'We slew a goat yesternight,' replied Äbas.
'Hast thou the skin, O Äbas?' asked the Pĕnghûlu, 'for I am renewing the faces of my drums, and would fain purchase it.'
'The skin was mangy, and we cast it into the river,' said Äbas.
'What ails thy father, Äbas?' asked the Pĕnghûlu returning to the charge.
'He is sick,' said suddenly a voice from the curtained doorway, which led to the inner apartment. It was the elder son Äbdulrahman who spoke. He held a sword in his hand, and his face wore an ugly look as his words came harshly and gratingly with the foreign accent of the Korinchi people. He went on, still standing, near the doorway, 'He is sick, O Pĕnghûlu, and the noise of your words disturbs him. He would slumber and be still. Descend out of the house, he cannot see thee, Pĕnghûlu. Listen to these my words!'
Äbdulrahman's manner, and the words he spoke, were at once so rough and defiant that the Pĕnghûlu saw that he must choose between a scuffle, which would mean bloodshed, and a hasty retreat. He was a mild old man, and he drew a monthly salary from the Pêrak Government. Moreover, he knew that the white men, who guided the destinies of Pêrak, were averse to bloodshed and homicide, even if the person slain was a wizard, or the son of a wizard. Therefore he decided upon retreat.
As they clambered down the steps of the door-ladder, Mat Tahir, one of the Pĕnghûlu's men, plucked him by the sleeve, and pointed to a spot beneath the house. Just below the place, in the inner apartment, where Haji Äli might be supposed to lie stretched upon the mat of sickness, the ground was stained a dim red for a space of several inches in circumference. Malay floors are made of laths of wood or of bamboo laid parallel to one another, with spaces between each one of them. This is convenient, as the whole of the ground beneath the house can thus be used as a slop-pail, waste-basket, and rubbish heap. The red stain lying where it did had the look of blood, blood moreover from some one within the house, whose wound had very recently been washed and dressed. It might also have been the red juice of the betel-nut, but its stains are but rarely seen in such large patches. Whatever it may have been the Pĕnghûlu and his people had no opportunity of examining it more closely, for Äbdulrahman and Äbas followed them out of the compound, and barred the door against them.
Then the Pĕnghûlu set off to tell his tale to the District Officer, the white man under whose charge the Slim Valley had been placed. He went with many misgivings, for Europeans are sceptical concerning such tales, and when he returned, more or less dissatisfied, some five days later, he found that Haji Äli and his sons had disappeared. They had fled down river on a dark night, without a soul being made aware of their intended departure. They had neither stayed to reap their crops, which now stood ripening in the fields; to sell their house and compound, which had been bought with good money,—'dollars of the whitest,' as the Malay phrase has it,—nor yet to collect their debts. This is a fact; and to one who knows the passion for wealth and for property, which is to be found in the breast of every Sumatran Malay, it is perhaps the strangest circumstance of all the weird events, which go to make up the drama of the Were-Tiger of Slim.
There is, to the European mind, only one possible explanation. Haji Äli and his sons had been the victims of foul play. They had been killed by the simple villagers of Slim, and a cock-and-bull story trumped up to account for their disappearance. This is a very good, and withal a very astute explanation, showing as it does a profound knowledge of human nature, and I should be more than half inclined to accept it as the correct one, but for the fact that Haji Äli and his sons turned up in quite another part of the Peninsula some months later. They have nothing out of the way about them to mark them from their fellows, except that Haji Äli goes lame on his right leg.
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