like you'll need an ice-breaker to clear a passage through those sharks, Whitney; or perhaps we can walk across their backs from the edge of the jam. Seem to be thick enough to give good solid footing."

And again, shortly: "Chain almost straight-up-and-down, Whitney. Mudhook going to break out in a couple of minutes. Can't accelerate that 'long, long pull' of yours, can you? Looks as if they weren't planning to wait for us."

It was a gruesome passage, that last hundred yards. The sharks were hardly as thick as Allen's picturesque hyperbole might have led one to believe, but there were undoubtedly more than a score of triangular dorsals slashing about in swift circles. But the sharks, for the most part, gave us a good berth. It was the things that didn't get out of the way that came near to flooring me at the last—black, bloated bodies, floating face down, like logs awash, till the canoe struck them, then to roll shudderingly over and sweep you with the sightless gaze of their wide, staring eyes as you fended with the paddle. Rona, her flashing glances running back and forth over the schooner (following Bell, who appeared to be lending a hand now and then on sheet or halyard), seemed not to see the floating horrors around us. Allen's steely eyes met the corpses stare for stare, and looked them down. But upon me the horrors which passed the others by descended with full force. How I kept going is more than I can guess. But I did it. At last the loom of the Cora's blistered starboard quarter cut off the seaward view, and I steadied the dugout in close to the upper line of her weed-foul copper sheathing.

Apparently no notice whatever had been taken of us up to this time. Short-handed as he was, Bell was doubtless too busy to keep a lookout, while to the few niggers watching us through the wire the sight of a dugout carrying "two fella white marsters and one fella Mary" was of indifferent interest. All they cared about was getting away from the Death Ship, and they didn't need to be told that this "pickaninny boat" hadn't come to help forward their desires in that direction. Besides, the guard walking up and down behind them with a Lee-Enfield over his black shoulder had undoubtedly given them to understand that the first one to start over the side would be shot.

It must have been the guard who reported us finally. Burning with impatience, Rona was just prodding up Allen and ordering him to clamber aboard and tell "Mistah Bell" she wanted to speak to him, when I heard the shout of "'Vast heavin'!" ring out, and presently a familiar tousled head was poked over the top of the barbed wire. (I should explain, perhaps, that three or four strands of "nigger wire" are run all the way round the rail of every labour-recruiting ship. This is done with a double purpose—to make it difficult for the blacks aboard to bolt, should the spirit move them, and to serve as a partial protection while at anchor against the always imminent attacks of the treacherous shore natives.)

There was a look in Bell's face I had never seen there before. The old familiar furrows of dissipation showed deep around the mouth, but if he had been drinking heavily, there was nothing to indicate it. What struck me at once was his air of determination—I might almost say exaltation. His head was held high, his shoulders were thrown back, and he might have been treading the deck of a battle-ship as he swung up to the rail. Everything about him betokened the man who has taken a great resolve, and means to see it through if it kills him.

Although I had heard no word of it up to that moment, I understood at once that Bell had taken command of the schooner, that he was going to try to sail her to some port where the plague-stricken blacks could be given medical attention and kept under control. It was like Bell to take on a job like that, I said to myself; but he would do it as a matter of course. It would never occur to him that there was any alternative, just as with an order in the Navy. There must be something more to account for that air of high resolve.... I couldn't help thinking that, and I was right. He let out what it was shortly.

"It's right nice of you to come off to say good-bye, honey—and of you, too, Whitney," Bell called down genially; "but, as we'ah not quite what you'd call fixed fo' cawlahs, you'd bettah do it from wheah you a'. You, Mistah Allen, if you have fin'ly made up youah mind in the mattah of signin' up for the voyage, I reckon we can find accommodation fo' you. But fust, let me say that if you've got any mo' of that dope you put in my whisky stowed about youah puson, you'd best scuppah it befo' you climb abo'd. I doan quite twig what you did it fo', unless it was to dodge out of goin' yo'self, afta you had promised to help me see the job through. But now, seein' you've come off of youah own free will, I reckon I can fo'get that lil' slip, providin' it ain't repeated."

Although Rona could hardly have known the exact meaning of "free will," she caught the drift of Bell's remarks readily enough. "This rotten boundah" (bounder was the worst name she knew to call a man in "pure" English) "not come himself," the girl cut in shrilly, speaking for the first time. "I fetch him. See!" and she threw back the folds of the peacock shawl to reveal the bright wavy blade of her little kris boring into the hollow between Allen's right shoulder-blade and the corded column of his sinewy neck.

"From the reef I see you an' this fella 'Slan''" (Allen's shoulder quivered under her designative prod) "go off to schoonah in boat," Rona went on, avoiding as well as she could in her excitement the jargons she knew Bell disliked so much. "Bime-by I see 'Slan'' come back—you stop schoonah. When I go home I smell'em kor-klee. You no sabe kor-klee, Bel-la. I sabe him too much long time. I smell kor-klee in one glass—not in othah. Pu-retty soon this boundah 'Slan'' come house. He say: 'Bel-la go off in schoonah. Now I stop with you all time!' Then I sabe what for kor-klee veh-ry queeck. So I katch'em this fella by neck an' fetch'm off schoonah. I say myself: 'If Bel-la dead, I keel this boundah; if Bel-la not dead, he keel him.' Heah he is, Bel-la—you fix him pu-lenty. Then we go home-side."

"So that's what upset the appl'-ca't?" There was nothing of the wrath of the jealous male in Bell's deep, chesty laugh. "Well, I'm not blamin' Mistah Allen fo' fallin' in love with you, honey. No propah man could quite help doin' that, as I see it. Just the same, I can't quite approve of his way of goin' about it, no' the occasion he took fo' it, eethah. So you brought him off fo' me to execute, honey. That's right rich. Youah a brick, you shuah a'. But I won't be killin' him, honey—no, hahdly that. I'm just goin' to sign him on as Fust Mate of the Cora Andrews, just as he 'lowed he do at the beginnin'. Of co'se I won't be goin' home with you, honey. Doan you see I'm in command of this heah ship?"

A sudden shiver shook Rona's tense frame at those last words. Half rising, she started to speak, but Bell cut her short with lifted hand and went on himself.

"Mistah Allen," he said, addressing himself now to the huddled figure in the bottom of the canoe; "I said I was goin' to sign you on an' take you with me. Let me qualify those wuds just a trifle. I'll pumit you to go if you'll agree in advance to my tums. I might explain that theah's two dif'rent views in the mattah of the best way of avoidin' catchin' the pleg. One is, that you must keep strictly soba—straight teetotal; the otha—diametrically opposed to the fust—is that you must keep dead drunk—pif'ucated. Now I reckon that it's goin' to take at least one white man to sail this hookah all the way to Australyuh; that is to say, at least one white man must steah cleah of the pleg fo' the entahprise to be crowned with success. But as theah ain't no suah data as to which is the safe an' sutin way to 'complish this, I figa theah's nothin' else to do but sta't with two white men, and let one of 'em try the fust purscripshun an' the otha the second.

"Now (tho' I must admit it's a bit high-handed on my pa't) I've already picked the one I'm goin' to take; so, if you elect to sign on, Mistah Allen, you'll have to take the otha. Theah's a dozen cases of whisky abo'd—not Jawny Wakah, to be suah, but still fayah to middlin' cawn jooce—an' I had to toss off a tumblah o' two of it as an antidote fo' that dream-provokin' dope you wished onto me. But"—Bell's head was up and his shoulders back again—"that's the last." His square jaw snapped shut on the words like a sprung wolf-trap. Now I understood. That was his Great Resolve.

Bell paused, and in the waiting silence I became aware for the first time of the low rumble of groaning from the bowels of the ship.

"So you'll see, Mistah Allen"—the corners of his mouth relaxed into a smile as Bell resumed—"that since the Skippah's plumped to try the 'soba man' preventative, theah's nothin' left for the Mate to do but to fight off the pleg by the 'drunk man' method. Theah'll only be two of us, you see, an' it's theahfo' up to us to hedge ouah bets an' play safe. But you won't be havin' to go if you ain't hankerin' after it. I'm not (in spite of what the way you've been 'shanghaied' by—by Miss Rona might lead you to think) runnin' a press-gang. It's entiahly up to you as to whethah o' not you want to sail as the drunken Mate of the soba Skippah of a black-birdah full of pleg-rotten niggahs. You see, Mistah Allen"—the whimsical grin broadened—"you see I'm not tryin' to luah you on by paintin' the picture any brightah than it is. 'Drunk Mate of a soba Skippah'—do you get that?"

Allen made no reply, that is, not directly. Raising his hand to fend the expected prod from Rona, he wriggled halfway round and started to speak to me, where, in the stern, I still paddled the canoe gently against the turning tide and held it close alongside the schooner. For an instant I was puzzled with the look on the side-face he presented, but almost at once saw the reason for it. For the first time in my recollection the thin upper lip was uncurled by its mocking smile. By that, I thought I could gauge something of the extent of his slip-up. Yet—if I could have read the man's mind—I would have known that it was something even deeper than the wreck of personal hopes that had sobered "Slant" Allen. What it was I learned later.

"Whitney," he began, the words coming huskily from the dryness of his throat; "I don't dope a man's chances for finishing inside the distance flag in this little Handicap of Captain Bell's as better than a hundred to one. That's long odds to be on the short end of when a man's life is his stake. I don't give a damn about my life. Anyone will tell you that. I've thrown it into the pool on worse than a hundred-to-one shot a good many times before this. But—well, I'd rather appreciate it if—if you could see fit to make a point of not telling my friends on the beach that—that I had any help in—in volunteering—volunteering to lend Captain Bell a hand in getting this hooker on her way."

Rona, sensing that her responsibilities, so far as Allen was concerned, were at an end, raised the kris from his neck and thrust it into the knot of her sulu. The Australian lifted himself lightly to his feet and looked Bell straight between the eyes. "Lead me to your whisky," he said in a steadied voice.... "By Gawd, I need it!"

Poising an instant on the middle of a forward thwart of the canoe, he sprang to the rail, clambered smartly to the top strand of the barbed wire, and swung lightly down to the deck on the main backstay.

It was at this juncture that I went through the feeble motions of trying to act the part of a man myself. I pointed out to Bell that I had knocked about on yachts a good deal, and, while I couldn't claim to be much of a hand with niggers, was probably as good a navigator as Allen was. I also said something about three men standing a better chance than two of pulling off the job, and even added, half jocularly, that I was about ready to go to Australia anyway, as I had had word that an exhibition of my pictures was due to open in Sydney in a fortnight. I only hope my words didn't sound as hollow to Bell as they did to me—for they were the last ones I was ever to speak to him.

Bell's gentlemanliness—nay, rather, his gentleness—came home to me more in what he refrained from saying in his reply than in what he said. He did not say that he had no absinthe aboard, and that, as a consequence, I would be only more useless and undependable than if he had. He did not say that his hands would be full enough looking after crazy niggers without having a crazy white man to keep an eye on. He even refrained from recalling to my mind a story I had told him of a French official in New Caledonia whose absinthe supply had run out while he was at an isolated post, and who, unable to stand the deprivation to the end of the three-days' run in to Noumea in a trading cutter, had taken a header over the side almost in sight of port—and relief.

All he did say was: "Nonsense, ol' man.... Quite out of the question.... Nothin' doin'." Then, as though to soften the curtness of his refusal: "'Twouldn't be propa, Whitney, to set a man that can slap colour on canvas like you can to herdin' sick niggas. Besides, I'm countin' on you to stick 'roun' Kai an' be a sort o' fatha an' motha' to Rona while I'm gone. Youah the only man on the island I'd ca'ah to trust with that job."

There was nothing more to be said after that, I told myself; nothing more to be done. I gave up limply and relapsed into wondering how long it would take me to paddle Rona ashore and traverse the quarter of a mile of coral clinkers between the place where she would land and the long green bottle cooling in its breeze-swept swing beneath my coco leaf jalousies.

CHAPTER VII
RONA COMES ABOARD

Well, I still think I was right on the score of the futility of further words. Nothing more that I could have said would have changed the situation; but was there nothing more that I could have done? Rona answered that question, so far as she herself was concerned, then and there, though hardly in a way that I had the wit or the will to profit by.

Bell's answer to the girl's anxious appeal that she be allowed to join him had been no less brusque and decided than that he had made to mine. "Sorry, honey. No 'commodations fo' ladies this voyage. You wun't intended to nu'se niggas, anyhow. Can't be done, honey." Then, to me: "Time to be shovin' off now, Whitney. Tide's already on the tu'n. Right sorry to have to hurry you-all this way." Not a word of farewell.... Navy training would not down.

"Bel-la, leesten to me!" There was more threat than entreaty in Rona's voice now. Beyond doubt, he had never crossed her before. That she was hurt and angry showed in every line of her tense figure, as she balanced precariously with her left foot on the outrigger and her right on the port weatherboard. "Bel-la, by crackee, I say I go with you! If you let me come on schoona, all good. If you say no, by crackee, I—I sweem! I sweem afta you. You know I good sweema, Bel-la."

Swim! I knew the girl well enough to know it was not a bluff, and Bell must have known even better. I had heard him speak many a time of her absolute lack of fear. Also, although at that moment his imagination was not quickened (as mine was) by the drunken roll a black cadaver under the counter gave as a questing nose pushed into it from below, he must have known what shrift a swimmer would have in those shark-infested waters.

Bell's mouth twitched at her words (I could just see his head and shoulders where he conned ship with a foot on the starboard rail and a hand in the shrouds of the mainmast), but he made no reply. Doubtless he counted on my doing what I could to fish her out before anything happened. Sweeping his eye fore and aft, he noted how the turning tide had swung the schooner so that she headed directly away from the passage, with the fluky puffs of the freshening trade wind coming over her port quarter. Then, cautioning the men standing by at the fore and main sheets to "take in sma't" as she gathered way, he bellowed the order to "Heave away!"

The ululant surge of the bêche-de-mer anchor chantey floated aft as the blacks resumed their rhythmic tramp around the capstan.

"What name you b'longa?
What name you b'longa?
You Mary come catch'm ride.
What name you b'longa?
Come hear my songa—
I take you to Sydney-side."

I have often wondered if the frank invitation in the swinging lines might not have been the inspiration of Rona's astonishing action.

The obligato of the incoming chain grinding through the hawse-pipe had accompanied the chantey for only a stave or two, when Allen's clear, ringing voice (he had not needed to be told where a mate belonged when a ship was getting under way) announced from the forecastle: "Anchor broken out, sir!"

"Walk lively! Get catted 'fore she hits the passage!" Bell roared back, anxious lest the great length of chain still out would make trouble where the lagoon shoaled at its seaward entrance. A moment later he came aft and relieved the man at the wheel, ordering the latter to stand by to keep the mainsheet from fouling the nigger wire. It was the gigantic Malay, Ranga-Ro, bulking mightily against the purpling eastern twilight sky, who responded with a deep-rumbling "Ay, ay, su!" and sprang to the starboard rail to clear the sagging lines running back from the unstable-minded main boom. Then the amazing thing befell.

As the schooner gathered way and began gliding ahead under the impulse of the half-filled mainsail, Rona had crouched as though for a spring at the towing whaleboat. The painter of the latter, however, made fast on the port side of the taffrail, brought the yawning double-ender too far away for anything but a creature with wings to bridge the gap. Seeing it was impossible to jump to the whaleboat, she straightened up again, swaying undulantly as the dugout bobbed about in the gently heaving wake of the schooner.

"Bel-la, I come!" There was more of anger than despair in that steel-clear cry; more indignation than resignation in the hair-trigger poise of the reed-slender figure. The instant that she hesitated on the chance that this final threat might soften Bell's resolve was all that prevented what at best could not have been other than a nasty mess for the both of us. There was no possible chance for me to intercept her before she jumped, and, once in the water, I knew she was quite equal to upsetting the canoe rather than be dragged back into it. As for help from the schooner—Bell had determined upon his course, and his eyes, like his mind, were directed ahead, not astern.

It was Ranga-Ro (deftly fending the slack of the mainsheet from the nigger wire), not Bell, who turned at the sound of Rona's cry. Whether or not he had glimpsed her during the previous ten minutes, I am not sure; but for the girl (whose eyes had been on Bell from first to last), I was certain that the big Malay had not impinged upon her vision before. Recognition of his racial characteristics must have been instantaneous. They were written for even an ethnic novice to read in the giant's straight black hair, high cheek bones, wide mouth, with its betel nut-stained teeth, and the light golden yellow skin clothing the monstrously muscled limbs. The peculiar twist of the loosely-looped sarong and a wisp of rolled leaf behind an ear would have located him even more definitely; but to Rona the fact that there was an indubitable Malay staring into her eyes from the nearest rail of the receding schooner, made the incidental of his being a Moluccan—a Spice Island man—of little moment. She was used to handling big golden-yellow men.... They had proved a deal more manageable than a certain white man she could mention.

I heard, without understanding, the swift run of her tripplingly-tongued Malay, and only the sibilant hiss of "Lekas! Lekas!" at the end told me that what she had ordered done was to be done "quickly! quickly!" Her next order—to me—was no less insistent. "Paddl' catch'n schoona, Whit-nee! Paddl' lak hell!"

The girl's imperious mood brooked no delay. My work was cut out clear for me, and, everything considered, I am not at all sure that the yellow man—on the score of zeal, at least—outdid the white man in carrying out the orders he had received. Slipping back to the stern to even up the down-by-the-head trim Rona's presence in the bow gave the cranky dugout, I plied the stubby paddle with all the strength and skill at my command. The crazy craft rode higher now with Allen out of it, but even so the speed with which I drove it threw a wave inches above the hole in the crumbling bow. The up-curling water poured through in a steady stream. My race, I saw, was against that rising flood in the bottom of the canoe quite as much as against the schooner.

There were only eight or ten yards to make up on the still slowly moving Cora, and, barring swamping or a collision with a shark or a floating nigger, I felt that I could do it easily. But what to do when we had caught her up? Ah, there was where the yellow man was to come in. Ranga was just as busily carrying out his orders as was I. "Clear away the nigger wire and stand by to pick me up," had plainly been the drift of that swift stream of Malay Rona had directed at him. Superbly disdainful of the sharp barbs that were slashing his bare palms to ribbons, he forced the whole savage entanglement down to the deck with no more apparent effort than a child would have used in collapsing a string-strung "cat's-cradle." Rove through steel stanchions set at close intervals along the rail, the wire could not be torn entirely clear. So the direct and simple-minded Ranga did the next best thing—gave a mighty heave and brought three or four of the nearest stanchions down to the deck in the tangle of wire they had supported.

An order from Bell at this juncture would probably have stopped this wholesale destruction of his protective entanglement; or perhaps I should say possibly rather than probably. One cannot be sure just how strong a force Rona had lashed into action. It has since occurred to me that the man must have been gripped with something very closely akin to the madness of amok to handle that wire with his naked hands as he did. It may be that the only one from whom he would have brooked interference was the one who had fired that savage train of energy—Rona. These points were not to be put to the test, however. From first to last Bell—although, from the wrecking of the wire almost under his very eyes, he must have known what was going on—never looked back.

What with the settling of the half-swamped canoe and the accelerating speed of the schooner, it was touch-and-go at the end. I had gained by feet at first; then by inches; and finally, with but a couple of yards more needed to bring the bow up even with the schooner's counter, I realized that I was no better than holding my own. It was the last ounce of reserve in my aching frame that I called upon for that final spurt. Rona must have sensed that I was going my limit, for she said no word ... only crouched, tense as a waiting wild-cat, for the moment of her spring.

For the first few seconds the gap closed quickly as the canoe gathered increased headway from the impulse of my wildly driven paddle; then more slowly and more slowly, until, again, I was no better than holding even. Another foot, and the jump would be safe. Bending low to make the most of my expiring strength, my eyes wandered from the goal for an instant. It was a shuddering gasp of consternation from the bow that brought them back again. The swooning mainsail, filled by the freshening puffs, was beginning to make its pull felt in earnest. The gap had widened. Instead of gaining a foot I had lost two. That dished me completely. "No good, Rona—I'm—all in," I groaned, and slid limply down into the bottom of the canoe, where the water now lapped level with the thwarts.

Half fainting though I was, the picture of that super-simian spring of Rona's is indelibly etched upon my memory. Save for that one quick gasp, she made no sound. The jump was an impossible one ... sheerly impossible. And yet— Only a swift gathering of muscles—very like the final quivering hunch of an ape that leaps from tree to tree—heralded action. Then, with a back-kick that forced the already half-submerged bow right under, she flashed up to her full height and launched her body into the air.

It was a good jump,—a wonderful one, indeed, considering the unstable take-off—but of course she missed the rail—and by feet. That didn't surprise me.... I had seen it was inevitable. But what I had not reckoned upon was the astonishing length of Ranga's mighty left arm. Standing by with a bight of the mainsheet gripped in his right hand to keep from overbalancing, he had sprung to the top of the rail as Rona jumped, leaning out at all of an angle of forty-five degrees, probably more. It was into the solidly pliant muscles of his great corded left wrist, extended to the full reach of the arm, that Rona clawed with the last half inch of her out-stretched fingers—clawed and held. I say clawed into, not clutched or seized. The girl's hold on Ranga's wrist was not that of an acrobat grabbing over the bar for which he has jumped (her leap was short by an inch at least of giving her a chance to do that), but rather that of a flung cat clawing into the limb or the trunk of a tree. With less strength of fingers or length of nails her hands would merely have brushed the outstretched arm and missed a hold.

Under the impact of that flying hundred and twenty pounds (in spite of her slenderness, Rona must have weighed quite that) of bone and muscle, striking, as it did, just where the greatest leverage would be exerted, Ranga was all but swung round and thrown from his footing. The hastily-seized mainsheet was hardly a scientifically-run guy for the leaning tower of his stressed frame, nor did the wreck of the barbed wire entanglement writhing over the rail offer the solidest of foundations. Back and forth he swayed, like the half unstepped mast of a grounded sloop; then steadied, quiveringly, up to his original tense slant.

The acrobatic miracle wrought by Ranga in swinging Rona's precariously hanging form inboard was the most perfect feat of strength and balance I ever saw, or ever expect to see. It looked as sheerly impossible as the jump had looked—and was accomplished scarcely less quickly. The drawing up of the extended left arm (what a marvellous rippling and bunching of golden muscles that was!) brought the girl's pendant form close in against the corrugated bulge of the giant's chest, reducing the terrific leverage by a good half. A similar doubling up of the right, with a sudden tug on the mainsheet at the end of it, did the rest. For an instant the great rangy rack of corded muscles balanced erect in the midst of the wire-tangle festooned over the rail; then jumped lightly down beyond and deposited its burden on the deck.

Hardly ten seconds could have elapsed from the instant of Rona's jump to the one in which Ranga plumped her down beside Bell at the wheel. The gap between the canoe and the schooner had widened to hardly twenty yards. I could see both the Malay and the girl quite distinctly as, with the latter still looped in the crook of his fingernail-torn left arm, he poised for a moment on the rail. Neither appeared to have turned a hair. Neither seemed in the least flustered ... might have been in the habit of doing that sort of thing every day for all the excitement they showed about it.

The first thing Ranga did, as the dropped mainsheet gave him a free hand, was to reach to the knot of his sarong and satisfy himself that the little bamboo flute tucked in there had ridden out the storm. And Rona—her first move was to gather up and stow an amber-streaming corner of the peacock shawl, which was threatening to catch in an uprearing strand of the nigger wire. Those two funny little incidentals complete my recollections of that breathless quarter-minute. Whether Rona, or Bell, or anyone else on the schooner waved good-bye in my direction I do not recall. Ranga was taking in the slack of the mainsheet when I looked again, and Bell, peering up at the flapping headsails, was grinding away at the wheel. Two or three shots rang out following a commotion forward—probably fired to check a fresh up-surge of the blacks from below.

As Bell brought her round in a wide circle, the Cora's sails were flattened in and she began to beat up toward the entrance of the passage in a series of short tacks. As she headed in past the quay, I heard a burst of cheers roll up from a knot of humanity blurring the beach in front of Jackson's. It was just a big, full-throated general whoop, that first one, but it was quickly followed by a number of other volleys of "huroars" that seemed to carry suggestions of control and leadership. The last of these was a hearty "three-times-three," topped off with a "tiger." "Cheering the parting heroes by name," I muttered to myself, and wondered who that last rousing "tiger" was meant to speed. I was still speculating when the sharp whish of a heeling dorsal, as a sheering shark avoided the submerged outrigger by a hair, awakened me to a rude realization of the fact that the swift tropic night had all but fallen and that I was drifting out with the tide in a holed and barely floating dugout.

Of all the ebbings of the tide of courage that my sorrily spent life had known, and had still to know, those next few minutes—with the Cora dissolving into the swimming dusk as she beat out through the passage, the weirdly green wakes of the sharks lacing the oily-black water with welts of phosphorescence as they assembled for their ghastly banquet, and my swamped canoe teetering in balance between positive and negative buoyancy—registered low-water mark. I have never heard of a despairing absinthe slave trying to break his bonds at the end of the day. It is invariably at the end of the night that he makes his break for liberty—at the beginning of the day he has not the courage to face. But it was the shame of the yellow in me, rather than the green, that held empire now. Rona had brooked no refusal of her demand to be taken on the Cora. Why had I? She had been ready to swim for it. Why should not I? Surely the sea, better than anything else, would wash that yellow stain from my honour and leave it white at the last. I didn't even have to screw my nerve up to the point of jumping over. Listing heavily to starboard as the half-capsized dugout was, one little inch edged to the right, and not even the leverage of the outrigger could keep it from overturning. Just the inclination of my shoulders would do the trick.... I would not even have to take the initiative to the extent of edging along. Surely—

With a quick gasp, I slid sharply to one side—but it was to the left—the outrigger side. The great starshaped welter of green luminescence, where a half-dozen wallowing man-eaters nuzzled into a bobbing witch-fire-streaked shape of unreflecting opacity, proved too much for my last unbroken filament of nerve—all that I needed to make my honour white. I had always dreaded sharks, and it was my horror of them now that checked the worthiest impulse that had stirred me that day. The momentarily eclipsed image of the cooling green bottle took shape again before my eyes, and, after that, there was nothing to do but make the best fight I could to reach it.

Proceeding with infinite caution to avoid the upset which I now feared above everything in the world, I crawled forward along the outrigger side and stopped the hole in the bow with my folded drill jacket, as a necessary preliminary to beginning to bail out with my waterproof sun-helmet. But before I turned to on what could have hardly proved other than a hopeless task, the sound of oars and voices reached my ears, and presently the bow of a hard-pulled whaleboat came pushing up out of the darkness. It was old Jackson whose strong arm reached out and dragged me in over the gunwale. When they got back their breaths lost in cheering the departing schooner, he explained, after depositing my limp form in the stern sheets, Doc Wyndham bawled over to them from "Quarantine" that some cove had been left behind in a foundered canoe. Jackson himself reckoned that the Doc was beginning to go off his nut and see things; but as several of the others seemed to have hazy recollections of something of the same kind, it was thought best to put off and investigate.

"'Ow'd you 'appen to miss c'nections?" Jackson asked sympathetically. "I spotted you paddlin' the canoe off, an' we was so sure the Skipper 'ad signed you on that we give a speshul w'oop in your 'onour. 'W'at's the matter wiv W'itney?' I bellered ('member the night you learned us that one?—time the looted fizz from the Levuka was on tap); an' the boys cum back wiv: ''E's all right!—you bet!—Ev'ry time!'"

"That wasn't the big 'three-times-three' at the end, was it, Jack?" I asked, my face burning with shame at the thought.

"Well, no; 'ardly that un," was the half-apologetic reply. "That ripsnorter was in 'onour uv 'Slant' Allen. Long time pal uv all uv us, 'e is. Slash-bangin' finisher, li'l ol' 'Slant.'... Trust 'im allus to be on 'and w'en they're liftin' 'ell's 'atches."

I knew then that I wasn't going to be tumbling over myself to tell "Slant's" friends on the beach that his volunteering to go with the Cora had been just a shade less voluntary than they reckoned. He had not pulled up dead at his first hurdle as I had, anyhow. No, until I knew more of what had transpired earlier in the day, I was not going to give the man away; and not to his old friends in any case. I would do at least that much homage to his nerve.

Seeing how dead beat I was, Jackson waved back the crowd at the quay and headed me straight for home. He knew what I needed, and I was as grateful for the bluff old outlaw's unspoken sympathy as I was for the help of his sustaining arm. With rare delicacy, he avoided being a witness to my assault on the green bottle by leaving me at the door. Like all the rest of those rough, red-blooded roysterers of Kai, Jackson felt that habitual absinthe drinking was degenerate, almost immoral.... All right for a "Froggy," of course, but not for a proper white man.... A thing that a real self-respecting beach-comber would never allow himself to be guilty of. The fact (which could not be concealed for long) that I was known to be addicted to the habit had taken even more living down than my painting, especially when they learned I was straight Yankee and not a "We-we."

I drank hungrily at first—gulping glass after glass of the cool green liquid,—but stopped just as soon as I found my nerves were steadied and before the first stage of "elevation" was entered upon. (A seasoned drinker takes some time to reach the latter.) Unspeakably tired physically, I dropped off to sleep almost as soon as the absinthe relaxed the tension on my nerves. My rest was dreamless and untroubled—or comparatively so.

CHAPTER VIII
I LEAVE THE ISLAND

Rolling out of bed at the end of twelve straight hours of sleep, I found the Trades blowing fresh and strong again, and the air—after the soddenness of the past week—almost bracing. A plunge from the reef and a piping hot breakfast of fried clams and duck eggs—my first solid food in over thirty-six hours—bucked me up astonishingly. For almost the first time since I came to the island, I was out before ten o'clock—and well in hand, too. I had to be.... There was much that it was up to me to learn—and perhaps to act upon.

That which I most desired to get some line upon was what Allen had been driving at in drugging Bell, or even, possibly, trying to poison him. What was kor-klee? (of which Rona appeared to be so terrified), and how did it act? were questions which I wanted especially to find the answers to. Was it a drug with a delayed action, following a preliminary stupefaction of comparative mildness? If so—no, there was nothing that could be done for Bell in that case; but, as a friend of his, I might do what I could to square the account later on. There was no lack of confidence that morning. The reaction (which had eluded me completely the day before) was strong upon me, and I felt quite equal to any situation that might arise. I still blushed with shame at the thought of the contemptible figure I had cut from dawn to darkness of the day previous, but I was ready to make such atonement as was humanly possible. It was merely one of my "high" moods coming three or four hours ahead of time. I could have slung my colours with telling effect that morning, if there had been a chance for me to get at canvas.

From one and another at Jackson's I gathered a fairly connected account of what had happened during the hours I was away on the leeward side of the island. The salient incidents of this I have already set down. None of them knew much of anything about kor-klee, but all agreed that Doc Wyndham would be sure to be an authority upon it. I dropped the subject for the moment, as I did not care to be pressed for an explanation of why I sought the information. The next day I slipped quietly over and had a long-distance interview with the learned Wyndham.

The Doc had buried the Cora's recruiting agent the night the schooner sailed, doing everything except the digging of the grave with his own hands. He had then returned home and shut himself in for his ten days of solitary quarantine. Solitary is hardly the word, though. Wyndham was far from being alone. Unlike Bell, he was a "spree drinker" rather than a speedy tippler. It was his habit (as he put it himself) to accumulate aridity during five or six months of the most rigorous teetotalism, and then blow up the dam and make the desert blossom like the rose under the stimulus of a generous flood. The breaking up of the Monsoon and the culmination of Doc Wyndham's biennial sprees were bracketed together in the Islands' list of seasonal disturbances.

The desert was hardly due for its wetting at this time, but Wyndham, shaken by his unsuccessful fight to save the Agent's life, was loath to face the ordeal of the confinement ahead of him without company. So (as he explained after he had halted me a dozen paces from his door with a revolver flourished from the window) he called in the only dead sure plague-immune he knew—his old friend John Barleycorn—and raised the floodgates. The last thing he had impressed upon his brain before putting Barleycorn in charge was that he must rigidly confine his desert reclamation project to his own wastes. On no account was he to leave his own house, and, on no account, was anyone to be allowed to enter it. "Strict quarantine's the word," he had repeated to himself many times before he started drinking, and "Strict quarantine's the word" was the greeting—and the warning—I heard when I stepped into the shadow of the big breadfruit tree in front of his door.

Solemn as an owl, Wyndham had been catching purple shrimps (or something of the kind) with a butterfly net and putting them under his microscope for examination. The big brass instrument was set upon a table pulled up to the window, while the shrimps were being harvested from the bosky depths of a patch of elephant-eared taro just outside. It was his favourite hunting and fishing preserve, that taro patch, the Doc had confided to me once, and the rarity and variety of the specimens captured there were rather remarkable. I don't remember many of them, but a sea-cow and a sabre-tooth tiger were among the commonest he had made slides of. Everything went under the microscope, of course. His captures were small in size during the first few days, starting with mere animalculae, but bulked steadily bigger as the desert blossomed to a jungle. It required a microscope with a great latitude of adjustment to handle such a wide range of subjects—but his was a most excellent instrument ... most excellent. Thus the Doc.

Pretending to ignore my approach completely, Wyndham continued squinting through the eye-piece of his microscope until I crunched over the dead-line he had established. Then he flourished the revolver, barked out his quarantine formula, and asked what I wanted. "When I replied that I had come to inquire respecting the effects of a drug called kor-klee, his manner changed instantly. By some queer psychological process quite beyond me to fathom, he started at once speaking French, or rather what he thought was French. It was a weird jargon he had picked up in the Marquesas, where he had spent a year in research work when he first came to the Islands, and where (it was said) only his passion for collecting pearls—other people's—had prevented his winning to international fame for his all-but-successful efforts to isolate the bacteria responsible for the dread fe-fe or elephantiasis.

"Kor-klee—mais oui, mon ami. Je comprend him fella kor-klee too much. Parfaitement. C'est la liqueur essential de la ficus—ficus—nom d'un chien—ficus what-dyucalum. C'est la aphrodisique le plus exquite, le plus fort, en tout le monde. Prenez vous comme ca—whouf!"—and he made a great pretence of inhaling the contents of his shrimp net to show how the drug was administered for that particular purpose.

"Encore—quand—quand eat'm like kai-kai!" he floundered on learnedly; "quand eat'm kor-klee il fait—mak'm mort—dead—tres vite."

Here he interrupted himself to ask for which purpose it was I intended to use the stuff.

"Neither," I denied stoutly. "I was merely asking out of curiosity."

"Parle that talkee a la marines," he scoffed. "Le meme chose talkee parle 'Slant' Allen. Je voudrais connoce ou—ou in hell you fella catch'm kor-klee. I'd like to get my fist on some of the blooming elixir myself," he trailed off into English.