The Skeleton of Paradise Island
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Alexander Vindex Vennard (1884-1947) was a freelance journalist who was prolific in the 1920s and 30s. He wrote many short stories, non-fiction historical articles, children's serials, and edited and produced a weekly children's page for a Queensland newspaper. Most of his fiction was published under the name "Frank Reid", but he was better known as "Bill Bowyang" of the children's pages. So well known that he was called 'Bowie" by his friends. The unique middle name "Vindex" comes from the Vindex range near Winton in Queensland, as he was born on a cattle station nearby named after the range.

THE SKELETON

OF PARADISE ISLAND
and other stories

Frank Reid

(Alexander Vindex Vennard)

1884-1947

Stories Collected and edited by Terry Walker from Australian newspapers and periodicals.

September 2023

Alexander Vindex Vennard

Aka "Frank Reid",  "Bill Bowyang"

EXCEPT as otherwise noted, all these stories were published in Australian newspapers under the author's pen-name of "Frank Reid", which he used for his short stories and historic articles. He was better known thoughout Queensland by the name "Bill Bowyang", under which he produced popular newspaper columns and children's pages for many years; both names were clearly much more catchy than his given name.

His unique middle name, Vindex, was the name of the Queensland cattle station near Winton, Queensland, where his parents were working when he was born. The station was named after the Vindex Range nearby (actually a mesa, known to locals informally as "The Jump-up", which is the site of the famous present-day Queensland dianosaur fossil discoveries.

As a 13 year old boy he went to sea, and until the outbreak of the First World War wandered the Torres Strait islands and as far as the Solomons. His "Bill Bowyang" name began in World War 1 when he was a soldier with the Anzac forces. He began the official regimental newspaper  "Kia-Ora Coo-ee", derived from greetings from New Zealanders and Australians, edited by "Bill Bowyang".

After the War he settled back in Queensland and embarked on a precarious career as a free-lance journalist. He wrote and prepared weekly children's pages for the Queensland Daily Bulletin, including numerous serials and stories for them, wrote short stories for the Queenslander and other papers such as the Sunraysia Daily, Smith's Weekly, the Australasian, the Sun, and the Daily Mail.

He lived in Bowen, Queensland, until his death at the age of 63.

This volume is by no means a "complete works".  There are many more stories, but some are unreadable due to the poor quality of the newspaper scans and the OCR. However, these are a representative sample of his short fiction.  This ebook is the first time any collection of his stories has been published.

—T. Walker

Contents

1: Easy Going

2: The Genius of Dakaru Island

3: The Skeleton of Paradise Island

4: Come-To-Grief Creek

5: The Gamble

6: The Moorhead Legacy

7:  The Pearls of Manomoa

8: The Green Parrot

9: The Parrot and the Pearls

10: The Madonna of the Thousand Isles

11: The Prince of Wandabilla

12: The Pink Death

13: Fingers of Death

14:  The Green Umbrella

15: The Pearler of Pomete

16:  The Curse of the Poppy

17: Cave of Death

18: The Creeping Death

19: Three Teeth

20: The Afterglow

21: Scalyback

22: The Plague Ship

23: Long Pig: The Mate's Adventure

24: The Pearls of Jacob Le Maire

25: The Mutiny on the Cypress

26: The Resurrection of Peter Breen

27: The Orang-Utan

28: A Home for Marie Ellen

____________

1: Easy Going

Queenslander 27 Nov 1930

(as by "Bill Bowyang")

JACK WELLS has retreated to his duck pond. Other men would have locked themselves in a room under similar circumstances, but Jack was not as other men, and then, too, other men, or rather many other men, do not have a duck pond.

Jack ran a farm in a North Queensland agricultural district. At least, he tried to run it. That was the trouble, for, loosely speaking, the farm ran him. When he had attempted to explain to the agent who had sold him fertilisers why he could not pay for the last shipment, when he remembered that the agricultural implement firm in Brisbane had promised to send that same day a representative to settle debts on some machinery purchased many months before, when he looked at his bank book and in his purse and discovered the- exact amount of money he possessed, Jack Wells had gone to the pond to commune with his ducks. They at least could only look their reproach.

He felt that if it had only been his fault he could have withstood it better, but— it was not his fault. He had a good farm. He worked hard from 5 o'clock in the morning until twilight, and often later. He knew he was not extravagant, for no one could be in that community.

Yes, Jack Wells had a good farm, but he was not a good farmer, and for that reason his efforts went unrewarded. For, although his crops were excellent, and he had a steads demand for them, his assets persisted in modestly retiring in favour of his liabilities.

For Jack was "easy going."

"Bad year for potatoes, Jack," Jin Harris would say. "I'll have to pay you for those fowls out of next year's crop."

Or Sam Cooney bad to have an operation.

"Of course, you don't know how it is, Jack, not being a family man yourself." was what he often heard when he would try to collect an honest debt.

"I suppose you're right," he would agree, and return home at poor as ever. But he often wondered where his creditors got the money for so many Improvements. He was very considerate. but it did not help himself with the debts he owed.

NOW he stood leaning against a tree watching the ducks swimming lazily around in the cool water. It was refreshingly cool and isolated there, and soothed Jack's tired spirit. It is not pleasant to admit to ones self that one is a failure.

"I reckon I'm just an ordinary dashed fool," Jack said to himself. "I have no right to hold people up for their debts. It ain't fair. I should get out and work for some one by the day."

That was the way with Jack, always blaming himself, and not some one else, for his troubles.

"I should be like those ducks, just getting my food for one day and not laying up for to-morrow," he mused.  "Still, I would hate to sell the farm. Dad was always able to made it pay. and I don't see why I can't."

But he was not the blockhead I am.

Just then a shadow fell across the path. Looking round, Jack saw the daintiest girl he had ever seen, with pretty eyes and hair that waved softly around a well-shaped forehead. She wore a pretty blue silk crepe dress. He smiled a slow smile of welcome as she came nearer.

"I'VE been looking everywhere for you. Auntie sent me about two hours ago for some oranges, and I've spent most of that time waiting up at the house for you," the dainty girl said as she came to the edge of the water. "Oh, I wish I had brought a tiny line and hook with me. I would have caught some of those little fish before I went back."

"No, you wouldn't," Jack said quietly.

"Why?" she asked curiously.

"Because they are friends of mine."

She glanced up at him from out the corner of her saucy blue eyes to see what kind of a man she was talking to. For with his strong, well-knit body and 6ft. of height she could not imagine him sentimental over fish. But she had failed to note the kind look in his steady grey eyes.

"Why did you come down here, where everything is so quiet?" she asked at length.

"To get away from people," was Jack's gloomy answer.

"Then that means I am not wanted," she said with some, dignity. "So, Mr. Wells, if you will please get the oranges for me I will leave you to your gloomy meditations."

"Oh, I didn't mean that for you," Jack explained. "You see, I came down here to keep from meeting a man to whom I owe some money. I don't mean that I don't want to pay it, but I just don't have the money now," he explained lamely.

"I SEE." said the girl quietly. "But I thought you had a thriving farm here. And you know you are the only one around here who grows such delicious oranges and mandarins, why is it the farm doesn't pay?"

"Because the people don't pay me."

"You mean because you won't make them pay you?" she answered.

"Oh, well, it's the same thing, I  suppose. But I'd like to see you get it, when they want it for something else."

"Is that a challenge?" she asked, with a mischievous smile.

"Yes," Jack answered, and then, he could have struck himself for it the next minute.

"I'll show you. They'll pay, and you, in turn, will pay your debts. Just watch and see. I work for a big firm in Brisbane, and I'm here for a three weeks' holiday with my aunt. I might as well spend it doing a little good as any other way, so I'll start to-morrow morning.

"Now will you please get me two dozen oranges? The basket is in the back of my car. And while you're doing it I'm going to watch your ducks."

She walked round to the other aide of the pond where there was  a creaking old railing, part of a fence that had once surrounded the waterhole. As she leaned against it to look into the pool it swayed forward.

"PLEASE go away from that old fence," Jack called as he returned. "It is not safe for any one to lean against, and the water is very deep just there."

"Did any one ever drown in the waterhole?" she asked suddenly.

"Yes," Jack answered.

"Who was it? Any one that you knew?"

"My mother fell in, and was drowned before we could reach her."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm always asking too many questions."

"That's all right," said Jack awkwardly, "but please come away."

"All right, if my oranges are ready I must be going, for I have stayed too long now."

He followed her to the front of his house

"I'll be back In the morning to start work," she said with a smile as she started the car, and did not wait for Jack's reply.

"NOW look here," the girl said,  "you've got to back me up to this. There's no use wasting my holiday trying to put you on a cash basis if you're going to let every Tom, Dick, and Harry go over my head to you."

It was the afternoon of her first day at work. She had appeared promptly at eight o'clock. Not in silk, but in a pretty little blue gingham dress with white collar and cuffs. She had insisted on running over the books with Jack, at the conclusion of which he felt very much like a small boy at school who had neglected to do his sums in arithmetic and was being taken to task for it.

"No wonder you can't pay your bills." she exclaimed scornfully. "You have been running a regular charity institution."

"You can't be too hard on them, especially when they're married." he said, remembering some of the arguments he had listened to.

"You're not doing them any good. You're only helping them form bad habits when you allow them to run such large accounts."

He told her to do as she thought best, and escaped from the house on the pretence of examining some piping leading into the horse paddock.

Jack had not been gone long when Dan Stradder came for some mandarins. The girl attended to his order and held out her hand for the money.

"Put it in the book," he said, looking at the "city girl" with surprise.

"Sorry," she answered, "but we have started on a cash basis."

"Where's Wells?" he demanded with some show of anger.

"I think he's in the horse paddock, but it won't do you any good to see him."

"It might and it might not," and he went out of the house.

"I SAY, that's a fine girl you've got at your place. Who is she?"

"Bookkeeper," Jack answered, returning to his task. "I thought so. It seems she don't know I'm a regular customer. Tried to make me pay cash."

"Our new rule," muttered Jack.

"New rule, eh. How was I to know? I told her I didn't have the money. She  said she was sorry, but that I could come to-morrow with the cash and get my mandarins."

"Well I suppose she was right. You will, won't you?" Jack asked as he looked up with a grin at the now angry man.

"But I haven't sold my cattle yet Now in a few days I could pay, maybe."

"All right," Jack said weakly. "You can tell her I said to let you have them."

A few seconds later Stradder went back in triumph.

Ten minutes later she took Jack to task for it.

"You told Stradder he could book his order."

"But he promised to pay in a few days," he finished lamely.

"He will not pay it because he won't have to— not again. He put his hand in his pocket and paid on the spot, or he wouldn't have got his fruit. And you just remember, the next man that tries to play that game, I want you to refer him to me."

THEIRS was a queer partnership, if partnership it could be called. For, although he owned the farm, the girl was the boss. But he had promised to let her have charge of things for three weeks, and he was keeping

One day while making an entry he saw a charge to old Dave Pavey. He turned to his new bookkeeper with secret delight and demanded how it happened, for he had never known Dave to book a thing before in his life.

She laid her pencil down and turned and looked at him before answering.

"Mr. Pavey needed the corn and also the money. He had a very badly infected arm, tied up with a dirty handkerchief, but would not go to the doctor, because he had not the money. I gave him the corn, and told him I would book it, and he could pay later, and to take the money he had and get his arm dressed. I had to almost shove him off the farm before he would go. He'll pay all right."

Jack was speechless, but he was pleased— a great deal— to find her a woman with feelings for her fellow man. It had not seemed quite right for a girl to be so hard. For he had only seen her in the role of a business woman.

THE next day Jack saw her in church,  and then at last he found out her name. It was Mary Hamilton, and her aunt was "old Mrs. Smith," who lived alone in the big house on the outskirts of the town. Somehow, as she sat on the pew with her dignified aunt, Jack half expected her to stop the parson in the middle of his sermon and tell him just how it should be preached. Of one thing he was certain— that her advice would be interesting, to say the least. He wished she would, but she did not. She was very demure and well-behaved throughout the sermon.

When she passed him at the door she said, "Good morning," and, nodding coolly, passed on with her aunt. Jack was standing at the sliprails when she came to the farm that afternoon.

"Would you like to ride a horse to the hill at the rear of my land?" he summered. "It's a pretty long walk."

"Oh. I'd love to," she answered quickly.

It only took Jack a few minutes to catch two of the horses and saddle them. He led them to where the girl was waiting.

"Which one am I to ride?" she asked, looking at the beautiful black horses. Jack took great pride in keeping his horses fat and sleek.

"You may have your choice," he answered,

She quickly chose the most spirited-looking one, and before Jack could get to her aide she had mounted, and was galloping over the field like a regular horsewoman.

In a little rocky gully at the foot of the hill they found some beautiful wild ferns, and the girl was busy picking them when she saw a snake. Jack killed it with a stone, and finished picking the ferns.

"I'm glad I didn't come alone," she admitted.

THEN she apparently forgot that he was there, or about snakes, for she sat down on a rock and began weaving a wreath out of wild flowers she had gathered. She looked up just as the sun dipped over the tree-tops, and cast weird little shadows over the grassy gully where she was sitting. Looking around as though she had never noticed just how beautiful a place it really was before, she exclaimed.

"Oh! How cosy." Then, looking up at Jack reproachfully, she asked.

"Is this where you bring them all, Mr. Wells?"

"I have never brought any one here but you," he answered seriously. Lovemaking was a serious matter with him, not a game, as apparently it was with this light creature.  "And I do wish you would not call me Mr. Wells."

She looked up like a small child with eyes filled with mischief. "I like Jack," she said. "It's simple and plain and strong, and—"

"I am going to kiss you," replied John, suddenly.

"Indeed you're not," she retorted, and in a moment her playfulness was gone. But it was too late.

"You brought it on yourself, and I'm going to do it," repeated Jack, getting to his feet. She jumped up, and faced him.

"If you do, I'll— Stop!*

For Jack had caught one of her wrists. He had never kissed a girl in his life. Where he found the courage to do it now was as much a surprise to him as it was to the girl. But he had said be would, and now he must.

AS his arm went about her, the soft slenderness or her came as a shock, She was the weaker, yet in her very weakness was her strength, for honor possessed him that he had got this far. She hated him. He could see that, for the blue eyes were dagger points. Yet he drew her nearer and kissed her on the lips. Then he let she cried.

"Clumsy, stupid, brainless brute! Now I'm going straight back"

As they were going through the last gate he found his voice.

"I wish I were dead," he said with sombre passion.

She did not answer him.

He jumped to the ground. Half pleadingly he held up his hand to help her dismount. She turned and lightly jumped to the ground on the other side of the horse. Then she walked away without looking back.

Jack stood where she had left him. Not a hundred feet away was the pond. He decided he would end it all by diving in the same spot where his mother had fallen. For he never expected to see again the girl of his dreams. The beautiful butterfly he had caught and wounded. He walked to the edge.

"Jack!" He actually jumped. Turning, he saw the girl looking at him from the corner of the house.

"Don't do it to-day, anyway," she called, and then disappeared.

SHE did not return next morning, and it was very little attention Jack's farm received, for every few minutes be wandered back to the house. It was so still and lonely— just like a house after the family had gone on a long journey. But it was his fault. He laughed hoarsely. A week ago he had thought he was having a hard time— because of money matters. Money! What was that to the loss of this priceless loan of life and cheer and impertinence? Now she was gone and would not come back. Not after that. He had .mistaken her lively spirit for fickleness— but too late.

He deckled to drive into town. When he returned a car stood at the front of the house. The owner was not in sight. He looked again, and his heart leaped, for he was sure it belonged to her.

He entered the room he used as an office. There she sat before the old pine table, and in front of her was quite a pile of money and cheques.

"Hello," she said coolly. "I've been out collecting— £120— and I thought you'd rather put it where it draws interest."

But Jack had no eye for money— not now.

"You came back ?" he said slowly, "after what I did."

She did not look up. "Yes, I came back— to— business."

JACK soon found that she meant it. She was all business, and had no time to talk about anything else. As the days passed the farm flourished, but that did not interest Jack now, only that it was her work. He worshipped anything that she did. He acknowledged that it was wonderful to know that he owed no man.

That it was simple he did not consider. Just a matter of getting what was due to him, and then giving no credit. It was simple, but who could do it except this wonderful little girl? And— who would do it when she was gone?

"I've only got three more days, you know," she said one afternoon, and there's still a lot to do."

Only three more days! Jack's heart sank. It was then that a great idea came  to him.

"I don't suppose you would give up your city Job for this?" he asked.  She sat up and looked at him with something of her old mischievous smile.

"Do you know how much I get?"

Of course, Jack didn't know.

"Four pounds a week."

Well, that was a lot of money, for him to pay out every week, but at had little respect for money.

"Would you pay that?" she asked him curiously.

"Yes."

THE girl suddenly looked down. Then she got up and walked to the window. Jack saw that she had take out her handkerchief.

"I— l cant," she said very low.

"Of course you cant," he replied. "I should not have asked you."

And he turned to go.

"Jack!" she called. She was facing him now. and he saw wonderingly that she had been crying. "There's no man like you."

"I'd pity him if there was. I know I'm no good," he answered sadly.

"You are," and she stamped her foot passionately. "Don't you dare say you aren't."

He looked at her wonderingly.

"But I can't work for you," she finished.

"Why not?" Jack asked.

She turned to him again

"Don't you see?" she demanded.

Poor Jack shook his head. "

"No. I don't, but I suppose you know best." Mary threw up her hands in a e gesture of utter hopelessness. Then she sat down in her chair and took her pencil.

THE next morning Jack left his work at the stables and went to the house. The gin was not there. although the car was in front of the building.

"Jack!" A cry came from the direction of the pond, and he looked in that direction Just in time to see a white arm go down. In a few seconds he was at the edge of the pond, and when she came up Jack caught her. Her arms went round his neck, and she clung to him as might a child. He dragged her to dry land and set her down, or rather he tried to, for she still clung to him.

"Jack, " she murmured, "you're not angry?"

"Angry?" Jack looked at her, and she saw his face was very white, and his eyes looked steadier than ever.

"Angry?" he repeated.

"Because I did it on purpose." Then her eyes fell.

"Did what on purpose?"

"Fell into the pond to make you think I was drowning."

Jack's arms fell to his sides.

"Why?" was all he could say.

"So you would rescue me, of course," she said. "Didn't you want to?"

JACK sank down on the grass and groaned. "What if I had— not rescued you, and you had not been able to get out?" he asked at last, finding words.

"Would you have cared?"

His eyes were enough as he looked up at her.

"But, all you wanted me for was a— bookkeeper," she murmured.

Still he was silent. She had hurt him more than she could imagine.

"And now you don't even want me for that, do you?"

Springing to his feet, he cried, "Yes— no—"

"Yes— no," she mocked. "Jack, what kind of an answer is that?"

"Mary, I want you for— everything."

Some time later Jack heard sigh from the quiet little person so dear to him, and Mary whispered: "If you'd said you loved me before, my dear, it would have saved all this trouble."

______________

2: The Genius of Dakaru Island

Queenslander  21 July 1927

The author ran away to sea at 13 and spent his impressionable early years on pearling luggers and trading boats in the Torres Strait Islands between Queensland and New Guinea. Many of his stories are set there.

FROM distance Dakaru Island looked like any other isle in the South Seas. Twenty miles long perhaps, and of little width. Girt with a narrow sand beach, the ground broke sharply upward from this, and the sides of the small, heavily-wooded mountain forming the centre of the island were ga?hed nnd pock-marked with deep gullies. The whole place was rank with luxuriant tropical vegetation, with brilliant colour— intense greens and blues that hurt the eyes in the glare of the fierce mid-afternoon sunlight. Now and then a parrot settling in the bush made a vivid splash of crimeon, as though a drop of blood had fallen there. Toward the waterside, in the lowlands, there was the usual steaming, dismal, festering mangrove swamp.

Harold Boyd, the trader, had decided to spend a month on Dakaru Island. Natives erected a bungalow fronting the bench, and here he set up his household gods. He even went to the extreme of bringing a piano— a tough, weather-proof little upright. It had been transported by his schooner from Sydney. And great was the amusement of the two white planters on the island, and greater yet the wonder of the natives when it was unpacked.

It was set up in the main room, which opened toward the beach. Above it, and to right and left, Boyd hung three mirrors, reflecting what passed behind him while he played. He had not struck a dozen chords before many natives gathered outside, and, and he did not appear to observe them, gave themselves free rein. They evidently thought the performance, absurd: they grimaced and laughed, frankly expressing their judgments of the uncouth din.

But, whatever they may have felt, the instrument was a comfort to its owner. When the two planters with their wives and families came to console him in his solitude, the little mirrors would reflect emotions far different from the laughter and derision of the natives, Often it was an old song or a time-worn hymn he was asked for; then, he played or sang, he saw many a look of homesickness— many a smile, half tears, in the betraying mirrors.

One hot afternoon Boyd sat at his instrument, intently curious over the shifting visions in the mirrors. Past the door and down toward the beach led the road upon which trooped the natives. They passed in groups and singly— sad and merry, old and young— in endless procession. Unconsciously be began to play the Pilgrim Chorus from Tannhauser, though the joyous, happy natives outside were far from embodying the grief-worn spirits of Wagner's opera. Though half conscious of the incongruity, even of the absurdity, of the music in this scene, he kept on with the theme, becoming more and more rapt as it developed. The passing figures in the gloss dimmed and blurred, and at last concentrated into a single careworn face, deep-lined by haggard suffering— a face prematurely old, it with desperate eagerness. A moment more brought the realisation that the pathetic vision was no creature of the imagination, but a reffection from the real world of the dusty lawn outside.

A man was sitting on the edge of the veranda, looking in. His was the face reflected in the glass. He did not see the mirror that revealed him; he was, indeed, utterly unconscious of all save the music. His dress was that of the poorest native, but no native would have been affected by that song. Boyd played the chorus to the end, then drifted off through chord after chord, trying old familiar melodies. He played  Home, Sweet Home,  and  Santa Lucia.  The man showed no recognition, but the haunting look of soul starvation in his face deepened to agony.

Under that native's dress surely lay a mystery. Boyd became keen to discover it. Could he but touch with his music the hidden chord of feeling, the stranger would reveal himself. The musician experimented— with simple songs, those to which the heart-strings of memory vibrated; but with no success. At last, made impatient by failure, he turned and made a gesture of invitation,

"Won't you come in?" Instantly the man flushed, rose and hurried away.

"Friend! friend!" called Boyd. "Stop! stop!"

Half a dozen natives paused and turned to him with smiling faces. The man scurried on, disappearing at a turn of the beach. Boyd was mystified.

The next day brought a similar experience— this time the stranger would not venture so near the house. His reflected image could be seen as he sat on the other side of the road, ready for instant flight, intent upon the music, nevertheless, with a pitiful insistency— a look half-beseeching, half-terrified. He sat there all the afternoon, while his puzzled entertainer played. But Boyd rose, the listener vanished. That was the last seen of him for some days.

Then came the beginning of a strange companonship. As time passed there grew upon the lonely trader on Dakaru Island the sensation of being haunted. He never sat down to his piano without the feeling of a presence near him. Sometimes the form of his mysterious visitor flitted across the glass. But always when search was made, the man disappeared.

Gradually Boyd became accustomed to his invisible auditor. At last he came to crave his presence as a stimulus to his playing. There was a weird enchantment in the mysterious proximity of the spirit he could feel answering to every note. However, all the lures that Boyd put forward were of no avail— the Unknown persisted in his unaccountable conduct. The mystery deepened.

AT this juncture came Ferrier's yacht, on a world's tour, and amongst those on board was Pentanoff, a Russian pianist. As Ferrier decided to stay on Dakaru Island for several days, Boyd's musical inclinations and piano brought him and the Russian much together. The virtuoso was a pale little man. His  mother was an English woman, and, besides his mastery of what was literally his "mother tougue," he had inherited from her a certain power and gentle directness unusual in his race.

One night, in Boyd's bungalow, as the two sat over their coffee and cigars, the host told of his weird experience.

"I'm sure he's near ue now!" he exclaimed, as he finished the tale. "I Am vividly conscious of him, though where he keeps himself is a mystery."

Pentanoff was all interest. "Not German, French, nor English, you say, or he would have answered to all three— Scandinavian?"

"I don't think so."

"I wonder—" said Pentanoff, tapping with tuneful finger a minor note.

Then rapidly, nervously, slamming the  music stool into position, he settled himself and plunged into the ringing measures of a Russian battle hymn.

How he played! Boyd felt an electrifying thrill. He could not keep still, he rose and walked about the room. That tormenting, irresistible music ran riot in his blood. He wanted a forlorn hope to lead— a height to storm— a dash to death with drawn sword, in some mad charge for liberty! The hysteria of the passionate song shook him like a great wind. He turned— and came face to face with the mysterious stranger.

Great tears coursed down the man's cheeks. He turned to speak— only dry sobs came. Pentanoff heard, and whirled around. The musician spoke in a language Boyd did not understand. The man threw himself on his knees in a passion of weeping. It was some moments before he controlled himself.

Pentanoff received then a merciful inspiration. Turning to the piano, he played gentle, half-savage airs, strange, thrilling songs of the infancy of a people— the simplest, sweetest, saddest in the world. They soothed like an enchantment the poor creature at his feet. Gradually the scalding tears gavg place to gentle sobs of childlike relief, iInfinitely pitiful— then silence.

Again the musician spoke, his eyes, with gentle test, intent upon the keyboard. The answer came, hesitating; halting.

"Would you mind," Pentanoff said, "leaving us alone?"

Boyd reluctantly left the room, and far into the night he heard the hum of voices— then more of the strange eerie music.

DAWN had almost come when Pentanoff rejoined him. "It's very sad!" he said.

"Tell me," demanded the host after a lengthened silence. "Am I to be 'pied piper' against my will, and not know why?"

"It's very sad!" he repeated. "His whole story is disconnected— a sort of patchwork of memory— and there are hopeless rents in it. He is my countryman. He was a Bolshevik."

Again Pentanoff lapsed into silence, an odd look in his inscrutable eyes.

"An official in his district," he resumed at length, "had become obnoxious to the cause, and wad condemned. The Circle, of which your man was a member, was called upon to furnish the murderer. They drew lots, and it fell to him— Fate is such an ironical dame! He was the first violin in the most popular orchestra, and it was decided that the offender might be shot at one of the balls which it was known they would both attend.

"Unfortunately for the society chance had not chosen wisely; the avenger had a gentle soul— he was weakhe couldn't do it. I wish you had heard him describe it. I feel as if I had lived it all myself, or dreamt it in a nightmare. He sat through the evening, his viotin trembling in his hand, his revolver lying in his breast. Dance after dance went by, and still he did not shoot. He pictured it to himself as he pictured it to me— how the man would fall— how that brilliant gathering would rise in screaming disorder— how he would be seized— perhaps not have time to empty another cartridge into his own brain! He saw it over and over again while the lights winked and glared at him and perspiration hung chill at his temples. He could not kill in cold blood.

"He was ordered to play a solo. He determined that thid one— this, the last time —he would play, and then —he would make an end of it. He improvised,- tearing out from his soul all that terrible day of fear had held for him. He lost trace of everything but his music, and his misery  He paused. The audience he had held spellbound burst into a roar of applause. The host sent him his own glass of wine, the hostess her gold bracelet. He was dazed for a few moments, then the mists cleared, and be saw that his man had gone.

"Vaguely he murmured the name. Someone told him that the official had received a message which called him away. The rest of the evening is a blank. He  remembers only stumbling into the outer darkness.

"According to his colo of honour he must give himself up to the society. That meant a disgrace he could not bear— and death!— that he feared with overpowering terror. He went home, secured his little savings, and fled. Realising that his fellow-conspirators would leave nothing undone to find him, and make an example of him as a renegade and a coward, he lived panic-stricken— hiding, running, starving for days at a time, possessed by a fear that daily grew upon him.

"He does not seem to know how long, or where he wandered; but after months of anguished flight he reached the coast and concealed himself in a vessel whose destination he did not even guess. She was an English tramp, bound for Australian ports, Yokohama her last call, he learned when hunger forced him on deck. He was impressed as stoker. Even on board the ship he did not feel himself safe from the grasp of the men whose confidence he had betrayed. He lived in apprehension. His mind was already in the clutch of the fixed idea— the monomania of the hunted.

"When he reached Sydney he was terrified at the prospect of the return voyage. He thought of embarking for America, and had already completed arrangements for that, when the war broke out. Then he took passage on a South Sea schooner, and later on buried himself in a little village in Fiji.

"There he lived five years, perhaps longer. He picked up the language and gradually became identified with the people, who accepted him at first with curiosity, at last with friendship, even with uniform gentleness.

"The fear was with him always, though its cause had after a time vanished front his clouded mind. Only one longing, one need, remained clear and persistentmusic. He purchased a sorry-looking violin from a native, but its melody wm a poor solace. A month back he came to this island in a copra schooner. Wanted to see new places and faces. Suddenly—you can imagine what it must have been to him— out of the blur of sandy beach and blue shadows came the long-lost tunes, the melodies for which his heart hungered. He was drawn to them as by a spell. Memories sprang to life, faint and indistinct at first, dim visionss of another existence. He followed the sounds till ha came to your veranda, and sat there looking in at the strange yet familiar instrument. Slowly he drank in harmonies long forgotten, long sought for. When at last you rose and spoke to him the old terror smote his heart and he fled.

"But the music drew him back. He would often crouch under the veranda listening with all his soul. In the last few weeks his mind has been born again, but the dread remains.

"To-night— but you know the rest— the final awakening came. He was exhausted. I played him to sleep at last. He's is there now, poor wretch! Think of it— what a life!"

THE two men sat silent. For the moment they entered that strange existence of fear and longing— understood the unutterable effort of that numbed brain working through a labyrinth of darkness, guided only by the slender thread of sound, leading slowly, out into the light.

Pentanoff rose.

"I'll come back in the morning," he said, "to talk over what we had best do. Leave the poor devil where he is; let him alone. I've made him comfortable, and he'll sleep for 24 hours at least."

Bidding his friend good-fight, Boyd went to his room and to bed, falling into a heavy doze, from which he suddenly awoke. He was sitting bolt upright in his bed, startled. He was sure he had heard some strange noise. It came again—three great chords on the piano! The suddenness of the awakening had confused him. For some moments he was at a loss to account for the sounds in the room beneath. His feet shpped to the floor— then a rush of music held him still and silent.

What was it— this overwhelming uprising of sound? Terror, terror, abject terror in every note. Then fragment of longing, yearning— reminiscent melodies— and again fear, smiting, all-benumbing fear!

Boyd swayed back and forth, blinded with tears. Again and again, he tried to rise, but sank down trembling.  A crash— a discord, that seemed to break the very heart of the instrument— then silence, through which the last chord hummed in a roaring circle of sound.

Snatching his dressing-gown, Boyd ran to the sitting-room. The swinging lamp that hung from the ceiling was turned low, and threw distorted gigantic shadows as it swung slightly to and fro in the draught of the opened door. The room at first glance seemed empty, but across the keyboard of the piano lay huddled, limp shape, one arm hanging idly, the other bent under the drooping head. Slowly the body lost balance— sinking, collapsing to the floor. The thread in the labyrinth was broken.

_________________

3: The Skeleton of Paradise Island

Sunraysia Daily (Mildura)  12 April 1921

ONE OF THE SKELETONS we found in a mound on the island shore. The second we found on a mound in the centre of the island; there were green vines laced through and through the bleached white bones, and its fingers were lying pressed close to its down-turned eye-sockets. The third one we found buried a foot below the second, and between the ribs of the left side there was a rusted knife.

My name is Thomas Clifford, and I am a lawyer. I was, to Calthrop, best friend, chief counsellor, and manager of affairs. Calthrop was young, slender— almost fragile, and, as the only son of the late Phillip Calthrop, the Queensland cattle king, was a rich man. He had run the gamut of luxuries rapidly. First had come the passion for popular sports; after that had come a mania for motoring; then there followed in quick succession, racehorses, gambling and yachting.

I was just beginning to wonder what Calthrop would do next, when my office door opened, and in stepped Calthrop to answer for himself. He dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette before he spoke. Then he said to me boldly:

"Clifford, don't call me a fool. It won't do any good. I can't help it, any more than I can help my hair being black or my eyes brown. I'm tired of everything, Clifford. I've got to have something new. I'm going back a thousand years, Clifford— I'm going to be a savage for five years."

"Delightful!" I sneered. I liked the boy, but my patience with him was well nigh exhausted.

"Yes," smiled Calthrop— "very. During my last tour of the South Seas I visited a small and uninhabited island, which is a paradise. I named it that— Paradise Island."

He rolled the words on his tongue as though they were a bit of honey. I stared, and he continued:

"I can't go alone— I should lose my mind in the silences. I offered the sum of five thousand pounds to one of my friends after another, in the effort to get a companion. There was nothing doing— until Elsie Kendall found out. She agreed to marry me, and go with me. It was a sacrifice "

"Elsie Kendall!" I broke in, amazed. I knew her— a slim, reed-like creature, with golden hair, and sea-blue eyes, and a sweet, pale, hyacinthine beauty. "Elsie Kendall a savage? Rot! She'd wilt like a violet. If you accept the sacrifice, you're—"

"Who asked for advice, Clifford?" He spoke almost angrily. "Now listen. Take good care of my affairs. You see, I trust you, Clifford. Five years from today, you must come for me. My yacht, the Ringdove, will take us down, and then be returned to you. Sell it, or keep it for you own use, as you like— I'm giving it to you."

He left a paper telling me of the location of his Paradise, forced from me my word that I would say nothing of the affair, shook hands with me warmly, and departed. The next day he was quietly married. The morning following that saw the Ringdove sail from the harbor, headed north.

A few weeks later the yacht returned. I sold it, and added the proceeds to Calfhrop's already magnificent fortune. Then I settled myself to wait five of the longest years of my life, for as I have said before, I liked Calthrop immensely.

When the time came, I gathered four of my friends, all of them trustworthy men, chartered a small steamer, and set sail for Paradise. We arrived in due time.

A mound on the beach caught my attention the moment I had put my feet on the shore, and I was afraid. But the person that had been buried there was certainly neither Calthrop nor his wife, for the skeleton was more than six feet in length. We left it, and made haste toward the centre of the island.

It was, in all truth, a Paradise, it was a place of flowers and palms, sweet odors and ripening fruits. Soon we came upon a hut built of cocoanut palms, and covered with rotting tarpaulin. Inside we found a pile of rotting boughs, a mildewed skirt, a ragged yachting coat, and a strip of white cloth of very fine texture, the last-named being covered with writing and dark-red spots. Then my friend Addison gave a startled cry, and dashed from the hut.

We followed him to a mound a few yards off, a mound that had at its head a crude wooden cross. Lying on this mound, with green vines twining about its bleached white bones, with its fingers pressed close to its down-turned eye-sockets, we found the second skeleton.

"She has died," said Addison, huskily, "and he has grieved himself to death here in the silence. There is no doubt that he came to love her. She was worth it."

"Yes," I agreed, "she was worth it."

When we disimerred the third skeleton, beneath the cross, we found a rusted knife between the ribs of its left side. It had been a thrust that had reached the heart. We viewed the thing with horror. Jack Winter voiced the sentiments of us all when he finally said:

"He has killed her. Indeed he did become a savage. The brute! He was my friend, but I say: 'damn the man that could do it.' "

Perhaps Addison had the best head of us all. He put forth a hand and took from me the strip of bloodstained cloth.

"Wait!" he protested. "Don't condemn Calthrop yet. There is a message here— and then the thing we found on the beach is to be reckoned with. Shall I read this, Clifford?"

"If you please," I answered. The message was addressed to me. It was as follows:

I'LL HAVE to hurry, Clifford, for I'm not to be blessed with much more or life. I'll begin with Sydney, as I rightly should. When the yacht was almost ready to sail, I had a little quarrel with my skipper, and he left the vessel. I found a good navigator at the last minute, however, in the person of a Swede named Swevson. He was a giant, this Swede—a big, broad man, with yellowish hair and up-turned moustache. I soon discovered that he was highly educated, and that he had in time past owned his own private yacht. He seemed a thorough gentleman. I explained to him that my wife and I were going to spend a few months on the island— a new thing in honeymoons, you know. We were put ashore late in the afternoon, Elsie and I. The yacht... (Here the message ran into one of the dark-red spots on the strip of cloth, and the writing became illegible. Addison took up the thread below the spot)... long night. We went to the highest point on the island to watch the sun rise. It was so very still. We were in a world of our own. It was a most beautiful, most peaceful world. I put an arm about my wife's waist. She seemed more fragile than ever, and I wanted to tell her that I really loved her.

Suddenly Elsie pointed a finger toward the scrub beIow. I looked, and saw Swevson making his way towards me! I looked for the yacht, but it was nowhere to be seen, and I felt, then, that a serpent had come  to my Garden of Eden.

"Why are you here?" I cried to the giant Swede. He did not speak until he had come up to where we stood. I saw him look into my wife's face, drinking in her frail beauty hungrily, and I thought I knew why he was there.

"I ran the yacht upon a reef, and she went down with all on board save me," smiled Swevson. "Surely you couldn't expect a man to drown when he could save himself!"

And I knew that it was a lie.

The three of us had not been on the inland a week before the Swede was making love to Elsie, in his violent, foreign way. Elsie seemed to fear that the man would harm me. She repulsed his advances as mildly as she could but that appeared to make Swevson the more determined. And soon I began to hate the Swede as I have never hated a man before. It was my slight build, my inferior strength, that kept me from attacking Swevson with my club— oh, yes. I had a club, and so did Swevson. One day, my whole body trembling with rage, I glared into the giant's eyes, and said to him insanely:

"You must leave the island immediately. You have no business here. We do not want you."

Swevson shrugged his massive shoulders, and threw out his hands. You know. Clifford, how those fellows do that. He twirled at his fierce moustache very calmly.

"How, I beg leave to ask," he said, with stinging courtesy, "am I to leave the island? We have no boat We have nothing of which to make a boat— nor have we lools, if we had the material. We are far from the tracks of ships. I will leave you if you will but show me the way."

There was no way. The serpent must remain in my Garden or Eden. I thought thought I should go mad. I had come to love my little wife very much. And she seemed to love me as well as I loved her. We... (Again did the message run into one of the dark red spots on the cloth. Addison passed over it nervously).... and weary days. I was madly in love with my frail, sweet wife now. I deplored the fact that I had accepted her sacrifice. She smiled, kissed me, and said there was nothing to forgive.

"There is but one thing that makes me unhappy, dear," she said to me. "It is Swevson. I am afraid. He may kill you. He has a knife— I saw it. What a pity you did not bring weapons!"

Late that night. Elsie stole from our hut. I was sleeping, and I didn't know that she was gone until she returned. She knelt beside me, kissed me,. and put the Swede's knife in my hands!

"Now, Fred," she whispered to me. "Swevson has no weapon at all. He has nothing save an awkward club."

"But to knife a man." I chattered, "is so brutal! If this were only a revolver, or—"

"My dear!" exlaimed Elsie, caressing my hair tenderly, "are you not now a savage, a primitive man. There is no law here to prevent it. I hate the idea, too. But you must do it to preserve your own life. I love you, Fred! Yes, or I could not tell you to do such a thing as this!"

I walked out into the bright moonlight, I turned the knife over and over, and watched it flash. I looked toward tbe little hut of cocoanut leaves in which Swevson slept. But I couldn't go down to kill him. I was not enough of a savage to kill a man in cold blood. I turned back to Elsie, and the knife fell from my hands. Elsie stooped and picked it up.

One fine evening, I was standing on the rocky beadland on the north shore, watching the sun set, when I saw my wife and Swevson walking along the smooth, sandy beach below. They were conversing in low tones, and I could not hear what they said. I became weak. I sank to the stones, gibbering foolishly. I resolved anew to kill the giant. I rose, and peered over the brink. Elsie and Swevson were standing still thirty feet below me. I took up a stone the size of a man's head and hurled it with all my might. It killed the Swede. Elsie turned her face upward, and it was very white.

"Thank heaven, Fred!" she cried.

For the time being I was a madman. I denounced her, cursed her. I told her, which of course was not true, that I had heard her making love to the Swede. I paused for lack of breath, and glared down at her. She smiled.

"Of course, Fred," she said sweetly, "I saw you standing there. I had to make love to him to keep him from seeing you while I led him here for you to kill him."

This made me very happy indeed.

I felt that I could never make amends for my vile accusation. I hurried down, seized my wife and kissed her passionately. Then we made a hole in tbe sand, and burled the big man. And now I felt that I was a savage.

Several months passed. They were the happiest months of my life. All that has happened and all that is to happen in my little, little, future, cannot. take away that fact. we had fruit to eat always, and fish whenever we wanted them, and the flowers never died. Elsie... (Here another blood spot interrupted)... looked at me with awful eyes.

"I won't deceive you any longer," she said harshly. "I loved Swevson! You are so puny. He was so big and strong, I begged you to attack Swevson, to give him a reason for killing you! Some day, Fred I shall kill you with this knife."

She placed the weapon back within her blouse. I know that she will keep her word. Of the two of us, it is she— sweet fragile Elsie— who is the savage. I still love her.

THUS ENDED the message. There was no bloodstain there. Addison looked up and spoke to me:

"She killed him while he was writing that he loved her! The spots on the cloth— she wiped her nands "

"I understand," I interrupted.

But did I understand? Can any man understand? I have wondered and wondered since about the bone fingers that were pressed close to the down-turned eye-sockets.

_______________

4: Come-To-Grief Creek

Sunraysia Daily (Mildura), 19 July 1921

The Capricornian (Rockhampton), 9 Dec 1922

Originally as by "Frank Reid", the reprint in The Capricornian was titled "The Girl at Come-to-Grief Creek," as by "Bill Bowyang."

WHEN RAIN PLAYS on the hills, or thunder-clouds hurl deluges down to fill it,  Come-to-Grief Creek is a raging torrent. At other times the stream loiters and ripples quietly over its stony ways with music and murmur.

Thirty years ago a loaded team was stuck in the sandy bed of the creek at a spot known as the Crossing. A flood came racing down from the hills, driver and horses were swept downstream and were not heard of again. Hence the creek's name.

At the Crossing, one August day, is where I met Marie. My horse, head down, was picking a path to suit himself. Suddenly he stopped, ears pointed straight ahead. A child was standing in the middle of the creek. Clad in a short print dress, curly hair free, with inquisitive brown eyes, holding her chin to one side, as though afraid of splashes, dress tucked above brown knees, and with a coy shyness that was bewitching, she stood looking up at me.

Come-to-Grief Creek's waters, with impatient gurgles at the impediment of my horse's legs, passed under him as we waited for the little creature to go by without danger of a ducking.

"Come ahead," she said. "I'm not afraid. I know you won't splash me."

The child's face a marvel. It was not pretty, but there was something brave and reliant about it— such an implicit faith— that I was captured.

"Certainly I will not splash you," I said. "Come on."

Even the horse turned his head with a friendly look, that seemed meant to tell her that he would not budge an inch until she was beyond his splash. We watched her— the horse and I —until she reached the opposite bank: then she half turned to look back at us, placing one hand over her eyes to hide them from the dazzling glare of the midday sun, which lighted up every curl and cranny of her silky hair.

"Thank you, sir," she said. "Won't you come along and have something to eat; its dinner-time."

There was a force in the invitation not to be withstood. The horse, it seemed, had anticipated it, for he pushed forward of his own accord. Involuntarily I said: "Yes, dear."

She gave me a smile that told her pleasure in my acceptance. She hitched her dress a little higher, as it was wet at the hem, and said. "Come along."

"How far is it ?" I asked.

"Just through the trees ahead You'll be welcome. Come along."

A few minutes we reached a galvanised iron hut that had been hidden by  trees fringing the banks of the creek. In front of the hut the child stopped. looked up at me, and, laying her hand fearlessly on the face of the nosing horse, said: "Get off and go inside. I'll take care of your horse."

"Get off!" she said, more emphatically, as I hesitated about leaving her with my horse. "Get down, and go into the bouse. I can take care of your horse. I like horses. You won't tread on me, will you, horsey?"

She gave the astonished animal a kiss on the nose that put him past even raising his head, and laid hold of the bridle-rein. I dismounted as she bade me. unhung the saddle-bag, loosened the girth, and watched the horse following her as if be were under a charm; then I went into, the hut and sat down, full of uncertainty.

The hut contained only one room with a table in the centre, and two bunks running along one side. The fireplace had in it a pile of ashes parted in the centre, and curving up into the corners, as though to bolster the blackened, cracked, rickety stones of which it was built. In the centre of the pile some white coated embers glowed under a large billycan. Above the fireplace was a shelf, dark with the smoke of many a year, upon which were heaped the treasures and decorations, of the room— a clock, a tin of jam, a fishing line, a rifle and a pair of boots with no heels. Tacked here and there were pages from illustrated papers, birds' wings and bunches of faded flowers. A row of mussel-shells upon the floor was placed as a hypotenuse to the right angle of the hut's corner, and within it was an indescribable collection of broken plates, pebbles, birds' feathers, a ragdoll, and a dozen other odds and ends— a child's playhouse.

On the stone hearth a fat kitten sat, contemplating the death of the coals. Beside the door lay a small pile of sweet potatoes: from a rafter hung a large piece of corned beef. While I was taking an inventory of Ihe hut's contents, and wondering how my little hostess of the Crossing was going to exercise bur hospitality.

She came through the doorway undisturbed, as if the entertainment of travellers was an every-day occurrence. She reported in a businesslike way: "Friend. I gave your horse some sorghum, and he's eating it: now we'll have some dinner. Mum's not at home; he's gone away shooting. He'll come in before dark, and fetch the cows. We'll have something to eat. It's dinner-time."

She blew up the fire into ruddy sprightiness, went out of the room, and I heard her chopping. After a lew minutes she came in with an armful of wood. Soon she had a blazing fire, and, observing my amazed look, said: "Would you mind holding me up, like Mum does, so that I can reach the corned-beef? Minn won't be home till near dark."

I picked her up, wanting to kiss her all the while, and put her under the meat, which she took from its wire hook, and quickly had slices of it frying over the fire.

"Friend," she said, gravely when the meat was fried, "dinner is ready. It ain't much, but you're welcome to it. We hain't got no china or pretty crockery like we oughter have. Just help yourself."

So I took a slice of the salt meat out of the pan, and thoroughly enjoyed  the eating of it. I insisted on her joining me, but she declined. "No, I always wait for Mum."

"Tell me your name, please. You have not told me yet?" I asked.

"Marie," she answered. "I wish Mum was here to see you. He's gone shooting." The opposite genders of "Mum" and "He" were irreconcilable, but the little witch was earnest and fascinating. sue The enigma was worth solving.

She told me of the cows, of how the horse had destroyed the fence around the cabbage-patch, and of aiouno everything me else she could , think of  concerning the "farm" (as she called the patch of wilderness about us).

She was sitting beside me on a chair as unreliable as my own. I so wanted to show my appreciation of her hospitality that I put my arm around her, and was going to lift her on to my knees, when she quickly jumped away. "No, sir," she said, indignantly. "I only sit on Mum's knee, so just keep your hands off me."

I confess to relief from my embarrassment when she exclaimed:

"Here comes Mum! He's coming." Either a woman in trousers or a man in skirts was a reasonable expectation; instead, a white-haired, white-bearded, tall, gaunt, man entered the room. It cannot be said that he was clad. His clothing epitomized the truth of the proverb: "Patch beside patch is  neighborly, but patch upon patch is beggarly."

He gave a hearty bush greeting:

"How is it, mate. You're welcome. What might your name be? I reckon Marie's taken care of you. She always does of anyone that comes, our way."

Taking a seat on a box by the fire-place, he said:

"Marie, go and milk. I fetched the cows. There's a storm coming. I seen it from the rise, so I fetched them home early."

The child cheerfully rose and went out. I mentally pictured the mit»e milking cows many times the size of herself— cows that willingly submitted their udders to her tiny hands.

Rousing from my reverie, I said:  "Marie is very small to do that sort of work. I think I will go and help her."

"Don't you do it, mate," the old man replied. "She's  the cleverest little girl in the district. The cows give their milk to her when they won't to anyone else -perhaps because she's little. She's a great help to me. I found her. Did she tell you about it?"

"No," I answered, with an interrogating inflection. I wanted her history and could see that the old man would tell me on the slightest invitation.

"It was the first luck I'd had for many a day— finding her," he said. "It was seven years ago, one dark night in April. The cows had wandered along the road, and I was bringing them back to the paddock. Just as the moon was rising I heard something I hadn't heard for many a year. 'It's not a lamb,' I said, 'it's a baby!'— 'Thrown away' (for I heard no woman comforting it). I'll admit nai I hoped there was no mother with it, for I was hungering for children. Mine was all gone— married and left me. And my wife has been dead this twenty years. It cried again. I left the cows, and started to follow the sound. Behind a clump of bushes I found It— red in the face and yelling— wrapped up in an old calico dress. I took it in my arms and stuck it under my coat— trying to warm it, and trying to hide, for it was mine! I'd found it; I didn't want anyone to see it. I was like a au with kittens. I carried it home and fed it with milk with a bit of rag on a saucer. That was Marie. I nursed her, and cared for her. She always calls me 'Mum'—she's never known any other. She has been a great comfort to me: she's worth more than a whole houseful of city girls for housekeeping. I see she spread dinner for you, mate. She's a fine cook. A storm's coming," the old man went on. "It's coming from the hills where Come-to-Grief Creek rises. A torrent will come down the creek in half an hour, and it's a good job that vou crossed when you did."

He walked to the door and called Marie. The wind was already sweeping down from tlie bills, and crashing into the narrow valley. The air was full of flying leaves. The dark shadow of the storm came almost instantly, lightning streaked from the clouds, thunder shook the earth, and the rain dashed in slauting streams. Soon the water came roaring down the creek. It rose, rapidly, and risting, bent ferns, shrubs, and low, swaying branches before it.

"Marie!" the old man called again, "She must have gone to tie up the boat at the crossing." he said anxiously. "She never forgets anything. She's afraid it will be swept away."

"Heavens, man, she will he blown away or drowned. I will go after her!" I exclaimed, anxiously.

"Don't mind her. mate. She's been out in worse storms than this. She's a regular duck in the water. The flood couldn't drown her no more than it could a fish."

Hatiess, I raced out, and shoulder to the wind, forced myself in the direction toward which the old man nad pointed. I reached the crossing, finding it a broad sheet of rushing water. On the opposite side, Marie, with a slender push-pole, held the boat to the shore. A young, gaudily-dressed woman clung to a sapling, her hair, ribbons and skirt streamin the wind, as she timidly made her way on to the flat-bottomed punt.

"Come on," the child urged, her voice thin and shrill above the uoise of the storm. "Don't be afraid, I'll get you over. Sit down, and you won 't fall out when the old boat wabbles and dips. Sit down, I tell you!"

The woman loosened her hold on the sapling, and stepped into <he noat. Marie placed the oars in the row-locks.

"Don't try to cross," I shouted. Stop!"

The child looked at me, and laughed. The boat swung as the current caught it. Marie dexterously turned the bow to the current, and set the craft at an angle to it, so that the stream's force might drive it across. The crouching woman stared at her. In the earnestness of the gale she seemed unmindful of the danger. Suddenly she rose to her knees and clasped Marie to her bosom. The child clung to the oars, not was unable to dip them into the stream, and the boat, left pilotless, drifted with the dashing water. I tore after it along the bank— saw the punt with its helpless burden swing and toss around a curve in the creek. As it disappeared the two faces were side by side, and even in the distance they were alike. The truth flashed upon me— it was a Magdalene and her child!

On I raced. Around the curve the stream was visible for a mile or more, but its tossing surface was empty. The boat had disappeared. As I ran, and watched for a sign of life, I saw something swimming. Before I could get to her I saw that it was Marie. She swam to the bank, and clambered from the water. She did not pause or look back. Her face looked hard and her eyes guttered; her dress, half torn from her, dragged in the dirt. The pelting rain and the wind halted her, and I would have taken her In my arms, but she drew herself up with a dignity that stopped me.

"Let me be," she said; "I'm going to my mum. That woman said she was my mother. She cried and tried to make much of me. I asked her it she was the woman that chucked me behind the bushes, and she said she was. I jerked myself away from her, and tore my dress. I handed her the oars and said, 'You  can have them, and the boat, but you can't have me. You threw me away and left me to me to die.' I jumped into the creek and struck out for the bank. I'm going to my Mum."

She left me.

Later, I saw her in the old man's arms. He was tenderly curling her wet hair upon his knotty forefinger.

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5: The Gamble.

As by "Bill Bowyang"

The Bulletin, 21 July 1923

BRODY, the owner of Taloonda, walked cautiously along the south side of the men's hut and peered through an open window. It was just as he had expected. Jim Cluney and Joe Connors were comfortably on the floor, with their backs against the wall. A drowsy game of cards was in progress.

Under ordinary circumstances Brody would have fired them on the spot. The war, however, had left more work than workers on the sheepruns of Western Queensland. Brody knew his men thoroughly. He was obliged to feed them, humor them, pay them good wages and hope and pray that they might by chance bestir them- selves and accomplish something.

This condition had ceased to be a worry to the squatter. He knew the situation would in time right itself, so he took it all in good humor. "I hate to bother you fellows," he said with a laugh. "I'm short three steers. I wish you would go as far south as the old hut and look around. Walk down and take your time— it's pretty hot in the sun."

Cluney and Connors dusted their trousers, gathered, up their cards and sauntered across the paddock. Six hours later Brody called Larry McDermott, the cook.

"Take this note down to the old hut, Larry," he said. "Jim and Joe are down there awaiting orders, I suppose."

CLUNEY and Connors stepped to the door of the old hut and looked at the road leading to the homestead.

"Here comes Larry. I'll bet the boss sent him out to see what we are doing," said Cluney.

"Wouldn't be surprised," replied Connors. "If the old man knew we had been sitting here all day playing cards he would be as mad as a horse-fly in a garage. The cook has a message all right— notice how important he looks. He walks as if he was riding on horseback."

McDermott drew within hailing distance and waved an envelope. "Walked five miles to bring' this, and it'll cost you five bob to read it," he shouted.

"It ain't worth it," retorted Cluney. "Come here. We want a match. Me and Joe ain't had a smoke for two hours."

The cook put the envelope in his pocket and handed Cluney the matches. All three rolled cigarettes and went inside.

"Five bob for the note," demanded McDermott, placing the matchbox on a corner of the rickety table.

"Ten bob or nothing," replied Cluney, banteringly. "We'll draw for it."

He produced a dirty pack of cards. With due ceremony they cut and turned up the cards. The cook won. "That's ten bob you owe me," he said. "Tell you what I'll do. Make it a quid or nothing. Cut again."

"A quid or nothing," agreed Cluney. Outside the sunlight was suddenly cut off. Greyish clouds rose over the horizon and moved slowly westward. A puffy wind kicked up little swirls of dust.

"A quid or nothing," repeated Cluney. Slowly and deliberately, after mutternig a few words that didn't seem to mean anything, he turned a card. The cook's ceremony over the cutting was, as always, even more complex and elaborate. Finally he turned a card and won.

The wind gave a hollow moan as it eddied about the hut. The entire sky was overcast now. A few drops of rain spattered on the roof.

"Two quid or nothing, said the cook.

Connors sat motionless. Cluney began his mumbling and muttering preparatory to the draw. Came a swish of wind and rain. A loose sheet of iron on the roof clattered.

"Hurry up," urged Connors. "We had better read that letter."

"What's the flamin' hurry?" growled Cluney as he turned a seven of spades.

McDermott then began his incantations. He waved his hands and ruffled his hair and shouted hoarsely above the din of the storm. A terrific rain beat down on the plain— a veritable cloudburst. Momentarily the wind increased in force. Again the cook turned his card and won. Cluney was desperate.

"Three quid or nothing," he roared.

For ten minutes or so Cluney walked in circles, and danced and waved his arms. Then he turned a five of hearts and collapsed.

Now it was the cook's turn, and not to be outdone he indulged in a most terrifying orgy of supplication to old Lady Luck, he outstayed Cluney by five minutes and turned a six of hearts.

"A fiver or nothing," he screamed in competition with the wind and rain. The water was now a foot deep in the hut, and the matches were floating under the table. Taking off his boots he danced in his socks. Then he turned a card and won. So dark was it now that it was almost impossible to distinguish the cards.

"Make it exciting," shouted Connors, "or it'll be too dark to see who wins."

"A tenner or nothing," yelled Cluney, and— turned an ace.

McDermott grabbed a card and peered at it with his nose an inch away. It was a deuce. "Nothing," he cried. "I lose. Here's the letter."

With water up to their waists they opened it; but now the interior of the hut was an inky black, and not a single word was recognisable.

AT DAWN next morning three men, in water to their necks, clung to the old hut as it floated down the Georgina. The first streak of grey was overspreading the eastern horizon. The rain had ceased.

Reaching into a pocket, Cluney produced a soggy envelope. He spread the note on the roof of the hut and read what the boss had written to them the day before:

"You fellows had better knock off work and come on in. It looks like rain."

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6: The Moorhead Legacy

The Australasian (Melbourne) 18 Mar 1922

Canowindra Star and Eugowra News (NSW) 24 March 1922

GOOD NEWS met good news at the door. It was a question which would find utterance first. It was neck-and-neck for a minute; then Ellen, being the woman, got in ahead.

"Harry, what do you think has happend? If you guessed a week of Sundays you'd never guess."

" You'll never guess what's happened to me! It's stoing to make us the biggest farmer in the district!" boasted Harry Seymour. His sunburned face was shining as from some strong light within.  .

"Harry, listen— you don't listen to a word I say! I tell you the Moorheads are going to lend us—"

"I tell you I've been offered—"

Ellen Seymour, lean and little, seemed temporarily to tower above her big husband. The patience of twenty years failed her in this need of patience.

"Sit down; Harry—right there on the doorstep. Tell me your news from A to Z; every last word.  Then if you care to hear mine— oh, Harry, I am so excited! But I did so want you to be thrilled as I was—and you had to go and spoil it by your own big news. Do you think if you kissed me I'd stop being excited?"

Harry Seymour laughed. "I might try it," he said. He drew her down beside him on the: step. These two had loved each other twenty years, but it was not often that they took time to kiss each other. Life, as they took it, hurried them— already in her thirties, Ellen Seymour was old.

"Well, Langley has offered to sell out to me, and as his property adjoins ours, it is going to make our farm the biggest one in the district. I can take a day off next week and get the deeds fixed up."

"Harry; aren't you ever going to stop and give me my turn? You've forgotten I have any news."

"Go ahead— go ahead— I'm listening!"

"It is almost too wonderful to believe. The Moorheads are going to Melbourne for two months, and— Harry, open both ears— they are go to lend us their motor-car. For two whole months— and the man to drive it too. Mrs. Moorhead says we might as well have him for the two months, because they pay him by the year, and you wouldn't have time to enjoy the rides if you had to learn to drive first. And, Harry; won't the children be happy! Two whole months, and one of them with 31 days!"

The first impression or her husband was of amazement at her excitement. Ellen was such a quiet little mouse— but look at her now! Eyes shining and actually colour in her cheeks!

Harry nodded to those shining eyes: he could not have done less. For himself there was infinitely more excitement in increasing the acreage of his   property. But it would please Ellen and the kiddies to put on style for a few weeks, if only it didn't spoil them for common, everyday life afterwards.

"The man who drives the car lives, at the farm. Mrs. Moorhead said to telephone him whenever we wanted a ride. Harry, I think I shall want another one the minute that one ends! Perhaps— perhaps it will stop us from growing old, Harry."

Queer how upset Ellen was over what she called the "Moorhead legacy."  One would think nothing had ever happened to her before. Well— had anything? That was a question that Harry Seymour rather hastily put aside. A farm, everybody knew, wasn't a very happenable place.

Ellen Seymour had begun life loving all the world and all the world's doings. She had been a gay and social young creature— how she had adored going to places and seeing things! Settling down on a farm at 19 had been a distinctly quieting process. Little sons came, a trio of them, and the quiet years went on monotonously. To the husband they were contented years of toiling and adding to his acres— always adding to his acres if the year went well.

THE motor-car rides began as soon as the Moorheads were out of sight— so Helen said. Often Harry went, too, and was pleasantly exhilarated. But he was too much occupied to go always, and for that reason, perhaps, he did not follow from day to day the change that was going on in his little family. It came upon him as a surprise. Ellen had grown young! The children had grown prettier!

One evening he sat on the verandah listening to the soft refrain of an old tune. It was one his young wife had sung over her work, and a young wife was singing it now. He could hear her moving about the kitchen with light steps. Unconsciously he joined, the refrain.

"Why, Harry, it's a duet!" Ellen came and stood in the doorway, and together they finished the tune. The red west light touched  Ellen's face— who said Ellen was growing old!

"Harry, do you remember the moonlight rides when we were lovers? If we were lovers now— Harry, there's a moon."

So after the children went to bed they rode away. The ever-ready Moorhead chauffer at the wheel looked rigidly straight ahead; he had instinstively the notion that if he looked round he should see a pair of young lovers and the things that young lovers do.

"It's the moon," whispered Ellen on the back seat. "Being out in it like this, Harry, and the wind in our faces— we're prosaic enough on land. Let's be moon-happy as long as we can— don't let him turn toward home."

But by-and-by, quite suddenly, she was "prosaic" again. Harry felt her draw away from him. In the soft light her face seemed to grow older, certainly more quiet. "What is it, Helen?"

"Tell him to turn round. The children— we ought to go back."

"It's not the children," he persisted. "I know the children— look. What made you quiet down all at once, Ellen?"

"Oh!" she shuddered. "I thought about growing old. We've got'to begin again the day after to-morrow. They're coming home then."

For an instant he was inclined to impatience— what he had feared two months ago had come to pass. Ellen was spoiled for common everyday life.

"Don't let me trot miserable,'' murmured Ellen. "We've had such a wonderful time it would be wicked to be cross. I only started thinking— I'm not thinking any more, Harry."

All his patience vanished, he set about diverting her attention from sober thoughts. To-morrow he was going to pay over the money for the purchase of the farm adjoining his own— what had he been thinking about to dally long?

Did it thrill Ellen? She sat very quiet. The man had turned the car, and they were moving swiftly homeward, their moon-madness over. They had begun again, to grow old.

THE NEXT DAY Harry Seymour rode away to the station. Ellen was very busy and very quiet; Harry attempted to make her "take notice," as he called it.

"I'll bring you home a present," he said gaily. "Why, Ellen!—Why, I've just thought— it's your birthday to-morrow!"

"I'll be sixty," said Ellen. "Old people don't expect presents."

"Sixty! Are you crazy?"

"Oh, is it forty? Maybe it is, according to the calendar, but there must be a mistake. You can't believe calendars—you'll be late for your train, Harry."

Queer he hadn't remembered her birthday was so near. What should he get in the city for Ellen? Handkerchiefs, flowers, ornaments? Wait— he  might have the deed of Langley's farm made to Ellen. The idea pleased him; for some reason he felt specially tender towards Ellen. She had been such a gay young Ellen lately; until to-day— to-day she had been sober.

"Oh, I suppose it's the Moorheads coming back.  She is looking ahead to riding in the old buggy again. I was afraid there would be a reaction." He felt- oddly resentful against the Moorheads. Still, he would not have had those weeks of the gay young Ellen, and those weeks had been very pleasant. That moon-mad night when they were young lovers— would they ever be moon-mad again, with the wind in their faces, and the sweet night-world slipping past them?

On the train a farmer acquaintance from another town shared his seat. "You'll never guess what I'm going to the city to buy," the friend remarked.

"You can't guess what I'm going for!" Harry replied.

"For my wife— a surprise, though she's picked out the identical one. The house has been full of catalogues for a month. Yours for your wife, too?"

Harry's head went up. "Yes," he said proudly. He would have the deed made out to Ellen.

"She picked her surprise out, too?" The acquaintance laughed. "Well, wives are the ticket— nothing like them. Look here, I'll show you a picture of my surprise if you'll show me a picture of the one you're going to get. I've got the catalogue with me." He was fumbling through his pockets.

"I am going to buy Langley's farm," Harry Seymour said a little stiffly. He experienced a momentary shame of the property he intended,to purchase.

"That what she picked out— land? Now, you couldn't persuade my wife to choose the best land in Victoria instead of a motor-car. And I reckon she is right. I don't believe in going in debt for luxuries the way some do. No, sir! But I believe in pleasing my wife. When it's a choice between luxuries that you can afford, I mean— but of course, if your wife picks out a piece of land—" He sighed, but was instantly cheerful again. "I had my eye on a fine piece of land that joins my place, but I've taken my eye off again. Got to please the wife, you see."

Harry Seymour sat stiffly silent while the cheerful voice ran on.

"Wives are brittle things— break easy. Farms are rather hard on them, don't you think? Women like change and, Lord knows, we don't get much change on the farm." He broke into a pleased chuckle at his joke.

The thoughts of Seymour were long thoughts. Was Ellen brittle? Was a farm hard on Ellen— did Ellen like change? They were new thoughts to Harry Seymour. He remembered Ellen's dragging step, and little, lean dull face, and Ellen's joyous renewal of youth— before and, after "taking" the Moorhead motorcar.  Were the two Ellens and the car connected?

"Well, here we are. Glad I happened to come down the same day you did— nice talk we've had. Now, look here— we might lunch together at the Empire!"

At one o'clock they met again. Harry was nervous, and not hungry; he had not yet done his business. His friend was healthily ravenous.

"I got it ! A beauty— going to run it myself this afternoon on a trial run. Lord, no, not alone; a chauffeur will come along to save my life. Don't you want to come too? I'll tel you all I know— I've been practising on a neighbour's machine. It doesn't take long to learn the trick."

Then Harry Seymour surprised himself. "Yes," he said, "I'll go along. We've got the whole afternoon."

He found himself suddenly hungry! He was no longer nervous. He knew what to take home to Ellen for a  birthday present. Warm thrills ran up and down his spine when he thought of what Ellen's face would be like. He saw the little colour flecks in her cheeks, the twin delights in her eyes. They would grow younger together.

All the afternoon they rode, with the chauffeur to save their lives. Harry Seymour took his turn at the wheel; he listened intently to all directions and advice. He would utilise the one remaining day— wasn't there one remaining day?— before the Moorhead's return, to take condensed lessons from Moorhead's chauffeur. He would take no risks. He would hire someone who knew levers and wheels and gears to go with them at first. But very soon— very soon he and the children and Ellen would go alone. They would ride together with the wind in their faces toward the beautiful fountain of youth.

It was rather late when he reached home in the birthday present for Ellen. A man was driving him from the city.

"Ellen! Ellen!" he called at the door. "I've brought you that present from town. Where are you? Come on ont to the carriage house and get it. The man— it's out here."

She came slowly, quietly glad to see him home again, but a little inclined to scold him for his tardiness.

"I know I'm late, but don't get wild, Ellen," he laughed. "Wait till after you've seen your present, anyway."

But after she had seen her present, Ellen only laughed and cried. "Oh! Harry— oh ! Harry, it's a beauty! I never saw such a beauty— but the farm, Harry— the farm that you were going to buy—"

"A matter of acres!" he said scornfully. "Little old girl, don't you see that with this I've bought the whole world!"

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7:  The Pearls of Manomoa

Australasian (Melbourne) 9 Dec 1922

This story was reprinted in slightly variant form as

"The Pearl Seekers" in The Queenslander (Brisbane) 6 Dec 1928.

The variations were mainly the names of the characters and of the schooner.

PETER BREEN, huge, red-faced, and full of rum, sat in the cabin of his schooner, the Coral Queen, fastened his small eyes on a pair of human skulls that adorned a shelf in one corner, and thought he was amusing the old black chief, Wano, by relating how he had come into possession of the craft nearly a year before.

"Yes, it'll be just about a year now," babbled Breen in drunken pride. "She was a-layin' off Talona Island, outside the reef, waitin' for the tide an' me an' Billy Gregson— Billy is my mate now— we slipped out to her in a dugout. One man on watch there was up for'rd, an' him snoozin', so Billy an' me, we come over the after-rail without no trouble. It's dark as hell everywhere. We slid down into this here cabin. Baxter, the owner, he was sleepin' right over there on that bunk. We swaddled up his head in a blanket so's he couldn't make a noise, an' hauled him on deck. Then' we looked for them two pearls we'd heard he had. But we didn't find neither one of 'em. Billy became boiling mad then, an' he puts a bullet into Baxter an' throws him overboard for shark food. Well, the rest of the crew comes alive sudden-like after that, but they weren't quick enough for Billy and me. We stands on deck, an' shot 'em before they hit the water. Two of 'em died on deck, an' Billy kept their heads, he liked 'em so—" Breen indicated the skulls.

"Now them two heads," he began again, "they—"

But the aged Wano interrupted him. Wano was entirely sober. The heat and rains and hurricanes of seventy years had battered and beaten his gaunt head, with its kinky greying hair above the steady black eyes and the wide nose. He was the chief of the island of Manomoa, in the Solomons, five miles long by two wiles wide, and populated by a thousand kanakas and a white man or two.

Outside, in the flickering heat of mid-afternoon, the mate Gregson was cursing at a crew of sweating blacks that was loading copra into the Coral Queen's hold, bringing it out to the anchored schooner in native dugouts.

Through the open porthole the chief fastened his gaze upon the rapidly diminishing pile of copra on the beach. He said:

"It's about the payment for the copra I have come."

"All ready for you," returned Breen with explosive good nature. "Right there."

He pointed out through the companionway to the deck. Resting there was a large rectangular wooden chest.

But Wano did not look.

"I will speak of that now," he said. "I do not wish it as payment for the copra any more. My men do not think it wise. They, and I too, wish that you pay for your cargo-in money. Many traders come to Manomoa now. I can use money."

Breen's mood reversed itself with the suddenness that alcohol induces.

"What?" he roared. "You mean you don't want my chest of tools no more?"

Wano shook his head. "I and my men have decided we want money."

"Money? Bah! For why?"

"Because already there are white men's hammers and nails upon Manomoa. And as for the other tools, we have found that on my whole island there is, perhaps, only one man who can use them skilfully, and he—"

Breen cut him off with a wave of his arm, half rose, and bellowed

"What for you think I'd be luggin' money aroun' to trade in these damn islands, eh? This morning when I come I sent for you, Wano. You're chief of Manomoa. An' you agreed to take the chest of tools. Is it not so?"

"Yes," the chief blurted. "But now we do not wish it so. We do not think the trade is a fair one. Our copra is very valuable, and—"

"So are my tools!" thundered Breen. He glanced sideways out of the porthole. Nearly all the copra was gone from the beach. There was a revolver lying on the table before him. He sank down in his chaiit and picked it up carelessly.

"They are valuable, them tools. Now, either you take them, Wano, or you take nothin."

So Wano took the tools. He lifted the heavy chest into his dugout, and paddled to the beach where the natives were waiting, and he had them carry it on to the village. When the procession reached his hut he opened the chest. The top tray contained the usual saw, hammer, and a few bits. When the last of the natives had inspected these, Wano lifted the tray aside. A low, surprised cry went up from the throats of the natives assembled. The bottom of the chest contained nothing but a quantity of common sand.

Perspiration popped out on Wano's forehead, aiid he stood up suddenly. At the time of the Coral Queen's arrival, when he had first Iooked-into the bottom of that chest, it had been filled with glittering tools. Palpably they had been exchanged for sand when he came ashore to confer with the natives. Now the amazed, wondering eyes of all his dusky counsellors were upon him; and his daughter, Nuana, coming out of the hut and observing what had happened, stared too, astonished that her father could have been so eaily duped.

The old chief looked down the hill to the lagoon. At the far-off mouth where a path of deep blue among the boiling breakers marked the entrance through the coral reef, the Coral Queen, her sails bellying to the steady breeze, was fast beating her way out into a smooth sea, stained crimson by the sunset.

Seventy hard years had begun to wither Wano's body a little; but they had not touched his brain. As he glared at the stern of the retreating schooner, he remembered accurately all the masses of the dafs transactions. There came to him a detailed picture of the Coral Queen's cabin, wherein he had sat and conversed with her skipper. And, further, every word that Breen liad spoken in his drunkenness now snapped back into the old chief's mind.'

There were vague stirrings of his memory. And then of a sudden, as he stood motionless, rigid, glowering, a great light burst in upon him. Without a word he turned and walked away from those about him.

Alone he went to a miserable, mouldy hut of thatch that stood some distance removed from the other huts of the village. He did not call outside, but strode straightaway into its musty gloom. A dirty pandanus mat lay upon the floor, and on this stretched a white man. He was short, very pale, and emaciated. He did not rise as Wano entered.

Nearly a year ago this white man, clinging to a lifebelt, and bitten by sharks, had been tossed up on the beach of Manomoa. At Wano's direction be had been placed in the abandoned hut and fed;  and there his wounds had healed, and there, or in the sunshine close by, he had sprawled on his back for more than half the time since, burning with intermittent fevers. He had long, red hair and a red beard. One of his legs had shrunken up much shorter than the other.

It was the chief's second visit to him. Now, without an explanatory sentence, Wano squatted in the centre of the hut, and began to repeat Breen's story almost word for word, hotly, indignantly. When he had finished, be said:

"And you, white one, you are that man Baxter."

It was no question, but a statement, for Wano was intently watching the other's pallid face. All the while he spoke the white man had been tense, attentive, leaning forward eagerly. Fever had burnt all the life out of his sunken eyes; but he hoisted himself to a sitting posture. He said listlessly:

"Yes; I'm him."

"Breen spoke of pearls you had," went on the chief. "What of them?"

"They were in a bag round my neck," answered the white man in big colourless voice. "They got tangled in the blanket. I had 'em till the damn sharks got at me. They're at the bottom of tbe sea now, where they came from. Was it to-day the Coral Queen was here?"

"Yes, to-day," said, Wano. "And now listen to me, white one. You have not suffered alone at the hands of this honourless man."

Suddenly he came closer, and in low, sonorous tones, that vibrated with anger, he told of the copra deal with Breen, of the sand-filled tool chest, and of his great humiliation before his natives. And then he unfolded a plan.

They talked together until far into the night.

EARLY the next morning Wano had the tool chest sent to the white man's hut. During the days that followed he himself spent many hours there. Sometimes his daughter came too. She was a tall, lissom creature, not black like him, but of a rich, soft brown colour, for her mother had come from the islands to the eastward and farther south. Her eyes were large and limpid, her nose not too wide, lips not too thick. The crippled man emerged from his hut, and stumbled about on his withered short leg more than he had ever done before.

In this fashion weeks rolled on. Then at length on a calm night he and Wano departed from the island in an outrigger. They travelled six miles over the placid sea to the neighbouring isle of Talona, and at dawn the chief returned to Manomoa alone.

SIX WEEKS later the Coral Queen on her return trip from Sydney dropped anchor off the beach at Talona. Breen and Gregson at once went ashore in the dinghy to recruit seamen. For several years past Talona had been favourite territory with them.

Standing in the hot sand at the edge of the palm-fringed beach. Breen suddenly looked down to find ten feet from his elbow a pale, wizened white man, red-bearded, and with long red hair trailing out from beneath his plaited straw hat. He wore dirty dungarees and a ragged coat over his thin chest.

"Takin' on crew, boss?"

Breen measured him with a glance.

"Yes, but we ain't lookin' for no whites."

The blunt answer silenced the little man for a time. Then— "I can cook, boss."

"Well, so can I. I don't need you for nothin'. Get out."

But the other held his ground through another wordless space.

"I'm a handy wheelman in these here waters," he recited doggedly. "An' I'm nice an' neat with a sail-needle— Mister Breen."

At the easy mention of his name, Breen gave a sharp, perceptible start. Something caused him to turn and look again at the speaker. He was puzzled, nettled that this smelly derelict should know his identity.

"What was it you said?" he demanded.

"I say, I'm a good wheelman an' sail-mender, boss."

"An' a cook, too?" Breen moved carelessly closer.

"Yessir."

"How much would you want, eh?"

"Well, now in my last berth I was gettin' £4 a month. I've been ailin' a little, but I'm fit-like again, an' I—"

Breen had come up to him. "I take you," he said, suddenly. "But I pay off in another kind of coin. See?"

With a swift, whizzing movement his closed fist caught the derelict under the chin.

"Here, Billy," he bawled to the mate, who was approaching along the beach with three Kanakas. "Take this with you." He indicated the huddle of rags and red beard at his feet.

When he had regained his senses aboard the Coral Queen things continued to go badly for the shrunken man. They had cleared the reef, and were again pushing eastward through the Pacific.

At four o'clock Gregson, frothy with rage, burst into Breen's cabin.

"That damn piece of white shark-bait what you picked up, he ain't no good for nothin'!" the mate thundered. "He's a cook— bah! Sailmender, bah! I don't believe he's no wheelman, neither: An' he can't do no real work— he ain't no good for nothin'— he's all crippled up— here!" Gregson whacked his leg violently.

Breen looked up from pouring out a glass of rum and said: "Well— what do you come to me for? Throw him overboard."

Satisfied with his orders, the mate slumped away. But the crippled man did not go over. Almost before Gregson could touch him he raised a piercing yell that carried loudly to the after-cabin.

"No, you don't, you lousy blackbirder," he screamed. You let me see Mister Breen! There's somethin' I want to tell him what be wants to know— badly. Let me see Mister Breen, I say! Then you won't be so damn eager to feed me to the sharks. Take me to the captain now, I say!"

There was a good deal besides terror in the cry. Breen had an accession of the puzzlement he had felt when the man first spoke his name. He stepped into the companionway as the mate was lifting a squirming mass over the rail.

"Bring him here, Billy," he called.

The cripple was thrust through the companionway with such vehemence that he fell sprawling on the cabin floor. He rose and carefully closed the doors in the mate's face.

"What's it you're yellin' about?" demanded the captain. "What do you want to tell me?"

The other sat down impudently across the table from him.

"I was on this here boat when you took her from Baxter, Mr. Breen."

"What's that?" he roared.

"I say I was on this schooner when you took her from Baxter. I'm Charlie Costin. I was Baxter's mate. It was me was asleep on watch when you came aboard."

Breen's small eyes popped for a moment, then he said calmly: "Do you think that is goin' to save you from being thrown overboard?"

"I know where them pearls of Baxter's is," went on the other evenly.

"You— what?"

"I know what became of Baxter's pearls."

Breen sat forward in his chair. "You know, do you? All right. Where are  they then?"

"You'll be willin' to gimme one of 'em if you get the other?" was the reply.

"Certainly," said Breen. "I'll give you one. Where are they?"

"Well, I'll tell you, boss. I stopped a bullet when I went over that night, but you didn't get me— see? You didn't get Baxter neither. There was a hole clean through him, but when he struck the water he got his head out of that blanket.  The pearls was in a bag round his neck an' they was tangled up in the blanket— that's how you didn't find 'em— see?"

Breen made a low growling noise in his throat.

"I had hold of a lifebelt myself. Baxter, he caught on, too. We was afraid to land on Talona, so whilst you was busy tendin' to the rest of the crew we swum to Manomoa, hanging to that lifebelt. The sharks got our scent, and tore us to pieces on the way. When we reached the beach Baxter was nearly gone, an' so was I. There was a mob of Kanakas runnin' down to us. Baxter says to me: 'Charlie,' he says, 'I worked hard as hell for these. There ain't nobody ever goin to have 'em but me.' An' with that he takes out them two pearls of his and swallows 'em."

Breen sucked in his breath sharply. "Swallowed 'em!" He was leaning across the table.

"Yes, swallowed 'em," went on the cripple. "Well, old Wano on Manomoa  believes in doin' things shipshape, you know. When Baxter died he was placed in a rough coffin, and buried before mornin'. I pulled through, an' they sent me back to Talona."

"Well?"

"Well, I was there bleedin' beside 'im when they buried Baxter. I seen the place a dozen times afterwards. Them pearls are with him yet. "

"Why don't you go after 'em, then," asked Breen, suspiciously.

"That's a pretty question to ask," jeered the other. "Look at me! I ask you, am I the kind to be diggin' for corpses?" He held up his withered leg, tapped his emaciated, sunken chest. "I ain't hardly able to walk. Been on my back nearly a year."

The light in Breen's eyes changed.

"Are you goin' to show me the place where Baxter's buried?" he coaxed.

"For one of them pearls I am," he was reminded,

Breen rose, stumped to the companionway, and bawled an order to Gregson.

THUS it was that the Coral Queen came again to Manomoa. But now she did not proceed to the beach in front of the village. Instead, the schooner approached the far, uninhabited end of the inland, hove to outside the surf, and put out her small boat.

It was midnight and there was a mounting full moon that shed a brilliant radiance everywhere.

Breen stepped on the wet sand and beached the dinghy.

"If you have have lied to me," he said, "there is one bullet in here for every word of it." He held up the revolver he carried, in his hand.

"I'd be a fool to lie to you about somethin' like this, wouldn't I?" replied the short man, grinning up at him from beneath his hat. "Knowin' who you are."

"It would be like signin' your own death warrant," said Breen.

He shouldered a long-handled spade that was in the boat, and together they set out through the tangled shrubbery that grew almost to the water's edge. The little man led. They moved very sharply upward toward tne ridge that formed the backbone of the island. The ground beneath their feet was either soggy or rough and treacherous, with rocky projections, it was hard going for a man with a shrivelled leg.

They travelled for a mile, pushing swiftly but quietly through the low foliage and vines. They came then to a small clearing in the bushes, where there were three oblong mounds grown over with lush grass.

"It's the one on this end," said the red-headed man. "That other pair, they're whites, too."

Breen was blowing hard from the steep climb. The moon, swinging high now, shed a flowing white glow into the clearing. He went to the mound indicated.

"This one?"

He got a nod in reply. Without words then he took off his coat and laid it  upon the ground beneath the leafage, and, then placed revolver beside it. He sank his spade in the turf.

"If you're lyin'," he said, glancing significantly at the revolver.

"I ain't lyin'," returned the other man, squatting on the ground. "An' Baxter ain't deep, either. You'll see."

The close stillness of a sepulchure hung over the jungle. Breen dug silently, with an explosive exhalation of breath now and again as he heaved the dirt aside, faster as the passing of the grass roots made progress easier, He cut away the mound, went into the soil below the level of the ground; a foot— two feet— three. His clothes became drenched with sweat; he cast his hat to the turf; he spaded with reckless, wild motions, badly scattering the earth removed.

Twenty tense minutes went by. And then of a sudden his tool struck  wood with a hollow, dead sound. He paused, sighing queerly. Close at hand a parrot rose out of cover, giving vent to a piercing, shrill scream. Both men started violently; the little one gasped aloud; Breen began a continuous nervous chuckling.

He was working his spade with gentler movements. At length he climbed out of the hole. Kneeling on the edge, he reached far down, and with a final echoing grunt, he pulled into the moonlight one end of a crudely made box. He braced it against the side of the hole, then caught the other end, and in a moment the rough, mouldy coffin was lying on the grass beside the gaping black pit.

"Well, there you are," said the shrunken man unsteadily.

Breen's laboured breath hissed in and out. He wiped his sweating face on his hairy arm. Clods slipped back into the hole, thudding softly. After a moment he inserted the blade of the spade in a chink and shoved downward on tlie handle. With a staccato crackling sound that ripped like rifle-fire through the night, the rusty nails gave, and the lid of the coffin came off. Breen stared in for a time.

"Ah! What the—"

The flooding, moon glow showed him that the inside of the casket was uneoiled and entirely empty save for a single dark mass of cloth. He bent and picked that up.

"What does this mean?" he cried, as the cloth unfolded before him. "A shroud! Grave clothes!"

At that instant a shrill, cackling laugh rose out of the throat of the red-headed man squatting on the grass. It went reverberating hideously through the night. From the pocket of his tattered coat had come a small revolver, and it was fastened unwaveringly on the dripping seaman.

"Yes, they're grave clothes. An' them's yours, mister, yours! They suit you! Try 'em on!"

Breen was slow to turn.

"Mine?"  Realisation had not penetrated his thick head. He was still staring wonderingly at the shroud.

"Yes, yours!" Again the cripple's laugh echoed through the bush. He snapped out: "They'll be a fit, too! I know the size of your rotten carcass all right!  Talk about me signing my own death warrant. Listen— you've been digging your own grave, mister! Hear that? You've just got through spadin'up your own coffin an' your own shroud, Breen." He slapped his withered leg. "You done this to me— now it's my turn. Listen to me laugh a little. An' while you're doin' it, just slip into them grave clothes. You'll be wearin' 'em a long, long time. Hear me? Put 'em on, Breen."

Breen swung full on him then, and saw the staring revolver. With a guttural oath he dropped the shroud and darted for his own revolver on the ground. It was gone.

"Look at me," screamed the squatting man. "Take one good, long, last look at it. Damn you, Breen, I want you to know it ain't Charlie Costin, it's Baxter that's presentin' you with a ticket to hell."

Breen did not move for half a minute. The scream had cut through him like a knife blade had set his great body trembling like shaken jelly. His broad face was grey, slack-mouthed, incredulous. Then, as he saw what the cripple was going to do, he made a desperate spring forward. But he was too late. The cylinder of the little revolver commenced to go jumpily around. Darting tongues of red flame chased each other but of its mouth.

"Here's six hot pearls you can keep," rose above its bark. "An' nobody will ever dig you up to get 'em."

Breen took one more step, went thudding to the ground, jerked a few times, and was quiet.

Out of the thick shrubbery, a little to one side, walked the old chief, Wano, and his pretty brown daughter. Both of them were showing their gleaming white teeth in satisfied grins. The little man continued to laugh aloud raucously.

"You have been very long, O meneke Baxter, but you have indeed done well. Nor have we ever doubted. Each night have we watched, knowing you would not fail. Now all things are as they should be. The man Breen has been fittingly punished for his treachery. We will bury him in a coffin made with his own inferior tools. Only your pearls are lost to you. And, fulfilling the promise I made, I, Wano, am giving into your keeping a pearl more precious than any that ever slept upon the ocean floor."

Nuana blushed. The man at her side kissed her. While Wano remained behind to bury the dead man they walked through the bush to the beached dinghy, and in it made their way cautiously to the waiting Coral Queen.

Suddenly Gregson and an unwary crew found themselves covered with a revolver. Before it they retreated forward, and at its owner's command they slacked off sail. Then the crippled man took the wheel of his schooner, laughing into the wind, and, with the brown girl standing by his side, her long hair flowing, he swung the Coral Queen about and headed her out to sea.

For several hours the owner of the schooner stood at the wheel as she tacked out. The stiff breeze whipped back his red hair, and occasionally he would throw back his head and laugh aloud.

For he was not really Baxter. Nor had he ever seen Baxter or heard of Baxter till old Wano spoke of him that evening on Manomoa.

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8: The Green Parrot

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 21 Feb 1925

IT was in Sydney that I shipped on the Polynesian Maid.  She was a windjammer, bound for Papeete with coal. The ship's carpenter was a young fellow, who had never before seen the South seas and those Tahitian girls who wear flowers in their hair.

It went to his head, and he and an ordinary seaman mate of his deserted there. We signed on a new carpenter who had been on the beach for months, and seemed anxious to get away. He was a queer customer, a little dried-up crab of a man who never spoke unless spoken to, and kept to his quarters for'd alongside those of the sail-maker's. These two rank as petty-officers on shipboard, and have their own rooms. We never knew the fellow's name; a carpenter Is never known as anything but Chips.

We took on a sailor there In Papeete, too; a lean Portuguese with a knife scar across one cheek. He was characteristically nervous and given to starts, the sort of high-strung spiggoty a devilish crew loves to play jokes on.

From Papeete we sailed for Sumatra, for it was the coffee season. It was in Padang that the carpenter bought a parrot from one of the native bumboats that flocked out to meet us. It was no ordinary parrot, but one of those inland birds, medium-sized, and with brilliant green feathers.

Those parrots have an uncanny quickness of imitation. That bird had not been on the boat a week till Chips had it swearing in English and praying in Spanish. Its power of recognition was remarkable. If Chips was ashore it would know him as soon as he came in sight and flap its wings and start chattering raucously.

Besides Chips, the only other man tho bird would much noticr was the cook, who used to throw him little balls of dough. Whenever it saw the cook or anyone who had once fed it, it would hop to the deck and wait expectantly. That parrot never forgot anyone it ever connected with dough balls. The bird seemed peculiarly fitted to Chips. They both had an air of knowing more than they said. While the carpenter hacked away at his work the bird would sit above his shoulder on a yard-arm, solemn and quiet, cocking its eye at you with an air of profound knowingness.

The bo's'n offered a particular target for the bird's adeptness at mimicking. He had a habit of clearing his throat whenever he spoke, and before long, each time the bird sighted him it would sing out with a guttural rasp. It was a good joke for the crew, but we bo's'n was touchy and resented it. He would swear at the beggar till he was red in the face, and that crazy bird would flap its wings and got back at him in all the unholy lingos a bright parrot can acquire on shipboard. Finally the bo's'n threatened to wring the parrot's neck.

Now, you way steal a sailorman's wife, but never molest his pet. Soon there was bad blood between the bo's'n and Chips, but we thought nothing of it then.

From Sumatra we sailed for Burma, and after just one night at sea, Sails came aft to where the morning watch was turning to on deck, and tried to tell something he couldn't.

Have you ever seen a man awestruck? The sailmaker was just that. He was a big, slow-moving, slow-thinking Dane, and what he had just seen was too much for him. He stood there, staring at the crew with big eyes and open mouth. Again he tried to speak; then gave it up, and pointed for'ard like a child who had just seen a goblin and does not know how to describe it.

It was the bo's'n who led us for'ard, and there at the bow end of the ship, he stopped and stared at the dock. The sailmaker's and carpenter's rooms were side by side, and the door of the former was open. The other was closed, and from under it a thin, dark stream had crept out across the deck to the scuppers, where it was congealed in a sticky mass. We just stood there, staring, struck dumb as that big Dane sailmaker. Then, someone brushed past the bo's'n and threw open the door of the carpenters foc's'le.

Chips lay in the middle of the room, and with a knife wound in his heart. It was plain he had bee dead for several hours, probably since the middle of the dog-watch.  Nothing was disturbed in the room; there was no clue— just that body, and the dried stain on the deck. But that it was murder there was no doubt, for there was no weapon in the cabin other than the carpenter's own sheath knife, which hung on the wall, unstained.

The sailmaker had regained his voice how, but he could tell little. He had been turning to at eight bells, when, as he left his cabin, he had seen the stain on the deck. He had not dared to look into Chip's quarters— the very sight of that blood overawed him. It was the terrible power of suggestion. The sight of the thing itself was less horrible than that.

So, there we stood, the whole crew of us, huddled about that door, staring at the body, which rolled a little as the vessel breasted each wave. Then suddenly we saw the parrot.

The bird sat in a corner, swinging on a perch that Chips had fitted up, staring at us with an air of profound knowingness. And suddenly it flashed to every man of us that that devilish bird had witnessed the whole of what had happened in the dog-watch. By now the Old Man had noticed that something was wrong, and came down from amidships. He called muster and questioned all hands, but in the end the matter was a bigger mystery than before. The men who had been on watch proved alibis, those who had been beolow said they were in their bunks asleep throughout the dog watch, and no one could say they weren't. There was nothing to do but send the men back to work, while the cap'n and mate consulted in the cabin. And down in the carpenter's fo'c's'le, covered with a piece of sailcloth, that body rolled and rolled, while the parrot stood death watch.

It was only a moment later that I caught Sails staring for'd. I followed his look, and started. There, in the moonlight, sitting on the yard arm, was that crafty parrot, regarding us all with a look of profound knowingness, For a minute it sat there, then it opened Its beak and gave a raucous cry— the same effort it always made when it tried to pronounce a new word it had caught. And every man in that crew stood, staring, silent, as though fearing that bird would speak a word that would brand him a murderer.

IT WAS daylight next morning that the alarm sounded for all hands on dock. We found the cap'n and mate waiting amidships, and, with the entire crew mustered, they led us for'd. The door of the carpenter's fo'c's'le was open, and a dim light Inside showed a weird bundle 'in the middle of the room. And there, too, swinging on its perch, regarding the lot of us with a look of supreme wisdom, was the parrot. The old man's scheme was plain. He meant to have the men pass into the room one at a time, stoop over the corpse, gaze about a moment, then make a hurried exit. All in the one hope that the parrot would recognise the murderer and try to speak that word it had caught the night before.

The cabin boy was first, and I could hear the lad's breathing above the spill of the sea. I think he moved in a daze as he followed the cap'n's directions. As he stepped out of the room he fainted. But the bird had remained silent.

Sails' turn was second. He stopped at the door, and it took a command from the skipper to make him go on. He never once took his eyes off that bird sitting there regarding him silently, and as his groping hand touched the corpse he started, frightened. As he stepped out of the room he looked from the silent bird to us with a stare of unbounded amazement.

When my turn came I was positive, as I stooped over that form, I heard the bird pronounce my name distinctly. I tell you I expect to know nothing more awful than those few seconds, it was not till I somehow found myself outside, and heard the skipper ordering somebody else in that I realised the parrot had remained silent.

Finally there remained only one of the crew, who was at the wheel, and the mate and skipper who had not gone through the trial, and not once had the bird broken its silence. One of the men was sent to relieve the steersman, and the fellow came for'd. It was the Portuguese who had shipped in Papeete. For a moment he looked at that circle of faces surrounding him, then, as the skipper repeated an order, he stepped inside the cabin. He crossed the room, carefully, and stooped over the bundle.

The bird, swinging with the roll of the ship, watched him, silent.  A moment later the fellow arose and turned toward the door. Then, abruptly, the parrot stirred. The next instant it hopped down from its perch and walked solemnly across the floor as if looking for something. Then it stood and cocked its eye up at the Portuguese in an attitude of expectancy.

For just a moment the fellow stared at that bird, then, wildly, he looked at that circle of faces crowding about the door. Portuguese nerves are not made for strain, and suddenly, uncontrollably, that sailor broke for the door. On deck he halted for a moment, then fled for the fo'c's'le.

The Old Man had the fellow brought back and questioned him.

The scared devil poured out a voluble flood of explanations about nerves, but the skipper was not satisfied. He had the Portuguese strung up in the ratlines and ordered a rope brought. Do you know there is nothing like a rope's end to make a man confess? I can hear that poor devil's screams yet, but it worked.  In ten minutes he was lying on the deck, and telling the truth.

In Papeete he had learned that the carpenter possessed a handful of pearls stolen from a drunken diver. He had waited for a chance there, but never got it. That chance had come on board the Polynesian Maid.

Slipping out of his bunk in the dog watch, he had stolen for'd to the carpenter's room. But Chips had been lying awake and started up as the other entered the fo'c's'le. However, there is no one quite so quick with a knife as a Portuguese. Before the carpenter could put up a fight he had gone to the deck, stabbed to death. The sailor had found the pearls bound about the other's body in a belt, and, in tearing it loose, some of the gems had fallen to the floor. The parrot, watching, had thought that in the rolling white things it recognised those delicious little dough balls that had so often been thrown to it on deck. And that bird never forgot anyone connected with dough balls.

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9: The Parrot and the Pearls

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 9 Dec 1922

THE little white-haired man with the watery blue eyes, sat on the extreme edge of a chair in the office at the police-station. Between his knees was a dome-shaped object, wrapped in a faded green cloth. Presently he unfastened a couple of knots and removed the covering from a bird-cage. On the perch was a ragged-looking parrot.

"That's him," he said, "and I'd give something never to have seen the creature. You see, I'm a dealer in livestock, but mostly in birds. I generally buy them wholesale, but sometimes I get a few lots from deep-sea sailors when they come into port. Last Thursday I went to Bowers, the wholesale bird dealer, to buy a few parrots. He is a big man in the bird line, and I've dealt with him for  years. I bought six, and Bowers threw one in for luck— that creature. I didn't notice that he'd only got one eye until I got home, but I wasn't surprised, for old Bowers don't give much away. The others were nice birds, but not trained, of course— the sort we sell for about five-bob each. About one in ten lives six months, and only about one in fifty ever learns to say more than 'Pretty Polly.'

"No doubt you are aware that a good talker will always fetch big money!  Well, I was having lunch at the back of the shop when the wife rushed in. 'Jim,' she shouted, 'one of those new parrots is talking.' For a minute I thought she was having a joke with me. However, I went into the shop. Sure enough this bird that is before you now, was talking. 'Peter!' he says—"

The little man broke off quietly, and pointed to the cage. The parrot had climbed into the swing.

"Peter, Peter!" it croaked. "Pearls and shell! Pearls and shell!"

"A bird from North Queensland, I'll wager," said the detective. "Well, go on."

The bird began to scream and laugh, but the little man silenced it by throwing the cloth over the cage.

"Yes, the bird kept saying, 'Peter, Pearls and shell!' " the little man continued, "and that evening a man who looked like a sailor came into the shop. He pointed to the parrot, and wanted to know where I had got it. He offered me a pound to tell him, and when I refused, he started to swear and threaten; but, seeing a policeman crossing the street, he departed in a hurry.

"I put the parrot in the back parlour, and told my wife to let nobody see it.

"When I came back she told me that three men had called. One of them was well dressed, and wore patent-leather shoes and a panama hat. They didn't want to buy the bird; they wanted to know where I had got it. I put up the shutters, and got the surprise of my life. Pasted on my window was a notice:

Queensland parrot, for sale.

Will be sold, cheap,
as it is blind in one eye

I tell you that notice knocked me sideways.

"I scraped the thing off, but there was another one stuck on the window next morning, two hours after I had opened the shop. Since then the shop has been watched night and day. The three men have worried me about that parrot, asking where I got it; and, last evening, the well-dressed chap threatened to strangle me."

Detective Gleeson arose, and said quietly: "Take the bird with you, and if they paste another, notice on your window, let it stay there. I shall call at your shop this afternoon."

SEVERAL hours later the detective took possession of a stuffy little room over the bird-dealer's shop, and as he pondered over the story he had heard about the one-eyed parrot, the facts concerning it gradually became plain.

"Those fellows don't want the bird," he muttered, "but they're mighty anxious to know where it came from. That parrot had spent a night or two out somewhere before it arrived in Bowers' bird-shop, or it wouldn't be so bedraggled. I reckon that it is the bait for a man-trap."

As the dusk gathered, the shop was closed. The detective did not turn on- the gas in the room, but made himself fairly comfortable with a couple of chairs. Nothing might transpire that night, but he had made up his mind to stay in the shop until the mystery was solved.

As the hours passed by he began to doze, but eventually sat up erect with a start. Someone was knocking gently at the door of the shop, and the detective went quickly down the narrow stairs.

The knock was repeated cautiously, and he opened the door.

"I'm sorry to disturb you at such an hour," said a gruff voice, "but I called about a parrot that—"

A shrill whistle pierced the silence, and a blow on the chest made the detective stagger. In a moment he was in the street; A man was running for his life, and three other men were in pursuit, the detective, took in a long breath, and ran his hardest. Then came the report of a revolver, and a rattle of falling glass. It was a wild shot, for the bullet had shattered the glass of a street lamp. Gleeson began to gain. He passed one man. Pursuer and pursued had plunged into a narrow lane, and, guided by the clatter of footsteps, the detective dashed on. The cold breath of the harbour was in his nostrils. He could see the men in front of him now, and he put on a spurt. Another man was lagging. Then the waterfront loomed ahead.

"Blast you all!" yelled a powerful voice. "You've not got me yet!"

A splash followed. There was a thin mist over the harbour, through which the lights of the shipping shone faintly. Another defiant shout rose from the water, but it died away in a gurgle, choked and ghastly. The detective blew his whistle, and another answered from the distance. One man stood near the water's edge, a tall man with a panama hat on his head.

"Yes, Peter has done us," he said. "It's the end of him, for he couldn't swim a stroke!"

IN A little room above the shop, the stranger told his story, a story of the Torres Strait pearling grounds and of a lugger captained by Peter Dunlop, and manned by three whites, a Kanaka, and two Japanese. They garnered what treasures they could find— pearl-shell, bêche-de-mer and trochus-shell.

"Luck was bad, and it was a dog's life till we struck a bed of black-lipped shell," said the man quietly. "Though Peter couln't swim better than a stone, he was the best sailor I ever knew, and the hardest-hearted hound. The only thing he loved was his one-eyed parrot, and he worshipped that. We got twelve fine pearls out of that bed, and Peter was made for life. The rest of us, out of our share, reckoned that we would be able to live ashore like millionaires for a couple of years, if the whisky didn't kill us before that.

"Then the luck turned again, and it blew a hurricane. We grounded on a coral reef forty miles from Thursday Island. We saved the dinghy, and that hound and the parrot and the pearls went off in it in the night, though no man or fiend, except Peter Dunlop, would have faced the sea. The two Japs, and the Kanaka died of thirst and starvation, and we were like skeletons when a passing schooner took us off.

"We got to learn that Peter had gone to Sydney to sell the pearls. We followed, and swore that we would kill him, but we could never find him until one of my mates heard the old parrot shrieking out about Peter and pearls. And we knew Peter would never part with that bird, but had lost it by accident, and that he'd turn Australia upside down to get it back. He guessed that we were on his track, too, trust him for that. And he's done us.

"Oh, well, I suppose there's nothing for it but to wait until the body is recovered, and then get back to Thursday Island. I'll be around at the station in the morning, in case you want me. Good-night!"

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10: The Madonna of the Thousand Isles

Queenslander (Brisbane) 5 Dec 1925

THE sun, as though driven below by a freshening breeze from the south-east, lingered only a moment behind the broad line of Auatu's cocoanut palms. As if a great blue check below had grimaced, shut its baleful eye. it vanished. My fiddling was finished, anyway. I snapped shut the case, helped a Kanaka furl and tie the tiny deck awning under which we had gasped through the heat of equatorial afternoon, and then accepted a pouch of tobacco lazily tendered by Fendian, my comrade. Though for hours of heat and molten calm, broken only by the strum of auxiliary engine and the humid, scorching wind set up by the vessel's own motion, I had not thought of a pipe; now, with cool spume carried to us from windward and breathable air filling my lungs, I became conscious of appetite for the weed.

Fendian only did not smoke. In gawky effort he roused himself to his feet, made lame excuse, and disappeared below. A side glance from all eyes save Mitchell's, told that we understood. Fendian never smoked until after he had drunk. Now he would go down to the furnace enclosure called a cabin, find a lukewarm squareface of gin, and invert this into his throat. After that he would smoke several pipes of strong, pungent tobacco— and talk. Three nights aboard had convinced the others— all save Mitchell, who had joined us at Atiu, and who owned the four vessels of the line— that Jim Fendian was worth listening to. I knew. Far northward, in the Carolines, I first found him. For seven months I had lived his life, knocking about in whatever vessel came handiest.

"WE will put in at Mitiero," were his first words when he returned, puffing slowly on blackened calabash. "We take aboard another passenger. Her name in these waters is "The Madonna of the Thousand Isles!" Low exclamations greeted the announcement. Mitchell only— he being a lean-jawed, silent man, whose wavy hair snowed early silver and whose reputation for stern honesty, in our loose latitudes, was matched well by the financial reward it had brought— gave no sign of surprise. Doubtless he had learned the news from Bromley, the skipper.

All of us had heard of Marie Tempest, this strange philanthropist of the benches, who spent the golden years of her life— and the clinking gold of apparently endless wealth, in saving the self-respect of hitherto hopeless ones upon whom fortune had wreaked all but her worst. Hundreds of men throughout the South Seas swore, with fierce earnestness in their ordinarily irreverent eyes, that in assuming mortal beauty she had become a modern Madonna.

"I have seen her many times," continued Fendian, expelling even thicknesses of the black-blue vapour with his words. "And once she told me her story, I— well, she had brought me back from death the time I was robbed and knifed in Tiketau, the time I got this souvenir."

Here he drew away the open neck of his shirt to disclose a jagged, puckered scar extending from Adam's apple down indeterminately toward the left armpit.

"Five years I have watched and hoped for her in my wanderings, for she—  this saint of the islands whom men worship— is more in need of help, my friends, than the least of those to whom her goodness has meant life. I have failed, yet I wish to tell her story that you, who comb the islands as the years fly, may lend your eyes and memories to her service.

"The tale begins— ah, five and seven, I think— 12 years ago in Melbourne, when Marie Tempest was 16. I give you my word, gentlemen, that she must have been less beautiful then than now, for at 23, when first I saw her, she was but slimness just beginning to mold itself into the loveliness of woman. And no woman has lived who may compare.

"In Melbourne Marie had been left orphaned, then adopted into the family of distant relatives. These people were rich and proud. They made what they supposed to be an advantageous marriage contract for the girl, selecting Martin Hugon, the Paumotu Islands pearling king, a man of 50, and one for whom already two wives and countless other women had broken their hearts and lives.

"The girl protested, not confessing the glorious secret she possessed, of course, but trying to keep from this union so horrifying to her. It seems that in Melbourne at this time there was a youth at little more than her own age, son of a solicitor, who had his office in the city. The two had met, and while the boy never had spoken outright of his love, the sweetness of perfect understanding lay between them. He regarded her with awe and reverence tingling his passion— quite, I suppose, as I now, and hundreds more of us who have known her, still feel. She was, in truth, his saint, the girl-woman for whom he believed his whole life was to be shaped.

"In vain she pleaded, wept, and refused even to see Hugon. In time, though Marie never confessed, her foster parents suspected her reasons for hating the rich suitor, and hedged her about until the very day of the ceremony. And it was carried through strictly according to prennptial agreement, even though a maddened youth stormed at the doors in vain attempt to halt the sacrilege of which he just had heard. When the bridal party came out to the waiting cab, Marie, half-fainting upon the arm of her husband, the boy was standing there, kept back by a watchful constable. Only his agonised cry, uttered as he turned to flee into tho night, came to her ears.

"The constable, however, had been so busy keeping his eye upon the youth, who naturally might have been expected to start trouble, that ho. failed to notice a veiled woman on the other side of the carpeted walk. She was dressed in black, and under her cape she carried something small and warm— something which would have cried aloud save for the nipple of an empty bottle she kept always in its mouth.

"As Hugon and his unwilling bride passed her unseeing, her right hand flashed upward from beneath the cape. Two red flashes pierced the fainter light of strung electric bulbs. Then two more. The woman evidently had attempted to kill both Hugon and Marie. Her aim had not been good. With a year-old baby still clasped in her arms she lay dead upon the sidewalk, but Marie was untouched. Hugon sank down with two bullets through the tops of his lungs. One of his sins from the past had exacted partial payment, but for Marie and her lover the happening meant only added unhappines; for, you see, the boy, broken-hearted, fled from his home. Many months elapsed before even he glanced at a newspaper, and then it was an island sheet smuggled into the prison at Apia He heard not even a breath of rumour concerning the woman he had lost, nor knew of the catastrophe which closed the wedding ceremony.

"Hugon did not die. He was far too tough for that. Six months, a year dragged by, and still he was in bed— gaunt, breathing shallowly from his great lungs, but still looking upon the pale, submissive girl who attended to his every wish with the light of a waiting beast lurking behind the bland suavity of a patient and seasoned courtier.

"No physician gave him hope of recovery, but Hugon refused to die. Even when inflammation and thickening brought constant cough and reddish flecks to his thick, bestial lips, he waited, drinking in her beauty quite as he drank the stimulating, unsatisfying brandy which no physician could banish from his side.

"The yacht and the continuous sea voyage were his own ideas. Not wishing to wait for a boat of his own designing to be built, he ordered the finest purchasable one in Australian waters to be secured. And, as he had made a fortune out of pearls, his wishes were gratified in short order. The Wanderer was renamed. I believe it was the Aphrodite, belonging to an American millionaire, originally."

A QUEER sound came to us from the direction of Mitchell. Seven heads turned toward him, but he was not looking at any of us. Upright in his deck chair, he seemed tense, waiting. All of us were affected more or less strongly by this tale of our goddess of the South Seas, however.

"Go on. I am— interested," said Mitchell, evidently feeling the impact of glances though his grey eyes never crossed ours. Fendian nodded. He was too deep in the narrative to be disturbed by anything. Queer, but when he was telling a story the boat itself might sink, and not until the water closed over his face would he care to exert himself outside the thrall of his own tale. Perhaps the half of a square-face had something to do with it, or the fumes of his strong tobacco.

"I DO not know all the story of the man," continued Fendian, refilling his pipe. "I do not even know his last name, for, you know, he changed it after the 18 months he spent at Apia. They sent him to prison for some mix-up in regard to opium smuggling, I believe.

"He had gone the limit. Sanctimonious people, living from mouth to liver— with never an emotion or death of the spirit save that they get from indigestion— may find him hard to forgive. I don't. A man who does not love enough to care nothing for life when that love is requited, and yet snatched from him is a man whose life lies always in the colourless places. He may be a good citizen— the best, so-called— but I don't want him. No, not even if he is what they call 'too strong to succumb.' Such men are monsters, or they did not love.

"Harvey loved. Excuse me if I call him Harvey, for this was not his name at all. Harvey really was a Paradise plume hunter I saw slaughtered by savages on the upper reaches of the Sepik River, in Dutch New Guinea, and somehow I visualise— but never mind.

"Harvey loved her too much. He was young, of course, but what matters that! Jove must begin with youth, and there find its heights of beauty, else it is little save a pretence, a mockery. He went to hell by the straightest route— opium. Three years after the night on which he had fled from Melbourne, he was begging for money at Kania, on Savaii. Drawn, haggard, cheeks sprouting their unkempt beard, and fevered, glassy eyes told all too plainly what he would do with a coin if he got it. He was living with Yee Yuen then, the keeper of a low den on the water front.

"For some reason the Wanderer went from Apia to all the small ports. At every one Marie Hugon landed, under the pretence of shopping for curios. Back on the yacht her husband lay, comatose at times, and with one of his lungs filled solid. The private physician he had kept with him gave him only a month or two more to live.

"This doctor, a spruce, middle-aged adventurer in his way, invariably accompanied her ashore. He was laying plans for the time when his patient must pass out of consideration, and the Hugon fortune, which had paid him a munificent salary for three years, was fully as attractive as the sombre, still-girlish virgin wife of the man he attended. He kept his clothes in impeccable crease, and made such love to the wife of his employer as called for no immediate response on the part of the girl.

" 'For Heaven's sake, give me a few shillings!' sounded a voice at her side, a cracked, pleading voice. From the sand an unkempt, gaunt figure raised itself, stretching forth one hand for the expected coins.

"Marie stopped as one stricken. Her eyes, fastened upon the outline of the shore, palm-fringed into ultramarine distance, remained as if motionless iv their sockets. She did not turn her head.

" 'Leave me for a little while,' she said, speaking to the physician. 'I forgot something which I wished to purchase, and which I cannot obtain while with you.'

"The middle-aged physician bowed, smirking and satisfied at her promise to rejoin the company on board with the hour. While he left, swaggering white drill-clothed hips as he made for the rude quay, she did not turn, but remained motionless, clasping the yellow coin which almost she had flung to the beggar. Heedless of aught save an apparent chance for money, the beachcomber rambled on, wheedling, persuading.

" 'No!' she cried broken at last, wheeling upon him with both hands upraised in clenched fists. 'Oh, Arthur, you!'

"This was the greeting, after three years of separation and despair. As if wording off the poignant, terrible phantasms of night— one of those which had driven him deeper and deeper into the hopeless quicksands of indulgence— the beggar stared, then raised his arms before his face. A second later, passing the back of his hand before his eyes, he looked again. She still was there, staring down at him on his knees, horror, pity, and betrayed love struggling with each other on her countenance.

" 'Yes, Marie— Marie,' he stammered hoarsely, touching her dress for the assurance that she stood before him, and was not one of the opium visions to which he had become accustomed. 'It is I. Forgive me.' And with that he staggered to his feet, attempting blindly to make off down the beach to some hovel where he could lose himself. Tears of weakness and of shame flowed from his eyes. Raking sobs upflung themselves from the depths of his chest.

"Marie would not have it. She ran after him, all oblivious to wondering smiles on the faces of native girls who passed, and gruff comments from Europeans who contrasted the lacy white of her expensive dress with the ragged, dirty garments of her companion.

" 'Tell me all!' she commanded, searching his lined face for familiar lights and not finding them.

"It scarcely matters what were the details of that miserable tale. It comprised crime, imprisonment, dirt, exhaustion, blind dissipation, and through it all a scaring hurt of soul and being which not even kava, arrack, and trade gin could corrode away. Deliberately, Harvey had gone to the depth, and there, with the infernal cunning in self-flagellation known only to a white man's brain, he had dug a deeper pit in the slime than that inhabited by any native. He was hopeless, for he was steeled against hope. Though all other metal in liter tarnished, this held firm and mercilessly bright.

" 'And— your—husband,' he queried at last in a hoarse whisper, his head shaking as if with shivers of palsy.

" 'Hugon was shot the evening of our marriage,' she told him; stating unemotionally that the man had been waylaid by a former flame, who, before killing herself and the baby, had put two bullets through the lungs of her faithless admirer. For Marie the affair too long had lain as a sordid, hateful memory. Beside the pitiful tragedy which now confronted her, Hugon and his punishment seemed far-off, unreal.

"It never occurred to Harvey to ask if the wounds had been fatal. He took the matter for granted, as it seemed to fit in perfectly with the savage irony which had been his life. In that instant was revealed to him all of his weakness without even the gloss of sentiment it had possessed. As one stricken dumb with horror and remorse, he heard that, at the very moment that he had been running blindly away from the lighted sidewalk canopy, running into fierce search of his own ruin, his successful rival had been shot down. If only he, Harvey, had waited! An hour— even ten minutes— more of repression and then this senseless, irrevocable tragedy would have had no excuse, no being.

"Harvey did not rise gallantly from his bed of slime, revivified at the touch of love and the golden promise in the eyes of this girl whom he had loved. Opium and booze have no chivalry, and the beings upon whom their holds nre fastened do not escape merely by arising nnd making lurid vows. You and I know that. The worst of it is that opium dulls the desire for decency as well as breaking the will which might deny it. Harvey groaned, cursed himself, and tried again to escape. He did not want to listen to her words, to catch the stiugs of sorrow and reproach full upon shaken, quaking nerve ends. Long he had burned the incense of forgetfulness to his tragedy, and diluted it by drafts of horrible brew. To face it nil at once was beyond him now.

"He confessed that he was dying for the price of a smoke; that she had come too late to do aught else than help him to procure a fresh supply of the drug. He loved her still, yet months and years had buried that love beneath the refuse of self-respect. It could not be unearthed.

"Marie understood well enough, but she did not believe. Remember, of course, that at this time she had never apoken to a beachcomber, and knew nothing of vice other than that paraded before her by Hugon. Granted that all he said was true, she still insisted upon forcing him to take hold of himself. She gave him no money, but made him bathe, shave, and don an entire new outfit of clothing which she purchased. Then she held before him a mirror, and beside it the photograph of him when they had known each other in Melbourne— the picture she had kept beside her during all the weary months of imprisonment with her invalid husband.

" 'There is not much change, as you may see for yourself,' she lied. 'Only it is the will. You must will to be your old self again!'

"And Harvey, knowing that the clothes on his back could be sold to Yee Yuen for sufficient opium to keep him deadened for a month, agreed hypocritically, and mumbled promises of reform, hoping to get rid of her. His whole system cried out for the drug. Had she not been seized with a sudden revulsion and knowledge of his insincerity, and left him, he might have driven her away.

"Broken-hearted she went back to the yacht, knowing that as she sat down at the table that night with her frivolous companions, Harvey was lying in some Chinese den, stupefied. She told herself that her duty was done, that he could expect no more of her than this, yet the voice of conscience would not still. Sho knew, and before the weary courses of the meal were finished, she admitted to herself, that her duty lay more with the man back on shore than with the halfdead man in the cabin.

"That night, after giving orders to leave for Apia at dawn, she bribed a sailor to row her ashore secretly. Wearing man's clothes, and carrying a revolver in her coat pocket, she made straight for the Chinese shops, where Harvey carelessly had indicated the opium dens to be situated.

"Yee Yuen's lookout chattered shrilly when the unknown, fair-skinned stranger attempted to force an entrance. He struck a gong, and from the shadowy, curtained interior the bloated, toad-like Yee Yuen himself appeared. Marie waited no longer. At the point of her revolver she forced her way inside, past the astonished, protesting Chinaman, under painted squares of silk, through tbe damp, descending passage to the long, narrow room where the smokers lay. A double line of bunks lay on each side, crowding the aisle. The air was vile with the sickening sweetness of cooking nnd burning opium, and humid with odours of unwashed clothes and bodies. As she lifted the sagging curtain on the first bunk an arm plucked at her from the other side, and a jeering voice proclaimed aloud the discovery of her sex. Marie silenced him with a threat of the revolver.

"In the fifth bunk she discovered Harvey, stripped now of the clothes she had bought, and wearing only the trousers of the filthy suit he had discarded previously. A cry of horror burst from her lips. She tried fiercely to awaken him, but in vain. He grunted, snored, and slumbered on. Baulked for the time being. Marie stationed herself there, and waited the dreary, awful hours that dragged before he awakened. Then, while dazedness still hung like fog in his brain, she hustled him out, the Chinese gaping at her from a safe distance, uncomprehendingly.

"I do not know the horror of that next day, though I have seen some game fights with the devil of opium, and I know it is one which never gives up its gnawing, relentless appetite until it is killed. And that killing cannot be done in an hour, or even in a month. Rarely is it done at all in the South Seas, for, among the islands there is not enough inducement to decent living.

"Marie tried everything, I suppose, and all in vain. Pleas, threats, arguments, could cause Harvey to wince, but even he did not try to lie to her again. He was unworthy, and knew it.

" 'Oh, leave me, Marie!' he groaned at last. 'If I were married to you I might make a fight of it, and become a man again, but that is impossible. Please leave mc and forget!' Marie had caught at the suggestion embodied in his first words, however, and her face paled. Married to her? Then he could catch at shreds of self-respect?  'Impossible,' she echoed, staring out at the harbour where the yacht lay. 'No, it is not impossible.'

"She recalled that he had not asked whether Hugon had lived or died. 'I will marry you,' she went on rapidly. 'Right now— this morning! Listen to me, though!' And .be shook him until understanding crept down through the departing numbness of the drug.

"She asked him, demanded of him, whether or not he would make the fight if she made the sacrifice. She would marry him, but not live with him until he showed her that he had become a man. Would he remember that he had loved her, and throw off the curse?

" 'It will mean putting in escrow much more than your love and mine,' she told him in a low, tense voice. 'How much more than that I shall not try to tell you now. Suffice it to say that after this ceremony is performed I shall leave you. Six months from now I shall return, and this shall be loaded and ready in my hand.' She lifted the revolver so he could see the filled cylinder.

" 'If you have not been true to your promise I shall kill myself! Now, do you wish to promise? Answer, boy of mine!'

"Slowly, wonderfully, his eyes tilted, fastening upon her passionately earnest face. And with breaking voice he gave the promise, swearing it with upraised hand, and with a new light of sincerity shiuniug from his red-rimmed eyes. He did not ask why she did not stay to help him with the bitter fight, for he thought he knew. The six months of grace were given so that the loathsome object that he was might be transformed into the man that he had been.

"The ceremony was performed, and then Marie left him, to meet the searchers from the yacht before they discovered too much. On the sand at his feet she emptied notes and gold from her purse, yet she swears that in that last moment he did not glance down at them.

"That is very nearly all, gentlemen. The woman whom we know as the Madonna of the Thousand Isles went back to her company, and her real husband, with a gay lie on her lips, and with the technical crime of bigamy on her conscience. In reality this did not trouble  her, for though she now had two husbands in name, she still was the girl whom Harvey had known and loved in Melbourne. She had the assurance of the physician on the yacht that one of the hushands could last only days or weeks longer, and she did not worry at all about the law. If Harvey only were waiting for her at the end of the six months, they could be reunited easily ensough in some other port. He would forgive the deception, too, if the result was that for which she passionately hoped. So, for days and nights while she ministered to the invalid, she prayed constantly for the lonely man back on the beach of Savaii. the man for whom all the furies of hell now had become unleashed.

"The veal tragedy of it all lay in the hands of Hugon. Instead of passing away quietly and decently as every one expected, he lingered on and on, actually seeming to grow stronger at time. During these hours he insisted upon having Marie at his bedside. He kissed her hand, her arm, while she shuddered the hatred and revulsion she could not voice.

"Months passed with deadly slowness. Hugon, relinquishing life more stubbornly than any one had imagined possible, seemed little worse than before. Marie, pale, and with the shadows of worry and horror lined beneath her eyes, was torn now between two emotions. She feared that Harvey had not been faithful to his word, that the demand in his system had proved too strong. Also, without ever expressing the wish even to herself that Hugon would die, she recoiled in chilling fear from the possibility that he might cling to existence for an intolerable time. What must happen if he lived a year, and she did not return for tbe rendezvous with Harvey? The latter, even if he accomplished the miracle of rehabilitation, would believe her dead or faithless. Would not he then slip back into the muck? The query drove her frantic.

"Well, Hugon disappointed every one— including the middle-aged physician— by living too long. He lasted four months over the six which Marie had assigned as a safe margin, but Marie did not know of his death when it occurred. For weeks she had been the victim of nervous breakdown, half-way through the gate of insanity. When this passed she was too weak even to walk, and haunted melancholy had taken possession of her dark eyes. Even the physician knew now that the tough old Hugon had not been the cause of her illness.

"Thirteen' months from the day she married Harvey, Marie stood again in Kan in. She searched. She subsidized the local authorities to comb the opium dens, the whole island, for trace of Harvey, but it was vain. A few vaguely remembered the derelict, but it seemed that he had disappeared more than a year before. Heartsick, Marie was compelled at last to the belief that he had tried and failed. She never saw him again, nor heard nny word, though for years her yacht has traced and retraced every route in these waters making every port timw and time again.

"I think she has given over asking for him, but still she watches. If ever she learned that Harvey actually had been unable to carry out his promise, I know she would end it all. As matters stand, she goes on with the hopeless search, believing firmly that the whole blame lie with herself. Who can say? For my part, I believe that this is her metier, the work for which she was destined. For her sake I should tell if ever I came across the skunk Harvey, but I should feel like throwing him to the sharks, nevertheless. He was never worthy of her in any way."

STRETCHING out his long arms in a yawn, Fendian arose. Knocking out the pipe, he flirted an invitation for me to join him in a drink. Then, without looking to see whether or not I accepted, he disappeared below. One after another of the audience left, but I did not arise. Since midway in the narrative I had paid almost as much attention to one of the circle as I had to Fendian's yarn. Mitchell still sat stiffly, and, though for the darkness I could make out his features only dimly, I fancied that he was as one in a hypnotic trance.

"Corking tale, don't you think?" I asked, breaking the silence merely to sound a queer suspicion which had been gathering in my mind. He did not answer at first. Starting to his feet mechanically, he gazed about as if noticing for the first time that the circle had melted away. I did not repeat.

"When do you think we'll make Mitiero?" he demanded of me then, ignoring my query as though it had been no more than so much jangled noise, speaking in a strained voice which consorted oddly with his habitual reserve. I saw his hands clench and unclench spasmodically.

"Oh, along sometime after sunrise— six bells, maybe," I answered with simulated carelessness. I, too, yawned elaborately, and left him stalling at the ladder long enough to see him turn abruptly and stride to the bow, where he stood, gazing out and forward. Below, where still it was stuffy, I squirted a half-portion of seltzer into the vile, oily gin, and drank with Fendian.

"Let's stretch hammocks on deck," I suggested. "There'll be no sleeping here to-night." He agreed, and, while scarcely 20 minutes passed before his comfortable snore of relaxation, I lay awake a full two hours watching the motionless, shadowy figure stationed as though carven there in the bow.

EARLY sun awakened me, and I got up, to find Fendian sleepily donning his clothes. Mitchell had left his post at the bow, but evidently had not been to bed. I found him in his chair, staring out over the burnt-orange flare of ocean.

"Better join us at breakfast," I invited him, after dousing my head in a bucket of sea water. "Mitiero— and all that awaits you— will be nearer after coffee!"

His grey eyes flashed up to mine, coming to focus slowly. Then he glanced from one to the other of us, without speaking, and I had the intense satisfaction of seeing Fendian's jaw sag with supreme astonishment. So many times he had scored upon me that I chuckled all the way down the ladder. At table, however, there was never a smile. Fendian and Mitchell sat facing one another, and neither paid much attention to the food. It was an uncomfortable, pregnant silence, yet I, for one, did not dare to break it.

"My thanks are yours, sir," said Mitchell at last, setting down his drained cup, "as much for the bitter indictment you voiced as for— for the news itself. All night I have reviewed what you said. Now I ask you to listen, and weigh again the evidence. No one else knows that Louis Mitchell is Arthur Forsythe, the man you called Harvey. Men call him honest, stern, and merciless. He is  not rich, but four small vessels and a tidy income have been built up from the money flung at his feet that day upon the shore of Savaii Island.

"In truth he is weak, as you accused. When no news ever came of the woman who had promised herself to him a second time, he nearly broke the shackles of decency. He was too proud to search for her, yet not too proud to wish to destroy all the fierce-won good born from her promise. He tried to drink, yet disgust claimed him. Instead he yielded to new self-respect, and lived a life outside that of other men. That was not strength, but weakness. With each sundown thereafter came the wild impulse again, but it had become easier merely to drift. He remained abstemious. Now I ask you, and you will tell me straight from the shoulder, for you are a man, has he earned happiness when that happiness must take away from her work the Madonna of the South Seas?"

Mitchell half rose, and the grey eyes which I had deemed cold and inhuman blazed with a fierce, passionate longing. His hands clenched about folds of the table-cloth. Fendian gulped once. Then his long arm stretched across the table for a handclasp.

"By God, sir," he exclaimed, his resonant voice dry with the fire of his earnestness, "that weakness is what men call courage!"

"And only the brave deserve—" I began, then checked myself, conscious of inanity.

SHE came to the gangplank, with two native boys carrying her baggage. She was intending to make only the short return trip to Papeete, where the Wanderer had been in dock for repair. It was my first glimpse of her face, and though her glance was at the narrow board underfoot, I caught my breath with that poignancy of appreciation which greets only the most beautiful woman— and her only when sweetness of character accompanies that beauty. She did not look very young, for years of resignation and of kindness to others had moulded her features into the cast of a Madonna.

Midway on the short ascent she stopped, staring ahead almost in fright at a lean, grey-haired man who had appeared before her, stretching forth his two arms. The small handbag she carried dropped from her fingers into the murky water, unheeded, and a choking, strained cry of unbelieving gladness burst from her.

To my grave I shall carry the picture of her face in that instant, with forgotten longing, girlish joy, and the happiness that the clean-cut, manly figure of the man she had saved must have brought to her. Then she darted forward, throwing herself into his arms, and caring nothing that the two of them balanced precariously above a strip of water in a harbour noted for its man-eating sharks.

Fendian removed his hat.

"Gentlemen," he said quietly to the seven of us who had followed his example, "get your dunnage. We get off here and take the next boat to Papeete!"

And all of us obeyed, feeling the force of his unuttered reverence.

______________

11: The Prince of Wandabilla

Queenslander  17 Dec 1931

EMERGING from the clump of shrubbery that skirted the track, the horse stepped out upon a rocky promontory that rose several feet above the dry river bottom. Receiving a sharp command from his rider, the animal sagged to a halt, braced his legs comfortably, and threw his head and ears erect. The rider pulled one foot out of a stirrup crossways in the saddle, and leaned lazily against the pommel. His eyes filled with the light of amusement, a grin wrinkled the deep tan of his face.

Below him, in the great natural basin that had been formed by the action of the water in some previous time, he saw a horse, equipped with saddle and bridle, quietly grazing. Fifty feet from the horse was a young woman. She was attired in a short riding skirt, boots, and a soft felt hat. This much the young man saw at a glance. He did not take the trouble to observe the other details of her dress, for he saw that something had gone wrong. It was nothing very serious.

At the moment that his gaze had rested upon the young woman she was standing about fifty feet from her horse, her arms folded over her breast, her figure rigid, her face betraying a mingled riot of rage and disgust.

Presently, while the young man watched, she unfolded her arms and took a stealthy forward step, at the same instant extending one hand toward the horse. There was no indication on the animal's part that he had observed this movement. But, when the young woman had taken another step, and then another, the horse ceased nibbling at the grass, raised its head a very little, and regarded her distrustfully.

The young woman continued to approach. The horse resumed grazing, apparently unaware of her continued advance. But after a moment, when she had come within several feet of him, the animal raised his head and very deliberately changed his grazing ground to a point about twenty feet farther up the river. young man chuckled, and settled more comfortably into his saddle. This pantomime bade fair to be of long duration. He was not disposed to interrupt. He was enjoying himself hugely.

Both principals in the scene were now inactive. The young woman again stood with folded arms, her head lowered, her chin thrust out belligerently. The horse, standing broadside to the young woman, was grazing industriously.  Suddenly the young woman moved. She stamped one booted foot and gestured commandingly with one hand.

"Monty! You brute!"

Monty raised his head a trifle and regarded the young woman out of the corners of his slant eyes. Then he resumed his grazing unconcernedly.

"In my opinion that horse is a hard case," muttered the young man. And now the young woman again moved forward. This time the horse allowed her to approach within five feet of aim, and then, when it seemed she was sure of him, he snorted with defiance (and, it seemed, derision), kicked sharply, and cavorted sideways a full hundred feet down the river.

For an instant the young woman stood, her face red and angry. Then she suddenly stooped, took up a flat rock, and threw it furiously toward the animal. It did not come within twenty feet of the horse, but pretending that he had come very near to being struck he snorted in apparent fright, and removed his base of operations another hundred feet.

AND now the young woman changed her plan of attack. She resorted to cajolery, but the horse was not to be flattered into capture. He allowed her to approach again, but just when it seemed that she was sure of him he removed to a point farther on. Several times she got close enough to him to almost touch the bridle rein, and each time she failed to do so by the scantiest of margins. If horses laugh, this one must have enjoyed himself hugely.

The young man on the promontory might now have ridden to the young woman's assistance, but it pleased him to remain an onlooker. Then the pent-up rage and impatience that the young woman had thus far succeeded in holding in check burst out in a torrent. She stood rigid, invective springing to her lips, picturesque and forceful. The young man on the promontory abetted her sympathetically.

"It is certainly enough to make any lady lose her temper," he said. Then he smiled widely. "Ain't she going it?" he remarked to the surrounding plains. "I wouldn't like her to talk to me that way."

He smiled, and then stood in the stirrups, peering forward intently at the young women. "What's she doing now?" he questioned.

She had seated herself on a flat rock. For a moment the young man could not tell what she was doing. Then he saw her hands go up to her face, covering them, and her body shook convulsively. Plainly, she was crying.

The young man's face lost its smile and grim lines formed around his lips.

"Now, what do you think of that?" he said. He looked again at the young woman, and then cast a malignant glare at her horse. "If you were mine, you dashed scrubber," he said venomously, forgetting that a few minutes before he had been applauding the animal, "I'd bust you wide open." He touched a spur sharply to his own horse's side, urging the animal around a short turn and down a slope that led to the basin.

It was a short distance to where the young woman sat, and as he galloped up she heard the beat of his horse's hoofs, and turned to face him. Tears that had been flowing down her cheeks would not be held in check in spite of her heroic attempt.

"It seems to me you are in trouble," said the young man. "I've been watching you from that rise over there."

The young woman had succeeded in drying her eyes, and they shot indignant glances upward into his.

"Oh, you have?" she said sharply. "I suppose, you have been enjoying yourself?"

He smiled with embarrassment. "I've just been trying to figure it out," he returned, "and I don't know whether I've felt tickled over seeing you trying to catch the horse, or whether I've been mad at the horse for keeping away from you. He is certainly a humorous customer."

"I suppose you heard me talking to him?" she demanded, her face very red.

He laughed. "I'm not deaf," he returned, grinning hugely. "I certainly enjoyed that dressing down you gave him. I reckon he deserved it. You didn't say half enough to him."

SHE abruptly turned her back to him.

"No gentleman would sit idly on his horse like a graven Image while a young lady was in trouble," she snapped. He tapped his leg with the brim of his hat, which he had removed when he had first addressed her.

"I certainly didn't feel like any image," he said, smiling. "How did he come to get away from you?"

He saw that her skirts were dusty; a patch on her shoulder spoke eloquently of a fall.

"I reckon he must have thrown you," he said.

"Yes," she admitted, without turning her head.

"You didn't get hurt?" he questioned.

"I imagine you wouldn't care much," she returned. "Any man who will sit and watch a woman in distress—"

"Why, Miss, I—"

"—and laugh at her because she lost her temper for a moment, couldn't feel very-sorry for her if—"

"I was so amused at you, Miss. It was the—"

"—if she broke her neck," she finished, turning abruptly around and facing him, her eyes filled with hot resentment.

"Why, Miss, I didn't know he had thrown you. I don't want you to break your neck. If I had known he had thrown you, I would have caught him before this. He's an outlaw, Miss, and he deserved all the things you said about him."

SHE rose from the rock and stood erect, looking at him spiritedly.

"I suppose you know that he won't let me catch him?" she said.

"Well, I couldn't help but see that," he returned, grinning. "But I think I can."

"It's a wonder you thought of that," she said sarcastically. "But perhaps you thought that I could walk home?"

He was back in the saddle gain. "Horses are like men," he said gravely, "and women. They take streaks. But sometimes they're not real mean. They're only putting it on."

He spurred his horse after the miscreant, leaving her, with his last words, without a defence. It took him one time to catch the animal, but presently she saw him coming back, leading the horse, the latter now docile and wearing a most guileless expression,

"I thank you." she said. "I suppose I have treated you very badly. But I was very nervous and worried. Won't you forgive me?"

He smiled. "There is nothing to forgive, and I should not have acted the fool. But you are not going without letting me know who you are?" he said, looking frankly at her.

"Why, no." She smiled again. "I am Alice Burrows. My father owns Wandabilla station."

She saw a flush mount to his forehead. But he smiled.

"I'm Bill Grant," he returned. "I'm working over at Coreen Downs."

He was silent for a moment while she arranged her skirts preparatory to departure. Then he spurred his horse closer.

"Miss Burrows," he said, "things are pretty quiet over at Coreen Downs. I don't suppose there's much doing at Wandabilla, either?"

She considered him for a moment. "We are very busy," she returned.

"Father said yesterday that it would take him all his time to get the mustering done before the drovers arrived to take a mob south. It's awfully hard target good station hands."

He contemplated her for a moment. Then he smiled gravely. " I'm coming over to Wandabilla to-morrow to get a job," he said quietly. "I like you real well.  When we've got better acquainted I'm going to marry you."

She stared with surprise, her eyes mocking him.

"You are?" she said Incredulously. "I suppose I'm to have nothing to say about that?"

He had urged his horse around, and now regarded her over his shoulder. "Of course, you'll have something to say," he said, looking earnestly at her, "but you are going to say 'yes.' "

"Well, now," she mocked, as she pulled tightly upon the reins. But she heard the clatter of his horse's hoofs as he departed up the slope that he had descended to come to her assistance.

ON the morning of a day nearly a month later, Arthur Burrows, owner of Wandabilla station, was sitting, at a window of his office, overlooking the mustering yards. Presently he rose and walked to a door that led to somewhere within the house.

"Alice!" he called. There was a short wait, and then the door opened, and Miss Burrows stood in the opening.

"Come in," invited Burrows.

The young woman seated herself beside the window where she could see the men at work in the yards.

"Do you see that young man out there rounding up those cattle?" said Burrows.

"Of course." Miss Burrows blushed. "What's his name?"

"Grant," returned Miss Burrows, her face averted.

"H'm," grunted Burrows. He twirled his thumbs over one another. "You know his name all right, don't you?"

Miss Burrows nodded. And now she turned and looked her father squarely in the face.

"Well?" she said. "I've seen him and you running together a good deal during the past three weeks. What does it mean?"

"It means, Daddy," Miss Burrows said, "that I love Mr. Grant. I am going to marry him—if you don't mind."

BURROWS looked out of the window.

"If I don't mind, eh?" he said. "You're going to marry him —if I don't mind." He turned and looked at her. "What do you know about him?" he snapped.

"I know that he is a gentleman," declared the young lady. Burrows smiled. "They're all that— when you're in love," he said. "But what I want to know is this. What was he before he came to Wandabilla, and where did he come from?"

She flushed.

"I imagine he was always a station hand," she returned. "He came here from Coreen Downs."

"Coreen Downs!" snapped Burrows. He brought a fist heavily down on the table before him. "How in the name of goodness did he have the nerve to work here?" he demanded. "Why didn't I ask him before I gave him employment? This wouldn't have happened. I never thought it would happen."

"Why, father—" began Miss Burrows. But her father held up a warning hand. His anger had left him as suddenly as it had come, and he was now very calm.

"Alice," he said, "perhaps I ought to have told you before. Twenty years ago Evans, who owned Coreen Downs, got away with fifty of my poddies one dark night. They didn't do him much good, because he's dead, but some day I'm going to get those poddies back again. I never spoke to Evans after that, but his boy, who owns a station somewhere down South is also the owner of Coreen Downs. I've heard that he is going to sell it, and I hope he does."

"I don't see how that affects Mr. Grant," interposed Miss Burrows.

"It should not do so," admitted Burrows, after a moment's thought, "but I've always held bitter feelings against any one connected with Coreen Downs."

"I'm sure that if you talked to Mr. Grant you would decide differently," suggested Miss Burrows. "He's one of the nicest men " She blushed furiously. and averted her head as her father looked curiously at her.

"I'm going to talk to him," he said suddenly. He rose and went to the door.

"Grant!" he called. "Grant!"

PRESENTLY the tall young man of the river incident came into the room. He stood just inside the door, his lithe figure erect, his eyes alight with a curious expression of inquiry. He did not look toward Miss Burrows, but she cast furtive glances at him.

"Grant," said Burrows, "why didn't you tell me that you came from Coreen Downs?"

"My recollection is that you didn't ask me," returned the young man.

"But you did come from there?"

"I certainly did."

Burrows faced the young man squarely. "Did you know old Evans?"

Grant nodded.

"Did you know that he and I never got along well together?"

"I've heard about that."

"Hm! If you knew that why did you come her to work?"

The young man smiled. "I came over to marry Alice," he said quietly.

Burrows drummed absently on the table top for a moment, while Grant and Miss Burrows exchanged dubious glances. Then Burrows spoke again.

"Young man," he said, "I've been watching you ever since you've been here. You're one of the those men that don't let anything get between them and a thing they want. I feel sure you'd do almost anything to get Alice?"

"I'd steal cattle for her," stated the young man. He bowed to Alice.

"When I was a youngster," went on Burrows, "I read a story in a book. It was a fairy tale. In the story the fairy told the prince, who was wanting to get married to the girl, that he must do a certain thing before the girl could ever belong to him. It was climbing a glass mountain, or swimming a lake of fire, or something like that. But whatever it was the prince got the girl. They always do in the fairy tales.

"But this is no fairy tale. It's real life, and what I'm going to ask you to do before I say you can have Alice I know cannot be done. But if you're determined to have Alice you can try. I'm telling you beforehand that it cannot be done, because I don't want you to come back here and make any excuses about it. It's this:

"TWENTY years ago old Evans lifted a lot of my unbranded calves. I swore I'd get the same number of cattle back from him some day, and I ain't changed my mind. Since he's died his son, who has a station down south somewhere, is going to run Coreen Downs, too. I've heard that the son hates me just as much as the old man did. Now, as I've said before, I haven't changed my mind about them calves. It's fifty miles from here to Coreen Downs. It will take one day for you to go there and two more days for you to drive fifty head of prime cattle. back to this station. That's three days."

"Now, I'm saying this," he continued, "if you start now and drive fifty head of cattle from Coreen Downs into my yards before sundown on the third day you get Alice. Otherwise, you don't want to waste any time grazing on this  property. Are you saying anything?" he concluded.

The young man smiled. "You won't go back on that?" he said.

"I will not," returned Burrows quietly, "but they have got to come from Coreen Downs. And you've got to bring an agreement along, showing that old Evans's son is giving me those cattle of his own free will in return for the calves I lost years ago." He laughed again. "I reckon you'll find climbing glass mountains or swimming lakes of fire is child's play compared to What I'm asking you to do."

The young man turned to Alice, "I'm going to Coreen Downs," he said, "On the third day I'll be back here."

FROM his office window at three o'clock on the afternoon of the third day Burrows saw a dust cloud growing larger on the horizon, and half an hour later he could make out a number of dots stringing out over the plain.

"Dash him." he said, "I'm glad he's, coming back. Alice likes him a terrible lot. It beats me why a woman will sit and mourn and worry about a man who goes away like he did." He reached for his pipe, searched in his pocket for a match, lighted it, and smoked in silence. Presently, looking out of the window, he saw Alice. She, too, was gazing at the dots on the horizon, shading her eyes with her hands. Burrows-leaned out of the window.

"Alice!" he called. She came eagerly forward, her eyes aflame with excitement. "He's coming, Alice," said Burrows. She came into the room and stood beside him, her hands resting on the back of his chair. Together they watched the cattle driven into the yards by Grant and two aboriginal stockmen. Then they saw Grant dismount from his horse and stride boldly towards the house.

In a brief time there was a movement at the door, and the young man stood in the opening, his face wreathed in a broad grin. He smiled at Alice and walked to the table to lay a sheet of paper in front of Burrows. Looking over her father's shoulder Alice could see that the paper concerned the transfer of a number of cattle, but with a great fear clutching at her heart she saw that the name "Evans" was missing from it. She waited breathlessly.

Burrows leaned back in his chair, his eyes narrowing as they rested with a steady glance on Grant.

"YOU'VE brought fifty head of cattle," he said to the young man. "I counted them when you drove them into the yards. So far everything is all right. But young Evans's name ain't there. This deal is not through until it is there."

There was a grim quality in Burrows' voice that brought a pallor to Alice's face.

"Daddy—" she began.

But Grant smiled. "Have you got a pen here?" he said. Burrows reached in a drawer for one. The young man took it, and, drawing the paper to him, scrawled "William Grant Evans."

Miss Burrows reddened. "Why—" she began.

The young man turned an embarrassed face to her. "You had to know it some time," he said. "But I wanted to tell you in my own way. I didn't lie very hard," he pleaded. "Meeting you so suddenly was enough to make any man forget the truth for a time. You see—"

Burrows had reached into another drawer and drawn out a photograph. He silently passed it to young Evans. The latter took it, scanned it rapidly, and then looked down at Burrows in surprise.

"Why, it's dad!" he said.

Burrows smiled.

"Yes, it's your dad." he returned evenly, "I've had it for 20 years. It's a little faded, but it's clear enough to see that when your dad was your age he was as so much like you as are two peas in the same pod. When you asked me for a job a month ago I knew who you were right away, and I knew, too, that you hadn't come over here to handle cattle. Then I saw you with Alice a good deal, and I knew what you came for."

HE laughed, turning to Alice, and regarding her with whimsical smile. "But I hadn't forgotten about those fifty calves your dad pinched from me, so I sent you after the cattle that would make up for their loss." He smiled genially at Evans. "My word, you'd have made a fine prince in one of those fairy tales. You've got nerve enough to climb a glass, mountain, or to swim across a lake of fire, or to fight dragons with a tin sword. But I don't know how you came to think I wouldn't know you— you're the picture of your dad. I thought you'd be afraid—"

"I was— a little," smiled Evans. He moved a step toward Alice.  Burrows smiled when he saw the movement.

"I don't think you're afraid of anything, young man," he said. "What you need—"

"Is Alice," grinned Evans. "Do I get her?"

"I reckon," returned Burrows, "no use me objecting. You've got Alice and I've got the cattle to make up for the calves I lost. Glass mountains and lakes of fire and objecting dads don't amount to much when a man's determined." He smiled. "Like the prince and the girl in the fairy tale, you've got my blessing."

_______________

12: The Pink Death

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 18 Feb 1928

IT was the very last day. The deck the lugger was littered with shells, in the midst of which sat Armstrong.  The treasure hunt was still fresh and fascinating to him, and whenever he found a tiny pearl he whooped with delight. But the operation had lost its charm for Hennings. He had fished this very lagoon before the war and had lost every penny he possessed. Then he had enlisted.

After the war he had returned, to the northern pearling waters with young Armstrong, his old school friend. They had hired the lugger at Thursday Island, and had arranged that the value of the shell should be divided equally, but that each should take in turn the entire catch of pearls on alternate days.

And the luck had all been with Armstrong. His share was thrice that of his partner, and his luck seemed holding to the last, for this last day was his.

The afternoon sun blazed down on the motionless deck, on the oily sea. Through the smoke of his cigarette Hennings gazed vaguely across the sea, and he was disgusted with his luck. At a suppressed exclamation from Armstrong he turned to look. A gigantic, knobby shell which the boy had just opened lay beside him on the deck, and in his hand he was holding a small, pear-shaped object of a pale, but indescribably rich rose colour that glistened softly in the sunlight. It was by far the largest pearl they had found, and its peculiar colour would greatly increase its value. Hennings estimated that it would bring £800, to £1,000 at least, and it had come just in time to fill Armstrong's luck to overflowing.

He examined the. beautiful pearl and then his eye fell on the shell from which it had been taken. Hennings looked at it-sharply, picked it-up. and scrutinised its ridged  surface with care. He then dropped  it again and his face hardened.

As he threw the shell down, the great pearl escaped from his fingers and dropped over the lugger's side. Armstrong bounded up with an agonised yell. But the pearl had not gone to the bottom. A dingy was lying alongside and the jewel had fallen into it, and lay shining softly in three inches of water. A Kanaka climbed down and brought it on board again. Armstrong pocketed it immediately. They found no more pearls that day, and they sailed for Thursday Island the next morning, with the lugger's hold full of shell. Each of the men had concealed his pearls in canvas pockets tacked under his berth.

That night they ran into heavy weather, but Armstrong's boyish enthusiasm caused him to remain on deck all night. About three in the morning he went below to look at the barometer. He swayed into the cabin as the lugger plunged wildly, and then stopped short. Under the irregular light of the swinging lamp, Hennings was kneeling in front of Armstrong's berth, balancing himself easily as the floor heaved beneath him. His hand was feeling for the canvas pocket in which his friend's pearls were concealed. His back was toward the door.

The boy stood in growing horror.-He returned softly on deck, and after a. discreet interval returned to the cabin. He found Hennings in his bunk, rubbing his eyes as if just awakened.

Armstrong could not comprehend it at all. It was impossible to conceive that Hennings should descend to larceny from a friend— but he had the evidence of his eyes. From that night he altered his hiding place.

Imperceptibly and involuntarily a constraint, grew between the two men. From Thursday Island they took the first steamer to Sydney. During the voyage the partners avoided one another almost instinctively, and they were both glad when they reached Sydney. Hennings sold his pearls for £600, which was more than he had- expected. But the thought of the great pink pearl clung to him like an obsession. He had not seen Armstrong since landing, and he did not know what had become of the pearl.

A knot of people were gathered before the window of a jewellery shop in Pitt Street, and Hennings glanced in as he passed. There, upon a cushion of black velvet shone a splendid necklace of perfect white pearls with a single enormous pink pearl as the pendant. Hennings recognised it instantly. There could be no other like it in Sydney, and he went into the shop. The necklace, he was informed, had been made for Mrs. Leonard Peck. The jeweller added that Mrs. Peck particularly desired that it be finished and delivered in time for her party on the following evening. Hennings had known Mrs. Leonard Peck slightly in the past. She was a plump, amiable, foolish, blonde widow of thirty-five, immensely rich from the departed Peck's sheep stations, and inordinately fond of showy jewellery, and of filling her house to suffocation with people she scarcely knew.

Next evening, he got into his dress suit, ordered a car, and was driven to Mrs. Peck's. residence. As he had expected, the guests were arriving in crowds. Mrs. Peck was receiving, very décolleté, with a marvellous coiffure, and around her white neck softly glowed the new necklace, with the great pink pendant reposing on her satiny bosom.

Hennings hardly knew anyone in the crowded rooms. Presently, to his surprise, he encountered Armstrong, and they chatted a few minutes; then Hennings moved on. Later he approached Mrs. Peck as she fanned herself,   surrounded by an admiring group. She was supporting the pink pearl in her hand, and it seemed to Hennings that it glowed with a deeper red.

"Do you know it almost frightens me," she was saying, with a little laugh. "It actually, seems to be growing hot; it burns me. Of course, it's only my imagination—"

The sentence ended in a little shriek. Hennings had pushed brusquely through the group, seized the pendant without a word, and snapped its gold clasps. Mrs. Peck screamed again; then there was, a rush to her assistance, but in the first moment of noncompreherision Hennings had almost gained the door.

"Stop him!" a dozen, men were shouting. Before he could reach the exit ho was seized. He struggled to free himself, but more men hurried up, and he was held fast. By a supreme effort he managed, to released his right arm for a moment, and endeavoured to fling the pearl through the window, but almost at the moment it left his hand it exploded with a blinding flash. His captors staggered back, half stunned. The room Was filled with an acrid odour of strange gas, but no smoke. The shock had broken the nearest window, but no one appeared: to have been seriously hurt; except Hennings, who was lying bleeding and insensible on the carpet.

He was carried into one of the bedrooms, and an attempt was made to revive him. His neck and his right arm were badly lacerated, but by some miracle he seemed to have escaped any deadly injury. As his eyes opened, his glance fell vaguely upon Mrs. Peck at the foot of the bed. She had revived from her collapse into a state of daze and bewilderment. Armstrong was standing by the pillow, wearing an appearance of anxious non-comprehension— an expression, in fact, which was common to every face in the room.

Hennings smiled weakly,, and seemed to try to pull, himself;, together.

"Now do you understand?" he said, a little faintly to his old friend. "This is what I was trying to save you from.

"I know you saw me in the cabin that night," he continued. "I couldn't tell you about it then. It was too incredible.

"You know I was there before in that lagoon. Sharky Seeby was working in  the same waters, and he was a pearl pirate. He bribed my divers and then took them away from me. He cleaned me clean out. I had to leave; but I fixed things up to get even with him; I never told you I that part. I wasn't very proud of it.

"You remember manganite, that new explosive that came out about that time? It was about ten times as powerful as dynamite, but it would explode only under a long continued, and very gentle warmth. Well, I got a little bit of  it, and made it into a ball, and covered it with red wax. I went back to my  lagoon and found that Seeby had a pearling lugger there already, so I had to do the business at night. I fished up the biggest oyster I could find, opened it, and put the jump of wax inside. You know the Chinese make pearls that way. Then I sunk it again. I reckoned that it would be a pearl in six months.

"I knew Seeby would never sell such a pearl as that would be. He would wear it, or give it to his wife, and the mere warmth of the body would be enough to explode it in an evening. Oh, it was a devilish thing to do, but I was crazy. I'd been robbed of all I had.

"I never heard of the thing again until we fished it up. I recognised the shell by a funny, half-moon shaped mark on it, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't dare to tell my yarn; it sounded too utterly mad— and I didn't care to show myself such a brute, anyway. I came near delaying too long. In another minute, Mrs. Peck would have lost her pearl and her life at once. Now do you see why I wanted to steal your pearl?" he added, glancing up at Armstrong, and holding out his uninjured left hand, which the boy grasped without a word.

Mrs. Peck did not know what to say. She was vaguely conscious that her life had been saved by this young man, who had told the disagreeable story of manganite and revenge, but she was shocked at the whole atmosphere of the thing. And she had been robbed, besides, and she murmured plaintively:

"And it was such a beautiful pearl!"

__________________

13: Fingers of Death

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 10 Nov 1923

THERE is horror enough on land, with its desolate valleys and dark forests, but far worse, I say, in the clutching terror of the sea, with the heartless loneliness of it all. It's man to man there under the empty sky; and the men on the phantom ships below are always singing their harbinger of death in the still night. I have always found it so.

I had signed as second mate on the island barque Sulu Maid, and I'll say for her that a neater, tighter little craft never skipped out of Sydney Harbour. Her captain— may the saints pity him— was a fiend if ever one trod a deck. He was known from Samarai to Samoa as a devil, and a driver, and his crews, poor dogs, were always made up of deserters from the service and sulking derelicts without soul who would sail a ship to hell for a glass of rum.

How could I know Durkin? I was far off my usual course in Sydney, with not a berth in sight; so when the old man offered me a chance as second mate I couldn't sign quick enough. We were bound for the Solomons to lift a cargo of copra, and we got under way with a bowling wind behind us that lasted well out to sea. Everything was trim, and it looked to be a good run. The crew mustered nine men, five of them Australians, one Englishman and one Portuguese; an unlikely lot they were, too, but tolerable seamen.

Besides the old man, the mate and myself, there was a boy to wait on the table in the after cabin, and to save the officers from dirty work, I reckon. I've sailed with men of every country, but I couldn't name the land that cabin-boy came from, and he wasn't telling. He was the most silent, hermit-like human I over saw on board ship. You'll find a lot like that ashore, but you'd think the loneliness and hard life afloat would draw them out. But not him. He didn't give any odds, and he wasn't asking any (not that he would have been likely to get any mercy on a ship like the Sulu Maid.)

I never knew the boy's name. The whole crew called him "Pedro." He might have been sixteen or forty, for all we knew and for all he said about it. He had a thin grey face with a sharp, knife-like nose, and parchment skin. His lips were thin and white, and were always writhing and licking in a horrible leer, which was a thousand times worse on account of a paralysis of one eye, which would suddenly dip out of focus with the other, and then slip back again.

In spite of his evil looks and disposition, he might have got by without arousing any particular wonder, if it hadn't been for his left hand, which had but three fingers. They hadn't been cut off, either; he was born that way, and it seemed as if his fingers had grown and his hand hadn't, for his hand was small and shrivelled, whereas his fingers were long and hairy. It resembled the talon of some monster bird of prey, and he had a peculiar habit of holding the hand on his chest just below his throat, and twisting and stretching those fingers until it made your flesh creep to watch him. I've never seen a mere repulsive  human. No wonder he couldn't feel sociable with other men.

To see him sneaking about the docks, his feet making no more noise than a cat's, and his face darting up sideways to give a glimpse of his weird face, and his crippled hand busy at his throat, reminded you of some strange, ghoulish animal that you didn't dare turn your back on. I remember once waking up suddenly from a sound sleep, after a hard watch, and finding that leering death's head staring at me, ten feet away. I stared up in a cold sweat and cursed him out of the cabin, but I couldn't sleep any more that night.

Even Durkin, who was said to fear nothing on God's earth, didn't relish that cabin boy. He seldom beat or kicked, him, and the boy probably got less ill-treatment than any one of the men forward, who all knew the weight of the old man's fist before we had been out a day. However, Durkin took it out in cursing him, and the more indifferent Pedro seemed to the captain's oaths, the more fervently he was cursed. The captain took a barbarous delight in devising oaths to torment the boy on his weird appearance and especially about the claw of a hand. When the poor wretch came within range of the captain's curses, he displayed no feeling, unless it was that his lips twisted a little more than usual and the three fingers writhed more feverishly than ordinarily.

As I said, the voyage promised to be a good one, and Matthews, the mate, and I, were congratulating ourselves on the uneventfulness of the log, when, four days out of Sydney, the captain began drinking, and from then on it was a different ship— a floating hell.

There is nothing worse than a drunken skipper, especially if he is a man of Durkin's type. Matthews and I saw trouble ahead and we ventured to argue with him, but we might as well have talked to the phosphorescence in our wake. He looked at us for a minute out of his sot's eyes, and then told us to mind our own business. He was captain on his own ship and he'd brook no interference from a couple of lubberly upstarts. So we gave up trying, to remonstrate with him, and hoped for good winds and a quick run to the Islands.

One morning the captain staggered aft to the cabin after his watch was up. Tho wind was blowing fairly hard, and coming as it was, in gusts and flaws, it was a hard job to keep the ship from losing headway. The rain had been coming down in torrents all night, and Durkin had resorted pretty often to the rum, so by morning he was very drunk and very irritable.

As he lurched down the companion-way, he tripped over Pedro, who was unfortunate enough to have gone to sleep just at the foot of the ladder. The captain turned around, cursing, and kicked the boy with his heavy sea boot. Pedro sprang up, grimacing as usual, and holding his side. I reckon some of his ribs must have been broken. The captain kicked him again, knocking him against the cabin wall, where he crouched without a sound, feeling his throat with his lame hand. He didn't say a word or utter a groan, but the leer on his face was unearthly.

The captain looked at him for a minute and then turned away; Pedro crept noiselessly up the ladder. After that he was pretty careful to give the old man a wide berth, and the latter, being always drunk, didn't go out of his way to molest him.

The boy grow weaker, and also thinner. If that could be. I tried to get him to let me look at his injury, but he just snarled at me and limped away, so I let him alone. He never took his eyes off the captain when he was within sight of him, but followed him with a look that can't be expressed. It was too strong for hate; it was a kind of Inhuman eagerness, like that of a snake. If Durkin hadn't been too drunk to see, he might well have feared it.

As luck would have it, Pedro chanced to come within reach of the old man when the latter was just fighting drunk. Before he could get out of the way, the captain had knocked him down and kicked him into the scuppers, where he lay motionless.

He was such a hulk of skin and bones before, that I was looking for serious consequences if Durkin should beat him again. I walked over to the spot, and was pretty well wrought up to find that Pedro would never get up again. The ship fell off a point just then, and the moonlight got down into the dark spot where he lay, and I saw the most shivering sight that ever blasted a man's eyes.

That hideous face, spattered with blood, and blue as my coat, was contorted into an expression that makes my blood turn cold to think on. It was a look that I'll swear was never seen on a man's face before.

I started back when I saw it, and I could feel the hair rising on my cold scalp, and a lump of fear in my throat I tried to close those staring white eyes, but it was no good. Then I calmed down and called the mate. He was taken worse than I was when he saw it, and said with his teeth chattering:

"There'll be hell to pay for this, man." He looked aft. "The bloody devil!"

We covered the body with a tarpaulin and laid it amidships. Matthews and I agreed not to say anything to the captain, but to let the law take its course. We were determined that we would not defend the murderer. The next day we told the men, but one of them had seen the whole thing, and it was common property. We laid Pedro out, uglier a thousand times than he ever was alive, and the men got canvas and needles to get him ready for his last cruise.

Just at that minute, the captain staggered forward with blood in his eye. One glance at the thing on the deck turned him crazy, and be sprang into the midst of the circle, swearing and raving, and picking the body up, he started to hurl it out over the rail. Strange enough, Pedro's three fingers caught like a hook in the captain's throat. He screamed and struck at them, and then we heard the splash below.

The men stood as if petrified for a second, then they rushed to the side, to find— what we already knew— the corpse was floating. Durkin had gone aft again, and the crew went about their work with white faces and trembling hands, because sailormen know that a ship is cursed if a dead man is given to the fishes without a burial and a shot at his feet.

After that day, Durkin drank no more. I don't know whether his rum had given out, or whether he was afraid of what he saw when he was drunk; but anyway he was sober and haggard. He left the handling of the ship to the mate and myself, and kept pretty much to his cabin. When he did go out on deck 'he seemed uneasy, and kept glancing over his shoulder as If he thought someone was following him. Then he used to sneak up to Matthews and me and get chummy. He told us stories of phantom ships, and asked us if we believed in spirits and the like. I never saw a man change so. He was like a whipped cur.

One night he came on deck, looking even more drawn than usual, and said he was going aloft to let the wind clear his head.  After he had clambered up the ratlines, Matthews and I stood talking, and speculating on the chances of a good wind.

"From the  looks of the moon," he was saying, "I look for a—"

He got no farther. A long shuddering scream grated our very souls. We looked up into the dark mass of canvas overhead. for we knew a man screams like that only once.

A whirling black hulk dropped , like a stone from the rigging and crashed on the deck with a crunching, grinding sound. We rushed to it. Yes, it was Durkin— dead. His face was grey mottled with black, and was twisted into a form that I'll swear was like that death mask of Pedro's.

I heard a gasp of horror. Matthews was pointing to the dead man's throat with a shaking hand. There, in three distinct black lines, were— the prints of three fingers.

___________________

14:  The Green Umbrella

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 8 Jan 1921

SINCE 1870 there have been many changes in Sydney, and the establishment of J. Hicks, licensed pawn-broker, suffered with the passing of the years. The once dignified reserve of its windows had given place to the cheap allurements of unredeemed pledges, frankly offered for sale. Within dirt and decay had made their home in every corner of its neglected premises. In fifty years many things had come into the little shop and gone again. Love and joy and death and bitterness, and pledges innumerable, waning with the years from the dignity of watches and wedding rings to the degradation of flat-irons and bed blankets. And it had somehow gradually come about, through some resultant twist in the old man's mind, that, in a general way, he preferred his pledges to his money, that he re-linquished them often with manifest regret, and that certain immemorial items of collateral upon his shelves, representing money hopelessly lost to him, had become nevertheless the source of profound satisfaction.

Such was No. 831 as it stood entered upon his books. Commercially regarded, No. 831 was a green silk umbrella, with a heavy metal handle of considerable intrinsic value; sentimentally, it stood for Hicks' oldest and dearest friend; psychologically, it supplied him, other motives being lacking, with something to live for.

Its history was a simple one, but of quite exceptional interest. It had been pawned one morning in the early years of his business life by a respectable elderly man, who, after some haggling, accepted for it the sum of fifteen shillings. With this sum and the customary ticket, he went out of Hicks' shop, and was never seen again there or elsewhere.

Nearly a year from the date of this transaction, and just before the expiration of the term of the loan, a young-man had turned up, and had inquired with evident anxiety regarding the pledged umbrella. His description was accurate, and Hicks had no difficulty in identifying the article, and no reason for denying its possession.

"It is most important," said the young man, "for— for family reasons, that this article be redeemed. There is no objection, I presume, to my paying the loan and interest, on behalf of my— my relative, and taking the property out of your hands?"

"None whatever," said Hicks, "provided you have the ticket." "Surely that is unimportant," urged the stranger, "so that you get your money. Sup-pose we say double the amount, by way of penalty for my carelessness in having lost the ticket."

"That won't do," said the pawn broker. "Suppose it turned up?"

"But it can't turn up,'' said the young man earnestly. "It is at the bottom of the sea with the man to whom you gave it."

"How can you prove that to me?" said Hicks. "No, no, my friend, I must have my ticket."

"But the thing is worthless— I will pay you ten times the loan to safe-guard you against any claim— twenty times! Good God!" he cried excitedly. "I must have it, man; more depends upon it than you know."

But Hicks was obdurate, and the stranger, after having exhausted his stock of argument, entreaty, and pecuniary temptation, finally went away.

When he had gone, the pawnbroker took down the umbrella from its shelf and examined it with a new interest. It was an excellent umbrella, solidly respectable as to handle and stoutly serviceable as to fabric, yet scarcely deserving the valuation the young man had put upon it. Doubtless its value was sentimental merely; and yet— the claimant had been strangely eager. There was some mystery about it. Well, in thirty days it might be solved, for if, as the young man had said, its owner and the ticket were both at the bottom of the sea, the umbrella would become his when the loan matured.

But the matter turned out by no means so simple. Two days before the loan matured, the young man returned, clearly fortified with a better knowledge of the business and of his powers and privileges, paid the interest on the loan for another year, and thus renewed the matter for that period. Hicks accepted the money with an odd sense of defeat and discomfiture, and when his visitor had gone away with his receipt, he again took down the umbrella, spread it, and, seating himself beneath its superfluous shade, pondered deeply upon its mystery, but to no sort of satisfactory result.

"At least," he said to himself, as he closed and replaced it, "possession is nine points, even if he has scored one."

In twelve month's more, just as Hicks' imagination was beginning to hover in close circles about his mysterious pledge, the young man again returned and renewed the loan as before, after again trying vainly to negotiate its surrender.

In another twelve-month the same performance took place, and again at the fourth and fifth anniversaries of the transaction. Each year Hicks' visitor looked thinner and more careworn, and his argument grew more languid and perfunctory, but if his pursuit was less eager it was not less persistent, and, each annual recurrence of the date found him promptly on hand to protect his mysterious interests.

Between whiles the pawnbroker never saw him or heard from him, but there was scarcely a day that he did not think of him and of his pursuit, and scarcely a week that, in an ecstasy of baffled curiosity and greed— for to his inflated imagination the simple umbrella had become the key to treasures untold— he did not take down the article and reexamine it, rap it, sound it, rattle it, feel its fabric inch by inch, and, upon occasion, curse its silent secretiveness in good set terms.

Its metal head was large and heavy, solid, apparently, to all tests that he dared make, and cast or carved at the top into the semblance of a grotesque head with staring, deep-set eyes. Cut or otherwise invade the substance of stick or handle he dared not, as a matter of professional scruple, and, finally, noting that his frequent handling was causing signs of wear, he was forced, for the same reason, to deny himself altogether the futile pleasure of touching it, save upon rare and eagerly anticipated occasions.

Thus time went on, the young man still coming doggedly year after year, every season older and greyer, soon a middle aged man, by and by an old man, older than his years, shabbier than once, and feebler, but still unfailing in patience. He was always safely in time with his payment, but occasionally a little later than usual, because, perhaps, he had to journey far, or because money was scarce, and he had trouble to get even the poor sum needed to protect the pledge.

Meanwhile the pawnbroker lived in a state of eager anticipation, the more controlling that it was utterly undefined. Each year was to him a crescendo of hope, ending in sharp disappointment. His life and its affairs went on merely as the left-hand part or accompaniment to the air provided by the disputed umbrella.

Thus half a century went by, and as the fiftieth anniversary of what had now come to be the chief event of his life, approached. Hicks felt a livelier hope than its usual stir within him. His annual visitor had seemed unusually feeble at the time of his last visit, and the chance that he could have survived appeared comfortably remote. A conviction that at length the mystery of so many years would be somehow revealed to him penetrated the old pawnbroker's mind, and as the critical date, approached, he felt an almost youthful eagerness of anticipation. As a rule his visitor had turned up a day or, two earlier than was necessary, but this year he had not appeared on the morning of the final day.

By the terms of the loan the owner's rights expired at noon, and as that hour approached, Hicks took down the umbrella with an unsteady hand and deliberated upon a plan of investigation. He had amply provided himself with tools, and only awaited liberty to use them. One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Nine! Ten! Eleven! Twelve!

Hicks had selected a cold chisel from his lay-out, and was poising a hammer to strike, when a shadow fell upon his desk, and a familiar voice said: "Yes, you've won. I haven't the price. I've tried hard, but when one hasn't money to pay for food, even bigger things must go."

Hicks paused in his work and looked at his visitor. He was pale and emaciated, and could hardly stand from weakness. What little life was left him burned in his eyes, with which he eagerly stared at the article for which the two had so long contended.

"Let me show you," he said. "There is an easier way."

He took the umbrella from Hicks, and, inserting an awl in one eye of the carved face on the umbrella, with this leverage easily unscrewed the top, to the pawnbroker's amazement and disgust.

The cavity thus discovered contained only a piece of folded paper, yellow with age. Upon this Hicks pounced with a kind of whine of animal greed and satisfaction. But the stranger's hand fell upon his with an energy of which his feeble body scarcely seemed capable.

"Don't touch it!" he cried. "For God's sake don't. It is nothing— nothing to you; to me it is so much. No," he urged, as Hicks strove to with draw his prize. "Not yet, at any rate. Not until you have heard my story."

He sank into a chair, his hand still grasping Hicks' wrist, and went on passionately:

"It belonged to her father— this umbrella. He was my employer. I loved his daughter, and she loved me. But be found, it out, and forbade me his house-  forbade, me to think of her. But I wouldn't give her up, and she wouldn't give me up, and so we used to write one another every day, and send the letters back and forth in this umbrella handle. The old man always carried it, wet or dry, and I used to watch my chance during the day and unscrew the top when he was out of the office, and put in my letter, and she did the same at home. It seemed a great joke then to make him our post man. Good God! What a joke it turned out."

Hicks slowly withdrew his hand, leaving the yellow paper between them on the desk.

"Business went wrong," continued the stranger after a pause. "The old man got involved worse and worse, tried the wrong way out of it, and had to skip. He realised on every thing he had— even this, as it turned out — and left within two days, taking her with him. They sailed for England on the Ginerva— you remember?— she was never heard from— never even spoken. And never a word from her— it was all so sudden— I knew that— but something might have been done — I couldn't understand— I think I went pretty near out of my mind. My body just went round without me, somehow, for months, doing the old things without my knowing anything about it, when all at once I thought of the old 'umbrella post,' as we used to call it. It was a chance. Perhaps she didn't have any other. All their things had been scattered by sale, but I hunted and hunted. There were a hundred chances that he had taken it with him, but I took the one that he hadn't. By and by I thought of the pawn shops, and went the rounds. I think yours was about the last, and when I got my eyes on the old thing, it was like coming home. But the ticket stuck me, and I couldn't tell my story to such a man as you were then. You've changed a good deal in fifty years."

He paused and looked longingly at the letter.

"That's what I wanted. I knew it was there. Her last letter to me. The last one she ever wrote. It made me wild at first to think that if I could only get my hands on the thing for a minute, I could have it out. But you never let me touch it. What'd you think it was— money?"

The pawnbroker nodded.

"Money!" cried the other. "I've wanted money pretty bad, but never the way I wanted that letter. But I couldn't seem to tell at first, and by and by, when I got to know it was there, waitin' for me, it didn't seem to matter much, so that I could keep it safe. And I have!" he cried. "And here it is."

"Fifty years," exclaimed Hicks. "You damned old fool! Why didn't you tell me this fifty years ago?"

And, pushing the letter toward his companion, he turned away. With a little weak moan of satisfaction the stranger seized the paper and carefully opened it. It may have been five minutes before the old pawnbroker ventured to turn and look at him.

He sat just as he had left him, huddled together in his chair, the letter in his hand, his chin on his breast— dead.

_______________

15: The Pearler of Pomete

Australasian (Melbourne) 17 March 1923

"WHAT MAKES them call him shark proof?'' I asked, sprawled naked on the Island Belle's deck beneath the stars.

Blake removed the blackened pipe from his tight old mouth.

"There's a reason for the natives doing it," he said. "The reason being that it looks like he is shark-proof. There's probably more good pearls in the lagoon at Pomete Island than anywhere else in this Low Archipelago— also more sharks. On account of which latter the islanders never could have any luck at all diving there. After feasting the man eaters for half a century or so, they finally stopped and declared the lagoon taboo, and for more than ten years now they've been scared to so much as wet it toe in it. Some time after they gave up the business along comes this Bullet and settled there— the only white. He learned how to dive, and he's been reaping a neat little harvest ever since."

"I should imagine," I said, "with no competition."

The skipper nodded. "None at all. And somehow Bullett ain't afraid of the sharks. What's the reason? Mainly rum, I reckon. He stays drunk always. But then a white man has naturally got more nerve than a Kanaka, and Bullett has got more than the average white man, I reckon, also an over-share of good luck. He tells me he's never been so much as nibbled by a shark but once. And he's scooped off the bottom of that lagoon some pearls as pretty as you'd care to set an eye on. I know; I've bought most of them. Last Christmas he got a beauty. And those dumb-headed natives still stand round and watch him get rich, and believe he's got some sort of fancy magic that makes him shark-proof."

"Well, it is sort of queer, eh?" I remarked. "Just why do you suppose he can get pearls when the natives—?"

"Bah!' Blake interrupted. "I've already said the reason— damn-fool nerve, a lot of good rum, and a lot of good luck. I don't particularly approve of a man staying drunk all the time, but I can't help saying Bullett's got the stuff. Why, I've I seen him go down with hungry sharks all over the place, and—"

A rain and wind squall that had been brewing to south'ard suddenly gave evidences of coming our way. The Island Belle's canvas bellied, and she heeled. A few of the stars winked out. A little cotton-headed sea came popping up over the bow. Blake broke off and said—

"Better see about taking in stays'I and shortening all round, Rowse. It's going to blow the double-bottoms out of heaven for a little while." And I rose to obey.

But later, in the cuddy, with the warm rain pelting monotonously on the deck outside, the bluish lightning flashing intermittently, I came back to the subject of Bullett. It interested me. The skipper had got into his bunk, but he was awake, nursing his pipe, his stateroom door open.

"You say he's made a fortune, this shark-proof Bullett?"

"That's so. I've paid him a pretty decent sum myself," said  Blake.

"What's he done with it?"

"Don't ask me. Kept it, I suppose, what he hasn't spent for rum. He's never left Pomete since I've been carting there."

I wondered why. A man with a fortune sticking to a barren hit of coral plump on the outer fringe of the world. But the islands are great place for queer, unexplainable creatures, so I kept my curiosity to myself. This being my first trip in the Island Belle, I said instead—

"When are we due at Pomete? I'd like to make the acquaintance of this shark-dodger."

Blake knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"About a week from Sunday," he raid. "I call there once in three months, and the Island Belle is usually on time. Goodnight. Shake me at midnight."

The next time I looked up from the out-of-date magazines on the cuddy table he was asleep, his thin, hard-bitten face illuminated by the yellow glow that fell through the open door of his stateroom.

The islands breed hard men, and Blake was one of their choicest products— as hard as I have seen in my forty years. He freely admitted to blackbirding in his day, and some claimed that was not all. But in the last years a change had set up within him. Around Papeete his nickname was Law and Order Blake. He now stood stolidly for decency and morality in the islands. More than a dozen times he had proved it by furnishing the authorities in Papeete with valuable tips anent fugitives hiding on atolls and islets where his schooner called. And not six months before he himself had brought in Charlie Denning, wanted for murder in Suva, whom he had discovered and recognised on a lonely reef.

I was thinking it was a pity there were no more skippers like him aboard the trading schooners when Muputi, our Kanaka wheelman, called to me that another wind squall was coming down, and I left the cosy cabin for the sloshy deck.

About ten days later I met Bullett. We eased into the lagoon at Pomete one Sunday morning just after daylight. The island was a little scimitar-shaped thing of coral and sand, palms and cocoanut trees, very low-lying, like a bright-painted chip floating on the ocean, with scattering of thatched huts poking through the greenery. The lagoon was spacious and clear as blue glass. Even with the sun aslant I could see the bottom, seven or eight fathoms below, with here and there amongst the coral a cluster of pearl shells, any of which might hold a king's ransom.

The village believed in Blake's infallibility all right. They must have been on the lookout, for one white man and half a hundred natives were gathered on the shingle before we could drop anchor, and the minute we did they came skimming out in canoes.

The first one to get alongside was Bullett. He'd out-paddled the islanders.

He was a tall, skinny creature with eyes that had crawled so far back in his head you could not get a good look into them, and a thick black beard. Tall and skinny, I say, except for his chest. One look at it and you knew why he could dive eight fathoms and more; it stuck out like a whisky-barrel. I stared hard at the man, my mind doing tunny backward tricks. He was naked from the waist up, but before he climbed the bulwark he pulled on a dungaree jumper out of the bottom of his canoe. And just as he did that, caught a glimpse of something that made me start as if I had been stabbed with a hot needle. And all at once I remembered.

"Hullo, Blake!" were his first words. "Got my 'tea' handy? I'm nearly out."

"It's on board," answered Blake, and ordered two cases of rum to be brought from the hold and put into Bullett's canoe.

"This is my new mate, Mr. Rowse," he said, introducing me. Bullett seemed pleasantly drunk. He shook hands, smiling good-naturedly, and as we stood facing each other I took a first-rate look into those funny eyes.

Then he and the skipper climbed overside into the canoe and went ashore, leaving me to look after the unloading of the other stuff (most of which was rum also). They made a full day of it in Bullett's hut, and I tell you I was fit to burst, fairly sick with pent-up information, by the time they returned at sundown. I had taken the time to go rummaging in my chest, find an old scrap book, and tear from it a short newspaper clipping. I had it in my pocket when Blake got back aboard the schooner. Bullet, seemingly a little drunker than in the morning, shoved off in his canoe, called good-bye to me, and to the skipper said:

"Sorry there wasn't any pearls to-day, Blake. Bui I believe I've turned up a new bed that's not been touched. Things will be different next time, maybe. S'long. Look for you the last of August, eh?"

Blake nodded, and as the schooner's sails filled and she got on her way toward the month of the lagoon, he waved back to the man in the canoe. Then he turned to me.

"Well, there's your shark-cheater," he said. "How do you like him?"

But my thoughts moved along other lines.

"Never mind that," I replied. "Look here, Blake, there's something I want to tell you. Come down into the cuddy."

"Soon's we're through the passage," he agreed. "I don't trust Muputi in here."

So I waited impatiently, and the minute we were bucking the long Pacific swells again I dragged him below. We sat down on opposite sides of the cuddy table.

"Well?" Blake asked, puzzled.

"The name of that white man on Pomete," I blurted out, unable to hold my secret, "is not Bullett any more than mine is! Bullett!" I snorted. "He must have got that out of a book. His right name is Charles Smith."

Blake showed no particular surprise. "How do you know that?" he said.

I tried not to let excitement garble my yarn.

"Well, the thing goes back ten years," I told him. "In those days I was mate in the old Nautilus— Sydney to Papeete— and when we were laid off at the end of every trip in Sydney, I used to take my bit around to a certain bank and deposit it. This fellow Smith was the teller I always did business with— that's how I got to know his name. One day I went to the hank and Smith wasn't on duty. I asked the fellow in his place where he was. The new man looked at me sort of queer.

" 'Evidently you haven't read the papers the last couple, of days,' he hinted. So when I got outside I bought one. Well, it was the old story— a woman in it. And this Smith had absconded with a nice bit of the hank's money. He made a clean getaway. Time passed, and they never found hair nor hide of him. I forgot the business. More time passed— a lot of it. Then one day, almost five years later, in another Sydney paper, I happened to run across this item."

From my pocket I fished the clipping I had saved. Its headline was gone, but I read the balance:

The body of the woman found murdered in an empty house at Townsville three weeks ago has been finally identified as that of Agnes Williams, formerly of this city, who eloped with Charles Smith, an absconding bank teller, now at large for nearly five years. A second warrant for Smith's arrest, charging murder, has been issued.

I paused to let the paragraph soak in. "Naturally," I said then, "I've been on the lookout for Mr. Charles Smith since that any, having the advantage of knowing him by sight. Now, after five years more. It seems like I've had the good luck to ran into him."

I passed the clipping over to Blake, who read it slowly for himself. "What makes you so sure Bullett is this fellow Smith?"

I was ready for that. "Smith used to work in the bank with his sleeves rolled up," I replied. "There was a picture of a bunch of roses tattooed on his right forearm. This morning, before he put on his jumper, I saw the place where it used to be. It has been partly removed with acid, but you can still see the picture blurred and faintish blue under the skin. Besides, his face hasn't changed so much, only for the beard and being a little older.

Blake was silent a long time. He spat through the porthole.

"Well," he asked at last, " what do you want me to do?"

I knew that he knew what I was thinking; so I came right out with it

"I want you to hand him over to the police at Papeete."

Bake turned and looked at me with his eyes hard as shiny rocks, like he could see right through my skull and make out what was going on inside. That look made me squirm.

"It must have been about ten veins since you saw Smith, he said. "Ten years is a long time. Its easy to make a mistake. I couldn't afford to make one like this. Bullett has been a friend of mine."

That was it; I saw his problem. He did not want to believe. It showed strikingly in his grim, suffering face. In spite of it though I plunged on.

"But I am absolutely sure about the man, Blake. That tattooed picture— his eyes— I got a good look— I couldn't he wrong. Listen, I'm so sure I'll make you a proposition. You stop at Pomete on our way back. By myself I'll accuse this Bullett straight to his face. You won't be mixed up at all. If I make him admit he's the man I say he is, you let me take him to Papeete. If not to save you embarrassment, I'll quit my berth when we make port. Is it a go?"

"I'll have to be positive, absolutely positive," he began again through thin  lips.

"All right," I clinched the thing quickly, lest he should waver. "It's a bargain. If I don't make you absolutely positive about Smith, you don't have to take him in, and you won't be out anything, not even his friendship."

I took back my clipping.

SO, about a month later, one shimmering, cloudless morning we slipped quietly into the lagoon at Pomete again. The faint air that had brought us in died away just a we dropped anchor, as though of sudden something had sucked all the breath out of the world. It was stiflingly hot. Motionless cocoanut trees and palms, hung along the hump of the island, stood out like they had been cut from green paper and pasted against the sky. Glassy smooth and clear as a lump of blue crystal the lagoon was, with bright-coloured little fish wiggling through it, and now and then a long, tapering grey shape floating still or slithering lazily through the coral forma

The Island Belle was not expected for two months yet, there was no one wailing on the beach. Thick silence hung over the world. There were circles under Blake's eyes that morning,  He came to me on deck.

"From now on, Rowse," he said, "you're master of ceremonies, understand?" We had threshed that out.

"We'll go ashore at once," I nodded.

We lowered our whale boat, and before I entered it I went into the cuddy and slipped the newspaper cutting and my revolver into a pocket of the light jacket I had donned. A small knot of natives had gathered on the shingle by the time we grounded.

"Where's menace Bullett?" I asked one of the men.

He told us Bullett had gone to the far end of the island at daylight on some errand or other, and had not yet returned.

"We'll go up to his hut and wait, eh, Blake?"

The skipper nodded, and I followed him along a path through the palms. Bullett's dwelling was a crude contraption of palm and pendants thatch, with a roof that had been slewed crazily sidewise by the wind, and never repaired. It stood a little apart from the two score of huts making up the native village, and the high grass around it was so thickly sprinkled with empty rum bottles that walking was hard. The place had no door to close its entrance, and Blake and I walked into the fusty interior.

Blake sat down on an empty rum case, staring fixedly out across the glittering lagoon. I joined him. Time dragged heavily. A soundless hour crept past. Two. Noontime came. Still there was no sign of Bullett. Finally we decided to pull back to the Island Belle for lunch. If Bullet arrived home during our absence he would be bound to see the schooner, and would probably come out.

And that was precisely what he did— while we were at our meal. Now I am no professional man-hunter. Far from it I will live a long, long time before I forget how the food stuck in my throat that day when I suddenly heard a canoe scrape alongside the Island Belle, and Bullett's heavy voice shouting:

"Hi, Captain Blake! Hi! Where are you? What are you doing back so soon?"

The big moment had come. Somehow, I was absolutely sure of my man— yet— Well, I found myself sort of trembling And tingling all over. It was as if I had been touched with a bundled little electric wires. But I steadied when I looked at Blake. I was ashamed to let him see I was excited and half-scared. He rose, and I followed him on deck. Bullett was standing up in his canoe, holding to the rail with his big knotty hand.

"'Morning. Come aboard, Bullett," invited the skipper, very matter of fact. "Rowse here has got a proposition to put to you."

"Rowse?" said Bullett, sort of kindly.

Then he remembered. "Oh, yeah— your mate." A queer expression came, in his sunken eyes, but he made fast his painter, and climbed slowly to the deck. He had on the dungaree jumper. He turned and faced me.

"All right, Mr. Rowse. What is it?"

I tried to fasten those ingrowing -eyes.'

"Bullett," I said— and hesitated. My voice sounded flat and funny, as if something awful had happened to the air so my words did not carry any longer. But I caught myself up after an instant, and went through with it.

"Bullett, I told him, "I happen to know your right name's not Bullett. You're Charles Smith, of Sydney, and you are wanted there for absconding with money from a certain bank. You may not remember me, but I used to make a good many deposits through your window. Also, you're wanted for—"

We could not see much of the man's face for the curly black beard, but his body gave a jerk as if he had been slugged from behind. He broke in on me.

"You lie! You lie!" he snapped. He turned to the skipper. "That's a lie, Blake. I never heard of such a person. Your man's crazy. I'm not—"

But I had got myself thoroughly in hand now.

"I've seen those tattooed flowers on your arm too many times to be mistaken, Smith," I cut him off. "If you'll take off your jumper, I'll show it to Blake! And I was going to say— also, you are wanted for the murder of Agnes Williams, the woman you eloped from Sydney with. There's a reward out for you. I aim to take you into Papeete and turn you over to the proper authorities."

That got him. When I mentioned the woman it was as if he had seen a ghost. You could see the white skin clean through his beard now. And what with surprise and the rum in him, I reckon he went plumb crazy.

"You lie! You lie!" he shrieked, giving himself away.  "I didn't do it! Smith, but I didn't murder Agnes— I mean, she made me do it— she was going to—"

Then he saw what he had done. He checked himself.

"Why, damn you," he screamed at me. "You can't take me— you're not going to take—"

I never did know just how he got that revolver out of his tattered trousers. It was one of the fastest pieces of work of the kind that I ever saw. Before I even guessed what he was up to, the wicked little black muzzle was looking me dead in the face, and the instant I ducked it blazed. The bullet must have missed my head by inches.

Just then something else happened. Over by the hatch, where Blake stood, there was a bluish flash in the sunshine. Then three shots cracked out so close together it sounded like one. Smith let out a piercing yell, dropped, his gun, and clapped his hand to his right shoulder. Through the fingers blood was squirting from three bullet holes there. He gasped, and reeled as though he were going to fall.

But Blake stepped forward.

"Oh, don't do that, Smith," he warned. "You ain't hit had enough to fall. I punctured you in the shoulder on purpose.'

Rattled and dazed from my close squeak, I stared dumbly at the skipper. He had backed me; saved my life! But then of a sudden I saw into his eyes, and a queer icy chill went running up my spine. Somehow, all the softening light of sanity seemed to have vanished out of them! They were dead, like two little chips of flint in a marble face. And after that things happened as they do in a had dream. Blake's voice rose to a shout.

"Those natives on Pomete say you're shark-proof," he spat at Smith. He pointed across the lagoon to the beach, a good hundred yards distant. "All right!  Let's see if you are now! With those three little holes in you I'm going to let you swim for your village. Savvy?"

The next instant, before his words could have much time to sink into Smith's brain, he rushed. His body struck the murderer's with a thump, and Smith went staggering backward, tripped over the bulwark, and with a scream plunged into the quiet water of the lagoon.

"Swim! Swim for it!" Blake barked the moment the black heard rose above water. He leaped up on the bulwark and levelled his revolver at the man below. "Swim, curse you! Don't dare come back toward this, schooner! You swim for the shore!"

I was too flabbergasted to do anything, even to move. I stood rooted and stared. The plunge seemed to revive Smith. He turned his agonised face toward the beach, rolled on his side, and using his good arm in an overhand stroke, began to swim away rapidly as a native. But, as he moved, from the three wounds in his shoulder the blood steadily oozed and trickled, and a thin red streamer trailed out behind him and paled to nothing in the crystal blue water. And before he had got twenty yards that ribbon of blood was being followed. No hound has a keener nose than the shark for the blood scent. I saw a long, tapering, silent gray shape glide up behind Smith, hang there for a moment, suddenly swoop under the swimming man, twist over—

Then, at last my paralysed muscles came to life. I whirled away and plugged my ears tightly with my fingers. When finally I removed them, the only sound disturbing the enormous hot stillness came from Blake. He must have watched It all. He was still standing on the bulwark. And he was chuckling like a mad man.

"Shark-proof!" he muttered, and gave a long, grisly laugh.

Suddenly I found words again. "You fool! You fool!" I screamed at him wildly. "What made you do it? Don't you see? You've made yourself as bad as him! You've no right to take the law into your own hands! You've made yourself a murderer, Blake, just as much as—"

"Shut up! it's all right; it's all right," Blake interrupted harshly. "All I wanted was to be sure— absolutely sure—"

"Sure of what? What do you mean, anyway?"

"Sure it was Smith," said the skipper. "I wanted to hear him say so himself— couldn't afford to make a mistake. What do I mean? I mean he's not the first man that ever changed his name and occupation in the islands. Ten years ago life played me a dirty trick. A man ran off with my wife— a man I'd never even seen. I went to the dogs; a month later I drifted to the islands; got careless; blackbirded; got into trouble. I had to change my own name when I sneaked away from the New Hebrides and came over to the Societies."

Slowly he climbed down off the rail and put the revolver back into his pocket.

"When I lived in Sydney," he said,  "my name was David Williams. That man murdered my wife."

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16:  The Curse of the Poppy

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 8 March 1924

THE island was a little scimitar-shaped thing of coral and sand, palms and coconut trees, very low-lying, like a bright painted ship floating on the ocean, with a scattering of thatched huts poking through the greenery. At the hour of sunset, Warner awoke from a cold, frightened sleep, on his dirty pandanus mat lying on the floor in the miserable mouldy hut of thatch. He lay for a moment, then arose and dressed himself with shaking hands.

"You're a mask of death," he said, as he passed the cracked looking-glass. He turned out his empty pockets, cursing them and the nakedness of the room. As he walked out of the front door he had two thoughts in his mind. One was, "Does life hold any more adventures for me?" and the other: "Where can I get any opium to-night?"

Warner had had adventures— splendid ones. At times the glory of the world had been so dazzling, the wine of life so strong, that he had felt more like a god than a man. But the long level stretches between such heights— he had all but died of those, until he drifted to this island and discovered opium.

But the opium? Whence was that to come to-night? Ah Hong, the Chinese trader on the island, would give him no further credit until the trading schooner brought his quarterly remittance. He had nothing left to sell, everything negotiable except the clothes he stood in had been passed across the Chinaman's counter. So there remained only the natives to supply him with food. Damn their food! It was opium he wanted. There was the lagoon! And the lagoon it would have to be unless something turned up quickly. He detested the idea. Not that he was afraid— not he! But death appeared to be the end of everything. One couldn't be sure, of course, but it looked that way. Then there might be more adventures in this life, if he could hang on a little longer and that was worth suffering for, instead of the blue water, and oblivion.

He was dreaming wide awake, it seemed. That morning he had seen Yvonne walking through the coconut grove, down near the beach. He had fled wildly, forgetting that she, being but a dream figment, couldn't see him. Yvonne was a girl he had loved in Sydney two years back. He loved her still.

The opium! That terrible pang in his heart told him he must have opium or die.

He dashed away, then, remembering that he was racing toward the beach, drew himself up, and, bracing his wrecked body with a great effort, sought the store of Ah Hong.

Toward midnight Warner returned. He had drifted back because his limbs would no longer support him, and he had need of a place to die in. Under his feet as he walked he could hear a curious, cottony sound— pad, pad. He felt in his body a vast, immeasurable emptiness.

Suddenly his hut loomed up before him. The one window in front was aglow with light, and behind it hung crisp, lace curtains. He drew in his breath sharply. Looking through the door into the room a soft radiance poured from a rose shaded lamp. A beautiful rug hid the coral gravel floor. In the place of his pandanus mat and the torn blanket was an alluring couch, a snow bank of downy pillows and silken coverlets. Tall roses leaned from delicate vases on the table. A dainty supper was spread ready, and a long, gold-necked bottle lurked in a pall of ice. And— oh, Paradise!— beneath the lamp lay a fancy carved bamboo pipe and a tray of opium.

A footstep on the coral outside, a hand on the door, and Yvonne entered, as he had known she would. Yvonne, lovelier than ever! He would gladly have lingered in rapt contemplation of her beauty— the glory of her eyes, the roseleaf softness of her cheek, the lustre of her hair, and her nymph-like form, In its shimmering garments such as nymph never wore. But she gave a glad little cry, and flew to his arms, like a homing bird.

An hour passed. Warner reclined on the couch, Yvonne at his feet, her head against his knee.

"I have done nothing but seek you, Richard," she was saying, "since I came into father's money. You were— all I wanted. But I should never have found you had it not been for the missionary."

"Who's he, sweetheart?"

"The missionary on the next island. And oh, he's a real sport! He knows about us."

"He knows? You told him, Yvonne? Everything?"

"Everything. Richard, it was too wonderful that he should have been sent here, or rather to the next island, where you were. It was he who traced you and told me where to find you. I want him to come over in a canoe in the morning, and marry us. And then we'll go away, travelling. We'll put a girdle round tho earth, Dicky, like Puck. We can have the best times! We'll have some of those adventures you used to dream of!"

Warner, kissing her softly, wondered a little. Does a man have real adventures after he is married? He looked at her and smiled.

"Yvonne," he said gently, "You don't— you are perfectly sure you don't feel it a sacrifice?"

She caught him to nor heart, crying aloud at the sacrilege.

TWO HOURS passed. She had fallen so sound asleep that he could lift her head from his knee to the couch without awakening, her. He stood for a moment, and watched her as she slept. Tiptoeing to the table, he picked up the dainty bamboo pipe, twirled the pea shaped piece of opium over the flame of the silver-mounted lamp and applied it to the bowl of the pipe. Then, lying back on the couch he slowly inhaled the thick smoke.

"The best of them all," he said. "The adventure of the enchanted hut!" Then he lay back to sleep, with his head in the lap of Yvonne.

THOSE who found him huddled on the floor near the dirty pandanus mat, felt a thrill of pity, that he should have died so miserably, and alone. How could they know of his triumphant passing— of the exquisite madness, vouchsafed to the Slave of the Poppy, at the very end, before the light goes out. They little imagined the splendour and delight of his last hours.

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17: Cave of Death

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 15 March 1924

SIX weeks back I was at in Chou Luey's store in Hollandia, the little Dutch post perched on the shores of Humbolt Bay, in Dutch New Guinea. Here Herman Bauer, a Dutch orchid hunter, introduced me to Edward  Steen.

On January 4 last, Steen wandered into Bauer's camp on the banks of the Sepik. His clothing was in rags and ribbons, his feet were blistered and bleeding, and he was shivering with scrub fever. Behind him shuffled a naked little, wizened native who limped badly on his right leg.

For two burning days Bauer nursed the fever-stricken man. Steen pitched  and tossed in a vague, unreal shadow world. At times. he rolled from his hammock and grovelled helpless on the floor. In conscious moments he gulped desperately the quinine handed to him by the orchid hunter.  On the tenth day after his arrival in Bauer's camp he was able to shuffle about. Then he told his  story to the , Dutchman, and he repeated it again for my benefit when I was introduced to him in Chou Luey's store.

LAST November, Steen, with a parly, of natives, left Hollandia to prospect  for gold in the interior. A fortnight later he turned his back on the last civilised outpost. Chinese plume-hunters who watched him depart shook their heads, but Steen, who was a stranger to the country, would not listen to their warnings. He travelled slowly through scrub and swamp, until he came to rocky hill country covered with stunted timber. Here, he found alluvial in a dry creek-bed and pitched camp. The few natives he saw generally retired at the approach of his party. Steen was just congratulating himself that he would experience no trouble from this direction when the savages attacked his camp.

It was not yet dawn when he arose and stepped, outside his tent. In the star-glow he saw a black form crouched behind a tree on the bank of the creek. As he watched the figure moved on again toward another tree, and shortly afterwards was followed by another. Then other and bolder forms began to materialise, run softly along the bank, and then, dropping on all fours, work their way slowly toward his camp. Steen caught the frequent flickering glint of spear points.

When the foremost of them was within twenty-five yards of his tent Steen raised his rifle and fired. The naked savage who appeared to be the leader let out a quivering scream dropped his spear and fell forward on his face. Again Steen fired and another savage lunged sidewise, thudded on face and shoulder, and lay twitching. Six times tho prospector fired, as swiftly as he could work the ejecting lever, and with each shot his surprise and consternation grew— for the savages did not falter.

Four of their number were stretched on the ground, a fifth stood swaying with a bullet hole in hls neck, and still they charged on. Steen threw down tho lever for a seventh shot, and— the rifle jammed!

With fiendish yells the blacks closed in on him. He was wrenched away from the tent and went staggering forward. Ho felt his skin pierced and torn in many places. But he was ulmost beyond pain. Whirling viciously he swung his arms free of the surging mass, and crashed both fists into a black face. Even as he felt them crash home a club found his temple. He knew no more.

STRETCHED upon the filthy floor of a hut where the air hung sodden and foul, Steen awoke. His eyelids were leaden, and at first the thatched roof swam and danced before his gaze. Gradually he grew conscious that his hands and feet were lightly bound with strands of gomutl rope. Warily he turned his head and saw sitting cross-legged, on the floor near, a door a figure of a complete hideousness natural and acquired. His body was grotesquely striped with a white concoction like lime, and stiff pigtails were run through his sagging ear lobes. His thick, wet lips hung open, and behind them the jagged front teeth came together evenly, animal fashion.

For two days this hideous savage guarded the door of the hut. Then, on the third day Steen was led off, amid a mob of wildly dancing, chanting blacks, men, women and children, who laughed and taunted him. A quarter of a mile from the village they stopped at the mouth of a cave between two enormous rocks. The savages formed in a semi-circle, and six of them approached the prospector with long gomuti ropes. Crawling about six feet into the cave, one of them tossed the end of a rope down a black hole about three times the size of a man's body. Then they led Steen to the hole, and made signs for him to descend by means of the rope.

AS WE sat in Chou Luey's store, the prospector, said that he did not like to admit fear, but that he felt something very much akin to it during the time he stood in front of that cave. He did not know what awaited him at the bottom of the black shaft, but something told him that it was a death worse than that to be met at the point of a spear, so he struggled in the hope that one of his captors would end it. He was simply bound rather loosely, the rope was drawn up and passed under his shoulders, then he was lowered into the cave.

Steen judged that he had been lowered forty feet, and as he lay on his back  all he could see was a dim, diffused light above him. As he had been bound loosely, he soon twisted his hands free and liberated his legs. As his eyes became somewhat accustomed to the darkness, he was able to see the walls of the cave for a few feet. Feeling around, he found them to be rock, covered with dank vegetable growth, and, in some places, dripping with water. He did not fear death so much as he did life in that chamber of horror.

Feeling his way along the walls, and keeping the dim circlo of light always in view, he found that the cave was circular, probably not more than a hundred feet in diameter. At one point tho prospector's hand felt the rim of a hole In the wall, not quite as big around as his body. He pushed his hand in as far as it would go.

Suddenly ho heard a sharp hiss;  he started, drawing his hand partly out. Again the hiss. Cold sweat drenched him. Something cold and soft touched his hand. Swiftly he drew his hand from the hole. Twisted around his forearm was a snake. In a frenzy he tore it away and smashed it against the rocky wall until it dangled like a thong in his fingers.

Repugnance sickened the prospector, and he dropped it. Then he laughed and cried, and covered his face with his hands. When he was himself again,, all about him he heard a hissing and the sliding of slimy bodies. Steen confessed to me that he would have welcomed the stinging sensation which would have meant that it was all over. But the snakes were evidently not poisonous, nor had they fangs to bite with, for although they wriggled over Steen's feet and twisted about his ankles, they did not molest him. He had a new and terrible fear of going mad before the end should come.

The circle of dim light was fading fast, and he knew night must be approaching. It seemed years later when the circle dwindled into nothing, and Steen was left in total darkness. There was no sleeping. The reptiles crawled ceaselessly over his feet and ankles. He laughed and cried and prayed, but how the hours passed he did not know. Another day passed, and again the circle of light faded.

Then came a voice from above. He recognised it as that of one of his natives, Moti, one with Malay blood in his veins, and who originally hailed from the upper Diegul country. There was a little whirr and a thud. The end of a rope fell at his feet. Steen fastened it round his shoulders, and a few moments more he felt himself being lifted.

Fresh air stung his nostrils as he was lifted into the moonlight. Moti was standing beside him. The prospector staggered, and the native supported him until he was able to control his own legs. Then, without saying a word, both men slipped into the forest.

Steen said little about his trip to Bauer's camp. Day and night both men travelled, living on herbs and berries. Then fever gripped the prospector, and Moti half carried and dragged him along.

Moti was the only one of his native party to escape when the savages attacked the camp. He concealed himself in the forest until the blacks moved away with their white captive. Then, being an expert bushman, he followed them. He saw the prospector being lowered into the cave, and awaited a chance to rescue him. That chance did not come until the second night.

TWO DAYS after I interviewed Steen, he and Moti, with other nntives, again left on a prospecting trip toward the interior of that vast and mysterious country that is so little known to those who dwell in the outside world.

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18: The Creeping Death

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 25 Oct 1924

WE were plume hunters, De Graff and I, while Seymour was orchid-collecting for a rich man in Sydney whose hobby it was to breed and cross-breed these moth flowers. We sat in Lum Wan's bamboo-walled shop in Hollandia, and it was a place sacred to our kind in those days. There it was our wont to drink the favourite mixture of the Dutch possession, gin and bitters, and renew acquaintanceship with our comrades on the Outer Fringe.

The Dutchman, Koenraad de Graff had just ended a recital of his recent experiences. He had gone "in" after the valuable blue bird, but for various reasons he had failed to bring them back from the dark heart of the Jungle.

"In the evil entrails of der jungle we came upon a tribe of head-hunters," he said. "Yes, mein friendts, and they was a sort of throwback, vot you calls der lower development. We rarely see them, but we know that they watch us from der growths of jungle. Then they shoot poisoned darts at us. Poof. They go shust like that. I lose two Javanese an' one Malay. They shust scream, then flop on their faces in the stinking mud. The strain was too much in dot black mournfulness of growths. Our nerves broke and we fled. My companion, Grondalt, was a German, and it was his first trip into der interior. His hair go white in one night."

Outside the moon swung low, and the wailing monotones of the Kling boatmen down by the beach, came to us like the inarticulate voices of mystery. We fingered our gin-pahits and watched our shadows wane and grow upon the bamboo walls.

Then Seymour broke the silence.

"I don't know much about this cursed country," he said, "but these yarns about a man's hair going white In' one night make me feel ill. It's all balderdash and piffle— that's what it is. It makes mw weary. De Graff, I tell you. It doesn't happen to men outside the covers of a book. It isn't even fiction, as I see it— It's just plain flubdub. Bah! It's just hysterical nonsense."

SEYMOUR tripped and went sprawling on his face in the stinking jungle ooze. It was the third time he had done this within the hour— grim advertisement of a growing weakness. Each time he fell he lay longer; it required a more desperate effort of will to sling his aching body into action again, to rear himself out of the muck and continue on the seemingly hopeless quest through the half-lighted, tree-and-creeper-choked wilderness.

He scraped the slime from his face with his shirt sleeve and looked around him. His eyes burned intolerably, and the lids were swollen half-shut from the poison-stings of tho myriad jungle Insects. The black, fearful, inviolable puzzle of the wild New Guinea bush mocked his stare in every direction. Seymour had lost his pocket compass. That was his trouble. He did not know where or how. He had looked at it when he plunged Into the jungle from the mangrove-fringed bank of the Sepik River, five hours ago.

It had been his intention then to penetrate no more than half a mile into this unknown stretch of Dutch territory, and, should prospects appear good, to return later with his party of Javanese. Prospects had not appeared good. Within less than an hour Seymour had been ready to retrace his steps to the river, where his boat was anchored— and that was when he had reached into his shirt pocket and discovered his precious compass missing. It had been dropped, no doubt, as he stooped at some point to force a way through the matted undergrowth.

Seymour had not been uneasy at first. He had a fair sense of direction, knew the tricks of tropical jungles, and had kept his eyes open as he proceeded inland. He was sure he could find his way back to the river. He was still sure at the end of an hour's fighting with the slimy tangle of growths that hemmed him in. But his confidence had steadily ebbed with the passing of two, three, then four fruitless hours. And now, at the end of the fifth, his water bottle was empty, and despair rode like an Old Man of the Sea upon his shoulders.

He was about to make another desperate effort to gain his bearings when a spine-chilling crescendo yell crashed upon the jungle hush. Seymour took to his heels and floundered in the mud. Then he heard sloppy steps behind him.

Savages!

The white man plunged forward and sank deeper in tho ooze. The savages heavy breathing hissed steadily about five yards back. The orchidologist, his face tense, his mouth a grim line, turned and worked the lever of his Winchester mechanically, pumping his shots at the advancing blacks.

But the bullets produced little effect upon the charging savages. Seymour guessed there were fifty of them. He placed his back against a tree and waited for the end.

Then his spine crawled at a sudden, daunting thought.

What was it the Dutch plume hunter had told him hack there in Hollandia? The Creeping Death! The unspeakable and barbarous agony of a thousand deaths. Yes, he had spoken of the Sepik savages who tortured their captives with the terrible army ants. In a sudden frenzy he raised the muzzle of his rifle to his temple, but even as his fingers touched the trigger there came a leaping rush— a black arm interposed— the stunning impact of a heavy club was followed by the swift silence of oblivion.

SEYMOUR awoke to an overpowering thirst, emphasised by the blinding dazzle of the sun. At first he could see nothing, but presently he made out a black, encircling ring of hostile faces, rolling eyeballs, thick lips, teeth gleaming wolfishly, while about him there rose a fierce, broken chant of menace and of exultation.

For a moment he lay inert, passive, wondering, but as yet not greatly afraid. His head throbbed painfully, and perspiration, trickling down his forehead, stung his eyes with a salty sharpness. But when he attempted to raise his hand he could not move it. He was staked out, spreadeagled, trussed like a fowl for— what?

It was while his bemused and whirling, brain grappled with the problem that a sudden sharp, stinging pain, like a red-hot needle, burned through his leg. There came another, and yet another agonising sharp stab, but as yet like tho tentative probing of a surgeon's red-hot scalpel. Presently— this was what the Dutch plume hunter had hinted at— the ordeal of the ants— the dreadful death which, after lingering agony, would be his, and which, long minutes ere it came, he would pray for with frenzied supplication.

Seymour was a brave man, but now the multiplied agony of pain, like a fiery bath, wrung from his tortured lips an inarticulate babble.

"God!" he shrieked, insanely, straining at his bonds, his whole body shuddering away from the ferocious onslaught of his invisible attackers.

For a moment, to his dulled, and pain-racked mind, there seemed to grow in the distance a rumble, a mutter, rising and falling upon the windless hot furnace of the air— then, faint and clear, like the breaking of a stick, a staccato rattle, as of a boy drawing a flat stick against fence pickets. He strove to set tho thin edge of his will against the mountain of agony which was bearing him down— then, mercifully, unconsciousness smote him, like a vast and smothering band.

He came back to consciousness to the sense of deft hands about him— pitying voices. He stretched an arm tentatively, clasping and unclasping his fingers as a man groping out of the dark. A voice reached him down a long ladder of dreams:

"A near thing— we just made it, old man; you'll come round, never fear; we gave the black swine what-for—"

Seymour rose painfully to one elbow, his dim gaze on the bronzed face of Cartwright, owner of the boat he had leased for his trip up the Sepik. What was it he was saying? He rose weakly to his feet supporting himself on a stalwart shoulder. Then he gazed at the place where he had lain, just now black with hideous life— the Place of Expiation— the Crawling Doom— the stronghold of the ants.

Something snapped in his brain. He shrieked thinly, once like the squeak of a trapped rabbit. He gasped, his mouth working spasmodically, his face paling to a mottled unhealthy grey.

"God!" he shrieked insanely, his hands upraised between him and the sheer, sickening peril which he had escaped as by an eye-lash. Then, shuddering like a man in a fit, he backed off, stiff legged, face twitching, eyes set in a glassy stare— how he reached the boat he never knew— friendly hands reached out— voices, profoundly pitying and kind, came to him as from dim leagues of distance.

WHEN Seymour awoke the bright sun of an October morning was flooding his tent on the banks of the river. He yawned, stretched, thankful just to be alive, shivering slightly with a chill that was not all of the morning's sharpness. What a singularly vivid nightmare it had been, to be sure! Ugh! For sheer horror it had been a plenty. But with five minutes' brisk exercise he would be his own man again.

It was then, as he sprang from his stretcher that he saw the face in the little mirror at the foot of his cot— his own and yet not his own face— staring eyes, parted lips, cheeks drained of their last vestige of colour.

With a windy shriek he fell backward upon the stretcher as the crowning proof that it had been no dream, indeed, confronted him. For the hair of his head, had been turned, in a single night, to the whiteness of snow.

It was as Koenraad de Graff had said.

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19: Three Teeth

Smith's Weekly (Sydney) 17 May 1924

SURABAYA had been left behind, and the mangrove-fringed coast of Java was a pencil line on the distant horizon. The Lascars were butchering a sheep in the forepeak galley, and the warm scent of fresh blood stirred up pandemonium among the jungle folk in the cages lashed to the deck by the fore-hatches. The sea was a lake of oil and barren of a ripple, save where the big twin screws threw astern a long lane of swirling, bubbling phosphorescent flame.

It was stifling hot— the decks were like hot plates— and there was scarcely enough breeze to blow out a match as I joined de Jongh in the bows. It was de Jongh's business to ransack the out-of-the-way places on the fringe of the earth, gathering wild beasts, unheard-of birds, and strange plants. He was a queer man, a Dutchman, with odd tricks, of speech, and many surprising customs borrowed from the natives in the remote places he had visited.

"Good!" said do Jongh, pointing with his pipe to the cages below. "Dose fellows are yelling fine down dere; raw blood brings, back dreams of liberty, when they chase and make the kill themselves. Yell and scream, unhappy ones."

As if in answer, the deep-throated roars of two tigers rose in unison with the cat-like shriek of a leopard; a couple of dozen of the little monkeys that die of homesickness gibbered obscenely, while a fiendish orang outang rattled the grating of his cage and yelled like a soul in torment.

It was a bizarre ensemble we looked down upon in the thick tropical dusk. The lithe, dark-skinned Lascars, naked save for breech-cloths, grimy with coal dust or glistening with oil from the engines; and the unseen children of forest and jungle voicing their unrest. It was hot beyond belief, and the pace of the ship fouled the air with reek of wild beasts and the smell of the East from the Lascars' foul kennel in the forepeak.

"Lascars!" grunted de Jongh, gazing enviously at the half-dozen naked forms sprawled In the bows and sleeping peacefully through heat and uproar; "I belief a Lascar could sleep in hell and haf sweet dreams. Ram Singh! he there!" he shouted above the din to his native helper, "turn a hose on the monkeys to make them cool."

Gradually the uproar subsided and gave place to the orderly accustomed noises of the night— the swish of the oily sea on the forefront, the muffled tramp of the engines, the clanging half-hourly note of the ship's bell, and the monotonous foreign chatter of the Lascar crew.

I lay watching the heat-lightning play all around tho horizon, and must have been drowsing, for de Jongh's voice startled me.

"Last time I took some specimens to Melbourne," he said, "and our flag was flying at half-mast You see?— somebody had died. Is it too hot to listen why that soul flow away, or will I tell you a tale which only we two know, Ram Singh and I? Listen, then, my friend.

"When I was collecting that time I travel like the Wandering Jew. I freeze in the Himalayas, and nearly lose my life falling from the roof of the World to get some snow leopards; later I was roast alive in the jungle of Dutch New Guinea. All in the day's work. For a year I barely existed— I was a pariah dog— and it was good to come to Singapore again, where I picked up little Ram Singh. Like it? My friend, so soon as I leave the smell of the East behind me, I do not live until it is in my nostrils again. Yes, I come back always to answer the call. Europe,  America, and Australia are too sanitary— too clean.

"I loaded my cages on a big freighter at Singapore. It was so hot the decks were like stove-lids, and I sit still and see two tigers, one leopard, and a giant wild boar die on route, to say noddings of a dozen monkeys. Monkeys, liddle monkeys, drive me crazy. They die of homesickness. It is as deadly as cobra poison, only slower.

"Der second officer, Engel, was a German with a pig's head. Lombroso would haf called him a mattoid; his, brow, chin and ears were unlovely. He was a cruel man, and before I knew him three days I see he will make trouble for me— and the poor helpless beasts. For hours he loafed by the cages, day and night, poking sticks and laughing, until my beasts get wild and yell like demons. Den he would go away laughing— this great black devil, with his enormous misshapen ears. I haf seen him throw his head back and laugh when he succeeds to make a liddle monkey, cry like a baby. He was not a man; he was a devil, and I hate him for the black heart In his breast.

"We haf words, hot, ugly words, when he will not keep away from my beasts. '

"One day Engel struck Ram Singh in front of Rajah's cage. Rajah was a glorious tiger, fifteen feet from tip to tip, and I had, already sold him to a circus proprietor in Victoria. Engel was standing there poking, poking, always poking with a long, stick. If it was accident, I cannot say for true, but Ram Singh  staggered past and spilled filthy slops over the German's fresh white suit, and he looked up at him grinning. Then Engel struck a second time, full on the mouth, and liddle Ram Singh went down like a stone in a well. He lay so close to Rajah's cage the breath was hot on his face, and the big beast roared just like those fellows to-night when they smell sheep's blood, for Ram Singh was all bloody.

"Ram Singh lay there looking death out of his hazel eyes at Engel, who laughed and turned away on his heel before I could kill him. Gott! How mad was I!

"But Ram Singh spat out three teeth, and with the taste of his own blood in his mouth, and the tiger snarling in his ear, he cursed the going of Engel Sahib, who had done him such a great wrong, and made him a laughing-stock among his fellows. Ram Singh called him a swine, a jackal, a dog;  he defiled Engel's ancestors and cursed all his womankind for hand-maidens of sin. And then, quite slowly, but not speaking clearly for want of his teeth, he swore by the Prophet that when the tale should be written in full and the scroll rolled up, he, Ram Singh, would smile through the gap in his teeth with his honour whole again

"So swore Ram Singh. But Engel Sahib was a German pig, and he could not understand; he only laughed. But I— I who know the native as myself— I was afraid for him. And again he only, laughed and would not listen. So I 'washed my hands and waited.

"One week later, a night like tonight, only darker and hotter, it came. Nobody was moving except that mad Engel, who was teasing my poor Rajah with the long stick, and laughing like the fiend he was. I could hear the big tiger roar and snarl and fight the stick; I say in my heart a prayer for him to come a little nearer the cage, just a liddle nearer. Did my soul reach out and whisper to Ram Singh? I do not know. Was it a sending? I do, not know. But I belief as much as I belief anything, though no man saw, that Ram Singh crept up behind and shoved the German against the cage grating.

"It was done so quickly no man could see, no man could help, and Engel went out to his God with a woman's shriek on his coward's lips. Gott! It was terrible. The beasts roared like mad things, the Lascars whimpered like gibbering baboons, and the officers turned pale and sick at what they saw lying there by Rajah's cage when the lanterns were brought. It was not nice, even to see mineself, and I haf looked on death in a thousand forms. You haf seen an orange squeezed dry? Dot was Engel. And Rajah, raged in his cage with the light in his eye that comes from killing, licking his paws and muzzle white again.

"Next day Engel was sewed up in a piece of sail-cloth, and the Sulu Queen stopped.

"When her trampling engines ceased running the silence was so great, so impressive, I, felt all alone in the vast world. Did you efer feel you was the Last  Man? It is not nice. The captain stood by the grating to read a prayer, and the tears ran down his face. Soon a splash comes, in the water."

"And Ram Singh? What of him?" I asked.

"My friend, as you know, I did not see— no man saw wherefore Ram Singh would lie. But I looked deep down in his eyes and said: 'Ram Singh, what happened to Engel Sahib?' And he smiled through the gap in his teeth, for his honour was whole again. 'Heaven born,' said he, 'he was crushed by the tiger and died; the rest is with God.' Which was true— so far as it goes.

"All the same, it was a big price for Engel to pay for three teeth."

_________________

20: The Afterglow

Queenslander, 9 July 1931

BOB CAREY pulled aside the lawn window-drapes and stood looking out into the gathering spring twilight. Below him lay a garden where tender green things were eagerly making their way up through the fresh earth. Shrubs and trees fairly glowed with their promise of future blossoms. A new birth shone in everything.

He wondered as he looked down upon them if there would ever be a new birth for him. He felt prematurely old and inadequate— a useless tool thrown suddenly upon society with all the duties of a married man towards a wife who no longer loved him. For he had sensed keenly the indifference of the girl who, but a short time before, he had held in his arms and kissed so tenderly. There had been no response to his greeting— just a quiet submission.

Theirs had been a romance of the great war— one of those affairs so in keeping with the spirit of the times. He had met Anne in Enoggera training camp, where she and her father had been visitors. They had known each other but a short time, when orders came for his battelion to proceed overseas. Being young and very much in love, he had wasted no time in confessing his feelings to the girl— and they had been married.

"Don't worry, dear," he had confidently said at parting, "the war can't possibly last much longer now, and I will soon be back." Anne had bravely fought back her tears. He had been so tall and splendid in his uniform of khaki, with all the dash and fearlessness of youth. In him Anne seemingly found the answer to all her girlish dreams and romancing.

But the war had not ended as soon as he had anticipated, and he had known many a bitter experience before the guns had finally ceased. Twice he had been badly wounded, and there had been many times when he had despaired of ever seeing his girl-bride again.

WHEN the first Australian soldiers had gladly wended their way home he had not been among them. There had followed weary days of waiting, in which he had contracted a serious illness which brought back trouble from his recent wounds. He was taken from hospital to hospital, and opera-tion followed operation, until finally he became a mere wreck of his former self.

But now, at last, he was back— yes, after all those months of strife and bitterness he was back. And the girl— to her he was apparently a stranger, unloved and unwanted. Time, some how, had built a strange barrier be-ween them. Yet how could he expect her to realise and appreciate the big change in him— for changed he was, undeniably so. One could not go through the hell he had been through and be otherwise. How could a girl of Anne's type, who had known the love and protection of a comfortable home all the time, understand? How could she?

UNDOUBTEDLY his place in the office which he had held prior to the war had long since been most adequately filled. He could expect no opening there. Neither could he expect any help or encouragement from the thousands who, on every hand, had passed him by so thoughtlessly— seemingly forgetful of the soldier now and of all he had sacrificed for them. He had sensed their indifference even as he had that of the girl, whose very existence had been the one bright star on his otherwise dark and cheerless horizon. In each instance it had hurt— hurt terribly, cruelly.

But it was life, and the soldier was no exception. Held high for a time on the pedestal of public sentiment— feted, cheered, honoured, glorified. Then— oblivion and forgetfulness as other newer interests crowd into the background the idol of the hour. He left the room finally with the slight limp which war had left him as a lasting reminder of its fury.

Anne watched him coming from where she sat. How changed he was! In him she could recall no semblance to the boy she had married. The hair above his temples was noticeably gray. His lips had lost their humour, and his eyes no longer smiled. There were deep lines about his face which made him appear years and years older than the boy who had so blithely sailed away that golden day in 1915.

Somehow she felt cheated. War had taken from her a youth, carefree and happy. It had sent her back a man, aged and blighted by the relentlessness of its fury. Then— there was Terry— Terry, whose love she had fought for the sake of this man now standing before her. She looked into the dancing flames, and her mind's eye fashioned there a face, young and buoyant, whose eyes smiled back at her with keen affection —and her heart cried out maddeningly—"He is back, Terry. He is back.'

BOB sat down beside her, but made no attempt to touch her—not even to take her hand. It was going to be very hard to say what he wanted to, but he had made up his mind, and —well—a mind once made up must be satisfied. Then, too, he must act honorably. War might have sapped his youth and strength but it had not quenched his manhood.

"Anne," he said at last, "I have been thinking of many things; among them, just what my coming home like this must mean to you. I fully realise what a stranger I must seem to you now. I did wrong in taking advantage of your mood at the time and binding you to me before I went away. I should have waited " He paused as though to pick his words discreetly. Anne's heart pound-ed madly. She felt that he must surely hear it as she waited tensely for him to continue. "I was unfair of me," he went on finally, "very unfair. But I loved you, Anne. That is the only excuse I have to offer. Because of that I am going to ask you to give me a chance to prove my worth. Should I fail, or, on the other hand, should you find that you can no longer care for me in that way—why—well—there is a way out. I can disappear, anything—that will give you freedom."

Anne felt stunned, amazed. She hardly knew what to say. He was at least being fair with her. Ought she to be fair with him? Ought she tell him of Terry? Somehow her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth. The words just wouldn't come. Bob noticed her agitation. "Anne," he said gently, "don't let a false idea of duty hinder you. Let's each take a sensible view of things. Let's think only of ourselves in this matter."

"FINALLY Anne found her voice. "Very well, Bob," she said, "it shall be as you say. I have always tried to play fairly, and now you shall have your chance. But please remember that sometimes the odds are against us, no matter how hard we try. The war has left its mark upon us all— even those of us who have been forced to remain at home and wait. We have been merely the playthings of cir cumstances, tossed about at life's whim."

Bob, of course, could hardly compre hend the meaning of her words. But he felt an infinite relief that, at least, he was going to have his chance. Per haps this knowledge would spur him on to unexpected endeavour, and, per haps—achievement. Anne saw his face light up, and she experienced a sudden pang of pity for him. For, after all, she told herself, she had married him. He was her husband, and she must respect him.

Anne's father had never quite approved of her early and hasty marriage.

"Now, dad," she had said, "I know you would like to give your only daughter all the frills and fur belows of a big wedding. However, there isn't time— besides"— she had smiled optimistically— "the war will soon be over, and one can have a wedding almost any time."

Her father had made no reply to these remarks, for he fully realised that far greater things were at stake than the mere giving up of all the frills and furbelows of a big wedding.

So he had later watched the growing friendship between his daughter and his newly made young business partner with keen apprehension. It wasn't that he didn't trust them. He just felt what a tragedy it would be should Anne learn too late that she had married the wrong man.

He threw them together as little as possible, but mere politeness demanded that he offer his business associate the hospitality of his home occasionally. If there were times when he wished deep down in his heart that this smart, clever young man might have been Anne's husband, he never by word or deed admitted it, even to himself.

SO it was he who took the news to Terry the following morning.

"I expect him down here some time to-day," he said. "Pretty well used up, poor chap, and discouraged, of course. I thought, perhaps, we might help him out for Anne's sake, and give him work in the office."

"Why— yes— of course," Terry answered.

The older man looked in vain for some effect of the news on his young partner. Terry's calm outward mien wholly belied the tumult that was go ing on within. He hadn't held himself in check during the past months without result. But when later Anne's father left the office for a time, he flung aside his pen and gave himself up to the problem of the moment.

So he was back, this husband of Anne's— this man to whom belonged the only girl he had ever loved or ever could love. It was a funny, funny world yes, and a cruel one, too! He hadn't meant to love Anne any more than Anne had meant to love him. Whenever he had forgotten and overstepped his bounds she had always held up her slim white finger with its tell-tale band, and said, "I'm married, Terry, you know."

To which he had always answered, "Forgive me, Anne, but I wish you were not." But it had been such a useless fight —this unsought attraction of two lonely young people for each other— and then tne inevitable. Wrong, per haps, Terry told himself—yet, meant to be.

"A MAN to see Mr. Morris," the pert office boy's loud voice broke harshly in upon his dreaming.

"Show him in," Terry said, abruptly. A tall man entered with a slight limp to his, walk, and grey hair above his temples. There was weariness in his manner, and a strange resignation upon his face. Terry eyed him closely. Intuitively he knew this to be Anne's husband.

"Mr. Morris expected me?" Bob said as he saw a stranger at the desk.

"Yes, come in," Terry replied, and at nearer range he eyed Bob still more closely. Then he arose from his chair, and coming over to him put two strong hands on his shoulder and suddenly, without warning, wheeled him about to the strong light of the windows. Then he uttered a hoarse cry—yet a cry jubilant with feeling:

"My God—Carey—Carey of the 9th Battalion."

It was the other's turn now to scan his face.

"Why— why, old Dig." came the answering cry of recognition— and then two pairs of hands met in a long, fierce grip. Tears stood in the eyes of Bob Carey, great, big tears of gratitude.

At least he was remembered— tribute was being paid the soldier in him.

And for these two standing thus the office, with all its fine equipment, faded for a time into a vast expanse of barren wasteland, covered with heaps of tangled wire and strewn with war's horrible debris. The usual city din in the street below became entirely obliterated by the roar of guns, the bursting of shells, and all the terrific noises of those bygone days, whose memory time would never wholly eradicate.

Terry was the first to speak.

"Rather tough on you, Dig.," he said, "to be just returning now that all the cheering is over. I was more fortunate than you. I was among the first to return. After you saved me from 'Fritz' that night I never saw the front line trenches again. But— but I never expected to see you again, either. I thought you went West that night."

"No, not quite," Bob said wearily, "but just look at me." He flung his arms wide with a gesture of hopelessness. "Can you wonder that there have been times since when I wished that I had got my issue that night?"

Terry never realised more than at that moment how much he owed the man standing before him. "I'm so sorry the way things happened for you," he said. "Why— l— l— owe my life to you, and I am going to help you all I can."

"Don't think for a moment," Bob broke in sharply, "that I regret the service I was able to render you. You were a great pal, and would have done the same for me, I know."

"Why, of course," Terry assured him as he lay his hand comfortingly upon the drooping shoulders. "But it isn't my broken body or spirit so much now," Bob continued, "or the apparent indifference of my people. I could have stood all these things if only— it's the girl— my wife. Old chap. I fear I have lost her."

Of a sudden Terry's heart smote him. The girl— Anne, of course. He had almost forgotten. But he understood— for did he not love Anne, too? He recalled quite vividly now a mud spattered photo held close in a soldier's grimy hand. The features had been hardly distinguishable to him, yet plainly visible to his friend who tenderly viewed them with love-filled eyes in the dim light of the miserable dugout.

"My wife," he had repeated over and over to himself.

IT was a very white-faced but determined Terry who entered the Morris home more than a month later. Anne hadn't set eyes on him since her husband's coming, though she had longed, yet feared, to see him. She was just coming down the stair case, becomingly clad in grey, with a scarf like a pale blue cloud floating about her. She paused at sight of him.

"Anne," he muttered miserably, as he looked up at her, "I have come to tell you I am leaving. Your father and I are dissolving partnership."

Anne grasped the stair railing— a little grey bird with wings all aflut ter.

"Why— why, what has happened, Terry?"

"Come down, and I'll tell you," he said. It was an uncommon story that Terry told Anne as he sat beside her— a story of how, when a soldier had been left for dead on the battlefield, a companion had returned, and, at the risk of his own life, dragged him to safety, being severly wounded in the act.

No, it was not an uncommon story. It had quite often happened, and as often been told. But Terry painted his version in such glowing colours that Anne's eyes fairly gleamed with the telling of it.

"But—but Terry," she faltered when he had finished, "I can't see what this story could possibly have to do with your leaving dad."

"Just this, Anne," he said; "the soldier who was left on the battle field in this instance was myself. My pal was your own husband— Bob Carey."

Anne looked at him with wide, incredulous eyes. "Terry!" was all she could say.

"Yes, Anne," he said, "your husband. I had never in any way connected him with my wartime mate. There were always countless Blacks, Whites, Careys, and the like in all battalions, and, in fact. I thought the enemy got him that night. I never expected to see him again. I am leaving, Anne, because I feel that my place should be his. In time he will make good. He has the stuff in him. You have never told him about—about us, Anne ?"

"Not yet," she replied.

"Then don't ever," he said. "He loves you still. Anne, very dearly, and news of that sort would break him entirely. Just be good to him, and try to for get this mad infatuation of ours. He would have given his life once for me, so why shouldn't I give mine now for him? I'm going away to try to forget you, Anne— not that I ever really can," he ended brokenly.

Anne by this time was sobbing pathetically. Poignant memories were surging about her. Her mind became a chaos of conflicting emotions. She could scarcely grasp the meaning of this great loyalty of one Digger towards another, yet it touched her deeply with its immensity.

LONG after Terry had left her she sat staring into space, his good-bye still ringing in her ears. She lived over again the story he had told her, and for the first time saw her husband in a new light, as Terry had hoped she would. Born of sudden in spiration, he became to her the hero of a tale which, somehow, stood out glowingly from others of its kind. The years in between faded away. Once again she was the girl standing there amid that cheering, crying, laughing mob, as a big ship slowly made its way outward. Once again she fought back those tears which persisted, in coming as a tall khakhi-clas figure waved back at her, and a young voice callef: "Good-bye, Anne, till we meet again."

Somewhere deep down within her something was stirring, something sweet and undefinable— like a faint, warm aiterglow, and though she hardly realised it herself Bob Carey was coming into his own again.

How long he had stood there or just when he had come, she never knew, but she loosed up suddenly to see him standing beside her— the husband for whom she had thought her love long since dead.

"I hope I didn't startle you," he said as he saw the surprised expression which came into the violet eyes, still wet with their recently-shed tears. He couldn't help noticing that she had been crying, and he wondered if possibly he might be the cause of her unnappiness. No doubt his presence was beginning to wear upon her. No doubt she wished he had not come back.

"ANNE," he said, as she did not answer, "I have come home early purposely to talk with you. I didn't want to bring up this subject again so soon, but certain things that have happened make me feel that I should. I wonder if you know that Mr. Lane, your father's business partner, was a digger-mate of mine over the other side?"

"Why haven't you, yourself, told me this before?" Anne evaded the ques tion by asking one herself.

"Because I didn't think you would be interested," he answered. "You always seemed so indifferent whenever I mentioned anything about the war."

Anne could not dispute his words, for she knew them to be quite true. She had been indifferent.

"But to get to the point of what I want to say," he went on, "the short time we were together I had the opportunity of doing a slight service for him, so he feels indebted to me, and thinks he must repay me. He is leaving your father so that I may have his place. Now, I don't want him to— for, don't you see, Anne, if your agreement and mine does not work out well— if you decided to send me away— l will have gained nothing, while he will have lost a position worth while. It wouldn't be right— unless—"

Anne wanted to cry out— to tell him that he must accept this opportunity made possible by Terry's going— that, for her sake, he must stay with her always. But somehow her courage failed her. The words refused to pass her lips. The walls of doubt and in difference which she had been building about herself seemed falling in upon her and crushing her with their mocking emptiness. Bob, of course, misconstrued her whole attitude. To him, her silence meant but one thing— his own defeat.

ANNE couldn't sleep that night. She felt felt troubled and ill at ease. Siw finally arose and dressed hastily. All seemed quiet in the room beyond. Evi dently her husband was soundly sleeping.

Drawing a wrap about her, she crept cautiously out of her room and down the staircase. It was midnight. The hall clock was still striking the hour as she passed it and went into the library. She stepped out on to the veranda, but stopped suddenly. What was that?

Suddenly a foreign sound had broken the stillness of the quiet night— a sound as of a key being turned stealthily in a lock. Anne's first impulse was to scream, but she wisely, restrained herself.

Slowly the door farther along the veranda opened, and the figure of a man stepped out. Anne's heart gave a sudden bound as the bright moon light revealed her husband, fully dressed, and carrying a suitcase in his hand.

"Bob!" she exclaimed, and calmly faced him, like some sprite of the night out of whose glory she seemed suddenly transformed. Utterly confused, Bob dropped the suitcase on to the veranda floor.

"What on earth are you doing out here at this hour, Anne?" he asked. "I couldn't sleep," she answered truthfully, "so I came out to— well— I just come out, that's all."

Bob noted her hesitating tone and wondered.

"Neither could I sleep, Anne," he told her. "I've been thinking— and have finally decided that it is about time I ceased being the cause of sacrifices on the part of others. So I'm going away. I couldn't bear to say good-bye to you Anne."

He finished with almost a sob. Each took a step nearer the other. Anne unconsciously flung out her hand in a silent appeal, and before either realised what was happening they were in each other's arms. Bob Carey understood at last.

Tears of happiness streamed down his face, and Anne sobbed quietly. No word was spoken, for there seemed no need for any. The night wore on. Down among the trees a night bird called plaintively. But the pair clinging to each other there in the moonlight gave no heed to time. To them it was eternal.

________________

21: Scalyback

An Adventure in a Northern River

Queenslander 22 Jan 1931

SCALYBACK lay on the sand-bank, and the sun blazed down on his broad body. It was wet and glistening with the water of the stream, but slowly dried to a dull colour till the last drop trickled down his scales.

Around him the river flowed placidly, and an occasional plop sounded as some part of the undermined bank caved in. But he showed no alarm, interpreting the splash rightly. His massive bulk was motionless as if in sleep; yet all the time he was very much watchful, with one eye very much alive. Seeing everything that went on, he had chosen a spot with an uninterrupted view.

Far up stream a boat was driiting down with the current. In it was Ashley, the squatter, who owned the country on both sides of the river, and with him were two keen-eyed aborigines. Scalyback was a master of craft, and knew these people were powerless to harm him if he were careful. Yet suddenly on this bright day he stiffened to attention, raised his heavy head, and, while the boat was still far off, slid into the water, cruising about in the deep with only a glassy eye showing. A ripple on the smooth surface alone indicated wiiere he lay submerged.

"Boss," said the aboriginal at the stern of the boat, as he pointed to the spot where the crocodile had been basking, "I am an old man, and Scalyback has been there since I was born. Time after time we have hunted him, but he laughs at us. Our spears do not pierce his skip, and he bursts our traps as a man snaps a string. He is full of cunning, and has the eye of a hawk. Lying in wait, he pulls down the cattle when they come to drink. Not a week passes but some of them disappear."

THAT night when the moon rose the squatter put a plan in operation, and a boat stole off for a narrow island of sand, Here aborigines worked silently, digging a pit in which one might lie concealed. Before sunrise the boat was drifting down again, it ran aground on Scalyback's bank, was rapidly pushed clear, and went on its way. In the dark one occupant was left behind.

Ashley settled down in the pit prepared for a long wait. He was alone, and the Island was,a bare twenty feet wide, shaped canoe-fashion by the current that flowed sluggishly past. Not a sound broke the stillness except a faint lapping of water.

The dawn merged into sunlight, and the grey stream brightened. Ashley lay prone, occasionally raising himself steadily on an elbow to scan the river. The air warmed, and at last the surface was broken at one point by a small ripple. Scalyback was manoeuvring to come on land, and the watcher grimly sank back and slipped the safety catch of his rifle. Everything was going according to programme.

In reality it was doing nothing of the kind, for Scalyback held different views on the matter, and was putting them into practice.

The next time Ashley looked up, a pair of eyes were showing not thirty yards off, and their owner was coming steadily on. It was an easy mark, but a crocodile sinks when shot, and, what with the current and cannibal brethren, will not come up again at the same spot. Ashley waited till Scalyback would be ashore. But the crocodile knew his business best.

THE rifle was pushed slowly forward, but as its owner looked again a feeling of disappointment came to him. This was not Scalyback at all, but a crocodile much smaller. At the same instant there came the quick instinct of being stalked. He felt the sand quiver under a mighty weight, ant swung round to sec an enormous jaw not three yards from his heels.

His movement startled Bcaiyback, who spun rapidly round with a terrific swing of his tail.

The well-intentioned effort failed to sweep Ashley into the river. The holllow pit was his salvation. A second later he was on his feet, but the great bulk of Scalyback was submerged, and there was no vital part at which to fire.

With nerves ajar Ashley watched him go under, and stood waiting for the next move, yet knowing none would come. There was nothing more to do. The round had ended in a draw, and the rest of the day was an amnesty.

"HUNTING this notorious crocodile has taken more time than I can spare," said Ashley to his wife the following morning. "I hate leaving a thing unaccomplished, but I will have to send some one with more leisure to rid the locality of this pest."

"You will do nothing of the kind, Billy," said his wife from the door. "I will take Scalyback on. It's about time I had a try. I can't do worse than you, anyway. Simply because the poor dear tried to flick you with his tail you run away," she added with a laugh.

So it happened that at high noon the toils were drawing in upon the cunning old reptile. He was being approached by land and water simultaneously. Mrs. Ashley was no mean marks-woman, and was at the old game of drifting down in the boat.

The sun was hot, and little spirals of fine sand danced along the banks. An occasional one swept as far as Scalyback lay, and closing his wakeful eye he waited for each to pass. Now he noticed the boat, but it hung back a long  distance away. For this reason he suspected it, and gave undivided attention to its movements.

This was precisely what it was hoped he would do.

WHAT Scalyback did not see was a a figure which elbowed itself along, taking every advantage of the meagre cover and whirling sand. With frequent pauses it crept nearer and nearer behind his shoulder. He did not hear the final sigh of relief as wriggling across an open space it reached the shelter of a bush a bare hundred yards away.

There Ashley stopped to steady: his strained muscles. But the lady through her glasses watched the manoeuvre, and her boat resumed its journey down stream. It came with a wide sweep to pass him far out, and Scalyback was in no hurry to depart. He did not associate the fact with any scheme of alignment. At last he decided to leave, raising his head as a preliminary.

He never knew what happened, as the bullet saught him fairly in the neck. A second later another crashed into his skull, but this one came from the boat, whence the lady had brought off a long shot. He lay quivering in death with great jaws spasmodically opening and tail feebly twitching.

Ashley raced up to finish him at close quarters, afraid that with a dying effort he might slip into the water and sink.

So ended one of the most notorious saurians in the Gulf country. Now, there is only a heap of whitening bones in memory of the brute's evil days.

_________________

22: The Plague Ship

The Australasian (Melbourne) 18 Feb 1922

SOMETIMES Fate is kind. Now and then she not only gives a man an opportunity to redeem himself, but does so in a setting of such circumstances that those who stand by salute his name at the top of their honor list. Take Graham, for example.

As regards Graham, no one in the second class of the Marcoola, outward hound from Sydney for American ports, knew anything about him. He kept entirely to himself, leaving to his fellow-passengers whatever entertainment might be found upon his profession and arguing about the cause of his presence on the ship. But in these days it is not easy for a man to conceal his identity, on the high seas at any rate.

Graham had been uncovered by a passenger in the first class, and though not witnessed by others, the meeting had a touch of the dramatic. Graham climbed the ladder leading to the first class promenade deck to get a better view of some passing object, and looked up into the face of a woman.

Surprise and recognition were instantcously mutual. She was still under thirty, well dressed, with character marked on handsome clear features, while he— into his face swept that shifting, haunting shadow of something done which on this earth is neither forgotten nor forgiven. So they chanced to come together at the gate which separates the first from the second-class.

"My God!" he gasped. "I never expected to meet you here. I— you— you won't give me away, will you, Irene?"

He gasped the rail to steady himself from stumbling back down the ladder, looking up into her eyes with the pleading of a hunted animal. For a moment she regarded him unflinchingly, cold, unmoved, as one whose feelings had been grievously offended utterly past hope of reconciliation as if the man who begged this of her might be likened, to those, who go hence to the potter's field of our memory, the head upon whose tablets we write no requieseat in pace; no resurgam. But perhaps it was the outward and visible manner of: the man reflecting his inward sense of degradation which touched in her a sense of pity— the last favour to be desired of a woman.

"Are you in want of money or anything?" she asked.

"No," he replied, asserting a display of firmness. "At least I never asked that of you. But— you won't give me away here, will you? I've got to find a place where I can start, again without the handicap of that thing on me. Australia is too thinly populated. I always ran into someone who knew."

"You need never have fear of me," she turned away from him. "I—I had  ceased to regard you even as among the living."

Graham went down to the second class, feeling curiously grateful rather than in any way resentful at her attitude towards him. She had given him her word, and upon that he knew she would not disclose what she knew of him under another name. In the old days she had kept faith with him; and believed in his solemn oath when such had become otherwise a public jest. Even then— but what was now the use of vain regrets. He had been a fool, perhaps worse than a fool, as people chose to regard his case. Surely it was not for him to complain of feeling hurt by her manner, since he regarded himself in luck that it was she, and not Bob, or Jack, or another, who had discovered him on the ship.

So he withdrew to his all-day occupation of reading books, not caring to mount that ladder to the first-class deck again. It may be that a sense of the justice of his position caused him to avoid the possibility of another meeting, lest in her eyes it be taken for a renewal of his old  't'cnoe.

Meanwhile the Marcoola sped on her course, a little world of its own, in which humanity at close quarters revealed itself without reserve on the whole gamut of character notes. But except for that one in the first class Graham remained practically unknown. In this way the Marcoola drew near Fiji.

Eight bells of the afternoon watch had struck. Save for the pulsating  rhythm of the engines driving the big steamer at full speed through the smooth oily waters, there was no sound whatever. Suddenly this was sharply broken by one stroke of the engine-room gong, the stand-by signal. Presently a quartermaster came down from the bridge, hurried along the deck, and tapped on the door of the captain's cabin. He spoke a few words and returned to his post. In a little while the captain came out of his cahin and went up on to the bridge.

Followed quickly two strokes of the engine-room gong for half-speed. From below the ship's doctor appeared. He joined, the captain on the bridge, The signal to stop the engines produced activety among the watch on deck. It also wakened the dozing passengers under the double awnings. They sat up lazily, wanting to know why the ship had stopped. A passing officer informed them that they had sighted and were "speaking" to a ship that was smitten with bubonic, plague.

"A plague ship!"

Those who knew the significance of it repeated the words with awe-inspiring emphasis. These roused themselves, strode to the rail, lifted the side awnings, and blinked out across the dazzling waters. Half a mile to leeward lay the black squat hull of another steamer. From her flagpole her ensign hung at half-mast mid upside down. A string of flags from her main mast fluttered out a signal to the Marcoola. Shortly, interpretation of the Htninger's signal was passed from mouth to mouth.

"Steamer Sumatra, from BoniI bay to Fiji with Indian labourers for the canefields. Ship swept with bubonic plague. Captain and doctor dead. Medical supplies and doctor urgently needed."

Presently a boat was seen putting off from the Sumatra. The captain and doctor of the Marcoola came down from the bridge and talked together on the upper deck above the side gangway below.

"The boat, sir," said the doctor, "must not be allowed to come alongside. We'd better not risk it."

"Well, what do you suggest?" questioned the captain. "We can't refuse them assistance."

"Load our dinghy with whatever provisions and supplies they want. Then leave her for them to pick up."

''Very well," agreed the captain.

He gave an order to prepare the dinghy, then turned again to the doctor.

"But they need someone, a physician, to take the situation in hand. That ship must be a perfect hell, ravaged by plague."

"I don't quite see how I can go, sir," spoke the Marcoola's doctor. "I have one or two serious cases here to attend."

The Marcoola's doctor was a bit of a dandy in his white and brass button uniform. He was very capable in cases where young lady passengers were down with sea-sickness, and greatly in demand al all kinds of social entertainment; but— but clearly not the man to tackle that bubonic ship.

"No," the captain shook his head gravely. "No, we can't spare you, of course. But without the right kind of medical assistance I don't envy the the first officer in charge of that ship."

As the boat from the Sumatra drew near she was hailed to stand off, and wait to pick up the Marcoola's dinghy. Meanwhile dispute had been going on at the top step of the ladder leading from the second class to the upper deck. Graham had climbed that ladder for the second time, and was arguing with the quartermaster stationed there for "permission to pass.

"I tell you," persisted Graham, "I want to speak with the captain on a matter of vital importance."

"Captain's now engaged," tersely replied the quartermaster. "You must wait until we move on again."

"I won't wait." retorted Graham, hotly. "Stand back, if you don't want trouble."

He elbowed the quartermaster aside, and strode along the upper deck to where the captain and the doctor were conversing.

"Captain Hardy," he began, "I am told medical assistance is badly needed on that plague ship. Is that the case?"

The captain wheeled around to look Graham over, as if noticing him for the first time. In fact, he did not recollect having seen him before.

"Yes," he replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Because I wish to volunteer. I think I am still qualified to tackle that kind of job. I shall regard your permission as a favour."

"A favour!" repeated the captain, evidently thinking the request put in a strange form.

"Yes, in my case the greatest favour one man could bestow upon another."

"Hardly see much of a favour in being allowed to ship over there." The captain jerked a hand towards the plague-stricken vessel. "The favor's all on the other side, I should say."

He turned a questioning glance on the ship's doctor.

"But— you are not down on the ship's list as a physician," protested he of the smart white uniform and brass buttons.

"No, but I can easily satisfy you that I am, or was, one. I presume there is not much time to spare for an examination, so a lew questions should satisfy you of my ability for work of this kind."

The captain nodded assent, and the ship's doctor drew Graham a few paces aside. It was not the occasion for a searching investigation into Graham's past or credentials. The signal for help was plainly desperate. Therefore the ship's doctor merely satisfied himself that the volunteer for the task was competent. This he reported to the captain.

"You, of course, fully understand what you are doing?" the captain warned Graham. "That ship over there isn't any spick-and-span hospital-ward. I should say your chance of walking ashore at Suva wouldn't be taken by an insurance company."

"I understand fully," replied Graham.

"Very well," agreed the captain. "You can tell my doctor what supplies you need. If you wish to forward any messages to relations or friends we'll transmit them free by wireless. That's about the least we can do for you."

"I— I have none to send," responded Graham.

Presently the news was spread about that a doctor in the second class, to whom few had ever spoken, had volunteered to risk his life in a single-handed fight against the frightful odds of epidemic on that doomed, waiting ship. At once all interest was centred on him. Who was he? What was his name? Of a sudden he had become the man of the hour.

Back and forth between the first and second class all that was known of him was asked and told. In the sum total it was little more than nothing. Up to that moment he was unknown among them; but beyond it his assumed name was likely to be remembered in letters of gold.

Thus, when Graham came on deck, after making final plans with the ship's doctor and purser, he passed along aft to the dinghy between two lines of keenly interested fellow travellers. His bearing had significantly, changed, for lie walked now with head erect, as one who was conscious of at least doing a manly thing. Looking  squarely in the face those who cast glances of admiration on him. By this time seamen had loaded the boat with the supplies, and were waiting for its single passenger, Graham climbed over the rail into the boat.

"When you touch water, unshackle the davit ropes and shove off," instructed the first officer.

"All right," replied Graham.

"Ready now?"

"Go right ahead."

The men at the davits slowly lowered the boat, while all along the ship's rail watching figures leaned lover. When the boat settled on the water Graham obeyed the first officer's instructions. As she dropped away, clear of. danger from the Marcoola's propellers, the engine-room gong rang for slow speed ahead. It was then that the crowd on deck came to a full understanding of what was happening. One of their number had elected to go to that sweltering tank of death at the desperate risk of his own life, Something—  some expression of sympathetic feeling was surely due to him.

"Good luck to you!" a man shouted and waved his cap. "By God, you're built of the right kind of stuff. You can bet we won't forget you on this ship."

A cheer went up all along the rail, with a fluttering of women's  handkerchiefs. Graham turned in the boat and waved his hand. A smile of triumph lighted up his whole face. Another cheer followed as the great ship glided past. From the bridge the captain gave the lone man in the boat a seaman's farewell.

It was then a woman came on deck, roused from her afternoon rest by the general tumult. She joined a group at the rail, seeking information.

"Why," replied a military passenger, pointing to the boat now falling astern, "that fellow is really doing an awfully plucky thing. Going to try and stamp out a bubonic outbreak on that coolie ship over there."

"Who— what is his name?" she asked quickly, shading her eyes as she directed her gaze to the boat.

"Graham, I believe. A. doctor in the second class, but nothing else seems to be known about him.

She had turned very pale, and did not hear the extended eulogy ot her companion. In fact she left him abruptly, hastening aft to the stern of the ship. She stood there watching intently. Presently she saw Graham's boat taken in tow by the one from the Sumatra, and pulled toward that ship. He turned around once. Apparently he caught sight of her, for he stood up in the boat, and lifted his sun helmet. The crowd on the Marcoola took it as a parting salute to them, a rousing final cheer. Still she watched. She saw him reach the side of the plague ship and climb on board. After him the Marcoola's dinghy was  hauled up. Then the Sumatra raised her ensign to its proper place and broke the signal at her masthead:

"Thanks for assistance. Report our case at Suva."

The crowd on the Marcoola's deck broke up and went their several ways; those in the first class to dress for dinner. But the woman remained watching at the stern. Gradually the distance between the two vessels grew till at last the plagueship was at a speck upon the horizon, a black dot against the flaming of the sunset. Presently she bent her head slowly downward, dropped to her knees beside the rail, and buried her face in her hands.

"Oh why," she cried, in heartrendering sobs, "could he not have shown himself in his true light like this before? What how could he have been so pitifully weak in smaller things, and now so great at the final hour?"

A hand was laid on her shoulder. She started up to find her travelling companion standing beside her.

"I could not find you. I wondered where you had gone. Perhaps the heat to-day has been too trying.

"No," the woman replied, recovering self-control with an effort. "No. You did not know. No one here knew, but that hero who went to the plague-ship was— was my husband."

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23: Long Pig: The Mate's Adventure

The Daily Mail (Brisbane) 6 July 1924

(Reprinted as: "East of Samarai",  Sun (Sydney) 6 March 1932

THE mate was young and had much to learn; the captain had faded eyes, his hair was grizzled, his nose was red and bulbous. He stood up in the long boat and watched while the Porpoise canted up her stern and took her last plunge to the depths.

"Cocked up her tail and away she went," he soliloquised, with acid satisfaction— the mate had been at the wheel when she struck. "That rock must have torn yards out of her port side, under the waterline."

"I don't care— it wasn't marked on the chart."

In saying this the mate continued his share of the argument, which had begun before the kanakas swung the long-boat outboard.

"Then," said the captain, "do you suggest that a shark bit a piece out of the keel, or perhaps that a sword-fish rammed her?"

"I went by the chart," the mate answered.

The captain, by his reply, inferred that the South Sea climate was not warm enough for the chart.

"I shall make it clear to the owners that I went by the chart," the mate persisted.

The captain suggested a change of climate for the mate, as well as for the chart. He felt aggrieved, having been raked out of a comfortable bunk in the middle of a calm night, and it was poor satisfaction cursing kanakas. When the Porpoise had struck, whatever it was that was not marked on the chart, and had shown clearly that the outward voyage from Sydney to the Solomon Islands was to be completed in the long-boat— if at all— the captain had transferred a wicker-covered jar to the locker under the stern seat of the long-boat. His other personal belongings he merely tumbled in when the boat was clear of the davits and the kanakas had the oars unshipped.

Now, in a moody suence, he dragged out the jar and uncorked it. He ventured a remark before applying himself to the jar, that there was a bite in the air. The mate sniffed toward the jar.

"Smells more like a nip than a bite." he reflected aloud.

"Plagues and pestilence!" the cap tain exploded. "Am I to sit here and be joked at by you, you half-baked rudder-post? You and your chart—"

He tilted the jar sky ward and gurgled a goodly draught When he had got his breath back he held the jar out to the mate.

"Nip!" he bade, fiercely. "I'd hate—" the mate got a grip on the two wicker handles— "to have any little jars situated as we are."

He drank, while the captain gazed at him wrathfully. "What we want is big ones," he concluded, putting the jar down.

"Ho, ho!" the captain said scornfully, "you're too funny."

He diverted his attention to the six kanakas, implying that the oars were good, stout stuff, not likely to break under such strain as might be put to them by a lazy, misbegotten, unclean, thick-headed, squab-faced, yellow-livered set of thieving, backboneless— here he paused to get his wind, and the kanakas, grinning, pulled no harder than before.

"We'll make the Hermits by dawn;" he said to the mate, more amiably. "I'll write up the log then, and show where she struck."

"The Hermits?" the mate inquired.

"Ah!" the captain soliloquised. "Long pig land.  Many's the joint of long pig that has been cooked on the Hermits."

"What's long pig?" the mate asked.

"What?" The captain , was so blankly amazed that he lifted the lid of the locker and reached for the jar again. "You don't know what long pig is?"

"This is my first trip among the islands," the mate retorted, rather sullenly.

"Well," said the captain, changing his mind on the jar, "long pig is you, cooked. Pig is pig— cannibal meat— you— anyone."

"And you're making straight for the Hermits?" the mate inquired, in consternation.

"Where else?" the captain said cheerfully. "It's nearest by the chart—"

"But," the mate began a protest.

"Look here!" the captain interrupted him. "Who's in command — you, me, or those kanakas? Am I responsible for this boat's course or am I the ship's monkey? I am the law, and if them blanky kanakas—" The rest of it went to the kanakas direct.

The mate gave it up. Perhaps the captain had a friend among the chiefs on the Hermits, and perhaps with six beefy kanakas as a bribe, the Hermits cannibals would give one so lean as himself, a chance to live and fatten up a bit.

"It's your risk," he said. "I don't know these seas — I got my experience and my ticket in the China trade— tea coasters, and such."

"Huh!' said the captain, scornfully. "China trade! Peddling tea-cups in a sampan, most likely."

"For two pins," the mate retorted, goaded to wrath by the insult, "I'd forget about rank, and slosh that encrimsoned strawberry you wear in the middle of your face."

"Don't do it— don't even think of it," the captain advised, unmoved. "My private graveyard's about full, and a tablet to your memory would cost me a month's pay."

The sky gradually lightened eastward as the moon sank; the wind freshened with the coming of dawn, and a faint line appeared above the waters beyond the bow of the boat.

"Take the tiller and keep her on that cut in the hills," said the captain. "It's the Hermits, and I want a snooze."

He settled down uncomfortably with his head on the stern locker, and very soon was snoring peacefully. The mate looked down at him with vindictive gaze. He wanted to alter the course, but dared not. So the mate held on until, as the boat's nose ran on the firm sand, and the kanakas lay on their oars, the captain sat up with a start.

"Long pig land," he remarked. Then, in a roar at the kanakas, "out, you devils, and haul her up!"

He stepped dry-footed on the sand, and the mate followed. The kanakas, having pulled the boat up above high-water mark, waited.

"Squat— sleep!" the captain bade. "Drink, if you want to— no biscuit yet." He turned to the mate.

"We'll sleep, too," he announced. "I've not had enough yet, and you look as bleary as a chicken after a bath."

He grubbed himself a depression in the warm sand and got down in it. He was asleep— and so were the kanakas— when the mate, still grubbing half-heartedly and wondering at his superior's indifference, looked up with a start as a shadow fell across him, and sprang to his feet.

A copper-colored individual, brawny and large, who wore a sort of red flannel sash with the ends tied in front, a chicken bone through the lobe of  his right ear, and a spear with a shining blade— the Hermits cannibal advance guard, obviously— faced him

Stories of heroic actions flashed through the mate's mind. He could do little, he knew, but he could at least die defending the captain— if only he could get hold of that spear. He was still undecided as to what to do when the savage grinned at him unpleasantly, and slowly raised thn spear. At this the mate leaped for ward and struck at the ferocious face.

HE RECOVERED consciousness slowly. He had seen many brilliant constellations, and had a vague memory of turning Catherine wheels in the air for hours. He felt battered and dizzy.

"I hope you've quite finished knocking my friend about," the captin's voice came to him. "If so, we'll move around the point to the wharf under escort of chief Moses here, and see about some breakfast. Then I'll see if I can't get a cable through to the owners."

The mate leaped to his feet.

"You said they were cannibals!" he shouted, raging.

"So they were, fifty years ago," the captain answered, "but they ain't now. How's trade in copra, Moses?"

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24: The Pearls of Jacob Le Maire

Smith's Weekly (Sydney)  7 March 1925

ON THE COAST of New Britain, off the New Guinea coast, a fortune in pearls lies buried. This treasure-trove was originally the property of a French navigator named Jacob le Maire, who explored New Guinea in 1615. He had been told that gold in immense quantities could be picked up in this then almost unknown land.

Le Maire was the first white man to vjsit the natives of the Baining country of New Britain, and he seeme to have made a favourable impression, for, although they could not supply him with gold, the natives gave him as many pearls as he cared to accept. Afraid that he would fail into the hands of the Nederlands East India Company, who then held the sole concession to make voyages of exploration in the North-Western Pacific, he placed most of the pearls in an iron box, and threw it into a watery cavern, hoping to secure it on another occasion.

Eventually Le Maire was captured by Governor Coen, of Batavia, but when on the way to Holland as a prisoner, he died at sea.

___________

THE crazy door burst open with a crash, and a man half fell, half staggered into the room. The rays of the great moon shone fully on his form. Anderson stood there for several moments, breathing heavily. He did not hear the mighty swell beating impetuously against the coral reef— the father of all hurricanes had almost swept the island bare three days before— nor the frogs croaking.

After a while he rubbed a hand against his eyes in a puzzled, half-furtive manner. The reek of cheap spirits flooded his nostrils, and the sight of Wilkins lying dead drunk across his canvas stretcher made him swear viciously. He staggered across to the prostrate body, and shook and pinched the  recumbent figure. But Wilkins was too far gone to be roused. Finally Anderson gave up the attempt.

It was, he mused, like Wllkins— damn him— to be drunk just when he was wanted. It would servo him right if he— Anderson — never told him of the marvellous discovery he had made in a cave on the eastern side of the island. But he could never lift the I box by himself, much less raise it from its position at the bottom of a 50 foot-deep well, which was washed at I high tide by the sea. Ho would have to take Wilkins into his confidence.

They had been partners for years; at first in a little legitimate pearl-fishery which had failed; then as pearl thieves in New Caledonian waters; and, lastly as traders on this little-known but fertile island. Yes, he would tell him.

Suddenly he felt unutterably weary. Half-sliding from the stool on which heo had been sitting, he rolled on to the earthen floor, and immediately fell fast asIeep. The intense heat of the sun shining full on his face awoke him. In a second he was in full possession of his faculties; then he went to arouse his partner,

Wilkins was an unlovely sight in the intense white light. He cursed and grumbled at Anderson; but the latter, by repeated applications of water already lukewarm, compelled him to leave his bed.

"Shut up, you fool," he cried at last as Wllkins continued his protestations. "I've found Jacob le Maire's pearls, and we'll soon be rich men."

"Where's Tomba?" said Wilkina thickly, "the store ought to be open by now. I feel bad."

"Of course you do, you drunken swine," blazed Anderson at the other's obtuseness. "Didn't you hear, Dan? Let the store go to the devil. I tell you I have found Le Maire's treasure, and once we get the pearls we will be set up for life."

Anderson's fierce eyes and the ring in his voice penetrated Wilkin's senses.

"Where did you find it?" he said, but quite incuriously.

"At the bottom of the. hole in the east cave."

"Rubbish," said Wllkins, his eye shining yellowly in the sun. "I've searched it before."

"I tell you I've seen it," roared his partner. "A brass-bound box full of pearls. The hurricane must have washed away the sand that covered it."

"Suppose I'll have to come," grumbled Wilkins.

"You wouldn't have the chance if I could lift the box by myself!" shouted Anderson in fury.

Wilkins shot him a malignant glance, which the other failed to observe, for in a much quieter tone he continued. "We've been mates for years, Dan. Come, man, bring a crowbar and a rope and we'll get the box. The Dancing Wave is due in a fortnight. Then it's Sydney for us, old chap, dinner at tho Australia, and the finest show at the theatres."

The friendly tone softened Wllkins at once. Pulling his soft hat over his eyes, he fetched a crowbar and a rope from the store, and, within five minutes, they set out, Wilkins grumbling a little at leaving the store unattended, for neither Tomba nor any other native was in sight.

"What's the matter?" laughed Anderson, "let 'em have it all."

An hour's steady walking over rocks and bleached coral boulders brought them to the cave.

The entrance was low, but once inside, there was an air of space and light and noise, for down below this sea was swelling, and, aloft were many crannies through which the light toned down to a uniform grey.. In the centre of the cave was a well, some 50 feet deep, and about ten yards in diameter. How it had been formed was a mystery, unless volcanic action had lifted up the island many feet, and the actual well had once been composed of soft rock.

It was awe-inspiring to watch Anderson. His face was chalky white, but not with nervousness, for without hesitation he swung himself over the verge, and, taking advantage of knobs and crevices, clambered down to the bottom, where he stood ankle deep in water. Then, with a shout of joy, he waded to the box, which lay imbedded in sand near the second entrance, the entrance that gave the sea Ingress.

Wllkins entered the cave in time to see him plunge a hand into the hole his knife had so laboriously made on the preceding day, and bring forth something that resembled milky-coloured peas.

"Better than trading, Dan," he shouted. It was at that moment the devil entered Wilkins.

"Fasten the rope to a Bpur of rock, Dan, and come down."

Wilkins coiled the rope carefully, and clambered down. By the aid of the crowbar and much exertion they knocked off the lid. The sight that met their gaze held them spellbound. A fortune in pearls lay before them.

"We'll share alike, Dan," said Anderson generously. Undoubtedly there was enough for two, and Anderson's offer should have made Dan Wllkins a happy man. Instead, it roused all the devils that drink had engendered. What joy would there be in Sydney when everybody would soon know that he was living on Anderson's bounty? Why should he not have it all?

His drink-soddened brain recoiled from the thought of killing him down there where he would see the body while he abstracted the treasure.

"I'll climb up and see if the rope's secure," he volunteered. "This box seems very heavy. Put the lid on while I'm away."

The task was a strenuous one for a man in Wilkin's condition, but he accomplished it, and bent over the rope.

"Throw the crowbar up, Joe," he shouted, "it'll come in useful to save the strain on the rock."

"Dam it all," he cried a minute later, "I haven't the strength of a woman this morning. This knot's too loose. You'll have to come and tie it, Joe."

Anderson swore at the delay; but with tho agility of an ape he swarmed to the floor of the cave, and bent over the offending knot. Without compunction Wilkins raised the bar and brought it down heavily on his friend's head.

Anderson fell forward and lay still.

"He's dead," muttered Wilkins, gazing at the curiously still face, though he could not force himself to touch the body. With nervous but strong fingers he tightened the rope, and descended again. But even though mingled fury and dread doubled his strength, he could not move the ponderous box a single inch. It was only when he was absolutely exhausted that his mad efforts ceased.

He was in a tight corner. How he wished now that Anderson were alive. It would take him many journeys up and down the well before he could empty the box; and even then he hardly dare leave such wealth lying about for any prying native to discover. But he had no alternative.

Hastily stuffing his' pockets and every other receptacle with pearls, he attempted to climb the rope. It was a heart-rending task, and once or twice he slipped and fell. But after a terrific struggle his eyes reached the cave level, and, as was natural, he looked at Anderson.

The body was gone!

The shock proved too severe for his spent body. His nerveless fingers loosed the rope, and he fell to the bottom of the well with a mighty splash.

After a long interval a man climbed carefully over a protruding ledge of rock, and, stealthily approaching the edge, peered down. Wilkins' body lay washing in two feet of water, for the tide was rising fast. Anderson remained there, his head throbbing like the cylinders of an antiquated car, and thought over the past. Wilkins had tried to murder him. Wilkins was dead. But the treasure which had changed him into a brute beast was left. What should he, Anderson, do with It? Was he to take a native into his confidence, and run the risk of a second attempted murder?

No; rather would he make a single trip, fill his pockets, and leave the cursed spot for ever. His mind fixed, he cast his eyes downward.

What he saw nearly startled him into a headlong dive. With staring eyeballs, and cold, clammy skin, Anderson saw an arm, long as the trunk of an elephant, and well nigh as thick, shoot from a crevice, and coil round Wilkins' body. Another arm followed; then a third, and a fourth. Finally a centre like a small gas-bag, with horrid, staring eyes and beak-like mouth appeared.

It was a giant octopus.

Anderson rose to his feet, and fled from the cave as if all the devils were at his heels.

At the foot of the well, the guardian of the treasure of Jacob le Maire slowly digested his unexpected prey.

_____________

25: The Mutiny on the Cypress

Sunraysia Daily (Vic) 11 Jan 1922

Vennard wrote a great many historical non-fiction newspaper articles, and I have included this one as an example.  The case is well-documented, and curiously the Sunraysia Daily used the heading "The Mutiny on the Cypress" despite the ship being the Cyprus throughout the text. Doubtless a sub-editor error. I have retained that title.

IT WAS a beautiful morning in the month of August, 1829, when the brig Cyprus unfurled her sails and prepared to leave Hobart. The sun shone brightly, and green grass clothed the distant hills. Innumerable cockatoos, and flocks of variegated paroquets, as if in joyful harmony with the beauty of the morning, filled the air with their discordant but joyous cries.

Lieutenant Carew, as he stood beside his wife near the gangway, felt at peace with the world and with all it contained, for had he not been appointed to take charge of the cargo of human jetsam that was manacled in the cells below. He anticipated no trouble in landing the thirty-one convicts at Port Macquarie, although he was aware that all of them had earned the reputation of being the most desperate ruffians in Tasmania.

The sea was calm as a pond when the Cyprus loft Hobart, but the sky became angry as the brig rounded Whale Head, and the captain, who read weather signs that boded ill for ships not strong of heart and stout of timber, decided to seek shelter in Recherche Bay until the approaching storm had passed.

Impatient at the delay, and finding time dragging heavily, Lieutenant Carew and the ship's surgeon decided to take a small boat and fish off the reefs near shore. A warder and a convict accompanied them.

Two hours later the first batch of six convicts were brought on deck to exercise. The names of the prisoners were: Ferguson, Mallan, Pennell, Walker, Jones and McKan. Ferguson was a noted criminal, and the warders feared him more than any other prisoner on board. A fortnight before he had nearly strangled a warder and had damaged the features of three others, and ever since he had been placed in his cell with four companions he had schemed and had offered suggestions that, if carried out, would lead them to freedom.

Walker, who had been a deep-sea sailor, knew the dangers of the ocean, and warned Ferguson that even if they did gain possession of the brig, there were innumerable perils ahead of them before they would be safe from the law. He recalled the fate of the Harrington, which was captured by convicts in Sydney in 1808, and which later was lost off the Indian coast with all hands.

Ferguson taunted his companions with cowardice, and urged them to support him if he made an attempt to escape. They must have agreed, for they silently shook hands just as the warders came to the door of their cell to march them on deck. Usually ten warders guarded the convicts as they exercised on deck, but this morning there were only two. As the prisoners stretched their cramped limbs and hobbled up and down the deck with their fetters dangling around their legs.

It happened that the two warders turned their backs on the criminals and lookd toward the shore where the four men in the boat were fishing. Ferguson had been waiting for this moment, and, with a bound, he and his companions leapt upon the two warders and bore them to the deck before they could use their muskets. The captain, crew and the other warders, who were down below, were speedily imprisoned by having the hatches battened down above them.

The convicts then removed their leg-irons and released their companions from the cells. Ferguson addressed the warders below and promised not to injure them in any way if they surrendered quietly. A volley of shot from below tore through the hatches, and this so angered the convicts that they retaliated by pouring boiling water upon those below. This had the desired effect and the warders surrendered their arms on condition that their lives were spared.

Mrs. Carew was asleep in her cabin when the mutineers overpowered the warders on deck, and she was not aroused until a musket was discharged through the hatch. She rushed out of her cabin in time to see the captain and the warders surrender their arms to the convicts, and she fled back in terror. She decided to barricade the door but on looking around the scantily-furnished room she saw that this was impossible, so she crouched beside the bed and trembled at the thought of the fate that was probably in store for her.

Meanwhile Lieutenant Carew, and tbe ship's surgeon heard the report of fire-arms and immediately suspected that there was trouble on board. Carew gave orders to the warder and convict in the boat to row as fast as they could to the brig. When almost alongside the Cyprus he saw several of the convicts with muskets in their hands, leaning over the railing above. One sang out ribald jests to the men below and offered to cook their fish for them, and another hurled a potato at Carew with such accurate aim that it hit him on the side of the head.

Lieutenant Carew stood up in the frail craft and called upon the mutineers to surrender, but his words were greeted with cheers and laughter. Again he appealed to them to hand over their arms, promising that if they did so he would see that they were not punished for their rash act, but jeers and booinng again greeted this foolish offer.

It was then that Ferguson appeared at the door of Mrs. Carew's cabin, and beckoned to the terrified woman to follow him on deck.

"Madam,'' he said, bowing clumsily, "This boat is no place for a lady."

With these words he ordered Lieutenant Carew's boat to approach closer to the side of the brig, and when this order was obeyed he handed Mrs. Carew down to her husband. Ferguson then addressed the convicts on board, stating that it was his intention to take the brig to China. The ship was well supplied with provisions, and there was no danger of any of his men starving.

However, his words did not appeal to all the criminals, and thirteen of them refused to accompany him. These were sent ashore with the warders and all the members of the crew, with the exception of one man, who decided to accompany the mutineers in their dash for freedom. Sufficient stores to last the party on shore for several weeks were then placed in a small boat and landed on the beach.

Toward dusk the Cyprus headed for the open sea, and in due time reached China. Here, however, the mutineers failed to convince the merchants of Canton that they were honest, law-abiding seamen, and they were thrown into prison. Later they were sent to England, where Ferguson met his fate on the gallows, and the remainder of the mutineers were sent back to Tasmania.

The members of the party that had been placed on shore attempted to reach Hobart overland, but, meeting fierce blacks and finding waterless country they returned to the seashore where they constructed a crude raft, and, putting out to sea, were picked up several hours later by the brig, Oxelia which landed them at Hobart.

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26: The Resurrection of Peter Breen

Smith's Weekly (NSW), 5 April 1924

THE old man with the bent shoulders hobbled through the gate of the big gaol, and followed the constable into the superintendent's room. There he stood staring helplessly round till the man at the desk stopped writing, and looked up inquiringly.

"What can I do for you?" he asked.

The visitor started nervously.

"It's about my son," he murmured. "He's in here."

There was a moment's silence, the prison official evidently thinking that his visitor would continue, but the old man hung his head and remained quiet. "What is his name?" asked the Superintendent.

The old man straightened himself up, and looked squarely at his questioner. "His real name is Peter Breen," he replied, "but he ain't in here under his real name. Look, mister, it's like this Peter was the best boy that ever lived, but he loved a girl, an' when she went back on him he just got a little wild. You know, mister, a lot of young fellows do that. But he's a good boy."

The superintendent nodded. He had heard the same story many times, but he had sympathy to spare for the old man who tried to shield his son.

"It was just that girl goin' back on him," repeated the visitor. "Peter was a straight goer up till then. He had a heart bigger than any boy in the district, an' he wasn't afraid of much. Then, as I told you, he went a little Wild, and then I heard that he had been placed in this prison. Young Martin Cluney told me he was here, and Martin knows."

The superintendent pulled the heavy register towards him and looked over the pages.

"There is no Peter Breen in here," he laid.

The old man moved closer.

"No, I told you he wouldn't be here under his right name. But he's in here all right, and I wish that you would let me see him. See, mister, it's like this. I've just run to the length of my chain, an' I'd like to see the boy before I go south to end my days. I've come right down from the Territory to see him, mister. He's my only son, an' he was a mighty good son up to the time that girl fooled him. I'd just like to shake his hand if it could be fixed. He was a good boy, an' If he knew that his old man wanted to speak to him he— he—"

The old man's voice died away in a faint whisper, and the superintendent fumbled nervously with his papers.

"I will make an attempt to find your son," he said slowly. "If you come back in three hours I might have news for you."

THE LONG LINES of prisoners were drawn up in front of the workshops before being marched to their cells for their midday meal, when the superintendent stepped forward and ad dressed them.

"An old man called here this morning to see his son," he said quietly. "He thinks it will be his last opportunity of seeing him, as he is very old, and is now going south to die. But the son is here under an assumed name, and we cannot locate him. Now I am going to call the man's right name, but before doing so I will give him warning. If he thinks that the fact of his real name being known to the authorities might lead to further prosecution he may keep quiet. If he doesn't, he can see his father, who will return to the gaol after dinner. The name is Peter Breen."

There was a shuffling of many feet along the line when the name was called. Prisoners gave sighs of relief and glanced at each other wonderingly. Each man thought that Peter Breen, if he was in the long line, would be a considerable fool if he made himself known, and they nudged one another to express their contempt or the superintendent's tactics.

"A nice Idiot he'd be to own up," murmured a man in the rear rank, and his companions snickered.

"Peter Breen is the name," repeated the superintendent. There was a moment of tense silence, then a broad-shouldered man in the rear rank pushed his way through the line in front, took two steps forward, and stood at attention. The superintendent and the gaol officials stared. The prisoner who had stepped forward was known as Charles Gregory.

"I am Peter Breen," he said quietly. "I would like to speak to my father when he returns."

THAT AFTERNOON father and son conversed for a short twenty minutes in the visitors' room, but while they were bidding each other an affectionate farewell, the Law was busy. The superintendent of Stewart's Creek gaol communicated the fact of the resurrection of Peter Breen to the authorities in Brisbane, and those authorities were busy looking up records to see if Peter was wanted for some other offence.

And the Law did not seek in vain. Peter Breen had slipped twice from the path of virtue, but for the first slip he did not pay a penalty because the Law was not familiar with his whereabouts.

Thus it came to pass that the same boat that took old Breen south, carried his son to Brisbane to stand his trial for an offence committed two years previously. The attorney who conducted the prosecution of Peter Breen made a brilliant effort in stating the case to the jury. The crowd in the courtroom shuddered as they listened to the remarkable manner in which retribution followed the evildoer.

"This man," said the attorney, "has been a fugitive from Justice for two years. But Justice is surefooted and tireless, gentlemen. Emerson has said that crime and punishment grow upon the one stalk, and the hand that plucks the one will surely gather the other. Breen's case is an example. He was an inmate of Stewart's Creek gaol at Townsville under the assumed name of Charles Gregory, but by a curious little happening, one of those little incidents that upset the best plans of criminals, his real name became known, and he was dragged to the bar of Justice."

The courtroom applauded the effort of the prosecuting attorney when he took his seat, after demanding a verdict of guilty, but the prisoner sat grim and defiant. The judge asked if he had any defence, but he shook his head sadly. An attempt to defend himself seemed a mere waste of words to Peter Breen at that moment.

The jury retired and in three minutes returned with a verdict of guilty, and the prisoner was sentenced to four years' imprisonment.

In the little corridor, where the sentenced prisoners waited before being conveyed to the gaol, an inquisitive constable who had listened to the trial, inquired how the authorities had discovered Breen's real name, and the prisoner told the story of his father's visit.

"I don't mind the four years," he said, "but if my old dad knew I got it through owning up to my right name for the sake of a twenty-minute chat with him, it would about end him."

The constable took out his tobacco pouch and passed some of its contents to the prisoner as they moved forward.

"There's no need to tell you to keep your mouth shut about me giving you this," he whispered. And the heart of Peter Breen was comforted.

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27: The Orang-Utan

Smith's Weekly (Sydney), 21 Aug 1926

AT the last minute the captain refused to take the orang-utan aboard. It was true Duke was a ferocious and terrifying beast. Six-foot arms with which he beat his hairy chest until the hollow drumming stirred our blood with memories of the jungle; a head and face more than half human; coupled with the howls that emerged continually from his deep bosom, striking terror even to the Malay beaters who had brought him in. He raged back and forth in his steel cage, screaming and shaking the bars, leering at us balefully in infrequent pauses and talking now and then in a language that just escaped being a language.

"I have to draw the line somewhere," said the captain to me. "That fellow la strong enough to twist those bars out like straws If he can get a leverage. I'll land the rest of your animal cargo in Sydney; but this howling banshee— something tells me to ride without him. There's a tramp, Sulu Maid, clearing In an hour. She'll carry anything."

So It was upon the upper deck of the Sulu Maid, as dirty a tramp as ever cargoed copra and oil, that the gibbering orang-utan was finally hoisted, the motley crew jeering at his jeers and howling as he howled.

And then, a few moments before sailing, there rushed down to the wharf my head beater, a cage dragged furiously after him by three or four natives.

He explained In his best mixture of Malay and coffee-house English that the beaters had just brought In a fine boa, 17 feet long, recently fed, and whose superlative charms would grace the interior of any zoo in Australia.

After looking her snakeship over carefully, I paid the rupees demanded. She was a beauty, with a splendid head; youth and insolence and wickedness in every curve of her finely-coloured body, now distended with recent food. At least she would cause no trouble on the voyage, being apt to sleep for two weeks more with that meal inside her.

We had been out only twenty-four hours when trouble began. It may have been the unabated yammering from the orang-utan's cage which roused the sleepy boa. Or it may have been that the ship's motion gave her some uncomfortable sensations. Anyway, the orang-utan soon began to recognise close to him on deck his most dread enemy— more dreadful than a tiger, more terrifying than a mad elephant.

When I ordered the boa's cage taken below the captain backed up the crew in their refusal to handle it. The swaying, leaping body was sufficient to alarm anyone. We lashed the cage to the deck and trusted to luck. The snake's unusual temper displayed itself undiminished. The cage of the orang-utan and the reptile were not far apart, and the effect upon Duke was surprisingly subduing. He fled cringing to the corner of his shelter, his big frame trembling, his face expressing the deepest terror.

Along In the fourth watch, with the tramp booming along before a good head wind, one of the hands, in swabbing. down the deck, came too close to Duke's cage.

The brute reached out swiftly and, grasping the man by the shoulder, dragged him close to the bars. The howls brought the crew running. Snatching up an iron pin, one of, them smashed It down on the hairy arm protruding through the cage.

Fortunately the blow landed on the tender thumb muscle, and the orang-utan dropped his captive with a howl of almost human rage and pain. Teamster, the rescued deck-swabber, rubbed his bruised shoulder and gazed upon the ape.

"Blime, you are affectionate, ain't you! Think I was your brother or something!"

At that moment the snake gave a terrible lunge and began to thresh and hiss in her quarters.

All ferocity vanished from the ape. He gave a pitiable cry and made another futile reach for Teamster. Teamster broke, out into loud laughter.

"Wants me to save him from the bloomin' snake, he does blarst his bloomln' hide!"

"Keep off, Teamster!" I warned. "He'll twist you into sausage and make a meal on your bones."

Teamster sat down on a coil of rope at a safe distance. In this sudden friendship I saw a chance to tame the orang-utan, who had promised to resist all efforts to educate and elevate him.

"It won't hurt you to give him a friendly word now and then, Teamster," I said, "but keep out of the reach of those claws."

From that day Teamster and the ape became almost blood brothers. They seemed to speak a common tongue and have a common standard of thought. But the temper of the boa, instead of improving, grew worse. Accustomed though I was to such dangerous displays of feeling, her fury got on my nerves.

The weather grew bad as we approached Torres Strait. Every sail trimmed, the pumps going, the tramp wallowed through sullen fields of slate grey, diving one moment for the bottom of the sea, hanging the next on the peak of a mountainous roller.

"We must get the snake below some way," I insisted to the captain in a moment when there was a pause In the crew's exertions.

"Not below," said the captain firmly. "Into the sea if you like, where she belongs.  I'll not have no wild snake below-ship. If a roller washes her off, well and good. A wild monkey is enough."

Suddenly, as all disaster comes, a gigantic wave lifted on starboard, drowning the Sulu Maid In an avalanche of water. Teamster was at the wheel; I between the cages of the two animals. I threw myself on a loose boom and clung there.

In the flood that blinded me I felt the snake, freed from her overturned cage, surge past me, slithering the weight of her body over me, wrapping her tail about masts as she went, intent on the cage of the orang-utan.

Teamster, at the wheel, screamed to me to save his precious monkey. But the captain, with black looks and dire language, ordered him to his own duty. Unless I could intervene, the battle was to be to the finish between the reptile and the ape. I must do something quickly or I stood to lose a £200 snake and an £800 monkey. Yet the scene paralysed thought.

For, In the moment of the ship's fall, snake and ape both leaped, the reptile, with all her cunning, looping herself about the giant frame of the jungle-man, her own body swiftly and shrewdly out of the leverage of the frantic hands whose grip could have torn her apart had they been free.

The strength of a full-grown boa is appalling. I have seen them shiver a steel-barred cage into a bundle of rods and smash the frame of a live bullock to splintered bones with the slow and measured pressure of their steel-cable middles. The serpent's head curled slowly about the orang-utan's hairy neck; across his mighty chest the black cable closed down with suffocating pressure.

The terrified crew, driven back to their places by the infuriated captain, retreated with white faces and bulging eyes.

The ape's face was a pitiable sight, human terror and human loneliness frozen upon it. He bobbed his sloping head ineffectually as he attempted to got his teeth into the cruel thong about his neck. Teamster swung the wheel fiercely, in an agony of helplessness and indecision. Then the ape gave a mighty lunge and cast one beseeching, terribly human look upon his erstwhile friend and comrade.

Teamster could stand it no longer. With a yell he bounded from the wheel which spun like a pin-wheel until the mate snatched it, and sprang down the companionway. It seemed but an instant before he was back. Howling like a Tugula head-hunter, he leaped at the cage, the captain's Malay kris in his hand, a deadly and efficient weapon, newly ground and shining. Reaching his arm through the bars— and now I wondered at and admired the sailor's cunning— he sought carefully with the blade for a telling hold.

Under one powerful pull of the kris the snake, with a jerk like that of a released spring, came apart, cleanly sliced in two. Teamster had nerve, for I have known boas to leave an old enemy and attack a new one without hesitation.

The writhing segments of the reptile were pulled out of the cage and thrown into the sea.

The orang-utan became maudlin in his gratitude and relief. He chattered volubly to his rescuer, hanging feebly to the bars and acting exactly as does a man who has been saved from mortal danger.

Inseparable comrades, the orang-utan and Teamster are together in a big circus, well-known in most parts of Australia. In the big monkey house where the ape reigns as the noblest of his kind he betrays affection for nobody and obeys nobody but his nearest of kin— Teamster.

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28: A Home for Marie Ellen

Queenslander  12 Sep 1929

JOE and Marie Ellen were school sweethearts, and both were from the farming country. Marie was that rare combination, both pretty and sensible. Joe was— well, he was popular. They never could tell just how they happened  to drift together, but drifting together was pleasant, so they kept it up.

They had left school several months back. For a time Marie was on the teaching staff, but then she went back to her father's farm.

Joe had a job in town, and managed to have a good time on his very ordinary salary. And still they drifted together. It began to look as if things were very much settled between them. Of course Joe took other girls out now and then; Marie was too far out in the country, and, besides she didn't dance. But Marie reserved her Sundays for Joe, and worked hard on the farm during the week. Sometimes she tried to talk to Joe about the farm, but he only laughed in his good-natured way, and said she ought to be in town where things were moving.

Then one Sunday they went to visit Rosalee. Rosalee was Joe's married sister, and she was immensely proud of Marie. Perhaps it was because they agreed so well. Joe himself was more intimate with Rosalee than with any one else, but they did not agree, not in the least.

Rosalee always made them feel perfectly at home. She shooed Joe off with Ralph, her husband, and invited Marie into the kitchen to assist with the cooking. Nothing could have suited Marie more. They stirred and whipped to their hearts' content. Then abruptly Rosalee stopped and sat down by the window.

"MARIE," she said, "Joe thinks a lot of you."

Marie did not reply. She was tending over a bubbling saucepan, and her face was hidden.

Rosalee continued, "Some day he will be asking you to marry him— and he's not worth marrying."

Still Marie did not reply. Rosalee went on, "We've tried to get him settled down, mother and dad and Ralph and I, all of us; but he just won't." She looked out of the window as if studying what to say, then muttered in a low voice, "I know he could make something of himself if he'd just try. He just doesn't seem to have any motive."

Marie's face lifted from the bubbling saucepan. It was very pale.

"That's what I have thought so many times. I've tried to talk to him—but he just laughs at me." Her voice ended with a little jerk as if the tears were very near.

"Marie, dear." Rosalee was very earnest. "I believe you can do more than any one else."

"I don't know, Rosalee; sometimes I think he likes any of the girls as well as me."

"You wouldn't if you were his sister. I know. That's why I'm talking to you so to-day. I believe, dear, when he asks you the important question, if you'll set him at some definite task before you tell him 'yes,' that he will do it, and it win be the making of him. Tell him he'd have to have three hundred pounds in the bank, for instance."

Marie was bending over the saucepan again, but directly she replied in a queer little muffled voice, "I'll try"

JOE was unusually full of good spirits that day at dinner, and Marie was unusually dainty and sweet. Perhaps it was just the essence of a bright sunny day, or perhaps it was—

They left early. Joe had suggested a ride along the river road before they ran into town. Marie always insisted on going to church, and in that Joe humoured her. Sometimes, it's true, he only took her to the door, but sometimes, and those were the evenings Marie prized most, he went with her, and afterwards drove her home. Tonight he had promised to go with her.

The river road was beautiful in the March sunlight, with the green tree canopy overhead and the sweet, wild flowers peeping from the grassy banks on either side. And it was lonely. Marie instinctively leaned closer against Joe's shoulder, and they talked very little. Presently Joe stopped the car and his arm slid across the back of the seat.

"Marie," he said, "let's get married."

MARIE raised her blue eyes straight to him.

"Joe, how can we?" she asked quietly.

"Simple." Joe's smile was upsetting and contagious. "Well run over to town next week, see a parson, and the business is finished."

He drew her closer. She did not resist, but still her eyes sought his seriously.

"Yes, I know, but the house and the furniture and everything."

"That's simple, too. We won't need much, just you and I, will we, sweetheart? I've got a job, and I expect a rise in salary next week. We'll have a jolly time."

Marie was looking very thoughtful, but she could not reply.

"Besides, I want to get you away from the farm." said Joe. "I'll rent whatever house you say, and I can get the furniture on time payment. Come on and say 'yes.' like a good girl. I want to kiss you."

THEN Marie spoke. Her words came all in a torrent as if she were afraid she wouldn't speak them once she stopped to think.

"But, Joe, you and I wouldn't get along at all. "We don't look at things the same; not at anything. I want a home when I marry— a home of my own. One that I can put the best of me into and know that some one isn't going to come along and ask me to move on when I've got it done. I want a little patch of soil— a place where I can dig and scrape and make things grow. And I want —"

A deep flush crept up over her white throat and across her face, and her eyes dropped. "I want babies," she ended almost in a whisper.

Joe was looking off towards the setting sun. His ism was very firm, and he did not turn towards her.

"I suppose, then," he said strangely, "that I'm dismissed," and without another word started the car.

Neither spoke till they drew up before the church door. Joe retained her hand an instant as he handed her oat of the car.

"Marie, if we did look at things alike, if— say I had a farm to take you to, could you care?"

"I do care, Joe," she answered simply.

"I don't think I will go in tonight," he said gently. "Good night."

Three hours later he telephoned Marie from town. "Hello, Marie— I'm leaving on the 11:10 to-night. No, nothing's the matter. I quit my job— going down the coast to look at some of the sugar land dad was talking about. Tell the people good-bye. Yes, I'll write as soon as I get there."

OVER a year had passed before Marie came Again to see Rosalee. It was a scorching January day. Tired and dishevelled she drew her horse in at the gate. Rosalee welcomed her with outstretched arms.

"You precious girl," she said, "wherever have you kept yourself so long? I was. Just telling Ralph I believed I missed you as much as Joe."

"I've been so busy," answered Marie. "I haven't gone anywhere."

"We thought you would be sure to come over to see Betty," said Rosalee.

"Betty?" Marie looked blank.

"The baby; didn't you even know we had a baby? My goodness, what you've missed."

She pushed Marie gently through the open door, and then skipped ahead to pull a blinking, rosy little someone out of her crib and put her up for inspection.

In half an hour, when Betty had cooed herself off to sleep, Marie was her own pretty, smiling, rested self again.

"Now," said Rosalee, tiptoeing back from the next room, where she had deposited Betty under a heap of mosquito, netting, "I think we're ready to talk. I wish you had come to dinner. It's so much fun to cook and talk at the same time. Heard from Joe lately?"

"Not since October last," admitted Marie, hesitatingly.

"Are you going anywhere for a holiday this year?"

"I don't know." Setting her jaw firmly. Marie went on, "I've been thinking of going down the coast."

"Down where Joe is?" beamed Rosalee. "That would be great."

"Maybe he doesn't want me," suggested Marie. It was more of a question than a statement.

"Maybe." agreed Rosalee. "As he has not written to you it looks that way, but he might have another reason."

Marie looked up quickly. "That's what I've thought. He was so hopeful six months back. Maybe things didn't turn out as he expected."

Rosalee was silent. After a pause Marie continued. "I could apply for a school in the same district, and just go there casually, you know."

Rosalee regarded her earnestly.

"Marie," she asked presently, "what did you ten him the night he left?" "That ne would have to have a home, and something to start on."

"Then," said Rosalee. "perhaps I have something yon would like to see." She stepped to the bookcase, drew out a letter, and handed it to Marie. Without another word she left the room so that Marie might be alone.

THE letter was from Joe. It read:—

Dear Rosalee:

This is going to be a glum letter, so get ready. My first crop is gone. The heavy rain a few months back settled it. Another month, and it would have been crushed. I never saw weather like it, and from the talk I hear no one else about here ever did either. I've been talking to some of the early settlers, and I'm thoroughly convinced that this is the place for me, but I wish I could have come here a year sooner. I suppose you know why. I stopped writing to Marie when the crop was settled. It will be two or three years before I will be on my feet again, and I couldn't ask her to wait. She's probably found same one else by now. It's infernally lonesome here sometimes, but it wouldn't do me any good to come back, and, anyway, I want to stick it out. This is the first job I ever struck that I got real interested in. Give Ralph and the kiddie my love.

Your lonesome brother, Joe.

When Rosalee came back she found Marie at the desk, blotting two freshly-written letters. She handed them to Rosalee to read.

"I've applied for a position as teacher in the nearest school to where Joe's farm is situated." she said, "and I've also asked the member for the district to assist me."

"You splendid girl," said Rosalee, earnestly. "Then everything will be all right?"

"All right with me," replied Marie. "Poor Joe."

IT WAS the first day of March.  The mail car from the railway terminus carried a trim but travel-weary little passenger. During the journey the passenger had plied the sun-browned young driver with questions. How far was it to their declination? Was her school on the main road? Did he by any chance know where Joe Lester's place was? When he answered "Yes" to the last question, and described its location as on the main road, just two miles this side of her boarding place, it seemed to make her very happy. Then, an hour later, they approached the girl's stopping place, and she seemed to feel that she was coming home.

"Oh, I love it all," she breathed rapturously. "Isn't it beautiful?"

"It is that," the driver assented heartily. Then, as they turned a bend, ''That's Joe's place just ahead. He and some other fellows have gone away on a timber-cutting contract about sixty miles from here."

From the corner of his eye he saw the little passenger start and turn her lace quickly away. Being a kind-hearted lad, he continued: "They all had bad luck with their crops last year, and they took on the contract to make money to put in another crop. They'll be back in a few months."

MARIE took charge of the little school, and her work was unbounded Joy. for, like Joe, she, too, was convinced that this was "the place" for her. She wrote to Rosalee often, but she left it to Rosalee's own discretion, whether or not Joe should know where she was.

Then one day Joe came. He rode past the school with, four other horsemen. Some of the older boys spoke to him. They called him "Joe."  Marie, too, had became "Marie" to the people whom she knew. She was one of them, and she was glad to know that Joe was, too. She was not disappointed when he rode straight past. She had not expected that Rosalee would tell him. He was no doubt riding down to the store, and he might hear there.

He did. At 4:30, when Marie was clearing her table, and carefully putting it in order for the next day, she heard footsteps outside, and looking up, saw Joe to the doorway.

"Hello, Marie," he beamed. "My word, it's good to see you here."

Then he came straight up and took both her hands in his own.

"I've just been down to post a letter to you; and learned this quite bay accident. You little brick. How did you happen to come?"

MARIE had not withdrawn her hands. She looked tenderly up into his sun-browned face.

"I had to, Joe. Rosalee showed me that letter."

"What letter?" he asked.

"The one where you told about your crop being lost, and I—"

"The dickens she did." Then he grinned. "I did feel like a failure that time. So you came out to cheer me up?"

"I came out," said Marie, earnestly, "to show you that I wasn't quite so mercenary as I seemed, and since we had come to see things alike, the other things didn't really matter."

He took her face between his hands and tilted it upward.

"Marie, you're solid gold," he said solemnly. "But I won't give you quite such a raw deal as that, dearie. I made good money out of the timber contract, and I've paid all my debts. My house Isn't much of a home, but at the end of next year if I have luck with my crop I'll fix it up and put new furniture in it—"

But Marie Interrupted, "I think your house is lovely for a beginning, Joe, just as it is, and I've saved up enough to get my furniture."

He hid her blush on his shoulder. After a pause he said softly very near her ear, "Marie. I'm going to plough a garden spot to-morrow, where you can dig,  and scrape, and make things grow." His voice was full of the old bubbling good humour. "Isn't it about time to make a start with it?"

"Next week," she answered promptly. "We'll have to go to town on Saturday to buy the seeds and—"

"Get married," he finished for her.

"Silly," she smiled up at him, "that goes without saying. I was going to say 'and get a hoe and rake.' "

____________

Table of Contents

- 1: Easy Going
- 2: The Genius of Dakaru Island
- 3: The Skeleton of Paradise Island
- 4: Come-To-Grief Creek
- 5: The Gamble
- 6: The Moorhead Legacy
- 7:  The Pearls of Manomoa
- 8: The Green Parrot
- 9: The Parrot and the Pearls
- Unnamed
- 11: The Prince of Wandabilla
- 12: The Pink Death
- 13: Fingers of Death
- 14:  The Green Umbrella
- 15: The Pearler of Pomete
- 16:  The Curse of the Poppy
- 17: Cave of Death
- 18: The Creeping Death
- 19: Three Teeth
- 20: The Afterglow
- 21: Scalyback
- 22: The Plague Ship
- 23: Long Pig: The Mate's Adventure
- 24: The Pearls of Jacob Le Maire
- 25: The Mutiny on the Cypress
- 26: The Resurrection of Peter Breen
- 27: The Orang-Utan
- 28: A Home for Marie Ellen