"By the by," I continued, "there was another gang robbery committed close to Ah Sing's and only two days before it. Did you ever hear anything about that?"
THE "MALE" AND "FEMALE" KRISES REFERRED TO IN THIS STORY.
"Suppose the Tuan found out who did it, would he have the men arrested?" he asked.
"It was so long ago that even if I found out it would probably be impossible to get up a case, for it would now be only hearsay evidence. No; I don't think I would do anything."
"We committed that robbery also, Tuan," he said.
At one time or another most people have gone in for collecting things; for twenty years my hobby was savage weapons. My Malay sergeant-major took a keen interest—or, with his innate courtesy, pretended to do so—in my collection, and I owe many of the weapons I have to him. Many of them have curious histories, but none more so than that connected with two Booghis krises.
Under our paternal rule the Malay is not allowed to wear his kris. He has a keen sense of his own dignity, and he wore his kris, as our ancestors did their swords, to uphold it. The resenting of an insult by the shedding of blood being contrary to our modern ideas, however, we disarmed him.
One day Sergeant-Major Etot brought before me a man who had been arrested for carrying a kris. He was an ordinary-looking Malay, but he had a deep scar across one side of his face, from the nose nearly to his ear. He said he was a Booghis, and that his tribe lived in the interior of Sumatra; that he had only the day before arrived from there, and did not know he was not allowed to wear his kris.
The sergeant-major showed me the kris, and said he had never seen one quite like it before; he had questioned the man about it, and he had told him that the Booghis had two kinds of krises only, which they named the "male" and the "female," which were very similar to each other, having but a slight difference.