His hair was black, straight, and short, and his eyes as black as coals. Like his companions, he stood as straight as an arrow, and could carry a pail of water on his head without spilling a drop.
He, too, ate rice three times a day. It puffed him up like a little old man, which added to his grotesqueness and gave him a certain air of dignity that went well with his features when they were in repose. Around his waist he wore a silver chain with a silver heart suspended from it. Its purpose was to keep off the evil spirits.
There was always an atmosphere of sandalwood and Arab essence about Baboo that reminded me of the holds of the old sailing-ships that used to come into Boston harbor from the Indies. I think his mother must have rubbed the perfumes into his hair as the one way of declaring to the world her affection for him. She could not give him clothes, or ornaments, or toys: such was not the fashion of Baboo’s race. Neither was he old enough to wear the silk sarong that his Aunt Fatima had woven for him on her loom.
Baboo had been well trained, and however lordly he might be in the quarters, he was marked in his respect to the mistress. He would touch his forehead to the red earth when I drove away of a morning to the office; though the next moment I might catch him blowing a tiny ball of clay from his sumpitan into the ear of his father, the syce, as he stood majestically on the step behind me.
Baboo went to school for two hours every day to a fat old Arab penager, or teacher, whose schoolroom was an open stall, and whose only furniture a bench, on which he sat cross-legged, and flourished a whip in one hand and a chapter of the Koran in the other.
There were a dozen little fellows in the school; all naked. They stood up in line, and in a soft musical treble chanted in chorus the glorious promises of the Koran, even while their eyes wandered from the dusky corner where a cheko lizard was struggling with an atlas moth, to the frantic gesticulations of a naked Hindu who was calling his meek-eyed bullocks hard names because they insisted on lying down in the middle of the road for their noonday siesta.
Baboo’s father, Aboo Din, was a Hadji, for he had been to Mecca. When nothing else could make Baboo forget the effects of the green durian he had eaten, Aboo Din would take the child on his knees and sing to him of his trip to Mecca, in a quaint, monotonous voice, full of sorrowful quavers. Baboo believed he himself could have left Singapore any day and found Mecca in the dark.
We had been living some weeks in a government bungalow, fourteen miles from Singapore, across the island that looks out on the Straits of Malacca. The fishing and hunting were excellent. I had shot wild pig, deer, tapirs, and for some days had been getting ready to track down a tiger that had been prowling in the jungle about the bungalow.
But of a morning, as we lay lazily chatting in our long chairs behind the bamboo chicks, the cries of “Harimau! Harimau!” and “Baboo” came up to us from the servants’ quarters.
Aboo Din sprang over the railing of the veranda, and without stopping even to touch the back of his hand to his forehead, cried,—