from maniacal rage. Fighting Hans had no other weapon but the broken, jagged, bottle-neck. In the cutting, cleaving, tom-cat scrimmage that followed, Fighting Hans ripped the mate's cheek from ear to mouth.

With a bellow of pain and rage, like a wounded beast, he grabbed his cheek, wheeled, leaped the rail and started down the gang-plank. Fighting Hans assisted him with a slush bucket between the shoulders. Carlos got well out on the dock, turned, struck a prophetic pose and shouted back, "You will pay me for this, but not in money. You will pay me, me, me!" Then he hurried up the dock to get some of the dark age medical witchery practiced in Guymas.

Any remorse that Fighting Hans ever felt over this fight was never shown. Yet, indirectly, it influenced his treatment of the seamen until the worst part of his nature was developed to the fullest extent. The different crews he shipped judged him by his name. They thought him to be a roaring, rough and tumble old demon of the sea. Holding this conception in mind, they treated him with mingled servile awe, and contempt that invited rough domineering treatment. This provoking attitude of the sailors soon changed his passive nature into a positive, savage barking old sea dog.

His name soon ceased to remind him of the fight and he quickly forgot it. No one had ever mentioned it to him save his shipper in Seattle just before he sailed on his present voyage. It was the last thing the shipper said as the ship was leaving the dock. He told Fighting Hans that he heard that Carlos had enlisted in the German Navy and had risen to the rank of submarine commander.

Then as the ship was drawing out in the stream he shouted to Fighting Hans, "I don't suppose you will find him cruising around in the South Pacific to collect the debt he promised you about twenty years ago. Well, hope you have a good voyage, Captain. So long."

The shipper did not tell Fighting Hans this hearsay as a warning, or to make him uneasy. Just a word about an old enemy, nothing more. Yet, curiously enough, it aroused a feeling of indefinable

dread that increased the further South he sailed, until now as he lay becalmed in about latitude 20, longtitude 120 of the South Pacific, it became a mental obession.

The motionless ship, the unbroken horizon and the damp, drugging tropic air made his body sluggish and his imagination a thing of torture.

Asleep or awake, his imagination invented scores of revengeful disasters perpetrated and executed by Carlos. Why these torturing visions came, he did not know. Why they stayed seemed an omen. He could not reason them away or banish them with a contemptuous grunt and a wave of the hand. He began to regret, for the first time, that the fight had occurred.

His mind, peopled with these phantoms, drove him to nagging the sailors, which in turn drove the sailors to a near mutiny. In fact, a mutiny was being planned by Slim Anderson. He wanted revenge for the useless scolding Fighting Hans had given him that day for dropping his paint brush.

The night following his one-sided clash with Fighting Hans, Slim Anderson was posted as an all night lookout. Instead of staying forward on the forecastle head, he felt his way aft. He sat down on the break of the poop deck and leaned against the rail.

The night was dark as only a tropic night can be. He could not see the misty outlines of the sails; not even his hand. To try to look at the sea was like peering into a motionless black pit. The sea was as placid as a mountain lake. There was not a smooth, heaving swell, or a catspaw, or the phosphorent glitter radiating in long lines from a shark's dorsal fin, to mar the glasslike surface of the sea.

Slim Anderson felt keenly his utter insignificance and helplessness in this vast watery waste. Just a microbe on a hallowed chip at the mercy of the elements. Such surroundings may well make the man with a clean record wish for daylight and company. But to Slim Anderson, who had shipped on the "Carrier Dove" to defeat justice, his wish was more like an unuttered prayer.

His memory opened the book of his past life to the blackest page. Then his imagination fed on the revolting details of a murder he had committed. He saw before him the lifeless body, ghastly beneath the lurid lights of the gambling hall. He could hear the blood dripping with a sickening spatter on the linoleum. That dripping of the blood, how realistic it sounded. It was only the drip of the dew from the booms.

The scurry and squeak of the rats in the lazerette worked into his imagination. First it slightly amused him. It sounded like the hurried march of an army. Then it changed to the footsteps and voices of pursuers. He caught himself listening with half consciousness for an officer's approach and slightly moving aside to escape hands that seemed to reach through the pitchy darkness to grab for him.

Suddenly on the port he thought he saw a light flash. His heart flew into his mouth and his breath came in burning gasps. "God," but it frightened him. It seemed that he must scream and break the awful silence.

Then from the starboard side, right beneath him, a metallic, terror-filled voice rang out, "For God's sake, pick me up. I've floated on this watery hell for seventeen days."

Slim Anderson collapsed on the deck nearly delirious with fear. Every nerve and fiber of his being was taut from fear of that nameless voice that died in the awful silence with a pitiful quaver. His ears strained, fairly yearned to hear that loathsome voice again, and banish the uncertainty that it had been nothing but a bad dream.

Then again that ghostly voice with its plea for aid broke the solitude like the cry of a tortured soul. "My God, Mates, you won't leave a castaway to die on this watery hell, will you?"

Slim Anderson leaped to his feet and started for the forecastle. He fell from the poop to the main deck. He regained his feet and stumbling over hatches, ropes and bumping masts and deckhouses, he finally reached the forecastle. He tumbled in a cowering heap on the floor.

A light was lit by the awakened seamen who asked what the row was about. Slim could barely control his quivering voice enough to whisper between gulps and sobs. "They's-a-ghost-on thestarboard stern."

This brought forth a roar of laughter that stopped as suddenly as it started. That voice, now cold and commanding rang out once more, "For God's sake, pick me up!"

There is courage in numbers, so they took the sea lantern and hurried aft with Slim Anderson among them. Fighting Hans had been awakened by the commotion and was on deck, as nervous and frightened as any of them. But when he saw them coming down the weather side of the ship, his sneering manner returned.

"All here, all here," he said. "Holy Saints, are you all here? Can't you speak? Answer me, answer me! I never shipped such a bunch of beach-combers before."

One by one, they reported present in hushed voices as they clustered about the lantern. Then silence fell. Something rubbed against the quivering leg of Slim Anderson. He jumped aside. There was a soft scurry on deck then a plaintive "M-e-o-w."

The sailors broke into a suppressed laugh. That angered him so much that he forgot his fear and launched a random kick in the general direction of the cat. It landed in Davy Jones' midriff. He sailed, yowling, through the air and splashed in the water, followed by the heavier splash of Slim Anderson's sea boot.

Fighting Hans instantly sensed what had happened and with an oath, sprang for him. He grabbed him by the throat and then a blinding glare came from an upward angle. He stood petrified. He let Slim Anderson slip from his fingers to the deck where he began to blubber a prayer.

Fighting Hans alone remained standing. A scraping and soft rasping noise was heard on the side of the boat. Then Fighting Hans cried out, "Save me, save me, Oh, God, I'm not ready! Good-bye, mates, an octopus has-" The rest of

his speech was muffled incoherency. When daylight came the sailors saw a life raft alongside with a barrel on it, that obscured all but the legs of a man. Davy Jones was howling and vainly trying to climb on the revolving boot.

There was nothing to the man but legs, and they were straw, and a pair of trousers. The barrel was a metal contraption, fitted up with wires and batteries. Some of it was stamped "International Wireless Telephone." The sailors saw no use for it. It had a mighty uncanny atmosphere about it anyway, so they sank it with scrap iron.

When the sailors got the ship into port, no two of them agreed as to how the skipper disappeared. Yet, they all agreed in pointing the finger of suspicion at Slim Anderson. He was tried for taking the skipper's life and heaving him overboard. He was found guilty and given a life sentence.

It is odd, but he is still there. Perhaps the hand of God, sometimes called fate, is what keeps him there. He is innocent of the crime he was found guilty of, but

he is guilty of a crime he was never tried for.

When the German submarine base was captured in the South Pacific, Carlos Schuler was found in command of one. In a hospital ward was found Fighting Hans. He made his personality felt before he was seen by his words, "Say, you sauer-kraut-eating horse doctor, hustle me a drink, drink, drink!"

Fighting Hans was lying on his stomach, allowing a raw spot in his shoulder to heal where a patch of skin had been artistically removed. In the next ward was Carlos Schuler lying on his back, allowing the same parcel of skin to grow on his face and hide a livid scar inflicted nearly a quarter of a century ago.

When Carlos was asked how he got such a realistic note of terror in the voice he transmitted over the wireless tele phone, he replied, "I had a passenger. 1 just held a knife to his throat and told him what to say."

When he was asked why he did not sink the "Carrier Dove," he meaningly replied, "She did not owe me anything."

S

EE what I have up my sleeve," Julian Bower casually remarked to his friend, Al Keef, as he nudged close to him on a crowded street corner just as the five o'clock crowds were pouring out of the sky-scrapers from all sides and surging restlessly toward the transportation centers which would start them on their way homeward.

"That's no friend to have up your sleeve. Ooh! You sometimes remind me of a creeping insect." And Al Keef shuddered.

Such were his impressions when he saw only outer appearances. If his eyes could have been focused so as to perceive the inner man he would have found in Julian Bower all of the chameleon and more.

"Well, how's business today?" Al Keef inquired.

"Booming. I sold over 100 bottles of 'Curo' today. Pretty good for a rounder like me don't you think?"

"I'll say it is," Al Keef replied. "But just how long can you keep this up?" he asked in an uneasy tone. "Have you no fear that your popularity might run out? Won't people get tired of buying?"

"What's this for?" Julian Bower counter questioned, confidently tapping his forehead. "Inside that brain of mine is unlimited cleverness. With it I can combat with any opposition; can defy it."

As he spoke he drew himself up to his full six-foot two, and squared his shoulders. He seemed indeed a dynamo of physical power while at the same time his decisive, positive attitude gave one the impression of mental power.

Al Keef looked at him doubtfully and then shrugged his shoulders.

"Perhaps you're righ Bower. But I'm glad it's you and not me."

Julian Bower folded his arms and took

a deep breath. Then he replied in a calm, low tone:

"Thin ice isn't so bad; if you know how to skate on it."

Al Keef in the jostling crowd had to stand very near his friend. With his five feet four, his head came none above Julian Bower's shoulder. Bower's folded arm touched close to Al Keef's neck.

Keef suddenly felt a chilly sensation run up and down his spine as a cold, paralyzing object touched the back of his neck. He wheeled furiously and confronted his friend.

"Keep your arm away from me," he muttered. "You needn't think I want any snakes down my neck."

A sly, triumphant smile passed over Julian Bower's face.

"Afraid! Afraid of a rattle snake! And a harmless one at that."

But nevertheless Al Keef accompanied Julian Bower home that night to dinner.

"I hate to do this," Al Keef commented. He gazed out the window of the swift moving elevated and thought a moment. "It takes no fool to see that your wife dislikes me worse than I do that snake," he finished.

"Don't let that worry you," Bower replied nonchalantly. "You're not the only one Zara dislikes."

He reflected a moment on what he had said then chuckled gleefully to himself. And Al Keef was puzzled but not abashed.

As Zara Bower hung up the receiver of her telephone her face was contorted with wrath. After a moment's reflection she started out and began to pace, like a tiger in its cage, backward and forward then, forward and backward the entire length of her two-room, convertable sixty dollar a month apartment de luxe, located on the second floor of a many

story building occupying half the block.

Stopping beside the glass door overlooking the court she stared intentedly out. Yet it was not the objects out there that she was seeing but in her mind's eye she was picturing Al Keef's face across the dinner table again this evening.

"It makes three times this week," she was mumbling to herself. "And how I do detest that man. If Julian Bower had the sense of his childhood he would stay away from him completely. But he never takes my advice; yet it always turns out in the end that I'm right."

As she reflected she heard steps in the stone corridor and presently a key turn in the entrance door across the room.

Now the history of Bower's life story if told in minute detail might fill a volume. He had lived so fast and experienced so much in his brief thirty-five years that details from the past were vague in his own mind. Consequently he often became muddled and confused when he tried to put fragments of events together.

And Al Keef, he noticed, seemed to enjoy his confusion as he took advantage of every opportunity to produce it.

To state it briefly, the parts most concerned here, Julian Bower first saw this world's light in a circus car somewhere in the mid-Western United States. His parents were stellar performers on a well known circus.

At a young age he, too, started his career on the saw-dust. Time brought him recognition, popularity, even fame. But he soon got a case of the almost inevitable conceit, the usual aftermath of such honors and it went to his head.

As a relief he forsook the footlights and became a glob-trotter. His wanderings carried him on an exploring tour through the wilds of the Andes. It was here that he learned from the native Indians how to mix the herbs for his 'Curo' tonic which he guaranteed would cure all the ills that humanity was heir to.

Soon afterwards he found himself in Buenos Aires where he struck up a friendship with one Von Schroder which was proving to be the one most regrettable event of his life. For Von Schroder

was wiley and before Bower knew it he found himself in a clutching vise of intrigue from which he had never been able to escape.

He finally drifted to San Francisco and there married Zara Winters, a former team-mate. Zara had also forsaken the footlights and had rented a suite of furnished rooms, out of the front window of which hung the sign:

MADAME ZARA,
The Honest Clairvoyant,
Readings 50c and up.

About that time there was a crusade against clairvoyants, in general, and unscrupulous ones of Zara's type in particular, so her professional sign was reversed to a "To Let" sign and together she and Julian Bower departed for Chicago.

They conceived the idea of manufacturing this "Curo" tonic and in due time obtained a factory and went to work on it.

Guided by Zara's penetrating mind, for she did have occult talent and governed by the uncanny ways of fate he had adopted business methods of a queer, unusual sort, but which soon won him immediate and tremendous success.

Purchasing a motor truck and obtaining a chimpanzee monkey, a yak and a rattle snake, and the aid of a former circus friend, he sat up for himself a minature show. His troupe was made up of a dangerous combination and his performances were sometimes highly exciting; and they drew the crowds.

These shows he reeled off four times each day at four designated places in the slums of the big city. And after each show he went through a five-minute monologue preparatory to selling "Curo." He had a good, clever, convincing line of talk and it was surprising to see how many denizens of the slums fell for it and paid the 50c for a bottle of the tonic. This day he had done unusually well and sold over a hundred bottles which brings us back to the evening in the apartment with Al Keef as his guest.

Al Keef took a deep puff at his afterdinner cigar then regarded it thoughtfully for a moment.

"Bower, how did you ever come to get