“Come, I think we may be off home to the Kampong; no smugglers will come ashore to-night, you may be sure.”
For a while longer did the two Celestials keep watching the steamer’s movements. First she showed her three lights plainly enough, she was therefore making straight for the land. After a time, however, all of a sudden, her green light disappeared, leaving for a while the red light only visible. Presently that also went out and only the white top-mast light remained visible, and, as it seemed stationary, our Chinamen concluded that the steamer had anchored or was perhaps moving with her head to the wind.
Said Than Khan at length, “It is no use staying here; while that cursed Matamata is about they will not be able to get anything ashore. Come, let us be going.”
“All right,” replied Liem King; “but I vote we first go and have a look at the Tjatjing, we may just possibly get to know something about the ‘djoekoeng.’ ”
So our two worthies clambered down the rough log which, as we have shown, stood as a ladder against the hut; the wind howling, meanwhile, as furiously as ever.
In a few steps they came upon a kind of pathway for which they had to grope with their feet in the deep darkness. They found it; and as every now and then a wave would come washing over it, the two Chinamen had to splash on in the brine. That, however, did not greatly interfere with their progress. They knew the road well, and even had the weather been rougher, they would have got along without much hesitation. They had, in fact, not very far to go. In a few minutes they reached the small river Tjatjing which close by emptied itself into the Java Sea.
At the spot where the Chinamen came upon the stream it made a kind of bend or elbow as if, just before losing itself in the ocean, it had thought better of it and was trying to retrace its course. At that bend the mangrove roots retired a little from the shore, leaving a pretty wide open space from which the prospect over the river would have been quite clear; but the darkness was so intense that even Than Khan’s ferret eyes could make out nothing.
“If the ‘djoekoeng’ has reached the Moeara at all,” roared Than Khan in the ear of his companion, “she must have come ashore here. They cannot possibly have got her further up the Tjatjing, there is not water enough and the marsh-weed completely chokes it up.”
“Hush,” said Liem King; “I hear something.”
He was right. In spite of the awful noise of the tempest a low moaning sound could just be heard.