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Roy Glashan's Library
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"BULLY" HAYES was a notorious American-born "blackbirder" who flourished in the 1860 and 1870s, and was murdered in 1877. He arrived in Australia in 1857 as a ships' captain, where he began a career as a fraudster and opportunist. Bankrupted in Western Australia after a "long firm" fraud, he joined the gold rush to Otago, New Zealand. He seems to have married around four times without the formality of a divorce from any of his wives.
He was soon back in another ship, whose co-owner mysteriously vanished at sea, leaving Hayes sole owner; and he joined the "blackbirding" trade, where Pacific islanders were coerced, or bribed, and then shipped to the Queensland canefields as indentured labourers. After a number of wild escapades, and several arrests and imprisonments, he was shot and killed by ship's cook, Peter Radek.
So notorious was "Bully" Hayes, and so apt his nickname, (he was a big, violent, overbearing and brutal man) that Radek was not charged; he was indeed hailed a hero.
Dorrington wrote a number of amusing and entirely fictitious short stories about Hayes. Australian author Louis Becke, who sailed with Hayes, also wrote about him.
—Terry Walker
SLANTS of light from the open windows of the Shellers' Arms lit the beach on the pier side of the island. The wolf-eyed seaman sprawling under the lone wind-twisted palm rose to his elbow swearing absently. A sound of fiddles and women's laughter reached him. Later came the tinkle of glasses, and then the soft sliding of silk as the dancers swept into the beflagged little ballroom.
A waiter with a heat-troubled face, a towel over his arm, peered from the door-way of the hotel longingly. The beach was his temporary respite from the steaming air of the cook's pantry. Between the toasts he generally managed to cool off on the strip of shingle that fronted the hotel. Observing that the landlord was busy inside the bar, he strolled, fanning his face with the towel, towards the wind-twisted palm, where he could catch the breeze that ruffled the waters of the straits. In the turn of an eye he saw the wolf-eyed man watching his approach. He halted, his round Irish face betraying his surprise.
"Captain Hayes, by the Holy! Sure ye don't mean to say—?"
"I'm down and out, Con. The gang at Darwin are holding my brig for a matter of seven hundred pounds, money owing for stores and rig. Blast 'em. I had to skidoo to save myself being shut-in for a number of other things."
Within the bars that dot the coast- and river-towns of Queensland, Con had many times met Hayes. They had borrowed and had owed each other money without mis-giving or embarrassment. And now Con stared in awed silence at the man whose name was known from one end of the Pacific to the other—blackbirder, buccaneer. Thieves and blackguards were plentiful enough; but this wolf-eyed ruin in the threadbare pilot coat and the torn shoes was unlike all the rest—he was still a factor to be reckoned with. It was the unexpected in Hayes that struck into the imagination of friends and foes alike.
"Maybe, skipper, I could hand you a feed if you'd come to the back door of the hotel," Con ventured. "The cook's a decent sort of a Chink."
The wolf eyes glared at Con. "When I eat, my lad, it's in the best room, with the roast and the wine." Then in a less hurt tone: "Thanks all the same, Con. I'm all right here, listening to those cursed dudes in that dance-room. I'd like to have the lot under my hatches," he added bitterly. "I'd let 'em up on deck to breathe twice every Sunday."
"Ah, now, but you've always been kind to people of quality, skipper," Con wheedled appeasingly. "Sir Benjamin and Lady Izzard's leading the mob. Landed here two days ago. They're on their way to India."
"Old Blowfly Ben!" Hayes growled contemptuously. "While I was amusing myself pinching niggers and selling 'em alive to the sugar sharks, Pen was running an insurance fraud somewhere, filling the place with weep-ing widows and orphans. Who are the others?"
Before answering Con glanced back furtively at the lantern-lit verandah of the. hotel. His voice was low as he spoke.
"Sue Sellars. You remember her dad, old Dan, who used to run a stall at Belmore?"
"Sue!" The buccaneer jerked himself upright under the palm, eyes narrowing to slits. "That flash-fingered little pickpocket!"
"Kind to the poor, all the same, skipper!" Con defended with gusto. "Tipped me a fiver this evening for the good of my soul. No man or woman between here and Hades ever thought of poor old Con Sullivan to that extent before. A flash pickpocket she may be, skipper ; but 'tis not my pocket she's pickin', nor yours either!"
"Bravo, Con!" the buccaneer guffawed in spite of himself. "She's the niftiest little privateer that ever cut a purse."
"She has brains where you and me have only pumpkin seed, skipper. And listen to this! She landed in Townsville a while back with one pair of shoes and a nice little frock she found in the cabin-trunk of a honeymoon widow. That and her face were all that stood between Sue and the beach when she stepped into the Grand Hotel.
"She left Townsville for this island a month later," Con chuckled, "with enough, clothes and jewellery to satisfy the Queen of Bagdad. 'Does she like men?' you ask. She does not. Women are Sue's meat. That old goldbug Lonegan, from the Towers, stepped like the Caliph Haroun into her cabin late one evening. About such things as timber in shafts or mud in buckets old Bill Lonegan knew plenty. But about women lie knew less than a canary. "As I say, Bill stepped like the Sultan of Arabia into Miss Sellars' cabin. He got what no sultan or flyweight millionaire ever got before!"
"What?" came from Hayes in the palm shadow.
"A show-down before the whole ship's company and passengers. Sure she had Bill babbling on his knees, with old Jim Flynn, the captain, standing by like a goat at a funeral to uphold the respectableness and dignity of his ship and passengers."
The buccaneer listened and nodded.
"What's her excuse for being here?" he asked.
"She's going to her brother Henry, the shipowner in Batavia."
"Her brother!" Hayes chuckled. "Old Dan Sellars never had a son. What else?"
"That's about all, skipper. Now the Izzards have taken her up. The old dame wants her to go with them to India."
"Family jewels?"
"Not on view," Con told him. "Lady Izzard's a nit sniffy about the Thursday Island crowd. She doesn't wear the sapphire and ruby custards away from home."
"She'll want 'em in India," Hayes told him. "I guess they're somewhere at the bottom of the bag. When's she leaving?"
"To-morrow or Thursday. And the betting is, skipper, that Sue will go with her."
After forcing a couple of cigars and the loan of a pound on the stranded buccaneer, Con returned stealthily to the hotel.
Hayes was alive to the fact that he was not the only occupant of the beach. During Con's brief stay his seaman's eye had roved in the direction of a restless figure reclining in the. deep shadow of the pier.
Crawling beside the silent figure, the buccaneer assumed a friendly attitude; bluff, hearty and ready-tongued, his manner invited confidence.
"Hey, kid." he hailed. "You're trying to sleep it off, I guess?"
It was a young, serious face that met his straight, searching glances, a boy of twenty, with the mark of the city on his threadbare tweeds and linen.
His reply to Hayes was disconcerting: "I'm minding my own business. When I need your society I'll buy a penny stamp and let you know."
An amused grin touched the buccaneer's mouth. "Easy on those penny stamps, sonny." He pitched one of Con's fat cheroots into the boy's lap. "Try a smoke. Let's be sociable. I'm on the beach, too, and feeling it worse than you. My name's Hayes. My ship's in pawn and I'm dead-broke!"
The youngster in the frayed tweeds sat bolt upright in the sand. It was as though someone had snapped a pistol in his face.
"Hayes!" he gasped. "Bully Hayes?"
"That's it, sonny—without the Bully. Never mind the yarns you've heard about me. I'm just a plain sailorman trying to find my feet again. Please smoke that cigar I gave you."
The young man began to smoke, absently at first, then hungrily.
The buccaneer considered him for a space—the dreaming eyes, the shapely hands and a face that reflected recent tortures of mind.
"No work for the likes of you up in Thursday, sonny. Those hands of yours might have plucked a few daisies; they never reefed a sail or steered a ship. Why did you pick this beach, son?"
"I wanted to bring a girl-friend home. She's up here looking for employment."
"You may find her, son, but that's not to say you'll take her back home. If she's pretty, the Chinks or other man-eaters will get her. If she's ugly, she'll pass to a beach of her own among the suds and the spuds. Don't worry about a woman, son; there's another 'bus coming along."
The cigar flattened between the young beachcomber's milk-white teeth. His fine eyes flamed dangerously.
"No other woman like her will pass me if I wait an eternity!" he said passionately. "I'll bring her home if I die. No man on these God-forsaken banks shall sully her name!"
"Easy, son," the buccaneer soothed. "You'll meet her, maybe, when you least expect. What's your trade?"
The youngster stirred uneasily. "I write for the press," he admitted reluctantly. "Sea chanties, among other things, you may be interested to know."
Hayes scowled. "You mean to say you write that blow-the-man- down stuff? Holy Peters! That trade won't put rings on your little girl's fingers."
Between them fell a silence, in which the soft boom of surf on the outer bars sounded like the passing of ghostly chariot- wheels. Peals of laughter came faintly from the hotel, interspersed with the scrapings of violins and the rhythmic poundings of a well-worn piano.
"A fine happy bunch over there," Hayes commented, jerking in the direction of the lights. "Mopey and wine and the easy life, sonny. A pack of good-for-nothing bounders who never earned a real bob in their lives."
Again the silence.
"You see. sonny." Hayes went on at last, "we'd stay here till Gabriel toots the trump if we waited for people to rush us with jobs or bring the music a bit closer. To-morrow, probably, when we join the band of free-soup suckers outside Sam Lee's chop- suey, a cop will start shoving us off the footpath. Then you, or me, maybe, will knock him cuckoo into the ash.can because we ain't used to being shoved and messed about. A bit later on," the buccaneer continued, gloomily, "a reinforcement of cops, black, brown and yellow, will reach for us on this beach. There'll be scrap number two, and a long roost for us both in that filthy little quod back of the palm scrub over there!"
"A long roost," the boy echoed absently, throwing away the half-smoked cheroot.
"Among the opium-bugs and bhang-chewers of this unholy shell- heap. And those stinking Rotumah men! Take it from me, sonny, we're booked for the vermin heap unless we make a break now!"
A touch of horror darkened the youngster's eyes. "That's rotten," he commented at last. "I don't mind a bit of a famish on a clean, warm beach. But getting into the nigger-pen will be the limit."
"Your limit, son. And what about this little girl that's probably scrubbing and mending for some 1 slattern of a half- caste woman? Burying your head in the sand may be good exercise for the neck, but it doesn't prevent nice girls becoming slushies in kanaka boarding-houses!"
Came another silence followed by peals of laughter from the hotel. The wind had dropped suddenly; a few hurricane-lamps winked across the straits, where a small fleet of luggers rode like ducklings under the lee of a big store-schooner.
"You see, sonny," Hayes went on in a lowered voice, "if I go into the pen it will be for a worth-while job. Let me put it this way." His hand fell almost caressingly on the youngster's shrinking arm. "If I walk into that hotel yonder, and merely announce that I'm Bully Hayes, bent on shooting the first man who gets in my way, the whole crowd will have a fit, including that pop-eyed clown Martin Gannon, who runs the pub. Do you believe me?"
"I do," the youngster agreed. "One look at you in your present state would be enough for most people."
"Well," the buccaneer laughed, "I'm going to do it. And I'll tell you this," he added quickly. "There's more real bullion and jewellery in Gannon's house to-night than you'd pick up in most country banks. The Izzard crowd is there. And, as old Becky is on her way to an Indian durbar, you can bet your Sunday socks that the pinkies and the winkies are going with her. For the sake of harmony we'll call it fifteen thousand quids' worth. No woman of Becky's weight and feelings could be presented to India's princes with less than that on her. What about it, son?"
"A stick-up!" the youngster groaned.
"A beastly, cold-blooded stick-up, Mr. Poet. You can join me or stay out. All I ask you to do is to stand by the front door and wave this one!"
In the turn of a hand the buccaneer had unshipped two heavy naval revolvers, one of which he thrust into a shaking hand.
"All I ask, Mr. Poet, is that you wave the blamed thing like a black sausage at any pushful person who tries to duck out of the ballroom before I'm through with Becky's small-goods. Believe me, son, you won't have to shoot. In fact, I'd rather you didn't. The minute they know I'm in the house they'll honk like geese and call for the doctor."
Like a prodded buffalo Hayes stood up suddenly, his powerful frame silhouetted against the hotel lights, and glared down at his companion.
"Are you coming, kid, or shall I do the trick alone, and leave you to your stomach pains and your sand-pies?"
For a moment the youngster remained dead to Hayes's appeal. Then, with the bound of a lashed steer, he was on his feet.
"Give me one of those pistols. I'll hold the front passage while you go after the stuff. If we work fast," he added, with a slight break in his voice, "we'll beat the police."
THE ballroom of the Shelters' Arms was reached from the main
passage leading from the Parade. It was crowded with local well-
wishers and friends of the departing Izzards. It was between
dances that Clem Simpson had called upon their pretty visitor
from Sydney, Miss Susie Sellars, for a solo ballet. Everyone
knew, he said, that she was queen of the Parisian style of ballet
interpretation.
Sir Benjamin pounded the piano top with an empty champagne bottle, while the whole room cheered for the adorable Susie to give 'em just one flutter.
A slender, fairy-like figure was gently projected from the crowd near the exit door. There was no doubt concerning Sue's poise and daintiness. She smiled on the half-demented gathering. Under the flower-ing lamps her hair was a sheaf of twisted gold, her oval face with its melting eyes a maddening dream for lonely men and artists. It. was just at this point that the big gold- framed mirror on the west wall of the ball-room was shivered by a revolver shot. A voice that resembled a second blast of gun-fire rang above the pandemonium within the room.
"Hands up, everybody, and keep 'em up, or, by the holy fires, there'll be cripples and dead men for the next waltz!"
Reflected in the splinters that was once a mirror, men and women saw a bearded intruder with a wolf-glow in his eyes. To them he looked like piracy and bloody hatches; like gun-butts slamming on the skulls of howling kanakas and boys. No need for women to scream out that Bully Hayes was holding the door! The men whose hands had closed over the necks of bottles knew it. And their fingers grew limp, their throats dry. No one moved a hand.
For one nerve-breaking instant the buccaneer remained in the doorway, a gaunt spectre of massacre. The malice in his burning eyes was real enough, the hate of one hungering and thirsting while others fed and drank.
His movements had been swift. No one knew better than he that only speed and a thunderblast voice would avail. But even as his glance travelled down, the polished floor of the ballroom he saw that the dainty, dancing feet of Sue had vanished through an exit door on the left.
The snarl of a tiger shook him. He turned with a fierce gesture to a figure standing at the entrance.
"Ahoy, there, Sydney!" he trumpeted. "Shoot any man or woman who tries to leave before I give the word!"
"Aye, aye, skipper!" came from the slim figure at the entrance.
A leap carried Hayes up the steep stairs to the carpeted landing above. For an instant he glanced right and left. Three rooms east and three rooms west! Damn them! Which one belonged to the squalling cat Becky downstairs?
The click of a closing latch found his ear. With a bound he reached the door; his shoulder was against the frail panel, his seaman's fist grinding at the door knob.
"Sue! Are you in there?"
Came the soft rustle of a skirt across the room. "Yes, Bully; I'm here."
"Open the door, Sue. I'm in on this one. D'ye hear, Sue?"
"No, Bully."
Hayes sucked down a crimson oath. Then: "If you don't open the door, I'll blow the damned panels in!"
"Blow, my bully boy, blow!"
A strain of silvery laughter reached him from inside, challenging, maddening. "Listen, girl!" he whispered. "I've got something to tell you, something you'll be glad to hear!"
There was no response. He drove at th flimsy panels. The door crashed; he fell inside, his guard arm up as one risking a possible thrust of steel.
The room was empty. An open window looked down on a plantation. Within foot-reach was a water-cistern.
"Dished!" he grunted, dropping down from the window to the tank.
A black-tracker could not have followed faster on the heels of the quick-running Sue. Once outside the plantation gate he pelted down the soft road, his eye catching the first flutter of a skirt as he rounded a bend in the sandhills.
"Stop running, Sue!" he bellowed. "The whole blamed island is on the jump. You're heading straight for the pen!"
It came to Hayes that Sue was heading for the scum side of the island, to seek refuge under the rafters of the "joint" kept by "Jumbo" Hamimura, one of the bone-breaking, eye-gouging pocket monsters from the Jap pearling fleet on the banks. Hayes knew her capable of taking any way of escape.
Where in hell was she leading him? Suddenly the dark palm- crested lane showed a gash of light. Within the gash stood an old sergeant of police cleaning a service carbine. Behind the sergeant was the low-roofed police station. Sue halted within hailing distance.
"Hey, Constable! Stop this big beer-lizard from chasing me! There's been a hold-up at Gannon's. I'm the only one that managed to get out and tell you!"
Sue's far-carrying voice put a brake on Hayes's frenzied rush. It was the old sergeant's movements that decided Kim. A second and younger officer appeared unexpectedly in the lamplit doorway of the lock-up. Sue was pointing down the road to where Hayes stood.
Swearing fiercely, he turned and padded through scrub in the direction of the north beach, where he could get aboard one of the luggers anchored off the point, and find shelter from the hornet's nest he had roused. "May I be sliced and scissored! It's me that's always providing chances for others. She took hers, anyway!"
THE police at Thursday Island recorded the fact that the
notorious Bully Hayes had escaped from the island in the pearling
lugger Nancy Free. There was no shadow of doubt that he
carried with him the almost priceless emeralds and rubies
belonging to Lady Izzard.
As no one in the hotel had been in a position to identify his confederate, it was taken for granted he had decamped with Hayes.
The whole island turned to Miss Sue Sellars in appreciation of her gallant effort to notify the police of Hayes's conduct. Only a girl of exceptional courage would have risked leaving the ballroom under the menace of Hayes's deadly weapon. Lady Izzard was in part consoled by the fact that the jewels were well covered by insurance.
"You dear, dear girl!" she cried, holding Sue in her arms. "I was simply paralysed with fear when that ruffian fired at the mirror. I hope we shall see more of each other when I return to Sydney. I wish you could be always near me."
There was no doubt that Sue had made a hit with the Thursday Island crowd. The shelters belonging to' the fleet at Goode Island presented her with five pearls of matchless lustre for her bravery in ridding tho town of the pestiferous Hayes.
TWO days after Lady Izzard had departed in B.I. steamer for
India it was learned that Miss Sellars had received a call from
Sydney, where her father was lying dangerously ill. The visit to
her brother Henry in Batavia was cancelled.
The pier was packed when the steamer moved away south. Cheer after cheer rose each time Sue's hand waved an adieu.
The ship shouldered her way down through the Barrier mists, her decks awash with the driving swell. There were few passengers on the cargo-littered spaces between the funnel-stays and the fo'c's'le head. The well-lit saloon proved more inviting with its card-hungry crowd settled for the night.
Eight bells had sounded from the bridge. Almost immediately afterwards a sharp scuffling of feet occurred near the engine- room door. The first mate, followed by two greasers and the purser, appeared haranguing a tall, starved-looking youth. Further blows and curses appeared imminent as they approached the bridge steps.
Half-way across the deck the youth whirled with almost maniacal energy, beating off the greasers and mate with straight blows.
A pair of dainty white satin shoes pattered up the saloon steps. The shoes carried a girl lovely in shimmering blue and gold, her hair of twisted gold.
She paused in horror at the scene before her, let fall upon the struggling mate and purser the detonation of her startled eyes.
"Why are you beating that young man? she asked. Her languid pose vanished. The heat of her anger mounted to her cheeks.
"Beating him!" The mate, a big, round man, wiped a bruise under his right eye. "I haven't had a chance yet. I'm sick to death of stowaways and cockroaches. I m tired of rooting 'em out," he complained.
The girl with the gold-twisted hair grasped the mate's arm. She thought they were behaving horribly.
The purser interposed half-heartedly. "But he's a stowaway, Miss Sellars—hasn't paid his passage, you know."
"Oh, is that all?" she drawled, and from her purse drew a number of notes and tossed them contemptuously at the bewildered purser. Then, with her intriguing smile:
"Find a cabin for the unfortunate young man, please. You surely don't want to kill a boy for trying to get home!"
The purser fawned. "Certainly not, Miss Sellars. Cabin twenty- three is unoccupied. He can move in straight away."
Later on the purser dug out a suit of white duck and passed them to the tattered, coal-grimed stowaway in cabin twenty-three. He also intimated that dinner would be served him at once.
AN hour later cabin twenty-three found himself under the
starboard awning, gazing at the large white stars that crested
the long blue shadow of the Barrier. Beside him leaned the girl
with the twisted-gold hair, and the mouth and eyes created for
lonely men and artists to dream about.
"So you tried your luck on the pearl banks, Len? Not a good place for poets or hairdressers. I didn't know you'd chucked your writing job."
His face flushed at her inquiry. "The thought of money didn't bring me to Thursday, Sue. The last star went out when you left Sydney. My little world of wooded bays and heights, visions of enchantment when you were there, became sterile as death in your absence. So I made the run north in the hope of meeting you on your return from Batavia. Instead, I met that half-pirate, half- devil Bully Hayes!"
Cabin number twenty-three paused as one screwing up courage for a damning confession. "I was with him in that ghastly stick- up at Gannon's!"he whispered hoarsely.
"You with Hayes!" Her voice was a suppressed scream. "Oh. Len dear, this is more than I can stand!"
Len held her quivering shoulder desperately. "It was Hayes's fault, Sue. I was mad at the time. Sleeping on the beach shook me badly. For two whole days I never tasted food. Easy, dear; don't cry!"
Sue recovered herself slowly. "I've always remembered one bit of poetry you wrote, Len," she said at last. "It was about not working too hard when you get old. My brother Henry's made things easier for me." She paused to fan her cheek. "So for a while you won't have to worry so much about selling your poetry."
A silence. And again Sue;
"I may not know poetry from a leaf out of a street directory, Len. But I like the bit you read out to me a night or two before I left Sydney to see Henry in Batavia."
"Which one?" he asked simply.
"It was about a poor sailor who wanted to mend his fortune. 'One more trip with the buccaneers'—you remember—it said. He wanted to raise the wind and smell the sea again before he got too old. 'Just one more trip to singe the King of Spain his beard.'"
Len raised a clenched hand. "I've had my trip !" he cried. "Never again!"
Sue fell into a gentle melancholy.
"Somebody's beard got singed, too!" she sighed. "But it wasn't the King of Spain's."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.