“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.