“Chapman!” I exclaimed.
Then he recognized me and reached out his hand, but not with the cordiality which I had expected. I noticed that a look of vexation, if not of distrust, was written on his face.
“How did it happen,” he asked.
In a few hurried words I told him the story.
“It is fortunate that the arrow was not poisoned,” he said “or you would have been booked with a through ticket. Can you hobble for half a mile or shall I send the natives for a boat?”
“I think I can manage it,” I answered.
A little way off stood a number of natives with great bushy heads and holding in their hands immense bows and spears made of bamboo.
“Your retainers gave me a warm reception,” I remarked.
Chapman smiled. “They are not my retainers, they are natives who protect my property along the coast and to whom I give a few pounds of tobacco and occasionally a bottle of square gin.”
Half a mile brought us to a deep bay. A yawl lay near the shore manned by four as villainous looking Malays as I ever set eyes on. At a signal from Chapman they brought the boat along side, we stepped in and they pulled away. The water was shallow and the bottom muddy. A third of a mile from shore we came to Chapman’s home. Large bamboo poles had been planted in the mud and at a distance of twenty feet above the water other poles had been lashed in a horizontal position, thus forming the foundation of the floor of the hut. The floor was also of bamboo poles and over it was built a substantial camp thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. When we arrived a ladder was let down and up it we scrambled.