The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, January 28, 1906, Page 4

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL This story published to-day —“The Escape”—is the minth of = series of thrill- stories by Cuteliffe Hype detalling “The Ad- wventures of Captain Kettle.,” If you want something that will warm the blood and Mft you out of the desd level of commonplaceness, don’t miss these stirring ex- periences of Oaptain Kettle. One complete story of adven- ture will appear every week in The Sunday Call umtil the scries is finished. every-day (PS55505%: Copyright by Cutcliffe Hyne.) OU’VE struck the wrong man,” gfld Captain Kettle. “I'm ost kinds of idiot, I'm not the sort to go ramming my he egainst the Government e sport of told,” Carnegie wearl you were a man nothin, #aid Kettle. e should man who'll s jail-breaking, spell of seven years in dost people’s am anywhere ndly observe our bare word s Innocence. The h people, by ferent she is person is escape tle bowed 1 fingered the 2 g He 1 a her sex this bu: fighting sir, a man y for twenty why deputy bribery who big idea of their ut of French " d steamer fare for t air of would come to ouple of postage stamps. ome in? You say lance. But TI'm : the balance is & from. No, sir; 2 e foolishness, ng I can do is to go urther talk. By James, own, for his impu- there’s a lady ttle stood up, thrust out 2 and sw on e t off znd 1g The door had been the room. = and took d, “I could tather any n and thank g yself. I knew you would be . s in our trouble. I knew it fr our letter, or ed agein, and e tan, “I'm nise,” he 1 am useless. was explaining to your—to Mr. gle, before you came in, the job L tside my welght. You see, nswered that advertisement, I wa something with a ste »oat that was wanted, and for rt of thing, with any kind of on, I am fitted, and no that signs better. But this—" do not say it is beyond you. Other prisoners have escaped from the French penal ‘settlements nE, determined map to arrange It only requires a™ Britain a large service. matters from the outside, and the thing is done.” Kettie fidgeted with the badge on his cap. “With respect, miss,” said he, “what any other man could do, I would not shy at; but the thing you've got here's im- possible; and the gentleman will just have to stay where he out the time he's earned.” ut, sir,” the girl broke out passion- ately, “he has not carned it.- He was ac- cused unjustly. He was condemned as & is and serve scapegoat to shield others. They were powerful—he was without interest; and all France was shrieking for a victim Mr. Clare was a subor e in a Gov- ernment office through which these plans passed. He was by birth nglishman so it was easy syspiclon against him. They forged great sheaves of evigence: they drew off attention real thicves; they shamed him horribly; and then they sent him off to those awful Isles de Salut anc raise from the for life. Yes, for life ease of the place should death. Can you think of anything more ightful *“Mr. C is te In having such a triend “A friend!” she repeated. “Has not my is promised wife We were to have father told you? I am Fancy the frony of it! been married the very day he was con- demned. It was my money and my fath- er's which defended him at the trial, and it neariy beggared us. And now I will spend the last penny I can touch to get him free again Captain Kettle coughed once more. “It was upon a tion of money that Mr. Carnegie I said to him “But it must,” must! You think us mean—niggardly. But it not ; we can raise no more. We e at the end our funds. Look around at this room; does this look like riches? It did not. They were in a grimy Newcastle lodging, au troisieme, and at one side of the room the flank of a bed- stead owed itself in outline against a cur aper torn and the carp: was nd from the shaft of the stairway came that mingled scent of clothes and fried onion which is native to this type of dwelling. Carnegie himself was a faded man of 50. His deughter carried the recent traces of beauty, but anxiety had lined her face; had fra vertise th and the pinch of res angustas ed her gown. All went to ad- truth of what the ginl had been saying, and Kcttle's heart warmed toward I He knew right well the of po himself. But still, he to perfarm impossi- a his voice and said nkness, bilities £0 with glum I am not remembering for a minute, miss,” with a wife a my earnings. I ter and he explained, “that I am a fellow children dependent on king at the mat- might be Mr. Clare’s tive 1 > got nothing new to tell you. A hundred pounds will not do it, and that is the end of the mat- ter as ti gh 1 e zirl wrung her hands and looked itully across at her father. Well,” sald Carnegle with a heavy sigh, “I will scrape up £120, though that will force us to go hungry. And that is all, captain. If my own neck depended upon it, I could not lay hands on more."” Captain Owen Kettle's face wore a Ve w a man of chival- rous instincts; it irked him to disoblige ¥; but the means they offered him were 8o terrib insufficient He did not repeat his retusal aloud, but his face spoke with cloguent sympathy. The girl sank to one of the shabby chairs despairingly if you fail me, sir,” she said, “the 1 have no haope.” Ke turned away, stiil fingering tarnished badge on.his cap, and ared drearily through the grimy win- dow panes. A s e filled tne room. Carnegie broke it “Otber men answered the advertise- ment,” he suggested “I know they did,” ‘and 1 read their letters and I read Captain Kettle's, if there is one man who could help us out of all those his daughter said; and that answered he is here now In this room. My heart went out to him at once when 1 saw his application. I had never heard of him before, but when I read the few pages he sent it came 'to me that I knew him intimately from then onward and that he and no other in all the world could do the service which we want 8t she said, ad- dressing the little ilor directly, “I learned from that letter that you made poetry, and I felt that the romance of this matter would carry you on where any other man with merely commercial instincts would fail.” Then you like poetry, miss?” “I write it,” she sai”, “for the maga- zines and sometimes i* gets Into print.” Would you mind <€haking hands with me?” asked Captain Kettle. “I want to do so,” she answered, “if you will let that mean the signing of our contract.” Captain Kettle held out his fist. “Put it there, miss,” sald he. “The French Government is a lumping big concern, but I've bucked against a Government before and come out top side, ahd, by James, Ll do it again. You stay at home, mi: and write poetry and get the magazines to print it, Instead of these rotten adventure yarns they're so fond of, and you'll be doing Great ‘What the peo- ple in this country need is nice rural : CUTCLIFFE HYNE. poetry to tell them what sunsets are like and how corn grows and all that, and not cutthroat stories they might fill out for themselves from the morn- ing newspapers if they only knew the men and the ground. “If I can only know you're at home here, miss, doing that, T can set about this other matter with a cheerful heart. I don't think the money will be of much good, but you may trust me to get out to French Guiana somehow, even if T have to work my way there before the mast, and I'll collar hold of Mr. Clare for you and deliver him on board British ship in the best repair which eircumstances will permit. You mustn't expect me to do impossibilities, miss; but I'm working now for a lady who writes poetry for the magazines, and vou'll see me go that near to them vou'll probably be astonished.” Turn now to another scene. There is turtle-backed isle In the Sea sufficlently small and naked to be nameless on the charts. The Admiralty hydrographers mark it merely by a tiny black dot. The Amer- ican chartmaker has gone further and branded it as “shoal,” which seems to hint (and quite incorrectly) that there is water over it at least during spring tides. The patch of land, which is egg- shaped, measures some 180 yards across its longest diameter, and, although no green seas can roll across its face, it is sufficiently low in the water, for the spindrift to whip every inch of its sur- face during even the mildest of, gales. On these occasions the wind lifts great layers of sand from off the roof of the isle, but ever the sea spews up more sand against the beaches, and so the bulk of the place remains a constant quantity, although the material whete- of it is bullt is no two months the same. As a residence the place is singularly undesirable, and it is probable that, until Captain Owen Kettle scraped for himself a shelter trench in the middle of the turtle back of sand, the isle had been left severely alone by man throughout all the centyries. Still human breath was hourly drawn in the immediate neighborhood, and when the airs blew toward the Isle or the breezes lay stagnant sharp, human cries fell dimly on Kettle's ear to tell him that men near at hand were alive and awake and plying their appointed occupations. The larger wooded island, which lay a long rifle shot away, was part of the French penal settlement of Cayenne and the cries were the higher notes of its tragic opera. But they af- fected Captain Kettle not at all. He was there on business, he had been at much pains to arrive at his present sit- uation and had earned a bullet scar across the temple during the proces: and, as some time was to elapse before his next move became due he was fill- ing up the intervening hours by the absorbing pursuit of literafure. He squatted on the floor of his sand- pit, with his teeth set in the butt of a cold cigar and rapped out the lines of sonnets and transferred them to a sheet of sea-stained paper. He used the stubby bullet of a revolver cartridge from lack of a more refined pencil and his muse worked with lusty pace—as, indeed, it was always wont to do when the world went more than usually awry with him. To even catalogue the little scamp's adventures since his parting with Miss Carnegie in that Tyneside lodging would be to write a lengthy book, and they are omitted here in toto, because to de- tail them would of necessity compro- mise worthy men, both French and English, who do not wish their trafiic with Kettle to be publicly advertised. Suffice to say, then, that he made his way out to French Guiana by ways best known to himself; pervaded Cay- enne under an alias, which the local gendarmerie laid bare; exchanged pistql shots with those in authority to avold arrest, and, in fact, put the entire penal colony, from the Governor down to the meanest convict, into a fever of unrest entirely on his especial behalf. He was put to making temporary headquarters in a mangrove swamp, and completing his preparations from there, and, to say the least of it, mat- ters went hardly with him. But at last he got his preliminaries settled and left his bivouac among the maddening mos- quitoes and the slime and the snaky tree roots and took to the seas again in a lugsail boat, which e annexed by force of arms from its four original own- ers, A cold-minded person might say that the taking of that boat was an act of glaring piracy, but Kettle told himself that, so far as the French of Cayenne were concerned, he’was a ‘“recognizea belligerent,” and so all the maneuvers of war were candidly open to him. He had no more qualms in capturing that lug- sail boat from a superior force than Nel- son once had about taking large ships -from the French in the bay of Aboukir. He had a depot of tinned meats cached by one of his agents up a mangrove creek, and under cover of night he salled up and got these on board and built them In_ tightly under the thwarts of his boat 80 that they would not shift in the sea- way. And finally, again cloaked by friendly darkness, he ran on to the beach of the turtle-backed isle, hid his boat in & gully of the sand, scooped out a'per- sonal residence where he would be visible only to God and the seafowl, and sat him- self down to await for an appointed hour. 2 By day the sun grilled him, by night the sea mists drenched him to the skin, and at times gales lifted the surface from the Caribbean and sent it whistling across the roof of the isle in volleys of stinging spindrift. Moreover, he was con- stantly pestered by that local allment, chills-and-fever, partly as the result of two or three trifiing wounds bestowed DY the gendarmerle and partly as payment for residence in the miasmatic mangrove swamps; so that. on the whole, life was not very tolerable to him, and he might ' have been pardoned had he cursed Miss Carnegie for sending him on so trouble- some an errand. But he did not do this. He roemembered that she was oeccupying herself. at home in Newcastle with the creation of poetry for the British maga- zines according to their agreement, and he forgot his discomforts in the glow of & Maecenas. It was the first time he had becn = bona fide patron of letters, and the pleasure of it intoxicated him. A fortnight passed by—he had given “Clare a fortnight in the message he smuggled into the eonvict station for him to make certain preparations—and at the end of that space of time Captain Kettle rolled hix MSS inside an oflskin cover and eddressed it to Miss Carnegle—in case of accidents. He put beckets on the top of his cap, slipped his revolver into these, and put the cap on his head; and then, stripping to the buff, he left his form and got up on the sand, and walked down its milkwarm surface to the water's edge. The ripples rang like a million of the tinlest bells upon. the fine shingle, and the stars in the velvet night above were reflected in the water. It was far too still a night for his purpose—far too dangerously clear.. He would have pre- ferred rain, or even half a gale of wind. But he had fixed his appointment, and he was not the man to let any detail of added danger make him break a tryst. S0 he waded down into the lonely sea, and struck out at a steady breast stroke for the Isle de Salut, which loomed in ;:; black outline across the waters before A more hazardous business than this part of the man’'s expedition it woyld be hard to concefve. There were no pris- oners in the world more jealously guard- ed than those in the pestilential settle- ‘mient ahead of him. They were forgers, ' murdcrers, or, what the French hate still more, traitors an@ foreign sples; and once they stepped sshore upon the beach they were there for always. They were men. t11 feroclous all lfe-sentence Unt ] labor or the batterings of the cllla:.’ below the soil, sent them to rest in with every breath were doomed to pal they drew. lgesperlu jailing like thlsm;n;:e; desperate men, and did any nt_ e oners—even the most cowardly O b oe —see the glimmer of & chanca" Ao cape, he would leap to take - L e though he knew that 2 certain i3 storm of lead would pelt along T trail. And as a consequence the rlglers the aisle bristled with armed \'Lf\rl ;(’ all of them marksmen. who s;:nd » anything that moved. and who oeg Iittle compunction in dropping a pm‘m oner as any other sportsman W have in knocking over 2 pml‘tfldze: To ‘add to,Captain Kettle's tally =2 dangers, the phosphorescence 'sena night was peculiarly vivid; the - glowed where he breasted it; his wake was 1it with streams of Ml\'fl" fire; his whole body stood out IHke i smolder of flame on & cloth of blac 8 velvet. His presence moved upon the face of the wwaters as an opon advei- tisement. He was an illuminated target for every rifle that chose to sight him, and, far worse, he was a flery bait enough to draw every shark in the Caribbean. And sharks swarmed there. His limbs crept as he swam with them. To move fast was to increase the phosphorescence; to move slow was to linger in that horrible suspense; and I think it is one of the highest testi- monials to Kettle's indomitable cour- age when I can say that not once dur- ing that ghasfly voyage did he elther hurry, or seurry, or splash. He was d prey to the most abominable dread: he of expended an nour ana a half over an hour's swim, and it seemed to him a space of vears: and when he grounded on the beach of the Isle de Salut he was almost fainting from the strain of i\l:a emn;lonsbba‘nfl for a while lay on e sand sobbing llke a ncémol L g hysterical ut a sound revived him and sent energy into his Umbs again vlthou{mn, prelude. From the distance there came to him the nolse of shod feet crunching with regulation tread long the shingle. He was lying in the track of a sentry’s By instinet his hand dragged th ~ volver from its beckets on ‘l:- e-n.e nrn!d then he rose to his feet and darted away like some slim pink ghost across the beach into the shelter of the thickets, He lg there holding his breath, and watched Sentry pace upon his patrol. It was evident that the man had not seen ntm: the fellow. neither glanced toward the rook of his arm " :nd flickered his eyes to th}- side and ¢ that like a man habitualiy traimed ¢, sudden alarms and a quick trigger fingsr His every movement was eloquent of the care with which the Isle de Salut was_ warded. Kettle waited till the man had gons o1t into the dark again and the soundless dis tance, and then stepped out from his a bush and ran at speed along the dim, starlit beach. The sandpats sprang back- ward from his flylng toes and the birds in the forest rim moved uncasily as fe jssed. The little man was sea bLred first and last: he had no knowledge of wooderaft; a silent stalic was a flight far beyond him; and he raced along his way, revolver in hand, corfident that he cou shoot any intruding sentry before a r could be brought to bear Of course, the discharge of weapons woald have waked t > and brought tue whole wasps’ mest about his ears But this was a state of things he could ave faced out brazenly. Throughout a" his stormy life he had given him an overestimate of the percentage of bul- lets which go astray. At any rate, the tarill of brisk fighting was a pleasure he -well knew and he never went far out of the way to avoid It. But as it was he sped along his path unnoticed. The blunders of chance threaded him through the shadows and the chaln of sentries so that no living soul picked up the alarm, till at last he pulled up panting at the edge of the open sp: which edmed in the grim convict barracks itselr And now began a hateful tedium of Waiting. The day he had fixed t th Clare was the right ome: the heur of ta2 rendezvous was vague. He had #aid “as near midnight as may be” in his message: but he was only able to Buess at the time himself and he ex- pected that -Clare was In 4 similar Plight, Anyway, the man was not there and Kettle gnawed his fingers with impatience as he awaited him. The night under the winking stars was full of nolse. In the forest tre the jarflies and the tree crickets s the katydids kept up their madden chorus. The drumming mosquitoe scented the naked man from af: put every inch of his body to the ment. The moist. damp heat of ) Place made him pant to get his breath. The prison itself was full of the uncasy rustling of men sleeping in discomfort. e Continued on Page 8.