One Maid's Mischief

by George Manville Fenn

“Go on,” he exclaimed, in his own tongue, as he loosed the branch whose leaves hid the sleeping girl from sight, and the boat went forward, the Malay peering back for a moment with his great opalescent eyeballs rolling as he looked up and down the great tree, as if fixing it in his mind with the surroundings on either side of the stream. After this he went on in the same matter-of-fact way, pressing the branches aside and examining his bank of the river for quite an hour longer, when the leader of the other boat, which was well in advance, hailed him, and proposed that they should give up the search as of no avail.

The other searcher made a little demur, when the other became more pressing.

“They could not have wandered up so far as this,” he said; and the tall Malay reluctantly acquiescing, the two boats were turned, a man placed a paddle over the stern for steering purposes, the other paddles were laid in by the weary rowers, who, leaving the boats to descend the swift stream, settled themselves in easy attitudes, pulled out their betel boxes and leaves, and each man, after smearing a sirih leaf with a little paste of lime, rolled up in it a fragment of the popular betel-nut, and sat back with half-closed eyes, chewing, as if that were the be-all and end-all of existence.

The boats sped rapidly down-stream, past the glorious panorama of tropic vegetation spread on either side: but it was not noticed once save by the tall Malay, who sat back in the prow with his bamboo pole balanced in his hands, lazily peering out of his half-closed eyes.

As they approached the huge tree, beneath whose shade the two weary girls lay resting, the Malay’s dark eyes opened slightly, as if he were again carefully observant of the place. Then they half-closed once more, then quite closed, and he seemed to go fast asleep.

Then the two boats rapidly glided down with the current and disappeared.

The sun, which had before been shining straight down upon the river, had gone westward, and had begun to cast shadows across the foaming stream, when once more a boat appeared, but only propelled by one man, who, armed with a long pole, stood in the stern, as he kept close in under the trees, and thrusting the pole down in the bubbling water, forced the little vessel along at a rapid rate.

He did not look either to right or left, but aimed straight for the great tree, and even then passed it, but only to alter the course of the boat a little, and let it glide back right beneath the branches and close in shore, where he silently secured it, and then stepped out to where the Malay girl still lay sleeping.

He stood looking at her for a few moments before kneeling softly down at her side, when, with a light, firm touch, he placed one hand upon her right wrist and the other upon her lips.

The girl started into wakefulness, and would have shrieked, but the hand across her lips stayed her. She would have seized the kris with which she was armed, but her wrist was pinioned.