III.
“Next morning the Tanjong Data started with Milner on board, leaving us in that God-forsaken place face to face with the mosquitoes. Havana mosquitoes are bad, but these chaps laid over them, striped brutes like tigers. Then there were the Sanut tingal pala ants; these chaps bite you and hang on with their teeth like bulldogs; if you pull them off they leave their heads behind. A cheerful place, with nothing to listen to but the rainy noise of the palm leaves, shaken by the wind and the howling of Dyak songs from the village, and nothing to see but the Bintulu coming down to the sea between banks of trees that seemed crowding one another into the river.
“There are parts of the Bintulu where no man could make a landing on the banks, by reason of the tangle of growth, vines and whatnots; but at Bintulu it’s been cleared, though in those days it was bad enough within half a mile of the town.
“Becconi wasn’t going to start for three days, so I had my work cut out killing time and mosquitoes. I’d sit sometimes by the river watching the gunfish by the hour. You’d see them prospecting along the bank, and then when they’d marked down an insect sitting on a leaf, they’d take aim and spit, letting fly a jet of water aimed sure as a rifle bullet. Then I’d sometimes watch the Dyak girls going about, the rummiest sight, in their brass arm rings and leg wear, and sometimes I’d sit and talk to Tuan, for Becconi had taken him on as a servant.
“He didn’t talk English bad, and at first I tried to comfort him about Ting, till I found out he wasn’t needing any. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been fond of the child, but it was just that he seemed to reckon Ting dead. Not corpsed, but dead to him and his tribe. I had some talks with Tuan on the business then and afterward, and he told me that the big monkeys took off Dyak children now and then and sometimes the children were got back after they’d been living a year or two with the monks, and that they weren’t any use; they weren’t humans any more. Tuan, though he didn’t know anything much more than the difference between the two ends of a blowgun, said all men had been monkeys once, but so long ago that man had forgotten, and if a child was to go and live in the trees with the monkeys he’d revert to the old times in a year or two, and not twenty or fifty years would fetch him back.
“I thought he was talking through his hat, but out in India, since then, I’ve seen the truth of what he said. You’ve heard of wolf children? Wolves are always carrying off children; some they eat and some they don’t, and the ones they don’t they bring up as wolves, and the children take to it and go on all fours and, after a year or less they’re fixed, can’t ever get back to be men. Why, they had a wolf child in the Secundra Missionary Asylum and kept it there till it grew up to a man over thirty. It died somewhere about ’95, and it never learned to speak, couldn’t do more than run about on all fours and snarl. Rum, isn’t it?
“Meanwhile Becconi was getting the lads together for his expedition, and he wasn’t finding it an easy matter, for in those days Sea Dyaks weren’t anxious for payment much except in human heads, and even heads were sometimes pretty much at a discount. The head-hunting chaps have got a bad name, but they weren’t so black as they were painted. They weren’t always rushing about, either, hunting for heads. It was mostly when they were in love and wanted to give a girl a present that they went hunting, or when they had a down on a chap and wanted to do him in. Becconi’s crowd that he managed to collect at last were head hunters to a man, but I’d sooner trust myself alone with any one of them than with a New York tough—a long sight.
“We started on a Saturday at dawn, crossing the Bintulu and striking toward the Tatan River. I’ve said Becconi was after minerals and so he was, but his main proposition was gold. Down along south of the eastern ports he’d heard stories of a gold river somewhere in Sarawak north of the Rejang, and he carried the idea in his head, and I suppose that was what made him strike south from the Bintulu.
“We had with us Tuan and half a dozen of the Sea Dyaks and provisions for a month, and we hadn’t more than crossed the river and gone a few yards when the trees closed behind us, shutting out the sound of the village and cutting us off from the morning sun as a closed door might. I’ve never got used to the jungle, that’s to say the real thing, and it’s my opinion it is not the place for a man. It’s a kind of old glass house where the beginnings of life come from, and it’s my opinion it has outlived its uses and would be as well done away with. Maybe I’m prejudiced, having done near all my hunting in the open. Anyhow, that Saturday morning I wasn’t in any too high spirits. If I could have broke my contract and turned back I wouldn’t, though, bad as I wanted to, because I’d taken a liking to Becconi, and I had my misgivings as to his pulling through without a white man’s help.
“I’ve hinted he drank. We took a good stock of liquor with us, but it went under my eye. That was one of my conditions, and I knew if he was left alone with it the jungle would soon have done with him.
“We struck a big stretch of soggy ground where Nipah palms grew and nothing else. I’m just going to give you a sniff of that hell place they call the jungle in Borneo, and I can’t begin it better than by saying we hadn’t gone more than five hundred yards from the river when we struck this swamp. It wasn’t a true swamp, either. It was solid enough in bits, and you’d be going along saying, ‘It’s all right now,’ when your foot would go, sucked down, and you’d pull it out with a pound of black mud like treacle sticking to your boot. We went along mostly clinging to the palms that grew along the solid tracts and gave us a lead. Then, when we’d passed the swamp we found ourselves before the Big Thorn. That’s what the Dyaks called it, a big patch of wait-a-bit thorn we had to cut our way through, and it took us the whole day to do that.
“Then when we camped on a bit of high ground the black ants raised objections, and the black ants of Borneo sting like wasps.
“I give you that as a sample of twenty-four hours in the jungle. You didn’t get swamp all the time nor wait-a-bit thorn all the time, but you got lots of other things not much better, and it was always that infernal glass-house damp heat and smell. It’s the smell that gets you, not a bad smell, mind you, but just the smell of a glass house—only more so.
“Then at the end of a week we struck a rival prospector. It was the rummiest meeting. He was a chap by name of Havenmouth. He’d shoved east with an expedition from Maka, crossing the Balinean River, and he’d found the gold. But he was dying. I never did see such a skeleton. The jungle fever or something like that had done for him, and he said he’d been living on quinine and whisky, but that he didn’t care as he’d found the gold. It was in a little stream to the nor’east. He said there was dead loads of it, even though the stream was so small.
“He said that little stream must have been washing its gold for ages to make us rich. There he lay with his hands like a skeleton’s and his face like a skull painted with fever, handing us out all that talk; and then he showed us a sample of gold grains he’d taken from the stream.
“Sure enough some of them were as big as split bullets. Then he died with a whoop, and we buried him. But the bother was, he died before he could give us the exact location by compass. He hadn’t got it written down, for we searched him and his effects; he’d been carrying it in his head. He’d given us the gold grains, though.
“Well, that was the worst present a man ever got. Havenmouth had said: ‘It isn’t more than twenty miles way back there,’ and that was the string that tied us to the circle, for we went wandering round like the Egyptians in the wilderness, round and round, hunting for that darned stream for months and months. You wouldn’t believe it, unless you’d been there, how that thing held us. I’m not overset on money, but it held me, same as when you draw a chalk line round a hen and put her nose to it, she’s held.
“We struck streams, all sorts of little tributaries of the Rejang and the Tatan, and we struck mud turtles and spitting fish and water lizards and snakes, but we struck no gold. Becconi was so full of the business that he forgot his wanting to drink. And so it went on for more than three months, till one day the madness lifted from us, and we saw that we were done. We’d got to get back to Bintulu and get back prompt, for we were near done for grub.
“I’d managed to shoot a good deal, and we had the remains of Havenmouth’s store. Still, all the same, we’d got to get back; and over the fire that night, when we’d come to the decision to clear out, Becconi had his first drink for a long time. We were sitting there smoking and talking when all of a sudden from the dark outside the firelight comes a whistle and Tuan gives a jump where he sat. Then he whistles between his fingers as if in answer and out of the dark comes a chap crawling along with his hair over his eyes. He creeps up to Tuan, and they begin to talk. Then Tuan comes to us and tells us the news. One of the Dyaks, a fish trapper that had done a journey up the Tatan on some business of his own had come on Kadjaman’s house.
“That’s what Tuan told us with a straight face, but we didn’t laugh, for we knew what he meant. The orangs build houses of sorts away up in the trees. They haven’t walls or roofs or lavatory accommodation; they’re just platforms built between two branches and furnished with bundles of brushwood and leaves. This fishing Dyak was a blood relation of Tuan’s. He knew Ting, and he knew of the carrying off, and a month before, going along through the forest by the river and chancing to look up he saw Kadjaman’s platform away up in a tree.
“He wouldn’t have took any more notice, monkey houses being common, only for a face looking down at him out of the leaves. He saw at once it was Ting’s face, and he called out, thinking the child might come down. Instead of that Ting went up the remainder of the tree like a flash and hid on the platform.
“He marked the place and then he’d set out to hunt for Tuan and us. He’d seen us start from Bintulu and he knew the direction we’d gone; but how he found us after a month’s hunt—well, search me! But find us he did.
“Tuan having got the yarn, said it was necessary for him, now that he had the indication, to drop everything else and get his child back. He said he couldn’t lead us any longer till he had that matter settled, and Becconi agreed that it was only right and proper to get the child back and said he’d wait there with the whisky while Tuan and myself made the journey and fetched the goods. The place was only a day’s journey from where we were. I agreed. I judged he couldn’t kill himself with the whisky in two days and that if he did it’d maybe be a mercy for him, and taking my gun I followed Tuan and the fisher Dyak, striking in the direction of the Tatan.
“It was less than a day’s journey, and when we got there it wasn’t above ten o’clock in the morning, and there, like as if a chap had hoisted a mattress and stuck it between two of the branches, away up in a big tree, we saw Kadjaman’s house; but there wasn’t a sign of the owner nor of Ting. We didn’t go to knock at the door. We all sat down in the undergrowth which hid us while giving us a view of the premises above, and there we waited. I didn’t know what Tuan proposed to do to get the child back, but I did know one thing, he was going to get it back now he’d found the address. I reckoned he’d kill Kadjaman and then climb for the child; but I was wrong as it turned out.
“I nodded off to sleep, for I was bone tired with the journey, and I’d been dozing maybe an hour when Tuan joggled me awake. I looked up and there was Ting crawling along a branch twenty foot up, following in the track of a big monk that was Kadjaman’s twin brother if it wasn’t himself. You could see at a glance that the child had joined up with the monkey folk in the three months he’d been with them.
“But I wasn’t bothering about that, I was watching Tuan. Tuan had his blowgun with him. It was a better weapon and twice as deadly as a Colt’s automatic. It was death itself, for the dart was poisoned. Tuan was standing up and leaning back with the gun to his lips. Up above, against the sprinkling light through the leaves, Kadjaman made a target as big as a barn door and not more than twenty-five feet off and Tuan with that infernal gun could hit the middle of a sixpence somewhere about the same distance. So there didn’t seem much chance for the monkey, did there?
“Well, all of a sudden I heard the ‘phut’ of the blowgun, and right on it Ting, up in the branches, let a squeal out of him and I saw he’d been hit, hit right in the neck where the big vein is and where the poison of the dart would act quickest.
“Then he came tumbling, kicking, and catching at twigs, bang into the bushes, dead as Pharaoh’s aunt. Tuan gave the body a stir with his foot to see if it was dead all right, and finding it so was satisfied. He didn’t bother about Kadjaman, though he could have killed him easy enough. He’d got his son back, anyhow, and stopped him from going lower than he’d gone. You see he wasn’t a chap to believe in Tarzan of the Apes or Mowgli, seeing that he knew what the jungle is and what monkeys are, and what men can become.
“Tuan wasn’t a popsy-wopsy father by no means, but I’ve often thought it’s chaps like Tuan, stuck by nature in the door in old days, that’s stopped humans from backsliding into beasts—but maybe I’m wrong.”
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the August 7, 1921 issue of The Popular magazine.