Hell's Hatches

acing. 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 f

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 bl

s 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 mo

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

w) 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

. 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,

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 sp

'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

e floundered on learnedly; "quand eat'm ko

o ask for which purpose it wa

outly. "I was merely a

Allen. Je voudrais connoce ou-ou in hell you fella catch'm kor-klee. I'd like to

h had I been less anxious for information that might throw light on the mystery I had set myself to unravel), about all that I had been able to gather was that kor-klee was the name given in the Dutch Indies to several preparations made from the latex of the wild fig of New Guinea. A crude infusion of it was employed by the Papuans in stupef

d Bell's teetotal resolutions! It would have been hard enough without anything further in the way of a 'thust aggravata.' I'm afraid he'll be having to exchange r?les with 'Slant' after all-to let the latter be the 'soba Mate of a drunken Skippa.'" Now that

save the actors themselves. Allen's infatuation for the girl had undoubtedly got the better of him the instant the turn of events suggested a plan which promised to give him undisputed possessio

ad tried to poison Bell, I had my doubts. I had not learned enough of how the drug acted to make my speculations on that point of much use. At any rate, with Bell unconscious on the schooner, it had clearly been the Australian's plan to return to the beach and remain there until she sailed, at the turn of the tide. That the Cora should get under way at that time had already been arrange

anchor up. The consequences of his finding her in on this latter occasion I had seen something of myself. How that slip of a girl got the drop on the most notorious bad man in the Islands I could only conjecture. Probably, with Allen, it was the old story-prudence going out of one door as passion entered at the other. I didn't reckon that Rona had ever read the story of Delilah; yet I felt pretty confident that the point of th

of the plague-infested schooner. He had not hesitated an instant in staking his life in what he had very fairly characterized as the short end of a hundred-to-one shot. There must be redeeming qualities in a man who could do that, no matter how shot through with infamy his past record had been. It occurred to me as just possible that Bell's magnanimity had struck a responsive chord in Allen's sense of sportsmanship-that the latter was going to play whatever remained of that grim game on the squar

had no intention of leaving Kai for a number of months to come. Nor, even after I began getting ready to go, did I attempt to ignore the fact that there might be duties for me to carry out in Townsville

d with the connoisseurs of Kai-men who knew at first hand the things I was trying to paint,-I had little fear that the more sophisticated critics of civilization would not fall for them. I hadn't any

ng a south-bound China-Australia liner inside of a fortnight. As Patton was known to be in bad for several little things at Thursday Island, his offer did more credit to his heart than to his head, and I was a good deal relieved when Jackson figured out a plan that promised to make it possible for me to reach my goal by another route. After thumbing a greasy sheet of Burns, Phillip sailings for the best part of an afternoon, the old outlaw suddenly announced he had found reason to believe that, with luck, a c

we pushed right in to Samarai. Old "Jack," however, sighting a bituminous smear trailing off above the tufted tops of the coco palms that line the inner passage, promptly shook out all his reefs, hauled up four or five points, and headed away on a course calcul

figures indicating soundings. "Three 'undred fathom-two 'undred fifty fathom-one bloody fathom! By Gawd, W'itney, we're 'igh an' dry a

shaved-off blackjack between his palms. "Ol' 'Choppy' Tancred never giv' the go-by to even a nigger dugout he could len' a han' to." Then he lighted his pipe, whoofed two or three whirling jets of blue smoke to leeward as he brought it to a proper draw, and settled comfortably back in puffing contentment. Ten minutes later he unrolled the chart a

top 'im w'en 'e 'its it." Then, presently, between puffs, as he stretched himself and sidled along to take the wheel as the cutter began to close the slowing steamer: "Wonder 'oo the bally cove'll be 'oo bumps a mis-charted reef w'en 'e thinks 'e's got four 'undred fathom uv

nally, he was credited with an amiable weakness for befriending every man who had run afoul of the statutes. I had heard them yarn by the hour at Kai of the way he had smuggled this one out of Australia, and that one into New Guinea; of how he had all but bumped South Head while standing-off-and-on in a "Southerly Buster" one night, on the off chance of picking up a jail-breaker, whose only claim upon Tancred had been that the latter had once before performed a similar service for

to the effect that I ought to consider myself dead lucky to be stacking up with "Choppy" Tancred; "or

d back, clawing round a projecting v

uv Kai Lagoon," he sang back, taking in the mainsheet as the cutter came up to the wind;

hat a man eccentric enough to take a case of drinkables with him on the return trip from the Islands didn't worry him as much as it might have some others. He was also kindly charitable about my "exclusiveness" of evenings (when all normal beings expand and grow sociable at

his set her back two days, and brought us into the offing at Townsville twenty-four hours after-instead of twenty-four hours before-a sun-blistered, foul-smelling labour-recruiting schooner, with a dead Captain and a score or more of dying niggers, was brought to anchor off the