Kadjaman

By H. de Vere Stacpoole
Author of “‘Glued,’” “‘It Is Paris,’” etc.
Tuan Marop, down there in Borneo, was capable of cutting out more than his right eye if it offended him. Perhaps Kray was right in guessing that Tuan was akin to those who have saved us in the past from backsliding into beasts.
Kray’s little son was playing with the big Siberian pup in the doorway. From where I sat I could see the child and the dog, and beyond them and framed by the door opening the pine-clad mountains cutting the blue sky of summer, and beyond these Omstjall, the snow peak and grandfather of the glacier that takes its name.
Kray has given up hunting these five years and is now manager of the Sellagman Salmon Canning Company, at least he looks after the fishing and the canning and gets two thousand dollars a year for the job, while I expect the real manager, the man who looks after the New York office and the prospectuses and so forth, gets ten—maybe more. I don’t know, neither does Kray, neither does he care. He says he has hunted everything in his time but the dollar, and that a free life in the open air is all he wants now that he has done with hunting and got married. He was sixty-seven years old when he married and didn’t look more than fifty, so he says; he doesn’t look more than fifty to-day, at a little distance.
He has hunted everywhere and shot everything and he started his business at twenty so that when he married he had been at the job nearly fifty years. That is a long time, for a year in the wilds is longer than a year in a city and the risks are greater.
Said Kray, looking at the child and the pup: “Olaff takes after his mother, don’t he? Same flax-colored hair coming. First I thought he was going to be darker, but it’s coming true enough. Scandinavian flax, there’s no other color like it. Gets on with the pup, don’t he? I saw the old dog lickin’ them both yesterday same as if Olaff was hers, too. I’ve sent her off to the Skagga fjord till the autumn.”