We returned to our bungalow and started the phonograph anew. Fully an hour afterward the “king” walked in upon us. He carried what looked like a great sausage, wrapped in thick, brown paper.
“I’m always glad to help a white man,” he panted, “especially when he has done me a service.”
I took the parcel in one hand and nearly lost my balance as he let it go. It weighed several pounds. By the time I had recovered my equilibrium “his majesty” was gone. I sat down and unrolled the package. It contained fifty silver tecals.
Our second day down the Menam was enlivened by one adventure. About noonday, we had cooked our food in one of the huts of a good-sized village and paid for it by no means illiberally. Outside the shack we were suddenly surrounded by six “wild men” of unusually angry and determined appearance. Five of them carried dahs, the sixth, a long, clumsy musket. While the others danced about us, waving their knives, the latter stopped three paces away, raised his gun, and took deliberate aim at my chest. The gleam in his eye suggested that he was not “bluffing.” I sprang to one side and threw the cocoanut I was carrying in one hand hard at him. It struck him on the jaw below the ear. His scream sounded like a factory whistle in the wilderness and he put off into the jungle as fast as his thin legs could carry him, his companions shrieking at his heels.
“When you are attacked by an Oriental mob,” the Dane had said, “hurt one of them, and hurt him quick. That’s all that’s needed.”
Miles beyond, as we reposed in a tangled thicket, a crashing of underbrush brought us anxiously to our feet. We peered out through the interwoven branches. An elephant, with a mahout dozing on his head, was advancing towards us. Behind him came another and another of the bulky animals, fifteen in all, some with armed men on their backs, others bearing a small carload of baggage. We stepped out of our hiding place in time to meet the chief of the caravan, who rode between the seventh and eighth elephants on a stout-limbed pony. He was an Englishman, agent of the Bombay-Burma Lumber Company, and had spent fifteen years in wandering through the teak forests of Siam. Never before, he asserted, had he known a white man to cross the peninsula unarmed and unescorted. For a time he was convinced that we were playing a practical joke on him and had hidden our porters and guns away in the jungle. Disabused of that idea, he warned us to beware the territory beyond, asserting that he had killed two tigers and a murderous outlaw within the past week.
“I shall pitch my camp a few miles from here,” he concluded. “You had better turn back and spend the night with me. It’s all of thirty miles from Kung Chow to here, more than enough for one day.”
We declined the offer, having no desire to cover the same territory thrice. The Englishman wrote us a letter of introduction to his subagent in the next village, and, as that hamlet was some distance off, we took our leave at once.
For miles we struggled on through the tangle of vegetation without encountering a sign of the hand of man. The shadows lengthened eastward, twilight fell and thickened to darkness. To travel by night in this jungle country is utterly impossible. We paid for our attempt to do so by losing our way and sinking to our knees in a slimy swamp. When we had dragged ourselves to more solid ground, all sense of direction was gone. With raging thirst and gnawing hunger we threw ourselves down in the depths of the wilderness. The ground was soft and wet. In ten minutes we had sunk half out of sight. I pulled my “swag” loose and rolled over to another spot. It was softer and wetter than the one I had left.
“Hark!” murmured James suddenly. “Is that a dog barking? Perhaps there’s a village near.”