Hell's Hatches

It was two o'clock when I began powdering and screening the yellow-hued inner lining of my sea shells. Subconsciously, I must have set three in my mind as the time my caller wou...

As a rider reins in his stumbling horse, so did I rein in my stumbling nerves. It was now or never, I told myself. If those final touches were not given before I stirred from my...

I have often tried to figure just what effect on the succeeding train of events my earlier arrival in Townsville might have had. I have never come to any very definite conclusio...

Nothing had been further from my mind than an Australian exhibition. I cared little for the provincial approbation of the Antipodes, and I was hardly ready for Paris--not quite...

With Allen and his coming in the back of my brain, it was only natural that my thoughts, as I ground and sifted and sorted the golden powders, should turn to Kai and the train o...

As a matter of fact, however, there had been a very considerable slip-up in "Slant's" carefully doped slate. That was plain from a number of little things which sunk into even m...

With a good many days of my life to which I cannot look back without a blush of shame, I write deliberately when I say that the one ushered in by the raucous grind of the _Cora...

That may give some hint of the state of mind of Australians when, waiting on the tip-toe of expectancy for word of the next dashing act of their hero, they received a message of...

The third day after the _Mambare_ sailed found me southbound for Sydney, with Paris as my ultimate objective. The thought that a striking--possibly a great--picture might be pai...

We spent the night at the hotel and went together to call on Rona at the Mission the following morning. The change in the girl was startling, far too great to be accounted for b...

Rolling out of bed at the end of twelve straight hours of sleep, I found the Trades blowing fresh and strong again, and the air--after the soddenness of the past week--almost br...

The lights had disappeared from the flume as I turned to go, and, rather than take the chance of another fall, I decided to use my small electric torch in finding a solid footin...

The expression of nervous anxiety I had noticed several times since he came was on Allen's face again as he started to speak. "It's a queer enough proposition," he began. "You s...

As for the girl herself, words fail me in trying to picture her, just as my brush and pencil (save perhaps for that one rough memory sketch, done at white heat while still gripp...

Although "Slant" Allen had "retired" to Kai on three or four occasions previous to my arrival, his latest sojourn--the one which ended with his enforced departure on the _Cora A...

The Chief of Police's allusion to the picture had started a nebulous idea in my head, but it took it several hours to crystallize. Driving alone up the hill, my mind gravitated...

I had not planned by what route I should go to the South Seas, and it was only because an Orient-Pacific liner chanced to be the most convenient connection at Brindisi that I we...

"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-...

interference was the one who had fired that savage train of energy--Rona. These points were not to be put to the test, however. From first to last Bell--although, from the wreck...

Well, I still think I was right on the score of the futility of further words. Nothing more that I could have _said_ would have changed the situation; but was there nothing more...