CHAPTER I A REPUTATION QUESTIONED in the Queensland and New South Wales papers LANT ALLEN and I, between us, had been monopolizing a good share of the feature space for a week or morbe as the Hero-Ticket-of-Leave- Man and I as the gifted Franco-American painter whose brilIiant South Sea marines have taken the Australian art world by storm-and now that it was definitely reported that he had Ieft 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 wouId be doing m 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 air and from what I had been able to pick up on the few minutes I had been ashore during the stop of my southbound packet at Tomnsville I was the only living person who knew he was not the hero of the aabnishing Cora Andrews affair, the audacious daring and almoat 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 rides -and Iikewise 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. To be sure, two or three of the blacks who were hanging over the raiI at the end of that accursed afternoon may have been among the survivors for it could have been only the strongest of them that had been able to fight their way up to the air when Bell chopped open the hatches they had been battened under over since the Gorccs officers had succumbed who knows how many hour befor but, even so, their rolling, bloodshot eyes could have fixed on nothing to have led them to believe that the greasy shawl of Chinese embroidery the girl appeared to have thrown affectionately over the shoulder of the Belated passenger in the leaking outrigger conceded the diminutive Bralay Jcrisrvhose point he was pressing into the fleshy part of his neck above the juguIar.