Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

  CHAPTER XIV

  HELL'S HATCHES OFF

  That may give some hint of the state of mind of Australians when,waiting on the tip-toe of expectancy for word of the next dashing act oftheir hero, they received a message of quite another tenor. It was theSydney _Herald_ man who sent the message that swept the country like theblast of a hurricane. He wired just the bare facts and no more. Hisimagination, even his reasoning faculties, as he confessed in a laterdispatch, were numbed for the moment, temporarily paralyzed by thestaggering shock of the horror he had looked upon.

  "The Hon. Hartley Allen was found at an early hour this morning" (ranthe telegram) "bound, gagged and lashed to the wheel of the schooner_Cora Andrews_, which has been aground for some time at a lonely spot onthe beach of Cleveland Bay, several miles north of Townsville. Allen,who was taken to the General Hospital as soon as he was brought back totown, is a raving maniac and not expected to live out the day. Frominformation in the hands of the police, there is no doubt that theworse-than-assassin was the ex-convict, 'Squid' Saunders, recentlyreleased from jail and deported to the Solomons through Allen's generousefforts on his behalf. He is known to have escaped from his northboundsteamer at Cairns, stolen a fishing sloop, and is believed to haveheaded back to Townsville to carry out the dastardly act his disorderedbrain has evidently nursed for years. As the police seem likely to yieldto the popular pressure to employ bloodhounds in running down thefugitive, his capture is probably the matter of but a few hours."

  It was a fairly sane, reasonable-reading dispatch, that. None but a manwho had felt his blood turn to ice-water at the sight the _Herald_ manhad looked upon that morning could appreciate how much credit hedeserved for stating the facts so coherently. For myself, at the momentthe launch brought us back from the _Cora_ and put us ashore at thelanding, I would have been incapable of writing my own name correctly.There was only one thing I could do--nay, would have had to try to do ifthe world had been disintegrating beneath my feet--and I did it. That iswhy so much of the next thirty-six hours is a blank in my mind.

  * * * * *

  It was on a Saturday that Allen had made his spectacular killing inwinning the Planters' Handicap, and on Sunday afternoon, to escape theimportunities of Townsville generally and the correspondents inparticular, he had ridden up to pay me a visit at my hillside bungalow.I had missed the race (through another appointment for a sitting withRona, which, like the others, she had failed to keep), and so took theoccasion to get some account of it at first-hand from Allen. He was inhigh spirits over his success, but rather inclined to be put out withthe impulsive Oakes for breaking down in church that morning andproclaiming to all and sundry the real source of the thirty-five hundredand odd pounds that had fallen at his feet like manna from the skies.What had come nearest to flooring Melanesia's leading bad man, I think,was that the missionary had publicly announced his intention of namingthe new medical mission at Suva after the donor!

  Allen also, somewhat to my surprise, was not averse to speaking of the"Squid" Saunders episode. "The only redeeming thing about the oldruffian," he observed, "is his affection for that girl of his--thered-haired one, I mean--the black-and-tans don't signify. Rather aremarkable girl, that one, Whitney. She was one of the kind that musteither soar to the high places or wallow in the low ones, and I've beensorrier than I can tell that I was slated to--well, not to start herwinging for the heights exactly. I really wasn't a lot to blame in thematter, but--that isn't either here or there. Old 'Squid' _thinks_ Iwas, and will go on thinking so till his dying day--or mine. I tried toget the old reprobate to call it quits when I shipped him off the otherday. Do you think he would? No fear. Not the 'Squid.' Indeed,considering the bother I had wangling him out of serving that Kalgoorliesentence of his, he was rather nasty. He asked me if I was trying to buyhim off for fear he'd get me in the end. There wasn't much I could sayto that under the circumstances, so I just let him go. Now the purser ofthe _Nawarika_ wires me from Cooktown to say that the 'Squid' slippedashore at Cairns and failed to show up again before sailing time. Pursersays he still has the hundred quid I gave him to slip Saunders when theyput him off in the Solomons. I have turned the wire over to the police,but have asked them to sit tight unless Saunders shows up in thissection again. I hate to drag the old fire-eater into a new mess,especially after all the trouble I had getting him out of the old one.So I hope he won't be fool enough to come mooching south again. Don'tsuppose he will, but--I'll be keeping an eye lifting just the sameagainst the loom of a vitriol bomb on the weather skyline."

  Allen tapped his coat significantly at those last words, and thatreminded him that there were two or three little things about"pocket-gunnery" he wanted me to coach him up on. Nailing a foot-squareof discarded canvas to the swelling bole of a bottle tree down by thestream, we put in a half-hour of "by-and-large" practice at it. Allen,thanks to his natural gift for judging distance and angle, proved a veryapt pupil.

  By way of return for his gunnery lesson, "Slant" volunteered to show mea few tricks of knife-throwing, in which he was reputed to have no equalin the Islands. "I'm about as much of a walking arsenal as you were thetime you waited for me at the _Australia_, Whitney," he said with agrin, as he produced a broad-bladed dagger from a sheath slungunobtrusively on his right hip. "This knife, by the way," he went on,tilting it lightly across his forefinger, "is balanced especially forthrowing. They are made in Lisbon, mostly for export to Brazil Iunderstand, where they seem to go in for that kind of stunt a good bit.I bought it from the skipper of a Portuguese gunboat at Deli, who alsotaught me the principles of chucking it. First and last, I've had a lotof sport out of practising with it, and have an idea I would have aneven break with the _Capitano_ himself when my hand's in. I was verygrateful to old 'Squid' for handing it back to me the other day. I onlyhope he won't be forcing me to pass it on to him again."

  Allen's skill with the wicked-bladed _facon_ was decidedly impressive.If anything, he was a shade more accurate in planting the point of itthan I was with a bullet from my pocket. Little luck as I had inthrowing it, I was quite as fascinated with the appearance and "feel" ofthe formidable weapon as Allen had been with my target revolver inSydney. "I trust you won't have to part with it again, to Saunders oranyone else," I said as I handed it back to him.

  Before he mounted for his ride back to town, I mentioned to Allen thatRona had left me in the lurch again the day before, and intimated that,unless she began to show more interest in the picture, I would have toconsider packing up and going back to Sydney. As a matter of fact, thegirl's perversity had already been responsible for effectually dampeningdown my first flush of enthusiasm, and I began seriously to doubt myability to make a success of the picture when the way was clear to workat it. Allen begged me not to be discouraged, and assured me again thathe would look up Rona himself on the morrow and see if he couldn't getsome line on what she was sulking about. He also said he would see ifthe quarantine people couldn't be prodded along to get at the job ofdisinfecting the _Cora_.

  Rona still failed to show up on the following day, and in the evening Iwas unable to get 'phone connection with Allen's bungalow in anendeavour to learn if he had seen her. Dr. Butler, whom I got on thewire at the Quarantine Station, said that Allen had rung them up thatmorning, urging them to get a move on with the _Cora_. They had told himthat they were planning to send a squad off before the end of the week.As word had just come to them, however, that men were seen climbing overthe schooner that afternoon, they had decided to clean up the job in themorning. As long as the ship remained in her present condition, he said,she would continue a possible spreader of disease. She should have beenattended to before. If I cared to go off with them, he added, he wouldpick me up at the landing at eight o'clock. I thanked him and told him Iwould be glad of the chance to look things over before going to work.

  I drove down early in the morning, taking Ranga with me on the chancethat All
en and Rona might care to go off and plan a tentative grouping.A black boy cutting weeds with a sickle in front of Allen's bungalowtold me that "white marster stop townside" for the night and had not yetreturned. At the Mission I found Oakes a good deal perturbed. The daybefore, he said, Allen had called just after lunch, talked with Rona afew minutes, and then borrowed Yusuf and gone off for a ride. He had notreturned at dusk, but during the night the horse, dangling a brokenbridle rein, had come galloping back to his stable. The missionary wasfearful the rider had been thrown and stunned, and had been lying allnight on the road. He had sent out boys to search soon after daylight.He was not sanguine of an early report from them, as Allen on his ridesalways avoided the metalled main highways to save his horse's feet. No,Yusuf's knees showed no signs of his having stumbled. He was assure-footed as a goat and as gentle as a kitten. Not in the least givento shying or bolting. Besides, the colt wasn't foaled that could unseatHartley Allen. Of course, he must have struck his head against alow-hanging limb in galloping some bush path, but that was unlikely.Hartley had his wits too much on the alert to be caught like that. Hewas beginning to be just a bit suspicious of foul play. Had I heard that"Squid" Saunders had left his steamer at Cairns and was believed to havesailed south in a stolen fishing-boat? He was just about to call up thePolice Station and tell them of Allen's disappearance when I came.

  Rona had been off on one of her long walks the previous afternoon, Oakessaid in answer to my inquiry, and was not yet up. He had spoken with herthrough her window, just after Yusuf came back, in the hope that shemight be able to give him some hint of the road Allen had taken. Thelatter had not mentioned where he was going, she said. She herself hadbeen "away inland"--Oakes had encountered her on his weekly roundthrough the plantation villages. She was a tireless walker, and veryrestless--altogether a strange character. I did not disturb the girl, asI reckoned there was no use in taking her off to the schooner untilAllen was along to talk our plans over.

  It would have seemed that this word of Allen's disappearance, taken inconjunction with the fact that men had been seen on the wreck of the_Cora_ the previous day, might have given me just a shade of preparationfor what I saw as I followed Butler and the _Herald_ man over theschooner's side an hour later. But it was not so, probably because mymental faculties were at their dullest at so (for me) unwontedly earlyan hour. If the news had come to me in the afternoon, possibly I wouldhave traced some connection between the two events, and so have been atleast slightly braced and stiffened for the coming shock. As it was, Ibumped into it all unset, and the staggering impact of it came near tobowling me over.

  It had been Dr. Butler's theory, propounded as the launch put away fromthe landing, that the figures descried on the _Cora_ the afternoonbefore were those of blacks or coolies, attracted to the hulk by thehope of loot. As a matter of fact, he said, they would doubtless havemade quite a haul, as nothing but the ship's papers had been takenashore on the day of her arrival. Considerable "trade" and all of thepersonal effects of her former officers had been left for removal afterdisinfection.

  As we came out into the bay the coast to the northward began to open up,and presently the wreck of the _Cora_, heeled sharply to port with theforemast over the bows, became visible against the deep green of themangroves a couple of miles distant. Butler studied the hulk closelythrough his glasses as we closed it.

  "Looks as though I had another guess coming," he remarked finally,lowering the binoculars with a puzzled air. "Someone aboard her now.Seems to be jiggering the wheel. Can't be a pirate stunt, can it?Wouldn't be possible to drop a petrol engine into her, block up the holeand get off to the Islands on the quiet? But of course not. That's adrydock job--'count of the propeller and shaft."

  At a quarter of a mile he raised his glasses again. "Chap at the wheel'sthe only man in sight," he reported. "He don't seem to have spotted usyet. Must be deaf, not to hear the explosions of our exhaust. Ah,perhaps that accounts for it! He's an old cove--big shock of white hair.'Bout time he was getting his helmet on, though, with this sun beginningto bore into the back of his neck. Ahoy, there!..."

  But there was no reply. The lone white-haired figure was still jiggeringat the wheel when the launch, nosing in cautiously in the up-boil ofreversed propellers, slid past the _Cora's_ stern and the loom of hercounter cut it off from our view.

  A moss-shiny Jacob's Ladder hung over the starboard side amidships,where a section of the "nigger-wire" had been cut away, doubtless whenthe labour-recruits were disembarked. Butler climbed up first, then the_Herald_ man (who had come off on the Doctor's invitation to see theship made famous by the great exploit of the Hon. Hartley Allen), andthen myself. Butler lingered at the ladder for a few moments, givingorders to his men about bringing the disinfecting paraphernalia aboard;so it was given to the newspaper man to be the first to go aft anddiscover that the moving, gibbering white-haired wretch lashed to thewheel of the schooner represented the sum total of the mental andphysical remnants of the man whose doings he had been detailed tochronicle.

  The horrified reporter uttered no sound--simply froze and stood rootedto the deck in amazed consternation. It was as though the basilisk stareof the maniac's eyes had turned the flesh and blood of his rangy frameto stone. When he stirred finally, it was to tip-toe softly back two orthree paces to where I, in turn, had frozen in my tracks. It was hishand on my shoulder and his white face thrust close to mine that brokemy own trance. Then the both of us must have retreated another step ortwo, until we bumped into Butler, similarly petrified with horror.

  I am almost certain that not one of the three of us made any outcry, oreven uttered a word, so paralyzing was the effect of the apparition atthe wheel. The first sound I definitely recall as breaking in upon thosemuffled mowings from the cockpit was a booming gasp as Ranga's mightychest sucked in a lungful of air, and then the big Malay's quiet "'Scuseme, Tuan," as he started to shove past between me and the deckhouse.

  The yellow giant had seen too many men, white and black, lose theirminds and their lives on that reeking old schooner to let the snappingof one more brain, or the parting of one more life-line, ruffle undulyhis solid Oriental composure. He had been fond of Allen, however, and Icould see that he was shaken, though not, like the rest of us, unnerved.There was a rumble of concern and anxiety even in that respectful"'Scuse me, Tuan," as he started to push past the blockade the coweringforms of three lesser men had made in the narrow passage.

  Ranga's steadiness was good for the rest of us. Butler checked the Malaywith upraised hand and, muttering something about his duty as a doctor,started aft, the _Herald_ man and I pushing in his wake. If it had beenpossible for the fear-distorted features of the wreck of "Slant" Allento express extremer terror, that heightened degree was registered whenButler extended his opened clasp-knife to begin severing the lashings. Ihave no wish to attempt to describe that hell-haunted face. Indeed,there will be scant need of my doing so, for there can be few readers ofthis record who are not already familiar with its tortured lineaments.It seared itself into my brain with a white heat of intensity that leftno room for any other image. At the moment it seemed as though it mustbe blazoned there as long as my body was quick with the spark of life,or at least until my reason recoiled at the horror of it and totteredfrom its throne. A little later, when the dread face itself had beenhidden from my sight, a light seemed suddenly to flash out in thedistance, and in groping toward it I found relief.

  The ghastly shadow of the Hon. Hartley Allen was standing wedged inbetween the wheel and the binnacle-stand, his wrists lashed to thespokes of the former and a maze of tangled line binding his knees to thelatter. The lashing was a length cut from the taffrail-log-line, anotherpiece of which had been used to secure a gag of wadded oakum. The onlywound visible (save for the wrists chafed through to the white cords oftheir tendons in his desperate tuggings to tear free) was ahalf-inch-wide incision on the right inner side of the neck, evidentlymade by the point of a knife pressed in close to the swell of thejugular vein. As thi
s cut was hardly more than a deep prick, it seemedprobable that the knife had been used, not to inflict injury, but ratherto compel the victim to remain quiet while he was being secured.

  As the wrist lashings fell away, Allen lurched savagely forward with athroaty "g-rrr" and did his best to claw Butler's throat with hisfingers. His strength was spent by his night-long struggles, however,and Ranga easily smothered the attack in the crook of his interposedarm. The removal of the gag did not, as might have been expected fromthe way the chest had been labouring, release a frantic scream. Thepassages of the throat, although the neck revealed no evidences ofhaving been choked--recently, that is,--appeared to be swollen almostshut. The windpipe would carry air to the lungs, but every effort toexpel it violently seemed to clap a sort of automatic muffler on thevocal chords.

  Allen collapsed limply into Ranga's arms when his leg lashings had beencut, but he would not swoon. The dread of the damned continued to streamfrom his staring and unbelievably dilated eyes; those hoarse heavings ofthroat-throttled shrieks continued to issue from his gaping mouth; everytime a hand or foot was freed, he continued to strike or kick with it tothe limit of his pitifully drained strength.

  Butler said that the only hope of saving the man's mind, and probablyhis life as well, was to rush him to the hospital and put him under anopiate as quickly as possible. Ranga picked up the tortured bodycarefully, as he might have handled a struggling kitten, and passed itdown to the launch. Butler had the forethought to have us all sprayedwith the disinfectant before we went over the side, so as to minimizethe chances of our carrying off any plague germs.

  Just as the launch was about to shove off, Ranga begged the coxswain tohold on for a moment, and went clambering back up the latter. He ranaft, picked up something from the deck, and came back tucking his littleMalay flute into the waistband of his dungarees. He had dropped it inthe cockpit, he explained.

  About all I can recall of the run back to the landing was theinterminable number of times the _Herald_ man insisted on telling usthat he had been talking to Hartley Allen all the while the latter hadbeen shifting into his jockey togs for the Planters' Handicap, and ofhow Butler, each time, replied: "And he slept in my pajamas all the timehe was in quarantine." Possibly I said equally trivial things; but Idon't recall them. I was conscious of a great pity for the plight of theman for whom I had come to have a genuine liking, and a dull sort ofwonder as to how the tragedy might have happened and who was responsiblefor it. But the haunting horror of that fear-stricken face hung like acurtain in front of my mind, dimming or blanking everything behind it.

  At Butler's suggestion, he--with Ranga to help--took a carriage at thelanding and drove direct to the hospital with Allen, while the _Herald_man and I went in my trap to the Police Station to report to the Chief.The latter had recently come to his present job from Charters Towers,where he had made something of a name for himself by breaking up a gangof outlaws who had long been doing pretty much as they pleased in thatrough and ready bonanza town. He was a chap of great determination,energy and courage, but of little subtlety--rather the type of aWestern American sheriff than a city police chief. I had met him at theClub two or three times, and liked him for his steady eye and openstraightforwardness.

  The Chief was a little impatient at the _Herald_ man's repetitions ofthe togs-shifting episode, and possibly also of my own wooden silence;but he got to the salient facts readily, and was no less forward withhis deductions therefrom.

  "'Squid' Saunders beyond a doubt," he pronounced decisively. "His sloopwas sighted twice between here and Cairns, the last time only fiftymiles to the north'ard. He could have landed night before last easy. Anyof the lagoons running back into the Caradarra Swamp would hide hissloop. That would have given him all day yesterday to scout for Allen.Why the schooner I don't quite twig. But the 'Squid' was always addingdevilish little embroideries to his jobs, and leaving a man to rot on aplague ship has all of his ear-marks. Never mind, I've had two launchespatrolling the north coast for him since yesterday morning. He must havelanded before they got there. But they'll nab him if he pulls out withthe sloop again, and if he doesn't, _I'll_ nab him. I hate to do it witha white man, but I'm going to put Rawdon's 'nigger-chasers' on histrail. I've got 'Squid's' old suit of clothes--the one he threw awaywhen Allen bought him a new outfit--stowed away here, and I fancy asniff of it will be enough to put them on the scent with. If I don'tmiss my guess, Mr. 'Squid' Saunders will be enjoying our bed and boardagain before another twenty-four hours has gone by."

  The Chief dropped his professional manner for a few moments as we aroseto go. "Allen was a good friend of yours, Mr. Whitney," he said, layinga kindly grip on my shoulder. "I don't wonder that you're a bit dazed bythe thing. Rather puts a damper on the picture, I'm afraid. Going up thehill now, are you? Good--a bit of a rest will steady you no end. Ring upthis evening and we'll give you the news. It won't be long before wehave our man."

  The _Herald_ man, with the Chief's approval, rushed off to the telegraphoffice to dispatch his wire. I drove round to the hospital to pick upRanga and inquire for news of Allen. Butler came down to see me in thereception-room and reported that it had taken an astonishing quantity ofmorphine to have any effect upon the patient, but that he was at lastbeginning to grow quieter. His heart action was very irregular and therewas no saying yet what turn things might take. He asked me to let Rangaremain at the hospital for a day or two. They were short of orderlies asa consequence of the smallpox epidemic, and the big Malay was a veryuseful attendant on account of his strength, quietness and good sense.As they were trying to avoid the necessity of putting Allen in astrait-jacket, they wanted someone in the room able to handle him if hebecame violent again on coming out from his opiate. I told him to keepRanga as long as he was needed.