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"SOME ONE WAS KNEELING OVER HIM, . . . AND PRESENTLY HE SAW THAT IT WAS HATCH"

of Jimsy possibly poisoned, of Jimsy most impossibly drowned. He shut his eyes an instant, groaning, "I 'm coming, Jimsy, I'm coming-" And on the words came the crash.

It was a crash too great for the senses

-a crash that struck at life itself, maiming and bruising it. Loch plunged downward into rushing darkness, full of burning steel, steam, wood-coals, and flashes of fire and lightning. He seemed suddenly to grow into something very small and

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"I THOUGHT YOU WANTED ME. AND SO I CAME-I CAME-
AS FAST AS I COULD'"

matches, and presently he saw that it was Hatch. The match-light flared pink for an instant, and showed the convict's face, black and grimy save for two little white patches under the eyes, which were glaring at Loch indignantly.

Loch sought for words, but for a time could n't remember what he wanted to

say.

"Yes. Young tree across the line; probably lightning, as it was all afire. No. 8, sir,"-Hatch's voice broke,-"there ain't enough of her left to make a penny toy." Loch lay still, trying to steady himself. "Is the line clear?"

"As far as I can see,-darm it! I can't stop your 'ead bleeding!-No. 8, she kicked the tree off, and then fell on top of

"Hatch, your face looks kind of lop- it herself. We must have flew like birds." sided-" "And how long have I been lying here?"

"Thank you, sir." Hatch's voice was piercingly sarcastic. "Which it ain't wonderful, sir, considering I fell on it. And

"Probably forty minutes, but there 's no knowing. Just beyond Banda we are,

and we'll have to walk back. And the woods is fair crawling with things. ProbProbably ferocious."

"My fault, Hatch-"

"Shut your 'ead!" Hatch swabbed away with the cotton-waste. "Whywhy, my lad, I thought you was done for." His voice broke again, and he pulled himself together. "Now, if you think you can get up, with the 'elp of my arm

Loch staggered to his feet. The night swung about him, pierced with fires of pain. He thought it was the earth that reeled, and did not know that Hatch was holding him erect by main strength. He took a few steps, and a little strength came back.

"That's better, sir," said Hatch, who had again taken refuge in sarcasm. "Keep it up, and we 'll be in Banda for lunch."

"Banda?" said Loch. "Oh, but we 're not going back to Banda, Hatch. We're going on."

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"Why, yes. Can't you tie that stuff round my head? Take the sleeve of my coat, then."

"The sleeve 's wet too. You 're pretty well cut about. I'll rip out mine. Did I understand you to say, sir, as we were going on to Mr. Lewis?"

"Yes. It's not much farther than Banda. I'll be all right."

Hatch opened his mouth, gasped, and was silent. The situation was beyond speech, even beyond swearing. Loch interpreted his silence.

"You need n't come, Hatch," he said quietly.

Hatch found his voice.

"Thank you, sir," he replied bitterly. "My neck is to be broke', and I'm to be insulted into the bargain. And well you know that I don't care a darm for lions or niggers, but only for the things that drops on you. And probably And probably stingers." He carefully adjusted the bandage round Loch's head. "Stingers. And probably down your back."

Loch laughed croakily.

'orrible crawly

"Tie the other sleeve round your neck, and come on."

He turned up the long track, wondering why ties were so hard to walk on, and

why they seemed to be set at such irregular intervals, two short steps and a long, two long steps and a short, a rest. "Loch, I want you. Loch, I want you"—he heard nothing but that, saw nothing but the glimmer of the wet steel he must follow. And Hatch, after one wild gesture that took to witness the flashing sky, the wet woods, and the ruins of No. 8 fuming by the right of way, limped after him, his mouth screwed into a dolorous whistle.

A FAIR young man, with nice blue eyes, was sitting at a table, pleasantly and peacefully sticking dead beetles on pins. The light of a shaded lamp shone on his quick fingers, on the jeweled wing-cases of his prey, and out of the screened window before him in a long beam. Now and then he murmured Latin words, and scribbled on little slips of paper. A fox-terrier and a black boy lay asleep in one corner of the

room.

Suddenly the black boy sprang up, and the dog began barking furiously, and there came into the room what might have been the blood-stained ghosts of two men.

"Loch!" cried Jimsy, and leaped forward.

But Loch held him off.

"So you are all right?" he said thickly. "Sure you 're all right, Jimsy? I saw you through the window."

"Of course I'm all right, old man," said Jimsy, staring blankly.

"But your message?"

"My message, Loch? Good heavens! I only wired to ask you to send me up a bit of glass for my new butterfly-case. And the wire gave out half-way through. Loch, I say-Loch!"

Loch began to laugh with relief; it was a queer laugh that shook him from head to foot, and he held to the table for support. But what 's happened?" begged Jimsy. "What have you been doing? Loch!"

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"Nothing's happened, Kid," said Loch, soothingly. "Only I thought you wanted me. And so I came-I came-as fast as I could."

"Look out, sir," cried Hatch, sharply. But the table was in the way, and Jimsy was not quick enough to catch Loch. It was into Hatch's arms that he fell.

AT THE EBB-TIDE

BY CHARLES JOHNSON POST
Author of "A Venezuelan Gavroche," etc.

LL ready, sir," bawled the first officer.

ship and the shore. Thirty days out from

"ALL baaved his hand from the Boca at Panama, and Callao not yet

The captain

the bridge, and on the instant came the muffled splash from under the bows, and then the hoarse rattle of chain; a Chilian sailor touched a burning rope's-end to the old-fashioned brass cannon, and sluggishly the Mopucha swung round with the coastwise set of the tide. Already the little port boat was half-way from shore, and presently the saddle-colored port-officer and the doctor climbed the side-ladder, and with a puffy dignity followed the captain into the chart-house. A few minutes later they reappeared, followed by the hopeless captain. The latter turned to the group of passengers.

"Quarantine again; five days, maybe a week or two."

A tattered Chilian ran a huge yellow flag up the foremast while the saddle-colored officials were pulled ashore, and then for five slow days under the tropic sun. we watched the squat, gaudy port of call blister on the edge of the South American desert, and all because of two Chilian sailors down with malarial fever in a slimy barricade between-decks that did duty as the ship's hospital. The purser hunted up the key to the big chicken-coop aft, and the Chinamen of the deck steerage chattered in angry groups; for it is the pleasant rule of the boat to collect a shilling a day demurrage from the steerage and half a sovereign from first-class passengers; and when the Chinamen, thrifty and assertive, refuse to pay, it is the duty of the purser, assisted by a tattered gang of Chilians from the forecastle, to lock them in the chicken-coop until they do.

For five days we shriveled in the heat, and then the port-officer added two more for good measure, while the doctor sold us medicines, and the port-officer collected commissions on the supplies that were ordered by the string of flags at the masthead, and delivered by means of a small ship's boat anchored midway between the

in prospect!

In the slow monotony of this dot-andcarry-one voyage, with the endless, heated blue overhead and the sluggish Pacific swells beneath, every diffident stranger of that first supper aboard at the Boca was now a long-standing intimate. Caste, custom, and convention faded away, and naught remained but a polyglot fraternity that ran from the deck steerage to the chart-house, and included all but the chattering Chinamen and the crew; and a dozen port-officers had been successively damned by us in as many varieties of vernacular.

As the yellow flag at last came down, a score of clumsy lanchas, propelled by twenty-foot sweeps, like galleys, and looking like nothing so much as a fleet of gigantic water-bugs, crawled alongside. The steam-winches at the port hatches banged and clattered all day, until, in the mellow tropical evening, the Mopucha began preparing to get under way. The last lancha, piled with the baggage on which the owners sat, made fast; a cask used as a chair clattered from the winch, and one by one, deck and cabin passengers, were hoisted in.

A light westerly breeze, which scarcely rippled the surface on the groundswell, was all that stirred, yet it banked up the swells until the racks had been on the tables for the noon breakfast, and in the distance the desert coast was fanged with a white, angry surf.

From the upper deck the passengers of the first cabin observed the new arrivals as they were swung through the after side hatch. The last to come, a woman in a yellow satin and black lace dress, and with a dull-black rebozo over her head, spoiled, shabby finery, and bedraggled with the salt surf, stepped easily into the cask. A copper-colored lanchero passed up to her a small child gay with fluttering ribbons and the fluffy clothes of Spanish childhood, the donkey-engine rattled, and an instant later they were aboard.

beaten silver, and on these coasts of Pizarro and the Incas silver is no sign of luxury. A half-naked Chilian sailor

"I see we 've got Chiquitita, Captain," called the first officer from the overhang of the bridge. The dreary, coast-dulled captain nod- climbed through the companionway from ded.

below with a steaming iron pot, and was

"Tell Mr. McCampbell he knows the surrounded by a crowd of squealing, clatorders."

McCampbell was the purser, a Chilian of four generations who spoke no word of English, and who fatuously believed he had inherited a fine Anglo-Saxon phlegm. "Who's Chiquitita, Captain?" inquired one of the group.

"Chiquitita? Most everybody on this coast knows 'er from Punta Arenas clear up to Guayaquil. 'Er in the yeller dress what 's just come on. I d' know rightly whether she 's Roosian 'r English 'r Scandahoovian; she ain't Spanish. Speaks English like you 'r me,-better English 'n Spanish, they say,-and she 's got about as bad a reputation as there is on the coast. Got caught once robbin' a state-room, or as good as caught, and since then none o' the boats 'll take her except deck steerage. That's what I was reminding McCampbell of."

On the west coast it is deck steerage or first cabin; there is no intermediate.

The captain climbed to the bridge, while the first officer went forward to heave the anchor short. The young engineer and the grandson of an archdeacon went into the smoking-room to play chess, while the rest scattered or drifted aft to where a rope, stretched across the deck between the port and starboard chickencoops, marked off the steerage. The Chinamen were squatting about the ship's iron pots, from which they filled their little bowls; farther aft a gaudily ponchoed crowd of natives amiably dipped from a single pot, scorning the exotic niceties of individual platters. Their general baggage made a low barrier down the length of the after deck; on the starboard side were gathered the women and children. Down below were the nominal sleeping quarters, rancid and stifling, while here on deck were established little plats of ponchos and vicugna rugs that marked the precincts of inviolable households.

The woman in the yellow satin dress was busy arranging with her baggage a niche for herself and the child. From a corded rawhide pack-trunk she produced a couple of plates and a bowl of native

tering native women and children; after him appeared one of the cabin stewards with a smaller pot, which he delivered to the woman in the yellow satin.

The purser strolled up, looking them over impersonally. He glanced at the woman, and then his eye fell on the child, who was curiously and gravely surveying the Chinamen knitting with their chopsticks and bowls.

"Pobrecita!" he said softly.

At that moment the woman called, and the child, fluttering happily, danced back. Its foot caught in the cloth on which the Chinamen had been playing some curious game with their narrow ebony cards and where their bean counters still lay in respective groups; the child stumbled, and the little heaps and ebony strips were scattered.

A shrill Chinaman aimed a kick at the baby figure with his naked foot; the communal pot was overturned in a squealing, angry confusion. In an instant the woman in the yellow satin dress had passed the low barrier of baggage; her rebozo had fallen back and revealed in full the dry, flaxen hair, the hard lines and the patches of raw, cheap rouge that even the heavy coating of powder failed to soften. There was a swift movement, a brief flash of stocking, and a gun swept the air as she jerked the shrill Chinaman to his feet by the collar of his formless blouse. The gun descended, and a dazed Chinaman dropped to the deck with his cheek-bone laid open from the blow. The rest of the group fell back before the ominous click of the cocked revolver as with the other hand she raised the child-it was scarcely more than a baby-to its feet, and backed off to the little niche among the piled baggage.

It was all past before the purser was half-way over the stretched rope barrier. The Chinese patron came forward, and there was a few moments of angry chattering. But the man who has the power to lock you in a chicken-coop unless you give him a shilling a day is too powerful a being to be trifled with, and McCamp

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