“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.
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.