"We will do what we think best," Muller observed grimly.
Koyala looked at him steadily until his glance fell.
"You will both leave him alone and attend to your own affairs," she announced. "The new resident will be taken care of by Ah Sing—and by me."
CHAPTER IX
The Long Arm of Ah Sing
Two weeks after receiving his appointment as resident of Bulungan, Peter Gross stood on a wharf along the Batavia water-front and looked wistfully out to sea. It was early evening and quite dark, for the moon had not risen and the eastern sky from the zenith down was obscured by fitful patches of cloud, gray-winged messengers of rain. In the west, Venus glowed with a warm, seductive light, like a lamp in a Spanish garden. A brisk and vigorous breeze roughed the waters of the bay that raced shoreward in long rollers to escape its impetuous wooing.
Peter Gross breathed the salt air deeply and stared steadfastly into the west, for he was sick at heart. Not until now did he realize what giving up the sea meant to him. The sea!—it had been a second mother to him, receiving him into its open arms when he ran away from the drudgery of the farm to satisfy the wanderlust that ached and ached in his boyish heart. Ay, it had mothered him, cradling him at night on its fond bosom while it sang a wild and eerie refrain among sail and cordage, buffeting him in its ill-humor, feeding him, and even clothing him. His first yellow oilskin, he remembered poignantly, had been salvaged from a wreck.
Now he was leaving that mother. He was leaving the life he had lived for ten years. He was denying the dreams and ambitions of his youth. He was casting aside the dream of some day standing on the deck of his own ship with a score of smart sailors to jump at his command. A feeling akin to the home-sickness he had suffered when, a lad of fifteen, he lived through his first storm at sea, in the hold of a cattle-ship, came over him now. Almost he regretted his decision.
Since bidding good-bye to Captain Threthaway two weeks before, he had picked twenty-four of the twenty-five men he intended to take with him for the pacification of Bulungan. The twenty-fifth he expected to sign that night at the home of his quondam skipper, Captain Roderick Rouse, better known as Roaring Rory. Rouse had been a trader in the south seas for many years and was now skipper of a smart little cottage in Ryswyk, the European residence section of Batavia. Peter Gross's presence at the water-front was explained by the fact that he had an hour to spare and naturally drifted to Tanjong Priok, the shipping center.