"I can never get them to balance," Muller cried. "Our dealings—the rattan we shipped—you know." He looked fearfully around.
"There never was a controlleur yet that didn't line his own pockets," Van Slyck sneered. "But his books never showed it. You are a book-keeper, mynheer, and you know how to juggle figures. Forget these transactions; if you can't, charge the moneys you got to some account. There are no vouchers or receipts in Bulungan. A handy man with figures, like yourself, ought to be able to make a set of accounts that that ferret Sachsen himself could not find a flaw in."
"But that is not the worst," Muller cried despairingly. "There are the taxes, the taxes I should have sent to Batavia, the rice that we sold instead to Ah Sing."
"Good God! Have you grown a conscience?" Van Slyck snarled. "If you have, drown yourself in the bay. Lie, you fool, lie! Tell him the weevils ruined the crop, tell him the floods drowned it, tell him a tornado swept the fields bare, lay it to the hill Dyaks—anything, anything! But keep your nerve, or you'll hang sure."
Muller retreated before the captain's vehemence.
"But the bruinevels, kapitein?" he faltered. "They may tell him something different."
"Wobanguli won't; he's too wise to say anything," Van Slyck asserted firmly. "None of the others will dare to, either—all we've got to do is to whisper Ah Sing's name to them. But there's little danger of any of them except the Rajah seeing him until after the Prins is gone. Once she's out of the harbor I don't care what they say—no word of it will ever get back to Batavia."
His devilishly handsome smile gleamed sardonically, and he twisted his nicely waxed mustache. Muller's hands shook.
"Kapitein," he replied in an odd, strained voice, "I am afraid of this Peter Gross. I had a dream last night, a horrible dream—I am sure it was him I saw. I was in old de Jonge's room in the residency building—you know the room—and the stranger of my dream sat in old de Jonge's chair.
"He asked me questions, questions of how I came here, and what I have done here, and I talked and talked till my mouth was dry as the marsh grass before the rains begin to fall. All the while he listened, and his eyes seemed to bore through me, as though they said: 'Judas, I know what is going on in your heart.'