“If we rise—ruin,” he said bitterly. “My people slain, my villages burned, my children slaughtered! That is the price of the honor of a man, Tuan. And for their lives, Vetter demands my daughter. Which”—he clenched his teeth in the quintessence of bitterness—“is the price of the honor of a king.”
Cary moved. He was listening to the old chap now, looking from him to the girl and back again.
“You mean,” said the doctor slowly, “Vetter will set a gunboat on your people if you keep your daughter from him, no matter how?”
“If she stabs herself!” said Buro Sitt, his voice breaking. He looked swiftly at the younger Malay and then his eyes went suddenly blank again as he got control of himself once more. “So she will go to him, Tuan. As the ransom for my villages, and the ransom for my people’s lives.”
Cary began to talk angrily, spouting what Malay he knew with his whole vocabulary of Chinese thrown in to make his meaning clear. The main point of his speech was that he’d like to wring Vetter’s neck and would do so at the first favorable opportunity. Buro Sitt listened without a flicker of expression on his face. He had himself in hand again.
“Tuan,” he said evenly, to the doctor, “will you speak to him, and urge that he sends away this other woman? It will not even be safe for my daughter. There is always poison⸺”
“I’ll remember,” said the doctor, not quite directly.
“The blessing of Allah be upon you,” said Buro Sitt evenly.
He swung down into the canoe. The girl and the young man followed him. They drifted off into the darkness, where the jungle noises began at the water’s edge. For a little while there was no sound but the lapping of the river waves and the furtive noises that came out of the squirming mass of vegetation.
Then the doctor said thoughtfully, “I wonder what he’s really up to.”