She saw his suffering and smiled. So she had been made to suffer, not once, but a thousand times.
"That was because I had sworn the revenge should be mine, not Ah Sing's or any one else's, orang blanda."
Peter Gross lowered his face in the shadow. He did not care to have her see how great had been his disillusionment, how deep was his pain.
"You may do with me as you will, juffrouw," he said.
Koyala looked at him strangely a moment, then rose silently and left the hut. Peter Gross never knew the reason. It was because at that moment, when she revealed her Dyak treachery and uprooted his faith, he spoke to her as he would to a white woman—"juffrouw."
"They are holding out yet," Peter Gross said to himself cheerfully some time later as the sound of scattered volleys was wafted over the hills. Presently he heard the dull boom of the first shell. His face paled.
"That is artillery!" he exclaimed. "Can it be—?" He remembered the heavy guns on the proas and his face became whiter still. He began tugging at his bonds, but they were too firmly bound. His Dyak guard looked in and grinned, and he desisted. As time passed and the explosions continued uninterruptedly, his face became haggard and more haggard. It was because of his folly, he told himself, that men were dying there—brave Carver, so much abler and more foresighted than he, the ever-cheerful Paddy, all those he had brought with him, good men and true. He choked.
Presently the shell-fire ceased. Peter Gross knew what it meant, in imagination he saw the columns of natives forming, column upon column, all that vast horde of savages and worse than savages let loose on a tiny square of whites.
A figure stood in the doorway. It was Koyala. Cho Seng stood beside her.
"The walls are down," she cried triumphantly. "There is only a handful of them left. The people of Bulungan are now forming for the charge. In a few minutes you will be the only white man left in Bulungan."