Forster collected his wits and answered earnestly, ‘It was an ant maybe. But I tell you, Cap’n Baker, there ain’t no difference betwixt that ant and a red-hot iron devil. Oh law! I’ll be good from this day. I know how the bad uns fare now.’
‘That’s a blessed resolution anyhow,’ said Baker. ‘But it didn’t last above a minute, you see. Come, show yourself a man, and shin up them shrouds again.’
‘No, Cap’n Baker,’ he answered slowly and impressively, ‘not if you was to put the Queen’s crown on top of the tree and fix a keg of rum half-way up.’
Then they found that the other man had hurt himself badly in falling. Baker was stubborn. But promises and taunts failed to move one of them, and he was too fat to climb himself.
‘Confound it, Tuz,’ said he discontentedly, as they pulled into the stream. ‘Other men have got these things. How did they do it?’
‘Them get Dyaks—naked chaps what see ants and snakes.’
‘Oh! And can I get Dyaks?’
‘You pay, Tuan Cap’n, I find plenty naked chaps.’
In the evening all was settled. Tuzzadeen knew the chief of a Sibuyou Dyak village on a hill just above the bay; they would scarcely lose sight of the ship. No preparations were necessary. He himself would go ahead when they approached a village, and the Dyaks would be pleased to see them.
At dawn next day Baker started, with Tuzzadeen and four armed sailors. They crossed the broad white beach, studded with big rocks, moss-grown, weather-stained, clothed with creepers and plumed with fern; through a grove of cocoanut palms, scaring a band of children—Malay, but clad only in a heart-shaped badge of silver dangling at their waists—and entered the forest. There was a well-worn path. In a hilly district like this Dyaks are content to walk upon the ground; elsewhere they lay tree-trunks, end to end, on crossed posts, and trot along, raised above the level of the bush.