I poured out a glass of whiskey and held it out to him. In accordance with Oriental etiquette, he refused it seven times with a pained expression. At the eighth offer he smiled nervously. At the ninth he raised his hand hesitatingly and dropped it again. At the tenth he took the glass gingerly between his slim fingers, eyed it askance, tasted the liquor half fearfully, smacked his lips, gulped down a liberal half of the potion, and handed the glass to the privates behind him.
The mutton roast engrossed our attention. When it was finished, I found the officer grinning down upon me. I filled the glass again. He cocked his head on one side in the beginning of a shake and kept it there. His refusals had lost force. With the third glass there was no refusal. The fourth he poured out for himself. By the time we were picking the chicken bones, the three warriors were dancing gleefully about us. We sat down on the blanket for a smoke. The sergeant, shrieking his undying affection, threw himself down between us and began to embrace us in turn. When we kicked him off the veranda he locked arms with the privates and waltzed away across the parade-ground, screaming a high-pitched native song at the top of his lungs. The quart bottle stood on the table—empty.
We spent the night on the veranda. We did not sleep there. Our sun-scorched skins would not permit it; even had they burned less fiercely, we could not have slept. One would have fancied the monastery a gigantic hen yard, with the priests transformed into chanticleers during the hours of darkness. After every shower the unveiled moon was greeted with a din of crowing that was nothing short of infernal. In the brief respite each gathering storm brought us, we tossed about wide-awake on our asperous couch, listening to the symphonic tinkling of the pagoda bells.
With dawn came a summons from the Dane. We hurried to his bungalow and joined him at breakfast. He had gathered together two pairs of shoes and four khaki uniforms. They were from his own tailor in Bangkok, still very serviceable, though fitting us a bit too snugly, and chafing our blistered skins. Rolling up the extra garments and swinging them over our shoulders, we bade our host farewell. As we left the garrison inclosure we came upon the sergeant, sitting on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chin, his face buried in his hands—a very personification of the baneful morning after.
CHAPTER XX
THE JUNGLES OF SIAM
The route to Bangkok, such as it was, lay on the eastern bank of the Menam. This time we crossed the stream by the official ferry, a dug-out canoe fully thirty feet long, which held, besides ourselves and four paddlers, twenty-two natives, chiefly of the gentle sex. All day we tramped through jungle as wild as that to the westward, following the course of the river. Bamboo villages were numerous and for every hut at least a half-dozen, mangy, yellow curs added their yelping to the uproar that heralded our approach. We cooked our food where we chose and paid for it when we had eaten. The inhabitants were indolent “wild men” like those of the mountains, content to live and die in their nests of jungle rubbish, with a dirty rag about their loins. Occasionally a family ran away into the forest when we took possession of their abode. More often they remained where we found them, squatting on the floor, and watched our culinary dexterity with lack-luster eyes. Except for their breasts, there was nothing to distinguish the women from the men. Both sexes wore their dull, black hair some two inches long and dressed it in a bristling pompadour that gave them a resemblance to startled porcupines. Both had jet-black teeth. The younger children were robust little animals; the older, ungainly creatures with overgrown bellies.
Chief of the obstacles to our progress were the tributaries of the Menam Chow Pya. Sometimes they were swift and deep. Then we had only to strip and swim them, our bundles slung around our heads. What we dreaded more were the sluggish streams, through which we must wade waist deep in black, foul-smelling slush or half-acres of nauseating green slime, cesspools that seemed designed to harbor poisonous snakes. Once we despaired for a time of continuing our way. We had been halted by a stagnant rivulet more than a furlong wide, too deep to be waded, too thickly covered with stewing slime to be swum. We wandered back along it for some distance. No stream could have been less fitting a scene for romance. Yet what was our surprise to find, where the green scum was thickest, an old dug-out scow, half roofed with attap leaves, anchored to a snag equi-distant from either shore; and in it that same youthful priest of our mountain tramp, engrossed in the entertainment of as comely a female as one could have run to earth in the length and breadth of these Siamese wilds. We half suspected that he would resent being disturbed. At sight of the scowling face that he raised when we hallooed to him we were sure of it.
Still we could not halt where we were merely out of respect for romance. We beckoned to him to paddle ashore and set us across. He refused and snarled back at us. We picked up the stoutest clubs at hand and shook them at him. He laughed scornfully. I threw my weapon at the craft. It struck the roof and went through it. The priest sprang up with a whine, slipped his mooring, and, twisting his face into an ugly grin of feigned amiability, paddled slowly towards us. We sprang into the scow and five minutes later were plunging through the jungle beyond.
The sun was still well above the horizon when we reached Kung Chow. The Dane had told us it was twenty-two miles from Rehang. Kung Chow was no ordinary jungle village. It consisted of a bungalow of unusual magnificence, set in the center of a clearing on the bank of the Menam, with a half-circle of smaller dwellings round about and at a respectful distance from it. The main building was the residence of the “jungle king”; the smaller housed his servants and retainers.
Of this royal person we had heard much at breakfast that morning. To the commander of Rehang he was “almost a fellow countryman,” as he hailed from Sweden. For many years he had been stationed at Kung Chow as manager of a company that is exploiting the teak forests, and the style in which he lived in spite of his isolation had won him his sobriquet.