II.
“Now I must tell you that Milner had a servant, Tuan Marop by name, and Tuan had his child with him, a little chap of six or so, named Ting. Mrs. Tuan had been dead over a year, and he’d brought Ting down to Bintulu to leave him there while he accompanied Milner on his expedition. Ting and Kadjaman had struck up a friendship of sorts. The child would talk to the brute in the Dyak lingo and Kadjaman would scratch himself and talk back in orang-utan. I tell you it was talking.
“You’ve seen a child talking to a dog—you’ve heard Olaff talking to that pup; well that was the sort of thing, only Ting wasn’t a soft little chap like Olaff. Ting was a Dyak, Sarabas Dyak, with a hundred generations of head hunters behind him, and what he was saying to Kadjaman didn’t seem a popsy-wopsy talk from what I could gather, though I didn’t know a word of his lingo.
“I asked Becconi to ask Tuan to listen and report, and Tuan said Ting wasn’t talking Dyak, but the monkey language. Seemed to think it a joke, but he was in dead earnest all the same. There is a monkey language as sure as there’s anything else in this world, and what they say to each other, Lord only knows, but they say a lot, and Ting seemed to have picked it up same as children do with foreign languages. Tuan said that the Dyak children, now and again and once in a hundred years, so to speak, could pick out what the monkeys were saying when they held their jamborees in the forest, but he’d never seen or heard of a child talking to a monkey before like Ting did, for the reason that the Dyaks didn’t keep monkeys in cages and so the children hadn’t a chance. He seemed proud of the fact, same as if Ting had taken a prize at college.
“So things went on like that till the Tanjong Data had done tinkering at her cylinder covers, and the day before leaving came, with the docks all of a clatter with fruit cases for down coast and rolls of matting and boxes of tobacco and Lord knows what else and the niggers all bug house with being driven and getting in each other’s way.
“Then, coming along four o’clock in the evening, when things had settled down and the breeze was rising, Becconi and I were sitting in deck chairs talking and saying good-by to Milner and the captain. Tuan had brought us up some tea which the steward had made for us, and Ting was playing near the gangway by himself. All of a sudden, swish! the bars of the cage went, and Kadjaman was out.
“I was sitting with my back to the cage, and when I turned I saw Kadjaman on the deck, a cage bar in his fist, and the bar was in the act of dashing a nigger’s brains out. It was all as sudden as that. I didn’t wait to see more. It was every man for himself, and I had no charter to clear the decks of the Tanjong Data of orang-utans armed with five-foot iron bars; besides I hadn’t my gun with me. I guess if I’d had a popgun even, I wouldn’t have taken a nose dive into the Bintulu River like I did. A man’s courage lies in his gun often enough—unless he’s fronting a moral duty, which I wasn’t. I just dived and got to the other bank and watched.
“Every one had skipped from that deck either overboard or through the saloon hatch and there was Kadjaman with his bar in his fist, a free man, so to say, soul or no soul. He was pretty busy, too. He wanted more blood, it seemed, but he was afraid of going below for it, afraid of traps, so he smashed away at the saloon skylight cover, beating the brass rods of it to knots. Then he beat the starboard rail; in fact, he gave that steamer the biggest thrashing of her life. Maybe it was his having been kept in a cage six months that was coming out, or maybe it was just his own nature; but he did take it out of that old hooker. He near beat the cockroaches out of her, and you can fancy that the chaps hidden in the cabin had a lively time expecting him down the saloon companionway.
“However, all of a sudden, he let up. I could see him standing sniffing the air as if he smelt danger. He stood like that for half a tick and then he stooped down and picked up something from the deck and threw it over his arm like a sack. Same moment he made a jump for the gangway and next he was on the bank.
“I saw now what he was carrying—and heard it, too—it was Ting. The child had been playing on the deck as I told you and hadn’t got below with the others. Maybe he’d sat admiring the ways of his friend, but that’s as may be; the fact was he was now shouting murder or what sounded like it in Dyak and Tuan was responding.
“Tuan had found a creese down below, and, before the monkey had made twenty yards, he was on deck and after him to recover his property. Becconi and Milner, who’d armed themselves, were after Tuan to lend a hand, and there was I stuck on the opposite bank only able to look on.
“On the flat Kadjaman was nowhere, but once he’d got among the trees he was the whole of the circus and the elephant.
“Just by the river there, the undergrowth’s so thick you can’t go more than a yard in a precious long minute. You should see it; wait-a-bit thorns three inches long, python lianas that twine about and knot themselves just like snakes, ground tangle that gets you just by the ankle. That’s what the goin’s like, and Kadjaman was up in the branches. I don’t know how he got along with Ting, swinging himself from branch to branch. I expect Ting clung to him for safety and so saved trouble and gave him the free use of both arms.
“Anyhow he got away—got clear away, leaving Tuan lamenting and the rest of them pretty well spent. Then they came back, and I met them, having swum the river, and we went back on board, and you should have seen that deck—the rail bent and skylight hashed and lashed so’s to look like nothing, and a dead nigger on the planks with a hundred thousand flies on his head like a buzzing turban.
“Tuan had come back with us. He’d altered in color a bit, but otherwise he seemed same as ordinary. He knew quite well there was no use chasing any more after Kadjaman, yet all the same he got his discharge from Milner that night, and he went off with a blowgun. That was all the weapons he wanted, so he said, but he didn’t catch Kadjaman.