Desperate Passages by J. Allan Dunn

Book Details

Desperate Passages – Three stories of the South Seas, treachery, kidnapping, and pearls.

The Pendulum Of The Skull (1923)
The swinging skull was a sign of danger; but danger comes to any man who invades an island of the savage seas, and matches his wits against the despots of the tropic outlands

Sailorman (1935)
It Was Celebes—Danger in the Golden Air, and Tragedy and Glory

Looter’s Loot (1932)
Mystery and Thrills in the South Seas
Chapter 1. – The “Duke” Sees A “Break.”
Chapter 2. – Plots And Plans.
Chapter 3. – The Senor.
Chapter 4. – Dead Man’s Warning.
Chapter 5. – Trial Of Strength.
Chapter 6. – Farleigh’s Pearls.
Chapter 7. – The Only Chance.
Chapter 8. – The Luck Holds.
Chapter 9. – The Word Of Mascalla.

Joseph Allan Elphinstone Dunn (1872–1941), better known as J. Allan Dunn, was one of the high-producing writers of the American pulp magazines. He published well over a thousand stories, novels, and serials from 1914–41. His main genres were adventure and western; although he did write a number of detective stories.

Desperate Passages contains 38 illustrations.

Files:

1. Dunn-DesperatePassages.epub

Excerpt: The Pendulum of the Skull

BUD BARRETT peered through the stilt-like stems of the pandanus grove that covered the ledge above the waterfall, and saw the weft of canvas flying at the maintop. He was sailor enough to know that this was a signal of recall, to guess that a sudden change in the barometer, prophesying a shift of wind, had decided the skipper of the Flying Cloud to get out to searoom and deep water, away from the shallows and coral ledges through which they had worked up to the island in search of fresh water.

The casks were not yet filled. He saw that, by squinting down at the stream where the men labored under the urge of the first mate. But the signal was imperative. In a few minutes they would go.

The first mate shouted his name, cursed it volubly, but Bud lay doggo, wriggling back under the broad leaves of a ground vine, completely hidden.

He was not going back. He had slipped away just as he intended doing when he learned he was to be in the shore party, He had never been a willing member of the crew of the Flying Cloud, and now the skipper, or the owners, could take the wages due him, and welcome.

He was through with a bully mate whose head he ached to punch—believing he could do it successfully—but who fought with kicks and belaying pins, backed by a gun and official authority. He was sick of the stench of the fo’c’sle, of the wrecks of humanity with whom he was quartered and rated—though he admitted several of them were better seamen than he was—tired of the badly cooked food. It would have been different if he had deliberately selected his berth. Then he would have gone through with and swallowed his medicine, bitter as it might be, but—

The two boats were leaving. There had come a strong and sudden wind from seaward, against the prevailing trades. The reef-set coast had been suddenly transformed from a weather to a treacherous lee shore. James Barrett, not yet accepted as Able Seaman, meant little in the face of that danger. They would not care if he were marooned on the island for the rest of his life, eaten by the natives. He was not the first sailor who had deserted.

Barrett hugged himself. There was not much danger from cannibals, he fancied though the bush tribes were said to be wild and dangerous savages. But there was a trading station along the coast, beyond the lava cape. The creek there was only a shallow one, and the skipper had sailed past, intent only upon replenishing the water that had staled on him and sailing on down south to the whaling grounds. As soon as the Flying Cloud was well clear of the land, Bud meant to work his way along the shore to the station.

His plans were hazy. He thought he might be able to get some sort of a job, splitting coconuts, keeping tally, anything—or playing Crusoe. He had acted on an impulse that was based on weeks of ill treatment. The mates were bad enough, the skipper was a hell driver, and what was bad now would become intolerable once they got to whaling.

He had noticed food enough since he had come ashore—fish in the stream, fruit of all sorts, cocoanuts, wild bananas, shaddocks, guavas, breadfruit, even orange trees. And freedom. Freedom from dirty weather, and a howling mate cursing him on to unfamiliar tasks, setting him to all the dirty work aboard, making a mark of him, calling him “Dude” while the cringing men laughed at the feeble joke. Freedom from the cockroach ridden bunk, and its moldy mattress of sodden, insufficient straw.

He had his knife for defense against wild beasts—if there were any. He didn’t believe the tribesmen would bother him before he had got to the station. And he had heard the second mate talking to the doctor—as the cook was called—saying that the island was quite a point of call for whalers watering north and south, and for other ships. He could get away, if the trader wouldn’t use him—any ship was better than the Flying Cloud, built like a barrel, wallowing and pitching and rancid as an ancient lard keg.

He stretched out luxuriantly in the warmth, shaded from the sun that filtered down through the leaves. It made him drowsy and, before he knew it, he was napping.

When he woke, the sun had shifted several degrees, the seawind was wrestling heavily with the tropic growth, fronded boughs thrashing, ripe fruit plumping down. The Flying Cloud was clawing into the gale, working out through a wide channel among the reefs that now showed white with foam.

Bud came down from the cliff, crossed the stream on smooth boulders, took a drink on the far side, stuffed his stomach with orange-skinned bananas that tasted curiously like Baldwin apples, and, skirting the mangrove belt that masked the exit of the creek, started to work down to the shore where the traveling should be easier and less hazardous than an attempt to strike through the thick bush.

      It was harder than he imagined, the belt of mangroves far wider, while the fury of the gale was astounding. Blue sky and sun had disappeared, the clouds were slate colored and lowering, and out of them blew the strenuous wind, that bowed the tops of the biggest trees and sent the palms lashing like whips. Whenever he got into the open it drove him staggering at a tangent back to shelter again, and came roaring through the bush after him. The barrier reef was a white and smoking wall of spume, the ordinarily placid lagoon was sudded with windblown foam, washed up, flung up in spongy masses.

Bud didn’t know it, but it was getting close to the rainy season, to the monsoon changes with swift shifts of wind and furious storms. All the wonder of gold and green and azure had turned into moaning gale, struggling vegetation that had lost its luster, while the light was flat and hard and cold.

Again the sky appeared to close in. A javelin of lavender flame rent it, flooded turbulent sea and tossing forest with its weird levin. He caught a glimpse of the Flying Cloud fighting out under eased sail—thankful that he was not punching at the stiff canvas, yelled and sworn at for his clumsiness—and then, as if the bottom had fallen from a mighty cistern, the tropical downpour burst, hissing into the lagoon, thudding on the beach, bulleting the leaves, cutting off light, all sense of location, blinding him as effectually as if he stood in the tumbling spray back of the falls at Niagara.

The wind did not cease. Its force was so tremendous that it angled the streams of water, and sent them with a rush and a roar that blotted out every thing, and rendered him in a moment sodden, beaten; until he felt bruised, floundering about in the edge of the bush, tripped, stumbling, flung headlong by writhing lianas. He found himself at last in the midst of the root stems of a great fig-banian, whose mighty thatch resisted even such a rain as this. Penetrating its dark maze until he touched the main trunk, he stood cowering, cold, shivering, though the temperature was close to ninety, watching the eerie flickering of the lightning checkering the tangle of the bush, listening to the frightful clamor of the long peals of thunder that went rolling overhead.

It was a nightmare of darkness, of dread, marked by the crash of some great tree, the furious, unceasing battery of the booming surf booming a deep bass to the wild orchestra of wind and rain and thunder. The air was hard to breathe. It was charged with unleashed statics, that he felt crackling in his hair, that tingled at his shrunken fingertips. Half an hour ago and he had been proudly confident of his own cleverness, his own ability, now he felt like the least of mites, the most helpless of atoms, an ant at the mercy of a whirlpool or crawling over a trench top with a battle at its most awful height—powerless—afraid.

Excerpt From: J. Allan Dunn. “The Pendulum of the Skull.”