There was one little item of news telegraphed from Townsville which I read with a good deal of grim amusement. The day before his departure Allen was given some kind of a send-off in the Town Hall. As he was riding down the main street on his way to this affair, a man ducked under the rope holding the crowd back at the curb, rushed at the open carriage and aimed a blow at the breast of the hero with a knife. No whit perturbed, the latter had coolly deflected the thrust by striking up the assailant's elbow with his left hand. Then, seizing the ruffian's wrist with his right hand, he had brought it sharply down on the edge of the carriage door, shattering the bones and causing the knife to fall from the relaxed fingers to the pavement. Infuriated by the dastardly attack, the crowd had set upon the would-be assassin, who was only saved from being mauled to death through the interference of none other than Allen himself.
The correspondents were much impressed, not only by the behaviour of the generous-hearted hero in intervening to save the life of the man who had just tried to take his own, but also--and especially--by a curious little circumstance in connection therewith. It was observed, in short, that, while Allen had defended his own body most effectually with his bare hands, as soon as he saw that the man who had attacked him was on the verge of being killed by a bloody-minded mob, quite beyond police control, he whipped out a revolver and used the menace of it to clear a space around the trampled body of his late assailant. The correspondents all thought that was rather fine; indeed, I was inclined to think so myself.
Allen had flatly refused to lodge a complaint against the man who had tried so desperately to knife him, and even declined to help the police in their attempt to identify the fellow. "Just an old Island affair, the big-hearted hero had explained with a careless laugh, as he turned on his way to receive the Golden Key symbolizing the Freedom of the Queen City of Northern Queensland." That was the way the _Herald_ man had it.
At the Police Station the prisoner was recognized at once as a man named Saunders, who had been convicted of a series of bullion robberies in the Kalgoorlie gold fields of Western Australia some years previously. Because of his diabolical practice of throwing red pepper and vitriol to blind his victims, he had gained the sobriquet of "The Squid." He had escaped after serving but eighteen months of his twenty-five-year sentence and made his way across the "Never-Never" to Port Darwin, where all trace of him was lost for the time. He was supposed to have slipped away to the Islands. This was confirmed a few months later, when a boatload of out-bound placer miners were held up and robbed of the fruits of their season's work in the Fly gold fields of New Guinea. Even if one of them, who had once been in Western Australia, had not identified Saunders, the fact that a jar of sulphuric acid had been thrown into the midst of the miners would have connected "The Squid" with the crime beyond a doubt. Australia had but fragmentary record of his later crimes, but he was known to have been mixed up in a number of pearl robberies in and about Thursday Island. He had continued to practise his vitriol-throwing trick (varying it occasionally with a fiendishly original stunt with some native concoction), and was still known as "The Squid." How long he had been lying low in Australia, or why he ventured there, he refused to tell; neither would he offer any explanation of his savage attack upon the hero of the hour. All he had said in the latter connection was: "'Slant' 'll twig why I took a flyer at returning the pig-sticker to him--it was his onct."