Middy and Ensign

by George Manville Fenn

Chapter Nineteen.

How Bob and Old Dick finished their Day.

The very motion of the boat lulled its occupants into a deeper sleep as they glided on and on down the swift deep river, with the tall waving palms and the dark undergrowth ever slipping by the travellers, who had embarked now upon a journey whose end was death.

The sampan floated quietly on in attendance, and the Malay, whose hand was twisted in the boat’s painter, kept beneath the bows of the little boat with merely his face above water, the dinghy now floating down stern foremost, and, having been guided into the swiftest part of the stream, always faster and faster towards its journey’s end.

Utterly unconscious of danger, and dreaming comfortably of being in a land of unlimited do-nothingism, Dick’s head lay across the gunwale of the boat in terrible proximity to the Malay’s kris; while Bob, with his chin on his chest, was far away in his old home, in a punt of which he had lost the pole, and it was being whirled along faster and faster through the shallows towards the mill down at the bend of the river.

He was very comfortable, and in spite of an uneasy position his sleep was very sweet, unconscious as he was of anything having the semblance of danger.

And now the dinghy was a good half mile below where the steamer was moored. They had passed the last house standing on its stout bamboo props, some distance above, and the river had curved twice in its bed, so that they had long been concealed from any one upon the deck, and still the Malays hesitated, or rather waited the time to make their spring. They had no special enmity against the occupants of the dinghy in particular, but they were three of the most daring followers of Rajah Gantang, who had assumed the part of fishermen in a sampan, with a rough cast net, so as to hang about the neighbourhood of the “Startler,” and pick up information for their chief, who, so far from being, with his two prahus, hors de combat, was merely lying-up in a creek hidden by bamboos and palms, awaiting his time to take deadly vengeance upon the destroyers of his stockade and miners of his income from the passing boats.

The opportunity of cutting off a couple of the hated infidels who had forced themselves into the peaceful country, where their rajah, like many another, had been free to carry on a happy lawless existence, cutting throats, selling slaves, committing acts of piracy, and indulging in every vile and sensuous custom, was one not to be lost. Rajah Gantang wanted no peace, or order, or prosperity in the land where he could seize on the wretched people, and make them pay him in gold, tin, rice, poultry, fruit, or any precious commodity, for the right to pass down the river, which he, and a few more of his stamp, looked upon as theirs by right; so that his three followers were certain to receive praise and reward for the proof they might be able to show of the death of a couple of the giaours.

For the Malays are good Mohammedans, and look upon the slaying of a Christian as a most meritorious act, but at the same time they were too cautious to endanger their plot or their own lives by undue haste.