“Come with me, white trader?” he asked me. “I am Pra Oom Bwaht.”
Idly I went. So, after visiting the other temples, we came to the Temple of Siva, perched on its rocks, with the river running near and its little grounds well kept. It was the hour of evening worship. The worshipers, mostly women, were coming in with votive offerings.
But among them all there was a Laos girl, shapely as a roe deer, graceful, brown, with flashing black eyes and shining black hair neatly coiled on top of her pretty head, and with full red lips. As she passed, Oom Bwaht just nudged me—pointed. She turned off at a fork of the path, alone.
I glanced at Pra Oom Bwaht. His twisty mouth was wreathed in a smile.
“She lives at the end of that little path,” he tempted. “She is Nagy N’Yang.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
He nodded again and went away. I turned down the side path after the Laos girl....
There was a full moon that night. About the middle of the night we came up the path to the temple again, the Laos girl and I.
“Come,” she had said to me when I had asked her for my heart’s desire, “come to the temple, and I can prove it is folly.”