HELL'S HATCHES

NEW FICTION

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

21, Bedford Street, W.C. 2

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I A Reputation Questioned 1

II Hard-Bit Derelicts 10

III The Girl Herself 25

IV "Slant" Allen Retires Again 38

V A Ship of Death 50

VI Compulsory Volunteering 65

VII Rona Comes Aboard 80

VIII I Leave the Island 93

IX A Grim Tale of the Sea 106

X Art and Suspense 124

XI A Hero's Homecoming 142

XII A Bad Man's Plea 180

XIII The Scene of the Final Drama 193

XIV Hell's Hatches Off 206

XV The Face 220

XVI A Sudden Visitor 231

XVII Down the Flume 255

XVIII The Masterpiece 268

XIX After All 282

HELL'S HATCHES

CHAPTER I
A REPUTATION QUESTIONED

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

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

To be sure, two or three of the blacks