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THE TWISTED FOOT


I








THE TWISTED FOOT
BY
HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
G. C. WIDNEY

e BOSTON AND NEW TOEK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Abe I3itocr?i&e $ttM Cambri&oe
1910


3/y.3, r, /crtj
-
J
COPYRIGHT, I91O, BY HENRY MILlfER RIDEOUT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published April iqio
PINU DEC 4 1911


CONTENTS
I.
THE SILVER LOCKET
1
n.
THE HUT IN THE PALMS:
DAWN
14
in.
THE HUT IN THE PALMS:
NIGHT
25
IV.
AT LARGE
87
V.
MARY: IN THE PLAINS
50
VI.
mart: in the hills
64
VII.
KUBOYONQ
76
VIII.
THE SHADOWS
90
IX.
DOWN HILL
100
X.
THE LAKE ISLE
113
XI.
THE WRITTEN STONE
125
XII.
WAITING
141
XIII.
THE DESSA
157
XIV.
THE GREEN POOL
170
XV.
THE HIGHWAY
181
XVI.
LAMP-COMEDY
194
XVII.
BATU BLAH
210
XVIII.
AMOK
221
XIX.
THE PACKET
239





ILLUSTRATIONS
yHE PICKED UP THE FALLEN SPEAR AND HELD
IT BEADY (Page 6) Frontispiece
J YOU SEE, I DID N'T TAKE EVERYTHING . 22
JTHE WRITER AT THE TABLE HAD CRIED
ALOUD 34
HIS COOK IS ASESINO TO MY STOM-ACHE . . 42
J THE TIMID AND BOOKISH ROSARIO, WHO WAS
RUNNING AFT 58
J A SHRILL CRY OF PRETERNATURAL VOLUME 64
TUAN RAMA LEFT THIS WITH ME, TO GIVE
YOU 246
From original drawings by G. C. Widney, reproduced through the
courtesy of "The Saturday Evening Post."


THE TWISTED FOOT
CHAPTER I
THE SILVER LOCKET
The captain's biscuits, a Huntley and Palmer
tin, were slung — high beyond reach of white
ants or more nauseous vermin — on a lanyard
made fast to the awning stanchion. There they
swung dimly, beside a bunch of ripe bananas, in
the darkest part of the boat-deck. If Agapito, the
mestizo steward, had stayed awake long enough
to coil up loose ends . . . but a tale was hanging
by that slender cord, along with the captain's bis-
cuits.
Into this tale, David Bowman plunged head
first over the side, through the unguarded gap
astern of the long-boat. The rotten cord snapped
from his ankle, and he fell whirling, in a shock of
surprise and blind rage. A long time, it seemed,
he fought and choked in the cool darkness under
the ocean. Then, as he shouted between air and
water, his streaming eyes, blinded and stung with
salt, cleared to show him the golden jet of phos-
phorus squirting from his mouth, the unbroken
swell of the tropic sea like black oil moving under


THE SILVER LOCKET 3
things to do, up north, in Manila. Now remained
only two great unrealities, — a swimmer, and the
moonlit ocean. The act of staying afloat became
so heavy, all at once, that he would have flung up
both arms and let go, had not a fragment from
an unknown book haunted him, ringing like a
sunken bell:—
"the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony."
"That means — me!" He lashed out in dis-
may; but the lights grew less, the black shape
lowered and shrank upon the heaving, liquid
foundation of his sight. Only the unknown line,
a dread stimulus, kept him at work above water.
"Some strong swimmer," — that was all he or his
final contest meant, to the tropic ocean and the
tropic moon.
He groaned. Anguish of the spirit, it might
have been; but before the sound went wide and
was lost, he knew it for anguish of the body.
"Swimming too hard: ease up," commanded
some unconquerable secret part of him; and obey-
ing, his arms and legs no longer jerked out
violently, but began to move with the strong,
deliberate ease of habit. Presently, by the same
impulse, he found his fingers tugging stubbornly,
under water, at buttons and belt. All day, by a
lucky chance, he had gone about the decks bare-


4 THE TWISTED FOOT
foot; and now, at last, he managed to wriggle and
tear loose from the leaden wrappings of jacket
and trousers. He swam naked, as light — by
contrast — as a floating sea-gull.
Behind him, for the time of a few strokes,
the swollen folds of white drill glistened in the
moonlight, like ghostly spirals of a water-
snake.
Before him, the Santo Nino had already faded
to a pair of twinkling points, often smudged out
by the tiny black squall of smoke. Beyond these,
on his right hand, stretched a continuous gray va-
por, the fusion of sky and sea in the moonlight;
but, on his left hand, the distant contours of
island mountains floated like darker vapors, al-
most equally dissolved. Land — shore: they were
too far off, and swept by strong, impassable cur-
rents; yet toward these he set his face, and, with-
out plan or hope, began doggedly to swim.
"As long as I can, anyhow," he grumbled.
After a weary time, the ship's lights were gone,
and he moved alone, interminably, through the
wide ocean. Whenever he turned on his back to
float and rest, the great moon, straight overhead,
surprised him by her pale splendor. After a
breathing-space it made him dizzy to watch her,
for sky and sea grew topsy-turvy, as though the
ceiling of the world had become the floor, and he
himself swung aloft, looking deeply down at the


THE SILVER LOCKET 5
inverted orb. He rolled over quickly and struck
out, to escape the vertigo of space.
Then, through the slow drift of hours, he found
the moon lowering into his range of sight. Her
path began to glimmer on the glossy, heaving sur-
face ahead. The long mist of western mountains
gradually took on edge, and blackness, and sub-
stance.
"I can't make 'em." He thought vaguely, and
with effort; for the growing chill, and the dull
pain of weariness which clogged his muscles, now
began to steal through his brain.
"How long, do you suppose?" he asked him-
self, aloud. The water had no more buoyancy.
The path of the moon faded. Over the flat void
settled a pale smoke, pink and gray. He noted
the changes with profound apathy, wondering
only if he should be afloat at sunrise.
All at once he spun bolt upright, treading water
so hard as to lift himself out, breast-high.
"Anito!" said a guttural voice, close by.
"Anito!"
The sound ran through him like a fiery shock;
for the voice had spoken almost in his ear, out of
the lonely mist.
A long, slim, black shape bore down slowly
from the right. It focused as the body, mast, and
outriggers of a sailing banca, in the stern of which
huddled the figures of two men.


6 THE TWISTED FOOT
"Ahoy! Hombre!" called David, suddenly
limp and sick at the vision of this godsend. Find-
ing no words but English, he waved his hand.
Two faces peered at him through the obscurity,
— gray faces, strangely drawn and puckered.
The hard, shrewd eyes met his, and stared, large
and wild, in the milky light of the sea dawn.
"Here!" he cried, choking, and beckoned
feebly. "Help! Sigue!"
The paler of the two men laughed softly. Nei-
ther stirred. The slender boat continued to drift
by.
Spent as he was, and bitter cold to the mar-
row, David burned inwardly with sudden anger.
Cleaving the water with a powerful overhand
stroke, he raced up the low, smooth slope of the
intervening swell, dove beneath the outrigger, and
spluttering, rose to clutch the heavy gunwale.
Still blind with salt, he saw dimly, in amazement,
a scowling bronze face and a shock of long, yellow
hair below some uplifted weapon. With a sob of
rage, he contrived to grip one bare ankle and to
jerk. A brown, tattooed body fell splashing over
the opposite gunwale, in the same instant that he
hoisted himself on board, picked up the fallen
spear, and held it ready.
The paler man, still squatting aft, made no
effort to help or hinder. Naked, slim yet beauti-
fully muscular, he smiled with keen, cynical brown


THE SILVER LOCKET 7
eyes, and waved his shapely hand in a sign rather
of command than of surrender. In the luminous
mist his body shone light-golden, his face stood
forth bold and suave, barbaric and cruelly sophis-
ticated. His hair, the coarse black hair of Asia,
was cropped in the fashion of Europe.
"You speak English," said David confidently.
The fellow eyed him without blinking, and
again, impatiently yet gracefully, signaled for him
to drop the spear.
The man who had toppled overboard now
reared his strange blond head at the stern, and,
climbing in, crouched behind his master, over
whose shoulder he peered with a frightened, sav-
age face. From his broad chest up to his power-
ful shoulders, there spread in greenish-blue tat-
tooing, like a pair of ferns drooping asunder, the
Bontoc chak-lag which marks him who has taken
a human head in war.
"Anito ! "he mumbled, shaking his yellow mop,
an ! staring at the white man from the sea.
"Anito? No, I am not a ghost," said David, in
such fragments as he could recall of the northern
hillmen's speech. "What are you doing so far
south?"
The pale man turned, and over his shoulder
murmured to the bronze head-hunter. Then
both, as though agreed, sullenly watched the in-
truder. Whether or not they had understood,


8 THE TWISTED FOOT
they were plainly determined not to speak. And
at last, all words proving useless, David lay back,
exhausted yet wary, a third partner in the hostile
silence.
Tropic day came quickly. The red sun snapped
the taut line of the eastern sea, like a coal burn-
ing a cord. All about the banco, thin vapors drifted
westward; and from the wet, feverous green of
island heights in the west, long gray lines spread
raggedly, steaming like smoke above rifle-pits.
Soon it was broad morning, and heat quivered
round the boat, which lay dead as a log, narrow
and greasy black, like a floating crocodile.
This heat, at first, was grateful to the naked
swimmer, whose fingers were cold, white, and
puckered, as though parboiled. At last, however,
he roused in some anxiety.
"I'll get baked alive here," he thought. Scan-
ning the bottom of the banca, he saw nothing
which could serve as garment. The only cargo
lay in a small heap astern, before the veined, mus-
cular legs of the yellow man: a narrow Tinglayan
shield of wood, stained a dull red, five-pronged,
laced with bejuco, and carved in lines as graceful
as those of a violin; some wooden "pig-pails" full
of camotes and rice; two gourds, two wooden
spoons, and a Samoki bowl of clay; a few hands
of bananas; and a sheaf of barbed iron spear-
blades, which must have come all the way from


THE SILVER LOCKET 9
the four smithies of Baliwang. Food and weapons
there were, then, but no clothing. David turned
to look forward, in hope to discover some bit of
matting.
Here also, however, he found nothing. He was
about to give over, and settle himself for a day of
torment, when just behind the step of the mast he
spied a dirty bundle. Spear in hand, he crawled
toward this, and to his great joy hauled up a
sopping mass of heavy cloth. He unrolled the
precious wad; then eyed it in stupid wonder.
It was a khaki shooting-jacket.
He turned a swift glance aft — a glance full of
anger and suspicion.
"Where did you get this?" he cried.
The two strange companions paid back his look
with ferocious interest; but neither answered.
The black-haired man with the yellow body smiled
in scorn, scooped out a handful of rice from the
Samoki bowl, and began to eat.
David, fingering the soaked and tangled pock-
ets, found them empty, except for a tag of white
cotton that, sewn loosely inside the breast, bore a
few scratches of ink — the Chinese tailor's ticket.
There seemed to be nothing else. The jacket,
though badly stained and crumpled, was of a
smart enough cut, and too new to have been
thrown or given away. A strange bit of white
man's world, the tawny cloth seemed to have no


10 THE TWISTED FOOT
sense or meaning, there in the dugout. One fact
alone was certain: it would have to be dried.
He was spreading it, when he felt in a second-
ary inner pouch, like a match-pocket, something
thin, flat, and hard. With difficulty he found the
opening, and drew out between finger and thumb
a small, shining object. At the first glint of this
in the sunlight, a hoarse cry sounded from the
stern.
"Anito!" The dark barbarian crouched be-
hind his master in a sudden fit of alarm. His
brown eyes stared as though the bit of metal in
David's hand was about to explode; and on his
dark forehead an old scar, of battle or of eczema,
turned to a patch of greasy mercury. The other
man glanced up, frowned, and bent philosophi-
cally to his rice.
Next moment, David had forgotten them both.
The thin silver locket lay open in a hand that
trembled. It was as if a voice from home had
spoken, as if a face which he had known and yet
sought all his life, had leaped out of a dream to
confront him. By the sound, he must have cried
aloud; and now he sat staring, without thought of
past danger or present incongruity.
The photograph, though discolored at the edge
by the moisture of hot climates, showed in the
centre the clear face of a girl, clean-bred, high-
spirited, whose eyes met his directly, with a look


THE SILVER LOCKET 11
at once friendly and whimsical. He had never
seen her before; they might have known each
other through and through.
A grating sound made him look up quickly.
Past the calf of the yellow man's leg the furtive
hand of the savage whipped back a loose spear-
blade from the bundle, then flashed aloft, poised,
and threw. The blade came flying like a dart.
David had barely time to whirl up the folds of the
jacket, from which the steel fell clattering at his
feet. He caught up his own spear, came aft in a
single leap, and confiscated the remaining blades.
When he had tossed them forward beside the
locket, he laughed. Something had brought him
luck and gayety.
"You chaps lose your chow for that," he
chuckled; and seizing their supply of bananas
and rice, crawled back to his former station.
The banca, meantime, had begun to glide south-
ward in a strong current before a light breeze.
Round her the ocean glared. All day without a
word the three men saw the far-off hills, high,
bold curves of green volcanic island, wheel astern
in drowsy procession, palm fronds, on trunks in-
visible in the distance, showing above each crest
like many bombs of foliage bursting in mid-air.
David found that day endless. Once he crawled
aft to seize a gourd of water. But afterward he re-
called neither thirst nor heat, nor the unearthly


12 THE TWISTED FOOT
solitude and silence in the crowded boat; only the
insatiate wonder as he studied his picture in the
locket.
No picture, it may be, had ever so outlandish an
adorer as this young man, bare-legged, his body
cramped in a jacket far too tight, and his head
helmeted in a wooden bucket. Near by, a tattooed
warrior, using a white pebble and his thumb for
forceps, tugged out bristles of beard from savage
cheeks. But David saw only the girl's face, half
pitying, half mocking him, and always looking
straight out, with ghostly directness, from the
dusk and limbo of the stained photograph.
The wide glory of sunset at last burned out;
the ocean lay black and velvety under the stars;
and a cool wind out of the tropic night swept the
lonely craft on toward the Southern Cross, with a
faint, blending rustle of sail and of water.
It was now that David fathomed the difficulty
of his case. The enemy, his two rescuers, could
sleep, turn about; but he must keep for himself
all the watches of the night. By clinching his will
he had thus far stayed awake; now, with dark-
ness, the power of sleep laid its leaden mace upon
him.
Time and again he shook himself out of obliv-
ion, and sat upright. This became harder and
heavier — at last, impossible. Somewhere in the
night, he became aware that a vague form was


THE SILVER LOCKET 13
creeping toward him from the stem. With a
bound, he woke and shouted: —
"Go back, there!"
Again his forces drooped. Again he slept, and
again the prowler crept forward on hands and
knees.
For the second time he drove the man back, sat
up rigidly, fought with sleep. And then a sudden
thought, a twinge of comprehension, came to his
aid, and for the moment at least, held him wide
awake.
Fingering the outline of the silver case, he
watched the stars above his unknown course.
"What's the good ?" he thought. "What's the
good, even if I should find her?"
The impulse had come without reason, without
control; he was jealous, beyond bound, of the
owner of that jacket.


THE HUT IN THE PALMS 15
broke in a running line of low surf, spectrally
white in this last hour of darkness. It was a coral
reef. Beyond it — as over a wall of snow — ran a
dark, ragged fringe of land, so near that even in
the gloom David could descry, vaguely, the top-
most points and tatters of palm groves.
He gave a start; for through a gap in the shift-
ing barrier of spray a feeble light wavered, un-
certain as the first star at evening. He lost the
gleam, watched for it, and either caught it once
more or had strained his eyes into seeing what he
so powerfully desired.
Turning toward his two enemies, he made
signs, vehement and unmistakable, that they
should head the boat into the gap. For answer,
the pale man laughed, as cool and scornful as
ever, and with a strong, graceful sweep of his arm,
plainly declared that no boat could pass the long
barrier of the surf.
But David was not to be denied. He was sick
of his company; he cared nothing for the risk to
them or to their boat; and the nearness of the
beach, so instant and unheralded, gave him a
great hunger for the land. He would set foot on
that lighted coast, though the light came from a
cannibal campfire.
"Won;t you!" he cried. "I will for you!"
He wrested the paddle from the steersman, and
fighting against a strong tide, swung the nose of


16 THE TWISTED FOOT
the banca toward the gap. In the darkness and
twisting current, it was touch and go; but the
slender craft, stung into life by the following
waves, at last shot through the narrow gate, just
as a shower of flying drops drenched her from
stem to stern, as if in raging disappointment.
With a final heave and downward slant, she ran
smoothly into still water.
David let her run, and peered ahead. A little
bay, a deep semicircle, lay quiet as a lagoon,
strange, dreamy, and placid behind the thunder-
ing breakers. Now there was no mistake: a light,
veiled yet ruddy, showed in the low blackness
of the shore like the spread embers of a dying
fire.
Suddenly, in delight, he slapped his bare thigh.
Somewhere near the fire, through the far-spread
hushing tumult of the surf, sounded the yapping
of a dog. It was no whining pariah who scented
them, but a good valiant little terrier.
"A white man's dog!" cried David in jubila-
tion. "White man's, and no mistake! Here, you
chaps, you can go straight — wherever you like.
Here's where I get out."
He sounded with his paddle, which brought up
in hard sand with half the blade to spare. Fling-
ing overboard the loose bundle of iron points, he
tucked the head-hunter's spear under his arm,
lowered both legs into the cool water, straddled


THE HUT IN THE PALMS 17
the outrigger, and began to wade toward the light
and the friendly barking.
When, after a few steps, he looked back, the
two men had turned the banca and were paddling,
half-distinguishable shapes, toward a broader gap
which lay, pale and smooth, to the southeast. For
a moment he stared after them.
"Of all the unaccountable blackguards!" he
wondered. Why, among the mad things they had
done, should they have grumbled when he slid
overboard? "They seemed," he thought, "as
anxious to have me stay, as they were before to
get rid of me."
He would never know why; for the banca, a
thin blade of intenser shadow, moved steadily off
toward the ring of foam that slowly brightened
against the east.
In shore, as he turned again and waded, the
night still lay black. Though only knee deep, he
was much farther from the beach than he had
thought. Step after step brought him no nearer
to dry ground, apparently, except that he could
hear the barking dog more plainly, could see a
bent bow of coral sand curve like a gray arc drawn
in misty phosphorus under the black land. The
light, still veiled, lay scattered and trembling be-
fore him, as on a forest pool. But this gradually
shrank and receded; the oily, rancid smell of de-
caying cocoanuts stole out to his nostrils; and at


18 THE TWISTED FOOT
last, his wet feet caked with sand, he strode up
the half-luminous coral beach toward a grove
profoundly black and silent.
Some small white thing darted sniffing about
his legs. He stooped.
"Hi, little dog!" he chuckled. A fox-terrier
rubbed its cold, sharp nose along his shin, sub-
mitting to be petted. "Hi, little dog from home!
Where 's your master?"
The terrier capered about him, withdrew coyly,
yelped and capered again, to beckon him toward
the light. Together the man and the dog climbed
a low bank, and in the sudden chill of land mist,
entered a labyrinth of palm trunks.
The light, David now saw, came ruddy through
a kind of coarse mesh, as coals might glow inside
a great basket. After stumbling toward it among
the bewildering palms, he saw that it shone in
tiny points of dull red through the plaited bam-
boo walls of a house.
Doors and windows were shut home, screened
by the same woven splints, porous to the light.
The whole interior of a room appeared in dim
transparency, with black objects (whether of fur-
niture or squatting men, David could not tell)
striking through in broken outlines.
He leaned on his spear, and called aloud.
"Hallo! I say! Inside there!"
There was neither stir nor speech in the lighted


THE HUT IN THE PALMS 19
house. The terrier frisked up to the threshold,
whined, and waited. Again David called, but
only roused a bat which fluttered across the dim
radiance and up into the lofty darkness of the
grove. Whoever lived in that house was a heavy
sleeper.
The black figures remained motionless. He slid
the frail door aside, and stepped up into the room.
It was empty, except for a smoky lamp that shone
on a rough table, and for two long chairs, a yel-
low Chinese chest against the wall, and beside it
a small iron trunk of the English pattern.
The terrier skipped across the room, through
an open door, into further darkness. After the
scratching of his paws there was no sound, not
even the sound of breathing. David stood listen-
ing, at a loss. Then, taking the lamp, he followed
where the dog had led, into a little room also bare,
except for a bed on which the terrier already lay
curled, asleep. No one else had slept there, for
the sheet lay smooth over the matting, and the
mosquito net hung festooned above.
The terrier opened one drowsy eye, blinked at
the lamp, and finding himself unreproved, fell
asleep once more. David laughed.
"You got what you wanted, old fellow." He
looked about and listened, with no result. "I've
half a mind to try that bed myself."
Instead, he returned to the other room, replaced


20 THE TWISTED FOOT
his lamp on the table, and stretched out in a
long chair to wait. Nobody came. Through the
open door he could hear the steady voice of the
breakers far out on the reef, and could see, far-
ther yet, the morning slowly diffuse the edge of
ocean. His legs were cold and growing numb.
But this did not matter, — nothing mattered.
It was still dark, the lamp still burned, when
he woke, or rather stirred in a drunken lethargy
of sleep and exhaustion. A light step sounded at
the door, through which swung the tall body of a
young man in white; barefooted, with trousers
rolled above his knees, and a stick or club in his
hand.
David, too drowsy to move or speak, saw the
newcomer limp across the threshold, and stand,
as though musing, in the little circle of lamplight.
The young man's face was of a singular and win-
ning beauty, — thin, sallow, and almost feminine
in its lines, but with the lips of a commander, and
with bright gray eyes, sad but quick, mournful
but haughty. His blond head, close-cropped, had
a curious, dangerous poise, lifted slightly, as
though the man were ready to answer or strike.
From kneecap to toes his legs were scarred with
red water-sores.
"And live alone," said the stranger, in a tone
of deep disgust. "'And live alone in the some-
thing glade!' What ass wrote that, I wonder?


THE HUT IN THE PALMS 21
Wish he were here once! I'd see he was fed up
with that sort of thing. What rot!"
The voice was pleasant, though void of in-
flection, like that of a man grown used to think-
ing aloud. David got unsteadily upon his feet.
At the sound of this movement, the man in white
wheeled with an instant and shocking violence,
flinging upward the object which David had taken
to be a stick. In the lamplight it now shone
surprisingly formidable — a short, heavy Mann-
licher carbine.
For all his sudden start* the young man's
handsome face had not altered by a line. His
voice rose ready and brisk, with a kind of engag-
ing insolence.
"Who the devil are you?" Then, unper-
turbed, as though there were plenty of time, he
surveyed David from head to foot, lowered his
gun, and with a look full of some new and un-
mitigated contempt, flung out another question,
"And where did you get my shooting-jacket?"
Tired though he was, and befuddled with
sleep, David roused as at a blow. No man had
ever spoken to him in that vein, or fixed him with
such a hateful stare.
"I fell overboard," he answered coldly, "night
before last. Two men in a banca picked me up"—
at least, I made them. I landed here less than an
hour ago. And as for your jacket, it was in the
banca. I had to wear something."


22 THE TWISTED FOOT
"Quite so." The gray eyes watched him, very
hard and bright. "Where are your two friends?"
"Gone, I hope," said David, with rising anger.
"I never saw them before," he explained stiffly,
giving back stare for stare. "And that's all I can
tell you."
The young man in white slung his Mannlicher
in the crook of his arm, and continued to regard
David with a face of unbelief.
"You're a Yankee, aren't you?" he said
curtly. "I've seen Yankee beachcombers —
plenty — but never, quite such a blighter as you;
my friend."
He stood back, significantly clear of the door-
way.
"Tell your two black and tans," he went on;
"that I carry this gun now. And by the way, keep
the jacket. Now that you've worn it, I can easily
do without."
For a moment David could not trust himself.
Then, very pale, and with fingers missing the
buttons, he ripped off the crumpled khaki, and
stood forth naked.
"So can I," he replied, in a voice that shook.
"I heard your dog barking on shore, and thought
it was a white man's dog. A natural mistake, of
course."
He stalked over to the Chinese chest, folded the
khaki with great precision, and laid it down. As



r





24 THE TWISTED FOOT
insolence. Jealousy, the same jealousy which had
tormented him in the boat without right or cause
or sense, had flamed up afresh, but now real and
redoubled in the presence of this handsome, dom-
ineering rival. He longed to ask the man to come
outside and fight; but that, of course, was absurd.
"I'm a fool," said David with conviction;
and leaving the scornful stranger in possession,
he turned toward the door, indifferent to a weari-
ness that made him stagger.
Into the long aisle of slender palms, through
which burned a vermilion sunrise, he went out,
naked and alone.


CHAPTER III
THE HUT IN THE PALMS: NIGHT
He had taken but a few steps, and those dizzily,
when the stranger's voice called after him, clear
and commanding.
"Wait a bit!" The man in white stood looking
down from the doorway, with an altered counte-
nance. "We're all fools, if it comes to that. Imean
to say, if you'd lived here by your lonesome, like
me, till you felt ready to beat your dog for not
answering — why, 't would have given you a
start. A man with your face and build is no
beachcomber, of course, and I beg pardon. You
gave me something like a jump, you know, and
your story was a bit of a shocker. Wasn't it, now,
to be fair?"
David stood there in doubt, sulking.
"I don't see anything in my story," he retorted,
"to shock any man with an open mind, or" —
he paused; then could not help adding — "or a
clear conscience."
His rival in the doorway laughed — a pleasant,
easy laugh, which was good to hear, and which
gave his face a look of captivating mischief.
"Dear chap," he cried, "I haven't either,
upon my word! My mind's a perfect nest of sus-


26 THE TWISTED FOOT
picions, as yours would be if —" He broke off
and laughed again. "And conscience — mine's
about as clear as mud. Come back here! I like
the way you took this."
But David, not to be cast off and whistled back
so easily, turned to go. On the flat path his feet
stumbled as if among hummocks; his eyes were
dry and leaden in their sockets; and round him
the slim trunks swayed and blurred.
"Easy now!'' coaxed a friendly voice. "Pins a
little wobbly? Hold hard!" David could not tell
whether he had fallen or not, but at all events
he was now leaning on the Englishman's shoul-
der heavily, and somehow without compunction.
"Steady a bit! Only a step or two —"
What followed David never could recall, ex-
cept that the stubborn terrier would not get off
the bed for a long time, that the glass of whisky
was tepid and potent, and that his host, limping
painfully about on scarred and mottled feet, was
scolding himself in a queer soliloquy.
He remembered waking once, to see through
a window the brightness of tropic day, the high
palm-tops dazzling in silver spikes, as he rolled
over into the infinite luxury of sleep.
It was evening when he came to himself, re-
stored to normal spirits, but hollow with hunger.
A candle burned in a little sconce of bamboo,
and on a chair, close by, lay a cinglet, a suit of


THE HUT IN THE PALMS 27
white, and canvas pumps coated with fresh pipe-
clay. He put them on with the gratitude of a cast-
away redeemed.
In the next room, beside the lamp, his host
sat opening a tin — a strangely menial task, it
seemed, for a man with the face of a young em-
peror.
"Hallo!" he said cheerfully, and bent his shin-
ing head over the obstinate metal. "How are
you? Feeling peckish?"
Through dinner he had little to say, but sat
watching, with a quick smile whenever David
spoke, a grave face between times, and always an
air of studying his guest. A curry of tinned meat
was followed by gula with fresh cocoanut milk;
this, by more whisky and tepid water, and then a
handful of Mrs. Middleton's cheroots. As soon
as the blue wreaths of Burmah tobacco were coil-
ing round the lamp, the two smokers leaned back
and eyed each other across the little table, like
friends.
"I see," drawled the stranger, "you're won-
dering. What, now?"
David smiled.
"Not for me to ask," he replied. "But if you
don't mind, two things did seem odd—no serv-
ant, and that gun lying just where I can't see
it."
His host laughed, the same engaging laugh


28 THE TWISTED FOOT
which robbed his face of all pride and all sus-
picion.
"A good eye you have there, old chap." He
stooped, fished up the carbine from under foot,
and stood it against the wall. "Habit, that's all.
It was n't meant for you, I assure you. There it
is — plain sight and equidistant, eh? Shows I
trust you?"
"I didn't mean that," said David. "Here I
sit, wearing your clothes, eating your food, smok-
ing your tobacco. You might carry a cannon in
your lap. But you invited the question."
The other nodded. His handsome face fell
serious again as he continued very slowly: —
"I had a servant once, but the poor devil got
frightened off — ran clear across the island at
one go, I dare say, with his pigtail straight out
behind him. I don't mind saying —"
The speaker paused, frowned slightly, then
looked David square in the eye. "The fact is,
I'm in a funk, rather. If they only knew, they
could bag me whenever they liked."
He leaned across, caught up the stubby Mann-
licher, and poising it athwart between them,
smiled oddly.
"I told you I trusted you. Here goes!" He
ran the side-bolt back and forth rapidly. The
deadly mechanism gave out a smart succession
of clicks, very loud in the stillness of the little


THE HUT IN THE PALMS 29
room. "Not a cartridge in it, you see. What's
more,"—he leaned forward and whispered, —
"there's not one in the house. Finish! And I'm
here alone."
Something in both voice and look gave sud-
denly to David an unaccountable sense of danger
and solitude. He nodded, beginning to under-
stand.
"Bluff?" he ventured.
"Quite so. Bluff." The Englishman patted
the empty carbine as though fitting the word to
it. "Bluff: that describes the past month of my
life here."
He replaced the gun against the wall, and
'leaned back, smoking hard. Into the bare little
cell of bamboo a silence seemed to pour, not only
from the tall grove, but from the ocean beyond
the reef, where the breakers no longer stirred.
When the stranger spoke again, it was with the
toneless voice and introverted gaze of a hermit.
"Fate, I suppose. I used to laugh at such
nonsense, but nights like these, of late —" He
smiled, and shook his head slowly. "I feel cer-
tain, somehow. They 're back in this neighbor-
hood. This time, or soon. Yes, they 'll get me.
Do you remember Hamlet and the sparrow?
Fate's the word. 'If it be not now, yet it will
come: the readiness is all.'"
Once more the grove and the ocean poured


30 THE TWISTED FOOT
their stillness round the ring of lamplight. The
night was close and hot, without a breath. David,
watching the thin, resolute face poised as if to
answer an invisible enemy, felt no longer any
spark of resentment, but only a nameless pity.
This owner of the locket, for all his arrogant
beauty, was a man in trouble. In the silence, a
shadow of mortality seemed to touch that shining
head.
"Bukhing to myself, eh?" The gray eyes
brightened, and returned to the present with a
snap. "Beastly habit. It's your turn. — Do tell
us the news outside. I have n't seen a paper
_ since Christmas-time."
For the rest of that evening the two men talked
of things from home, wars, politics, and small
gossip from west of Suez — familiar matters, now
far off and strange in this tropic night on the
rim of a neglected island. Before midnight the
stranger rose.
"Yawn away — don't hide it," he said. "We'll
save some talk for morning. Bed's the best place'
for you. I've another cot in behind."
Bed seemed the best place to David, who fell
asleep as soon as he had tucked in his netting.
Despite weariness he slept ill, tossing in dreams
painfully vivid, swift, and interchangeable. He
swam somewhere in an ugly darkness, toward a
circle of ocean — lighted as if by a magic lantern


THE HUT IN THE PALMS 31
— which always receded, and into which jutted
the black bows of a ship crowded high above with
glistening yellow bodies of Chinamen. Suddenly,
close beside him in the darkness, through an oval
window of silver, appeared the face of the un-
known girl whom he had surrendered, and who
looked at him earnestly, as though, from a great
distance and through unspeakable complexity,
she were imploring him to help the other man.
The black bow of the ship rushed between and
cut them off, while a voice on deck called
hoarsely, "Anito!" A ghost: the voice was right;
she was no person, but an empty likeness blown
down the wind of the world. Then the steward
of the Santo Nino was fishing for him, trolling a
log-line baited with biscuit.
And then David was awake. He had blown
out his candle, so that the room lay stuffed with
a darkness dense as India-rubber, except toward
the window, where the heavy screen of palms shut
out the moon, but flickered slowly and made a
turbid stirring of the night. As he watched this,
David found himself wondering who They might
be. The vague pronoun haunted him drowsily,
suggesting unseen and evil forces in ambush
round the hut. Who were They?
Another question vexed him. What could this
man be, at whose table he had eaten, yet whose
name — as he now recalled with a start — was


32 THE TWISTED FOOT
totally unknown? Some trader in coprah; the
rancid smell of cocoanut oil, pervading the grove,
gave the most plausible answer.
As he lay thinking, a slight noise made him sit
up in bed, suddenly but warily. Underneath the
floor of the stilted hut something moved with a
stealthy, intermittent motion. Whether beast or
man, it crawled beneath his very bed, toward the
next room. David had raised his netting, and was
about to slip through to the floor, when from be-
low, somewhere near their dinner-table, sounded
a faint rapping of knuckles against the floor
boards.
Silence followed. After an interval, the
knuckles rapped again; and this time a brushing
of bare feet told David that his host was roused.
Then the man's voice murmured cautiously: —
"Siapa?"
From under the floor a softer voice replied:—
"Ginawang."
The quick flare of a match, rubbed over cloth,
was converted slowly into the shaking light of
a candle, which passed at once behind a low
screen. With a creak, a loose board or small trap-
door was lifted. Through the woven wall, as
through a basket, David saw the tall figure in
white bend over the yawning square in the floor,
from which, like a snake, a glistening brown arm
rose, with fist clenched. White hand and dark





THE HUT IN THE PALMS 35
It was needless even to look a second time; and
yet David, though convinced, fell swiftly to his
knees and ratified the certainty. The man had
been cut down from behind, at one blow.
Sick and incredulous, David got upon his feet
and stared. The room showed no tragic signs,
but remained as before, except that a yellow, tat-
tered copy of "Punch," which had screened the
candle, now lay between the table and the outer
threshold.
He listened. The house, the grove, the whole
island, might have been the very centre in an
archipelago of the dead. And when for a moment
he stood in the door, nothing appeared but the
slim, lurking trunks, through which the long bow
of coral sand shone like a snowdrift in the moon-
light-
Rage seized him at sight of all this unmoved
solitude.
"Come in!" he cried, and shook his fist.
"Come in here and finish the job!"
The night received his challenge, and gave back
no sound.
Returning toward the candle, he stooped and
picked up the copy of "Punch." Across the pic-
tured cover, stamped in red and still damp, was the
print of a naked foot, with the great toe twisted
out, flaring at right angles in no human fashion.
He spread the sheet on the table and stared in


38 THE TWISTED FOOT
again, David fished out that same green pellet—
a wad of plantain-leaf, folded like a chew of betel
— which the crawling visitor Ginawang had left.
It contained a solitary pearl, not large, somewhat
warty, and by no means remarkable either in
"skin" or in "orient."
After an hour's search he sat down, utterly de-
feated: there was not a letter, not a written scrap,
to tell who had occupied this desolate house.
"But I know her face," he said doggedly; " and
her name's Mary, and she 's alive somewhere."
He jumped up as though to start off at once.
"And I'm going to find her."
A tour of the house and grove left him as ill-
prepared as ever. The dead man was no trader
in coprah, even by pretext; for there was no go-
down, and the cocoanuts lay smashed and rotting
on the ground. The dim cathedral of the grove,
the blinding crescent of the beach, the luminous
indigo and snowy reef beyond, harbored not a liv-
ing figure. Landward, through the trees, a low slope
of misty unwholesome verdure shut off the west.
"Across the island," thought David. "His
cook, the Chinese boy, ran off that way. If there's
only a settlement —"
On the chance, he set off inland, gripping his
spear for a staff, sweltering under his tight clothes
and borrowed helmet, as he climbed through the
fever-green tangle of bosque. Before noon he came


AT LARGE
39
out on a little eminence from which, far off, he
caught the glare of the western ocean.
His spirits rose; for under the shade of his hand
he could descry a thin pillar of smoke smudging
the tremulous air ashore, and on the flat, high
band of the sea a scattered flotilla of tiny boats,
stuck like currants or dead flies.
"A station there," he thought joyfully; and tired
as he was, turned without halting, to tramp home-
ward and pack up for the journey.
His marching order was light: the locket, the
small package, and the loose page of "Punch"
with its grisly red defacement, stowed in a breast
pocket; in another, the small bag of sovereigns,
and the leaf-twisted pearl; and slung over his
shoulder, a bundle of clothing wrapped round the
Mexican dollars. With this burden, which had
begun to grow heavy, he came swinging down at
sunset to the western coast.
He broke cover behind a long, dirty, white-
washed bungalow, a squat go-down with a tin
roof, and the straggling nipa huts of coolie lines.
Boats and "poogie" tubs littered the foreshore,
which exhaled an insufferable stench of putrid
shellfish.
In the veranda, at a table, a gross brown Span-
iard lolled in a posture, and with a face, of ex-
treme and lugubrious melancholy. He sat look-
ing into a tumbler full of milk; but at sight of


40 THE TWISTED FOOT
David he started up in his chair with a squeak of
dismay.
"You shall not come back here!" he piped, in
a voice absurdly small for his great bulk. "It is
no good! I will not speak!" To prove this as-
sertion, he began pouring out a mingled torrent of
Spanish and bad English. "Go away!" he cried,
fluttering his pudgy hand. "Go away!"
Then his oration stopped short, his mouth re-
mained open in astonishment.
"Oh! Ah!" he gasped. "I think you are that
Englishman." And in a rapid parenthesis of
eight or ten murky sentences he sketched the
Englishman's parentage and conduct.
"You see I'm not," said David, and waited for
him to regain breath.
"That man," cried the fat Spaniard, waving
his arm toward the eastern side of the island, "he
send his cook to be asesino to my stom-ache! See,
I eat nothing but milk!" Grimacing, with a
shudder of burlesque tragedy, the speaker took
a sip from his tumbler. "That man, he is the
thorn in my meat! Some day, look, I will go
shoot him. My divers, they all steal for him; and
from the other fisheries, everywhere it is the same.
They call him Villameres' Englishman — my
Englishman! I will go shoot him to-ij^rrow.
Tell him so! Last night, look, he send his daB(m
dog to bite me! Aha, look now!"


AT LARGE
41
The speaker chirruped suddenly. His broad
face lost all its ferocity, became radiant and fatu-
ous. Along the veranda skipped the fox-terrier,
which, with a bound, perched on the fat knees
and began sniffing at the glass of milk.
"Aha!" crowed the Spaniard. "Aha, my little
friend! You see, he bites me not! I have sub-
orned that man's dog."
David had utterly forgotten the fickle beast,
which now nestled comfortably on a new lap. If
the runaway had stayed at home last night, and
barked, his master might yet be living.
On the heels of this thought followed another:
suppose the dog had not run away? David fum-
bled in his pocket.
"Does this," he said abruptly, unfolding and
holding out the torn page of " Punch," "does this
mean anything to you?"
The fat man glanced up from patting the ter-
rier, with his brown face still joyful as a babe's.
"What is that?" he asked, looking with un-
feigned surprise at the red print of the twisted
foot.
David folded the paper, and slipped it into his
pocket. This man had no part in last night's
doings.
"Nothing," he answered. "That's the wrong
pa; 7. I've lost the right one. Will you tell me,
senor, where I may sleep for the night?"


42 THE TWISTED FOOT
The Spaniard eyed him with helpless, waver-
ing suspicion. \
"Is that man coming, too?" he squeaked in-
dignantly.
"The man," David quietly replied, "is dead."
His questioner gave such a start that the terrier
fell through his lap. Then, with a sigh of honest
relief, he said: —
"I am so glad to hear that."
Smiling pleasantly at David, he took a long sip
of milk, and leaned back in his chair to consider.
"I am so glad," he repeated pensively. "He
was to my mind just so — as his cook is asesino
to my stom-ache. You will stay, and cele-
brate?"
Thus David began his acquaintance with Casi-
miro Villameres, local agent for the firm of pearl-
fishers, Saldero y Hermanos. He was a lazy, mel-
ancholy dyspeptic, this agent, in whose bungalow
there mouldered the smell of "poogie" tubs and
of much greasy cooking. Never had David three
more unprofitable days to spend. Villameres,
gross and cropfull, squeaked in his absurd little
voice straight on from daybreak, through the
drowsy noon, to nightfall; but not one word fur-
nished David with any hint beyond what he had
already known or guessed. The dead man had
bought pearls, independently, and without scru-
ple. Many a coolie from Saldero y Hermanos


AT LARGE
43
must have crawled under his hut, like the brown
man whose arm David had seen rising out of the
dark. He had uncounted enemies, said Villa-
meres, but not even they knew him by name.
The runaway cook, a solemn Canton boy, had
nothing to impart.
"My no sabee," he repeated stubbornly; once
with the sarcastic addition: "Name-card no hab-
got."
Yet David broke, for an instant, through this
Chinese wall of reserve. Without warning, he
spread on the table, after breakfast, the loose
sheet with which he had already tried Villameres.
The slant eyes of the Chinaman never blinked,
but he set down a plate which clattered slightly,
and turning, left the room. For the rest of that
day he was missing.
To get his story, and to understand his terror,
David would have tracked him through the
jungle; but on the next morning, the Baltasar
Saldero, a dirty lump of a steamer, violated the
tropic silence of the bay with her screaming whis-
tle and rumbling chains. Her captain, a barefoot
mestizo, was drunk and still drinking; a black sow
ran loose by the forward winches, and a row of
gamecocks, crowing without pause, stood fettered
by the legs to the rods of her steering-gear; her
one bath-tub contained cigar-ends, a torn life-
preserver, and a bunch of bananas; but she was


44 THE TWISTED FOOT
the only craft which for the next month would
come nosing through that labyrinth of reefs.
Casimiro Villameres bade his guest farewell
with a kind of stolid gloom.
"Adios, Seflor Bowman," he said, keeping his
seat by the table, with the inconstant terrier asleep
on his knees. "I miss you already." He yawned.
"A man here, look, he has no conversation." He
screwed up his fat face in disgust, as he raised his
tumbler of milk. "And even if the cook comes
back, he will be asesino to my stom-ache!"
The last that David saw, from the stern of the
ship, was the huddled, pensive figure fondling his
adopted pet.
The crawling steamer, scented by day with
onions, coprah, and frying grease, outrageous at
night with the squalling challenges of strange
game-cocks picked up at every village along the
coast, at last came to anchor in the harbor of
Cebu.
On the rude veranda of the little club which
overhangs the water, a young officer, his khaki
badged with the scarlet of the Constabulary,
jumped up in such disorder that his glass fell off
the rail into the sea.
"Bowman!" he cried, staring. "How in!
They cabled from Manila that you were dead."
"They were just half right," said David, sitting
down exultant in a white man's chair, on terra


AT LARGE
45
cognita. "Picked up, I was, and carried all over
the shop. Look, bamboo officer: have you any
civilian clothes loose enough for me? And what's
the next steamer for Manila?"
The bamboo officer took this resurrection
calmly, like a man of experience.
"Sung-Kiang," he answered promptly. "Sails
in half an hour. I can fit you. Why this haste?
You going home, or she coming out?"
"Shut up," said David. "Come along, give us
your wardrobe, and what ready money you can
raise."
A gallop in a carromato and a spurt in a revenue
launch brought him safely on board the Sung-
Kiang. In ten minutes out of that hurry he had
seen the British consul, and left not only his own
written statement, but the dead man's clothes,
money, and pellet of plantain-leaf. About the
locket, however, he had said nothing; it still lay
in his breast-pocket with the little oblong pack-
age, the stained page, and the Chinese tailor's
label torn from the shooting-jacket.
"These belong to us," he thought, as he
watched the shore of Mac-tan slip behind. "It's
our affair, hers and mine. And these are all our
documents."
That night, at dinner, the blue-gowned steward
did him a good service.
"This chit," said David, handing to the sad


46 THE TWISTED FOOT
dignitary a copy of the tailor's label. "What
thing he talkee?"
The steward held the paper clear of the flutter-
ing punkah, and squinted.
"My sabee he," was his grave reply; "b'long
Nam Sing, Hongkong shop."
With this crumb of knowledge, David landed
in Manila, to be hailed on Muelle del Rey by the
first of many friends, all astonished at his restora-
tion from the sea. Friends, affairs, the need of
taking up his broken preparations for home, kept
him delayed in Manila when he would gladly
have followed to Hongkong even so slight a trail
as one leading to Nam Sing's shop. Here there
was no news; among all the Englishmen with
whom he talked at the Tiffin Club or the Ermita,
not one could help him; and in these dull, crowded
streets the reality of his late adventure began to
fade, his promise began to seem quixotic, and
his purpose to grow blunt, in spite of the silver
case and the packet which he still jealously
guarded.
A single episode' broke the monotony of his
stay. One morning when the Virgin of Antipolo
had come down from the mountains, to be car-
ried in state through the city, David, blocked on
a crowded corner, saw a man watching him from
across the street. The chanting procession passed
between, convoying with censers, flags, and un-


AT LARGE
47
lighted candles, the strange little wooden figure
aloft in tinsel robes; and among all the staring
faces, white or sallow or brown, this one swarthy
face, under a rakish straw hat, had no eye for
the pageant. So soon as David's glance fell on
him, the man turned into the crowd and was
gone.
"Who was that?" The dark features, intent
and passionate, had leaped out, plain as a threat,
from among the sleepy spectators. David had
seen the man before, though where, he could not
guess. It was a curious face — the forehead low
but broad, the mouth coarse but humorous. "He
might be anybody," thought David; "anybody,
from a Spanish lawyer down on his luck, to a half-
breed second engineer. But I've seen him, and
— and by his looks, he's no friend of mine."
He did not meet the fellow again. A week
later, his affairs in Manila being wound up, he
had taken ship for Hongkong.
It was a sultry morning when he disembarked
in that wide and busy harbor, under the steep,
dark-green shelter of the Peak. Ahead of the
puffing launch, seen between junks, black mail-
boats, and drab giants of the China Squadron,
the city sweltered through quivering heat. The
square, solid houses, tier upon tier of clumsy,
tenement-like verandas, promised nothing but
heat and stupidity. Far off, by the Kowloon ferry-


48 THE TWISTED FOOT
slip, the tall figure of a Sikh policeman, in tawny
uniform and scarlet turban, upheld on slow-
moving spindle-shanks the dignity of British
order.
In the face, in the teeth of all this, his dream
suddenly came true.
The glare of hot daylight showed, off the port
bow of the launch, the high, black bow of a
steamer crowded with hundreds of naked bodies,
shining wet and golden in the sun — a crowd of
coolies sluicing themselves with water. Squab-
bling and cackling, they made a patch of vivid
color, which caught David's eye and held it, as
though this familiar sight were something new
and strange.
An uneasy sense crept over him, of some great
event uncannily repeated, or prearranged, and
now about to fall.
Aware of a shadow on the starboard hand, he
turned to see, towering high above them, the dark
iron crag of a steamer's quarter. The menacing
bulk passed close, cleaving the fairway of the
harbor toward open sea.
"Must be the Roon," said a talkative lands-
man to David, knowingly. "She 'll be off for
Singapore."
To confute him, the gigantic stern swung de-
liberately over their heads, displaying the white
letters of her name: Yin Shan.


AT LARGE
49
David read them without interest. Then, his
eyes chancing to rove higher, he sprang up,
bumped into the talkative man, flung him aside,
and went jumping aft, over the feet of indignant
passengers.
The launch tossed on a wake of seething green
and white, like an upheaval of lemon ice. High
above this lengthening turmoil, from the after
rail of the Yin Shan, a girl in a white dress stood
looking down, alone.
She saw David, staring at her as at a ghost. A
curious change, almost of recognition, a pallor of
sudden and great emotion, transformed her. It
was gone quickly, while she made a little gesture
of disappointment.
His dream was true and complete. The face,
now dislimning into the distance, was the face in
the silver locket.
She became a white speck, motionless, in the
stern of the departing ship.


CHAPTER V
mart: in the plains
He had seen her. The shocking coincidence left
him between amazements — whether he had seen
her at last, or too soon, or only by proxy and mis-
take. This mental hubbub — which set him
walking briskly but without aim down half the
crowded length of the Queen's Road — subsided
or recoiled into his first certainty. The face look-
ing down from the stern was the face inside the
dead man's keepsake. He had seen her — but
outward bound.
He turned, with a sudden, clear, and urgent
purpose. The Yin Shan was Caird & Lovett's
boat. He knew a junior in that firm.
"Hai!" At his raised hand, a lounging saffron
and blue figure sprang up between brass-bound
shafts, and came trundling his rickshaw through
the press of busy coolies and grave yellow mer-
chants.
"Fai-di!" The rickshaw tilted, caught the bal-
ance, and started on its rattling way.
Under the cavernous, vaulted roof of the pave-
ment, a swarthy man, wearing a slouch Panama,


MARY: IN THE PLAINS 51
and Chefoo silk pale as the tassels of ripe maize;
turned to inspect the strings of flat, white-pow-
dered devil-fish in a provision shop. So abrupt
was his movement, that only by chance had David
caught the necessary glimpse. The dark features,
the shrewd eyes and coarse but humorous mouth,
were those of the stranger who had watched him
through the crowd in Manila. Now, by a single
flash of discomfiture, they showed that David had
turned with inconvenient speed. Nor was it natu-
ral for any man to be so suddenly engrossed in
dry devil-fish and brown, varnished ducks.
"Now what's he after?" thought David. "I'll
ask him, and have it out."
But when he had shouted to the bounding
coolie, and the rickshaw, wheeling, had rammed a
sedan chair, and disengaged from a brawl, the man
in Chefoo silk had dodged out of sight down one
of the narrow alleys leading to the fish market.
The incident had faded by the time that David
was mounting the great steps of Caird & Lovett,
Limited. In a sudden flush of excitement he
crossed the dark, cool office, and called for his
friend.
A merry little junior, alert and smiling, shook
hands across a polished plateau of teak.
"How are Cadwallader and all his goats ?" was
David's greeting. "Who brought you a pony
once from the north of China?"


52 THE TWISTED FOOT
The happy little Welshman grinned.
"One of my goats," he answered. "But he was
a good judge of horseflesh, and what can I do for
him?"
"List of passengers, please — Yin Shan." For
some reason, David found his pulse beating
quickly as he ran his finger down the names, all
written alike, stripped of distinction, in the same
neat office hand. In a second or two he would
know the next word after " Mary" — the word at
which the other man had been struck down in the
hut.
He groaned.
"What's up?" inquired keen little Mr. Pryce.
'"Here," said David, in dismay. "Do you re-
member either of these?"
He turned the list round, with two fingers,
spread apart, on the names: —
"Miss Mary Naves, Sourabaya."
"Miss Mary Arnot, Sourabaya."
The Welshman twisted his gingery mustache,
studied the catalogue soberly, then looked up
with a twinkling eye.
"Can't say I do," he answered. "Oh, wait a
bit! One was deuced pretty. But blessed if I re-
member which came first."
David watched him grimly.
"Ap Evans, Ap Rice, no fooling," he threat-
ened. "I'm in earnest."


MARY. IN THE PLAINS 53
"So am I," said the junior, in surprise. "Don't
you know which? Bar sells, I don't."
The two men had tiffin together at the club;
but though Pryce racked his brain, he could give
no further help. The whole affair seemed to
please his sense of humor inordinately.
"New departure for you," he suggested, "to
take such interest in the ladies. One thing, they'll
both be in Sourabaya, and two are better than
one. Why not go there?"
"Thanks, I will." David's serious look made
the little man stare. "What's the next ship?"
Two afternoons later, Pryce left his cricket to
see this unaccountable friend off. His launch
dropped astern, and David, turning to climb the
ladder, ungratefully forgot him in that instant;
for, looking down from the rail, with a smile of
satisfaction, was the dark, strangely familiar face
of the man in maize-colored silk.
He had gone below by the time David reached
the deck.
Doubts were now out of the question. Who-
ever he was, he had not come all this way by
chance. His presence on board was so far wel-
come, that it would give an impatient traveler
something to do.
Through dinner, David watched him down the
length of the table. He ate slowly and clumsily,
studying, between bites, one after another of his


54 THE TWISTED FOOT
messmates, with great brown eyes of which the
iris, fringed like a Cingalee's with velvety radi-
ation, had a strange lustre, as though touched
with belladonna. Yet they were bold eyes, quick
and cynical, which met David's with a sly gleam
of amusement. The fellow might have been hatch-
ing a joke.
Through the general murmur of talk his voice
came once or twice — soft and musical, but re-
strained or retarded, dwelling, now and then, on
words which came with effort. He was discuss-
ing markets with a Dutch coffee-planter.
At one point, when their talk grew animated,
he plucked from the heart of his curry a little
white ball of rice, and poising it with finger-tips
close-bunched, popped it between his thick lips.
Then, abashed, he caught up his fork with an air
of guilt.
The trivial slip went unmarked except by Da-
vid, on whom it had a singular effect. Somewhere
he had seen this fellow, or one like him, eating
in the same fashion. Where, he could not for his
life recall. A reversion to savagery, here in this
lighted saloon, the thing stuck in his mind and
troubled him.
Later that evening, he had walked his five
miles round the deck, and stood by the rail,
watching the great stars above an ocean of glossy
ebony.


MARY: IN THE PLAINS 55
"Sir, will you smoke ?" said a low, ingratiating
voice. The man in Chefoo silk stood at his elbow,
offering a packet of cigarettes.
Before he could say yes or no, David found a
cigarette thrust between his lips, and a match,
shielded in the box cover, flaming beneath his
nose. Above the sudden flare he met the scrutiny
of those large, brown eyes, so lustrous and yet so
penetrating.
"You get these from Manila," he said, with'
meaning.
The stranger, invisible after the single flash;
laughed pleasantly.
"Oh, yes," he answered, like a child eager to
talk. "Oh, yes, I get them there!"
"I have seen you in Manila," said David.
Again the man laughed.
"Oh, yes," said he, "I have seen you there."
"Also in Hongkong?"
This question, equally droll, evoked another fit
of musical and artless merriment.
"Yes, yes, in Hongkong, too!" Another match
flared, glowed golden through the frail sides of
the box, and lighted for an instant the man's
heavy lips and strong, white teeth. "In Hong-
kong I saw you many times, playing at the crickets
with your friends. Ah by Jove," he cried, with a
comical gusto, "what noble game are the crick-
ets!" Leaning both elbows on the rail, he blew


56 THE TWISTED FOOT
overboard a long stream from his cigarette, and
sighed. "That is a manly devotion. Your great
English poet says: —
"Give me a willow bat, and I
With cork and hide and twine,
From century to century
Will gambol round my shrine!"
The speaker smacked the rail with his open
palm. "Ah by Jove, I envy you! A noble game,
the crickets!"
David laughed.
"I prefer football," he replied. "Besides, I'm
an American."
His companion sighed once more, in genuine
disappointment.
"I thought," he answered sadly, "I thought
you are English, when I first saw you in"
He broke off, with some confusion. "I mean, you
played the crickets so lifelike. That is too bad!"
David had listened closely. Now, without
warning, he struck a match in his turn and held
it up.
"Where did you first see me ?" he propounded
severely, studying the face that leaped out so
prominent in this little torchlight — a broad,
swarthy face, at once bold and suave.
It altered somewhat, gathering sudden lines of
craft or perplexity. The match went out, leaving
David no wiser, except for a premonition that the


MARY: IN THE PLAINS 57
fellow was about to lie. In the darkness sounded
a low laugh, of almost infantile pleasure.
"I cannot think," came the answer. "Ah, how
extraordiny! I cannot think where it was. But
football is noble game, too. For me, no, it is too
wild; for I am timid man, and very bookish."
The cigarette glowed once or twice, lighting
dimly his coarse and cynical lips, which now had
a pensive droop. "Do you know"—the soft
voice grew deeply confidential — "do you know,
my one regreet is, I was not an Englishman. Ah
by Jove!"
He continued, leaning on the rail, to smoke and
chat and laugh, in the disjointed fashion of a
man easily diverted, who has nothing to conceal.
Long after bedtime, when they parted, David
had learned many gratuitous facts: the man's
name was Rosario, he was a sugar-planter, he was
bound for Sourabaya to see brokers, and thence
go inland. His plans had no offense, his remarks
a childlike simplicity, with now and then some
unexpected turn of childlike cunning.
And yet by daylight David was far from satis-
fied. At dinner, this man had watched him with
a furtive smile, between anxiety and bravado;
at breakfast, he nodded and grinned like an old
friend. Plainly, Mr. Rosario had in his own
mind settled some point, had formed a secret con-
clusion, and was henceforth at ease. Moreover,


58 THE TWISTED FOOT
thought David, he was not of the sugar-planting
type, was neither timid nor bookish, and knew
perfectly, all the time, where they two had met
before.
The voyage slipped by without incident. One
hot, clear morning, from the skyline on the star-
board hand, rose the steep Coffins of Tuban, and
afterward, continuing them to port, the cracked
and fissured plateaus of Madura. Gradually this
wall split asunder into the yellow gulf that swel-
ters between Madura and the east of Java. The
ship ploughed laboriously through turbid water,
past the lightship of the Westgat, and on be-
tween the green hills of the strait. Far out from
Sourabaya roads came racing the clustered hulls
of the tambangans, which, swerving alongside,
manned by fierce brown boatmen, hooked them-
selves to the steamer at full speed, like a swarm
of pirates.
The ship had lost the red roofs of little Gris-
seh, and went gliding toward the masts and high
dusty green chimara tops of the city, when below,
from among the swirling clump of tethered boats,
a new uproar broke out. Boatmen and ship's
officers were squalling at one another, as in a
moment of collision.
David, turning idly toward the rail, dodged in
time to avoid being knocked down by the timid
and bookish Rosario, who was running aft at top


MARY: IN THE PLAINS 59
speed, scowling over the side, and brandishing
his fists as he ran.
Below, on the muddy water, a tambangan had
cut her painter, and slewed careering astern.
"Mr. Bailey!" roared the captain, from the
bridge, "if you can't watch your crimson coolies
better than that. . . . The health officer will give
us what for!"
The tambangan sped now so far behind, the
glare lay so dazzling in the wake, that David
could not be sure; but it seemed, for a glimpse,
as though the figure of the escaping steerage
passenger, who cowered in the stern-sheets, bore
on brown shoulders a matted shock of yellow
hair.
David could do nothing but strain his eyes.
Blurred by sun and water, that head was almost
like the head of the tattooed savage in the banca.
The resemblance brought with it some sharp
perplexity even more elusive — some vague and
obstinate question, as though the sight had re-
called, to the very brink of memory, something
vastly more important. The tambangan drew
steadily away toward the low, bilious-green shore
of Grisseh marshes.
The Dutch doctor, a fat, red-bearded little
busybody, left him no time for speculation; and
as soon as he had landed and was driving in a
kosong past the line of gaudy Madura praus, —


60 THE TWISTED FOOT
which, with their carved and blazoned sterns,
perennially brighten the mud and heat of the Kali
Mas, — he had a far more absorbing puzzle to
consider.
The slip of paper in his hand contained, in
Pryce's neat memorandum, his two blind alterna-
tives : —
Miss Mary Arnot:
Miss Mary Nayes:
Were t'other dear charmer away!
"That may be the Welsh sense of humor,"
thought David sourly. "But it's no joke."
A furious clatter of hoofs, close behind, the
pistol-shot snapping of a whip, and guttural cries
of "Hrri,hrri!" made him turn his head, in time
to see a pair of galloping ponies dash round the
corner of the Grisseh road. On the seat of a ko-
song, tilted almost to capsize, sat his friend Ro-
sario. The clatter and rumble died away among
the marshes.
Before nightfall, David had eviscerated the
register of every known hotel, Simpang, Wijn-
veldt, Embong-Malang; but on no page could he
find either Mary Arnot or Mary Naves. Long
after dark he was still driving aimlessly through
unknown streets, without dinner and without
hope.
At last it became necessary to eat, in spite of
disappointment.


MARY: IN THE PLAINS 61
"Makan," he called to the driver. "Makan,
chupput!"
"Bai, Tuan." The taciturn Malay wrenched
back his ponies' heads, and stopped under a gut-
tering lantern which projected from a wall. The
faint light, shifting on a surface of mouldy plaster,
revealed in garish red and blue, the letters —
"Roemah Makan."
The face of this anonymous hotel was so forbid-
ding, the vaulted way which led within so damp
and malodorous, that David began to suspect the
driver's judgment. In a dingy little office, a fat
Eurasian, young and supercilious, sat beside a
lamp and mopped his face.
"Dinner is over," he announced languidly,
eying David with extreme weariness.
Content with this news, David was turning
away, when his glance fell on a small packet
beside the lamp. The sprawling superscription
leaped out to startle him: —
"Miss Mary Naves, Kamer 7."
He caught up the packet with a pounce that
woke the nodding half-breed.
"Is this young lady in?"
The mild Eurasian eyes slowly brightened to
the situation.
"Oh, yes," was the answer. "Will you take
her that? I forgot. It came from the shop this
noon."


62 THE TWISTED FOOT
Extolling his luck, David passed quickly into
the stifling little courtyard, a hollow square of dark
verandas, where a tiny jungle of trees crowded
and pressed in a still darker night. From the
door of room seven, however, streamed a faint
light into which jutted one corner of a table,
the back of a chair, and in that chair the head
and shoulders of a woman.
David stepped forward briskly, his feet echo-
ing on the cool, wet stones of the veranda floor.
His pulse, it seemed to him, made more noise in
the sweltering court.
"I've found her," he told himself; and already
a wild plan had crossed his mind to rescue her
from these unworthy surroundings. Seeing only
a gleam of yellow hair in the lamplight, he raised
his helmet and put his question.
"Sure, that's my name," replied a ready and
all too affable voice. The yellow head rose far-
ther into the light, taking on a sudden, frouzled,
meretricious splendor, in the same instant that
a strong young arm, draped in a kimono of
vivid scarlet, lazily withdrew from covering a r
yawn. "I'm the Miss Naves, with the movin'"
picture show. What you got for me? Say, a little
ee-lectricity would n't do this hotel no harm,
what?"
For a moment David stood like an ox. By
some vacuity, he had thought that both Marys,


MARY: IN THE PLAINS 63
the right and the wrong, must be the top of ad-
miration, being the twins of circumstance.
"I — I intended—" He forgot, and then,
remembering, laid the packet on her table. "This
came from the stores, you know —"
The young arm in the scarlet sleeve reached
out vigorously.
"The stores! Why did n't you say so?" Her
voice rose, domineering. "I thought you was
some gentleman to see me. Took your time
bringing it!"
David went softly back along the veranda, a
wiser man, grinning in the dark.
Within ten paces, however, he had wheeled
and was running back; for a shrill cry, of preter-
natural volume, rang in the stuffy courtyard with
overtones of such terror as might pierce an Ama-
zon.
It was strange to find so robust a young woman,
with limbs so long, hair so abnormally bright, and
drapery so red, lying white and senseless on the
matting in her room; significant to discover that
the poor parcel from the stores was missing;
but beyond all expectation, to see, stamped on
the margin of dry cement between matting and
threshold, dark with moisture from the newly-
washed veranda, the print of a twisted foot, on
which the great toe flared at right angles.


CHAPTER VI
MARY: IN THE HILLS
Miss Naves baa pitched her one outcry so effec-
tively that no second was needed. Footsteps,
both shod and bare, came swiftly down the ver-
anda, and into the room bounded three Javanese
boys, the oily Eurasian, and the kosong driver.
The Eurasian, fixing David with a terrified stare,
hastily took a position behind the natives, and
began to mumble something about an arrest.
"Here!" David snapped his fingers under the
man's nose. "Catch hold, and help me with her,
you Kubu! And you men," he cried, in the ver-
nacular, "go hunt among the trees, for anybody
hiding!"
So, with all the appearances against him, the
white man took charge of that curious scene.
The long young woman in the scarlet robe was
no easy armful, and the sputtering Eurasian was
only in the way; but at last David contrived to
replace her in the veranda chair.
"I think, I think," stuttered the clerk, "we
shall give her some brandy, sir? No, sir? None,
sir, of course! Excuse me, sir!"


66 THE TWISTED FOOT
tied up behind in knots like rabbit-ears. Their
hunt served only to wake a tree-lizard, who hic-
coughed loudly from the upper branches. At the
sudden, broken sound, the prostrate Amazon
started in her chair.
"My nerves," she said plaintively, "my nerves
are all of a jump. I sing, you know, so it's tem-
p'rament; but then, anyhow, I had a nawful turn!"
"What was it?" David felt that his tone could
never be too kind. "What frightened you?"
To his bitter disappointment, Miss Naves
shook her head, and screwing her eyes tight shut,
enjoyed another crisis of temperament.
"O-o-h my!" She trembled, and shrank to-
gether as far as her generous frame allowed.
"O-o-h, a nawful face, that was all! And a big
head in a red cloth. I don' know, but seemed like
it was that. The parcel you brought, I was tak-
ing it in to open where I could look — and some-
body grabbed, and —and that's all J waited to
see!"
David glanced at the margin of cement in the
doorway. Already it was dry: the print of the
twisted foot had vanished.
"Nothing more?" he coaxed.
"More?" snapped the convalescent, opening
her eyes in wrath. "No; it was enough, / tell you!
Things like that, jumping into a lady's room!
And snatching parcels! Ain't they found him?"


MARY: IN THE HILLS 67
The armed coachman and the three boys in
mottled turbans had come to the veranda edge.
"There is not, my lord," they reported, with
salaam. Whoever had been there must have fled
behind the bathhouse and along the canal. "There
is not, my lord."
"Your parcel's gone for good, I fear," said
David. "Was it valuable?"
The lady sniffed, and drew the scarlet folds
about her with the dignity of a Roman matron.
"You ought to know," she retorted coldly. "I
bought it in your shop. A comb, it was, that I
paid good money for, too. I never saw but one
like it, aboard ship once; and this o' yours was
only imitation."
David drove his fist into his palm.
"Of course!" he cried. "Aboard ship, and I
never thought! Tell me. Tell me, Miss Naves,
and I'll get you the most glorious comb in Sou-
rabaya. Where was she going — I mean Miss
Arnot?"
The young giantess raised the excessive glory
of her head, opened her mouth, and for once in
her career found no word ready.
"You give me the creeps, young fellow," she
declared at last. Her hard eyes, quick with calcu-
lation, made nothing out of him. "How could
you tell't was Miss Arnot's comb I liked? And
you fetching parcels? You don't know her!"


68 THE TWISTED FOOT
David, for an instant, wavered before this
home truth.
"Yes," he answered lamely, "I do know her
— a little."
"And like her, too!" The woman's rejoinder
pounced, like a hawk, on his confusion. "Oh,
you men! Could tell by the way you spoke. See
here." Miss Naves rolled out of her chair, and,
shining in her scarlet kimono, rose to the height
and posture of an angry prophetess. Her voice
became strident. "Look here, do you know what
that girl did to me? Well, out o' the whole lot
aboard ship, she treated me like a human being!
That's what she did. You! D' ye think she's
your kind? She — she 's a wonder!"
David waited for a lull.
"Should you like," he put in humbly, "to do
her a favor?"
The stormy sibyl reared higher at so mild a
question.
"Favor? I'd give her this off my back!" And
for one moment of perilous realism, Miss Naves
wrenched at her fiery robe. Then, desisting, she
looked again, more keenly, straight into David's
eyes, and heard him out, with the fixity of one
who would not miss a particle.
"Message!" She tossed her head, and gave
a short, hard laugh. "Important message, eh?
Mind you, I've seen Miss Arnot, and so I know


MARY: IN THE HILLS «9
your feelings! And you'd go give her a message
from another man, and him fond of her, too!"
She laughed, this time bitterly.
"You're a fool. That's plain." Under the red
silk she heaved her broad shoulders; then, fling-
ing out her hands in contempt, she turned, lifted
a smelling-bottle, sniffed, and put it down in
disgust. "Being square — there's nothing to it.
But you 're the sort o' fool, I s'pose, that girl
would think was . . . Anyhow, she's gone to
Arvana, over middle-Java way, and — and I
wish you luck!"
Hunger did not signify that evening, as David,
smoking black Sumatra tobacco with infinite rel-
ish, leaned back on the dirty leather of the kosong
and watched, far overhead, the bright host of
tropic stars. Arvana: there, by this time to-mor-
row night, he would see, alive and real, the face
in the locket, the face out of his dreams that had
looked down at him — so many miles away —
» from the stern of a departing ship. Arvana; Mary
Arnot: two certainties now — and he had slashed
through to them as through a jungle of guesswork
and cross-purpose and incongruity. Arvana;
Mary Arnot; to-morrow: he stretched out his legs,
threw back his head, and blew a cloud of tobacco
smoke at the stars, as he rolled through the dark
streets in lordly revel.
A noise, behind the rattle of his kosong, gradu-


70 THE TWISTED FOOT
ally claimed attention. Another rattle, and a con-
flicting patter of ponies' hoofs, followed steadily
in his wake, turning the same corners, at the
same pace, without gaining or losing ground.
David turned to peer over the back of his car-
riage. Behind, the darkness was complete.
"No lamps there." Leaning forward and
thrusting, he brought the point of his rattan be-
tween the driver's shoulder-blades. The Malay
pulled up his ponies in their tracks.
The incoordinate clatter stopped instantly, with
a creak and jingle of straining harness.
"No mistake," thought David. "That settles
it."
He stood up, and leaning against the forward
seat, gave his orders in a whisper.
"Bai, Tuan." The driver's mottled turban
nodded; his long gilt whip swung in the faint
lamplight; and off the ponies bounded, cutting a
corner perilously, to scamper down into the full
radiance of the Chinese "camp." Half-way
through the street, with a jerk and a plunge as
though following a polo-ball, the ready little
beasts tore a neat half-circle. A quick test of
horseflesh and horsemanship, it was well-timed;
for in the full glare from a joss-house door —
carved, gilded, and ghastly with acetylene lamps
— there swung into brilliant view the pursuing
kosong, all unprepared for such doubling, and


MARY: IN THE HILLS 71
still at the gallop. As it flashed by, David caught
a glimpse of the tugging driver — a Javanese,
who grinned sourly, like a humorous man caught
napping; of a Sikh watchman on the box, in faded
khaki, head bound with scarlet turban; and —
on the seat behind — of Mr. Rosario, that lover
of books and cricket, his face contorted with
fiery expostulation and chagrin.
The whole disclosure, vivid and fleeting,
passed to the hurry of hoofbeats into the night.
David's man pointed after with his long,
golden whip: —
"Desini, Tuan?"
"Tida." David shook his head. "Simpang."
And as the ponies trotted willingly for home and
stables, he sat with chin on breast, vexed and
wondering.
Not till dusk of the next day, when the slow,
fat little Dutch train came puffing into a bare sta-
tion on the Arvana line, did the real upshot of
that night's adventure become clear. The jour-
ney had given David plenty of time for thought.
Whoever had stamped the footprint in Miss
Naves's chamber, had snatched the packet from
her hand not only in great haste and greed, but by
mistake. "It was mine they wanted," David told
himself, patting the breast of his tunic. Inside,
he felt the corners of that small oblong riddle:
it lay there safe enough, — safer, indeed, than


72 THE TWISTED FOOT
when first wrapped and tied by the young stran-
ger in his island hut. Yet now, as the convex
outline of the silver locket also met his fingers
through the cloth, he received a further enlight-
enment.
"This won't do," he reflected, while he
climbed out into the press of sweaty coolies clam-
oring for luggage. "It won't do, to give these
things to her."
He paused, blocking traffic.
"I must go ahead. She may know better. I
must see her, anyway." And the knowledge that
this last was not merely possible, but near at
hand, sent his thoughts flying forward once more.
His carriage soon left the little town far be-
neath in the dusk.
Blood-red pools, penciled in clusters of sharp,
black, tiny strokes where young rice-blades stood
bundled, now faded rapidly in the tropic night,
leaped out for a moment as glowing indigo, and
were gone. His groom, a turbaned silhouette
perched on a bundle of bristling fodder, sang and
chirruped, urging the ponies up the westward
slope to where the keen edge of volcanoes scal-
loped the last brightness in the sky, like a range
of Fujiyamas cut from sheet-iron. Up and up
wound the road, till among the obscure texture
of bamboos and lowlier growth, shafts of the
tall rasamala ran their black lances toward the


MARY: IN THE HILLS 73
stars. An ape went rustling through the treetops,
racing the carriage for a time, before he swung
down and over, hundreds of feet, into the ravine
below, to chatter like some shrill woman im-
parting nonsense eagerly. Then followed a great
stillness, filled with the heavy night-perfume of
flowers.
Suddenly, round a sharp turn, where the road
ran more level on the broad mountain shoulder,
lamps twinkled through the trees.
"There it is!" thought David; and light and
thought were joyful to him. "Now then! — I'll
walk."
He called to the driver, leaped out into the
road, and with a curt order sent the carriage rat-
tling on ahead; for with the settlement so near in
view he found himself all flushed, giddy, devoid
of plan and of words, in this whirl of close antici-
pation.
The road rose gently underfoot, hemmed in on
one side by tops of liquid-amber trees shooting
up from below an unseen precipice, and on the
other by a long, white wall of mountain lilies, tall
and pale in the dusk as flowers of Botticelli.
Down the defile, as he advanced, pattered a slow
company of dark shapes bent under burdens of
strange bulk and outline — musicians of the
gamelan, as David guessed, returning from some
marriage-feast in the hills. Calling now and then


74 THE TWISTED FOOT
to each other in low voices of liquid cadence, they
passed on below, leaving the road empty as a
hermit's glen.
Down this came, presently, a murmur of sing-
ing, to the tinkle of some wayside music. And
then, round another turn of the road, where the
lights shone in a distant row from a long, white
veranda, David came upon a little group under
a tree.
A shriveled man, cowering on the ground,
plucked the strings of his canoe-shaped harp, and
sang in a plaintive voice, hushed and oppressed
as though by the fear of darkness, and age, and
mystery. Beyond the harper, on a rude bench,
sat an indistinct figure in white, with another
standing alongside.
By the heavy fragrance of melati blossom,
these, thought David, must be native women.
He waited till the murmur of song had ceased,
and the harper taken his hand from the strings.
Then, in their own tongue, he spoke them fair,
as became a people of great courtesy. It was still
many steps to the lighted veranda. Why, as he
now snatched at this delay, should his heart jump
heavy and rapid, as though he already stood at
the end of his search, in the very presence?
The harper rose, and with a stealthy deference
withdrew his little boat of music from the speak-
er's way. The light touched for an instant a snowy


MARY: IN THE HILLS 75
garland about his neck; it was he, and not a native
woman, who wore the melati flowers.
At the same time the white figure rose from the
bench.
"Yes, that is the hotel," was the answer.
"And you did not disturb our music."
Off came David's helmet. The voice, clear
and level, brave and friendly, was the voice that
he had waited for and known in fancy. Darkness,
the thick pool of night under the trees, could no
longer hide her face. Not alone by feeble sight,
but as if by all his senses combined and rejoicing,
he knew it was the face in the silver locket.
"I have come," he said, — without need to
halt or stammer, for, by inspiration, he knew
plain honesty to be both guide and warrant, now
and always, —"I have come a long way to speak
with you."


CHAPTER VII
KUBOYONG
"To speak with me ?'' The voice, though troubled,
was quiet and friendly. "Then, shall we walk
toward the house, meanwhile?"
Afterward he recalled how, as her white figure
moved out of leafy shadow, the veranda lights,
that streamed athwart the glossy tops of little gar-
den shrubs, evoked a dusky radiance from her
hair; and how, behind them both, her native girl
came, tall and lithe in a white kabaia, like a slave
contentedly following some gentle princess. Yet
now, as they two first walked together, David
saw nothing but her face beside him, her head and
shoulders above the shrubbery, as though she ad-
vanced through a low mist, or made a luminous
circle in the gloom by the mere light of her coun-
tenance. The silver locket, holding the truth, had
not held that light, and life, and magical reality.
"I can guess," she added; and this time her
voice trembled. Speaking, she glanced up at him,
with eyes large, quiet, and yet uncertain, as
though ready for the best tidings or the worst. "I
can guess, for there's only one subject a stranger


KUBOYONG
77
could come to tell me about. Gerald sent you?
You are a friend of his? Tell me, where is he?
How can I get to him?"
They halted in the path, eying each other si-
lently for a moment. David was prepared to find
her beautiful, but not so radiant and regnant, all
in plain white, yet crowned with a dusky splen-
dor of shining hair. He was prepared to know
and to be known, but not to have her go direct
to the heart of his errand. More than all, he was
prepared to pity her; but not to feel this great
wave of pity that swept away all his foolish, un-
admitted hopes, to leave him heartily ashamed.
Disloyal to the other man, he had been disloyal
to her; now let him serve honestly, with his best
service.
"No," he began, "I was not sent, exactly.
Your — he and I could n't be called friends, but
— he — you see —"
Her eyes, dilated in the obscure light, looked
straight through his confusion. Her face —
quickened with the clear spirit which had met
his, in the glare of that strange morning aboard
the banca — now grew slightly pale.
"Come, tell me true." She faced him with
courage. "Is he still— Speak out; be frank
with me; for I've looked everywhere, asked every-
body; and after failing here, again, coming here
on another false hope — why, the best thing is


78 THE TWISTED FOOT
the truth. Tell me, as though you were his friend
— and mine."
By sudden consent, they walked on together
through the glistening alley of leaves. The mourn-
ful, ululating song of a mountaineer floated to
them through the darkness, close at hand, from
a neighboring spur across deep gulfs. Dull and
heavy, a hollow log, smitten in some village far
below, boomed out the hour in seven strokes.
The veranda lay desolate in all its whitewash,
except that under the farthest lamps three fat
men in pajamas, and a lady with bare ankles, sat
playing bridge in Dutch.
The girl paused, with one foot on the steps.
"Oh, please!" she begged.
"I have something of his to give you," David
slowly replied. "One thing must wait till later,
but this other —" He fumbled inside his tunic,
and drew forth the silver locket, which he held
out, as one might surrender a talisman. "I
brought you this — from him."
The girl put one hand quickly against a pillar.
Her eyes were not dark, but very blue, as David
•saw before he turned his own aside and waited.
"His locket!" she whispered, with a little sob
that left David more shaken than if her finger-tips,
on the pillar, had been the hand of Samson. "He
never would have given — tell me, were you with
him, when — at the time?"


KUBOYONG
79
"I was," said David, staring hard at a clump
of white lilies which he did not see.
"Was it — is it a place where I could go?"
David shook his head.
"An island —very far from here."
The song of the mountaineer, descending in the
night across the gulf, came to them in snatches,
like a hopeless call. As though listening, the girl
turned her face away.
"I'm glad you were there," she said, contend-
ing for the mastery of her voice. "Very, very
glad. It brings him nearer, somehow — and then
— there's something in your face — something
that's good to see there, and makes me glad he
had you then."
David, silent and guilty, felt a return of the old
envy. That other man, in his grave, possessed
quietly forever what all the living could not win
by all their struggles. Her grief was very calm, but
of the calmness which outwears time and chance.
The wailing singer in the dark had passed be-
low and out of earshot, round some jutting edge,
before she spoke again.
"I must go in." Her lips were trembling, as
she turned once more to David. "For a while —
I must — be alone. Later, we shall talk." She
beckoned to the slim native girl, who stood pa-
tiently beside the clump of lilies. "Oh, and you
said — there was something else of his for me?"


80 THE TWISTED FOOT
David raised his hands toward the breast of his
tunic, but lowered them, with a vague reluctance.
"To-morrow, please, by daylight." He fal-
tered, then found his excuse. "It's only a small
packet. Not this evening? I think — I think he
would rather have it so."
He caught from brimming eyes a swift, unex-
pected glance, full of comprehension, or discov-
ery, or gratitude. Above him, on the edge of the
veranda, she paused as in perplexity.
"To-morrow? But to-morrow I shall be leav-
ing." She spoke wearily, as though details no
longer mattered. "The train starts at early day-
light, I believe. In Batavia, Mrs. Hemmes will
be looking for me. And you see, my passage is
taken for Thursday."
David felt a trace of relief.
"Then," said he, "if I may come to Batavia?
Before your ship sails —"
The well-known face, crowned with shining
hair, maintained a last failing show of courage.
"You are very kind to me," she answered;
then, beckoning the servant with a quick, fierce
motion: "Come, Chatra!"
The brown girl, simpering, brushed past him
on the steps. Left alone, David stood looking
out upon the vast night, where, alike in their
blackness, the established hills and the down-
ward-pouring clouds cut strange gores from the


KUBOYONG
81
starry substance of the heavens. Behind him, at
their cards, the players held a sputtering argu-
ment, with great gusts of Batavian laughter. But
without caring to see or hear, David remained
rapt in wonder. The shuttle of flying chance had
woven the loose thread of his life, for once, into
serviceable stuff. He had fallen overboard at
midnight, had seen a light from shore, and heard
a dog bark. The poor Amazon, Mary Naves,
won by a nod and a smile or two, had overheard
and treasured, for a few days, the name of this
station in the hills. And here, following so frail
a clue of accidents, he had come to deal the heavi-
est blow to the last person in the world. . . .
"To her." Remembering how eagerly he had
climbed this mountain road, he could have groaned
at his own baseness. "Well," he ordered himself
severely, "you look after her till Thursday. Your
best, too."
To see that her property was safe, he plucked
out of his tunic and scrutinized in the bright light
of the veranda her small, oblong packet.
The three words might have been written yes-
terday: "For Miss Mary"
"She gets you!" was his scowling apostrophe.
"She gets you, safe and sound, aboard ship, and
no more fooling!"
Perhaps it was the stir of his own fancy; but
as he slid the packet home he seemed to hear a


82 THE TWISTED FOOT
rustle, cut short, among the tall stalks of the lilies
where Chatra, the brown maid-servant, had
lately stood. Beyond doubt, one of the great white
chalices was bowing drowsily.
He strode over and thrust his rattan through
and through the stalks, like a rapier. It struck
nothing; and on the farther side nothing ap-
peared but solid shadows, flung from clump to
clump of mountain greenery.
"Humph!" he growled. "Mooning again!
Nerves — old woman's trick!"
A card-player, proud of his English, called
jocosely: —
"Aha! A snake, not?"
"No," said David briefly; "a granny-not."
"Zo-zo!" The Hollander nodded ponderously,
well pleased with so technical a report.
But David was far from satisfied. Dinner, with
its dearth of talk, and heaping abundance of rice,
passed dolefully enough; the evening more dole-
fully, although the Dutch gamesters, who had
shod themselves for the dining-room, unshod
themselves once more and made the empty ver-
anda echo with their jovial argument. Long
before they were quiet, the light went out behind
Miss Arnot's screen. And at last, alone, and
weary of the long wait before to-morrow's journey,
David entered his bare little room reluctantly.
Reluctantly: he wondered at that, as all the


KUBOYONG
83
evening he had wondered at a strange uneasiness
which made him look about and listen. He ex-
pected nobody. His part was over; except the
hardest part, that would begin — when a ship
had sailed on Thursday — for the rest of his life.
No; this, to-night, was different—and disquieting.
Once he caught himself glancing, through his
open door, at the lilies, the ambush of green
leaves and white chalices.
"Nonsense!" In anger, he snatched out the
dead man's packet, and tossed it on the table.
With it fluttered something else; the page from
"Punch " skimmed half-way across the floor, un-
folded, and lay flat to show its grisly red sur-
charge. k
"Oh, will you?" David swooped after it, and
in a sudden passion of defiance tore the paper to
shreds. "There, then!"
He flung them into the corner, as though cancel-
ing some bond or breaking a sinister compact.
She, at least, would never see or know that thing.
But the vague insecurity came flooding back
upon him. He went to the door, even, and heark-
ened to the stillness of the great mountains. No-
thing stirred but the white smoke of night-clouds
beginning to roll down through the garden. He
remembered listening so in the door of the hut,
that night among the palms.
"What rot!" He wheeled, returned grum-


84 THE TWISTED FOOT
bling, and stolidly prepared to sleep. An early
start to-morrow, and with her — enough to think
about; and Thursday — that also was enough,
for one lifetime.
To-night there was no thin oval of silver to slip
beneath his pillow, with the packet; but grasping
this last treasure the more tightly, he lay down
with it, fist and all, under his head.
From tangled dreams he woke now and then to
ask himself in drowsy, blank regret, what disaster
was impending. "Oh, yes, Thursday." And
muttering, he slept again.
The windows glimmered in two wide, misty
squares, the crowing of gamecocks rose thin and
scattering from villages below the clouds, when
David finally woke to some new trouble. Through
the ragged fringe and outskirts of slumber, there
might have sounded the fragments of a melody,
— as though first a woman's voice, nearing along
the veranda, had crooned a snatch of Kuboyong,
"The Captive"; and then a man's voice, in the
distance, had caught up her song and carried it
floating down the mountain. This, if real, ceased
abruptly. Now broad awake, David listened.
Outside, in the veranda, two gentle Malayan
voices interwove in a subdued and timorous
altercation.
"Cassi bangan!" pleaded a woman, repeating
the words like a petulant refrain.


KUBOYONG
85
"Tida!" The "boy" in charge of David's
room denied her, mildly and scornfully. "My
lord desires not our knocking. He rises at four
strokes. It has not struck three. Astaga! Is
there no decorum?"
"My lady," the woman's voice meekly per-
sisted, "my lady wishes ..."
"Oho! That beautiful one?" The boy surren-
dered, with a quiet laugh. "Give knocking, thou !'*
Light knuckles tapped the panel of the door.
"Come!" cried David, wondering at this early
visit.
The door creaked open, to admit the drowsy
light of a lamp, which the barefoot chamberlain
bore gravely across the room, and set upon the
table. Still gravely, the Javanese took from a
high teak wardrobe his master's kimono, and
approached the bed.
"My lord will hear this woman ?*" he ventured,
bowing. "She desires to speak."
The messenger had hardly withdrawn, and
David, slipping his packet, as always, into the pen-
dent sleeve, had wound but half the sash about
his blue robe, when at the edge of the lamplight
stood a slim white figure, tall yet drooping, with
the languid grace of a young bamboo. Chatra,
the brown maid, raised her great eyes askance at
him, smiled, and let them coyly decline under
their long lashes.


86 THE TWISTED FOOT
"What do you want?" began David,—se-
verely, for this vision was not without loveli-
ness.
Once more the girl exercised the power of her
dark eyes, fingered the silver Bantam breast-pin
on her kabaia, lowered her sleek head, and
smiled with furtive content, like one who had
found favor in her master's sight.
David grinned at the unseasonable coquetry.
"Yes, yes," he remonstrated. "You're a very
pretty girl, and all that; and these tiles are 'cool
and refreshing, especially to the legs'; but, my
dear, I seldom make eyes before breakfast.
What," he repeated, in the vernacular, "do you
want?" *
Chatra, simpering, glanced at him, then away,
then downward demurely.
"My lord, forgive." Her voice was like the
sleepy cooing of nutmeg pigeons in a deep grove,
at dawn. "Forgive. My lady sends me to speak.
My mistress: she prepares to go. She desires a
gift."
"She ? — a gift?" David bent on the speaker
a short, incredulous stare; but remembering the
vagueness of her race and tongue, added with
lenience: "What gift?"
The long graceful limbs twisted bashfully un-
der their white stole. Once again the girl looked
up, away, and down fixedly at the tiles. Her toes,


KUBOYONG
87
a delicate saffron in the lamplight, wriggled as
freely as a babe's.
"The gift," she answered, with embarrass-
ment; "the gift—of a packet. My lady wishes
— to see."
David's hand started, by instinct, toward the
hanging sleeve of his kimono. He watched the
maid. No: there was no guile in such conscious
beauty.
"Is it an order?" He flung the question at her
sharply, and still watched.
"An order, Tuan." Chatra raised her eyes, to
hold them steady and liquid-bright, as though
relieved at remembering her authority. "An
order. My lady wishes — to see."
David, slipping in his hand, brought up the
packet from his sleeve. Though now smudged
round the corners, the manila paper was still
neatly folded, still firmly tied with the blue and
white Japanese twine, and still bore legibly the
superscription written in the hut, and never com-
pleted— "For Miss Mary ." There was no
reason why she should not have her own. Even
if she sent for it before daybreak, his foolish mis-
givings might not delay the transfer.
"Wait." Moving to the door, he thrust out his
head. From Miss Arnot's window, a broad flange
of lamplight splashed across the tiles, and up the
white pillars of the veranda. She was awake,


KUBOYONG
89
his sash, caught up a towel, and shuffling into
flat sandals of bullock's hide, turned mechani-
cally toward his bath. Roused for the day, he
had no further business with sleep; so that when,
of a sudden, a timid sound of music echoed from
the veranda, he wheeled in a sharp and troubled
impulse of listening.
Chatra's voice, half lifted in song, broke off
with a quaver. Below the slope, lingering like the
clouds among the dense rattans, a wailing tenor
briefly sustained the next bars of the ancient song.
No question of dreaming now, thought David;
two persons had raised the lament of "The Cap-
tive," Kuboyong, in tremulous call and answer.
Beyond the open door, beyond a gleaming
pillar, the dim white chalice of a lily swung and
nodded in the darkness.


CHAPTER VIII
THE SHADOWS
The lily bowed lightly, as though on a stalk re-
leased from pressure. Before its motion ceased,
David sprang out, and losing both sandals on the
veranda steps, plunged across the driveway and
through the shrubbery.
He brought up, next moment, on the verge of
the mountain-side. Under his bare feet, a narrow
path of smooth-beaten volcanic dust ran wind-
ing, horizontal, between dim hedges of flowers.
Overhanging from these, to his right in the dusk,
another white bell nodded, lately stirred by a
passing shoulder.
Thus guided, he ran along the cool and fra-
grant alley, his feet wet with the dew of night
clouds. Round turn after turn he dodged, follow-
ing the freakish contour of the volcano, and ex-
pecting, at each sudden change of direction, to
overtake some figure flitting ahead through the
twilight. But always the path wound thread-
like before him, empty and still.
Through the leaves, presently, filtered a mur-
mur of low voices, the whinny of a horse, the
clack of a hoof on stone, and the dry creak from


THE SHADOWS 91
straining leather. The alley turned sharp for the
last time, to cast David forth on a wider level,
cut from the solid mountain shoulder, — a tiny
plateau where flaring torchlight, and the dull
eyes of carriage lanterns, disclosed a busy con-
fusion of horses and grooms, with a golden back-
ground of bamboo sheds. Across wild Rem-
brandt darkness and glow, a mountaineer led
two prancing ponies; his lacquered hat, as he
harnessed them to a "mylord," shone in glossy
vermilion.
David wheeled about, laughing at this anti-cli-
max. His mystery, the song of the two voices, the
swaying lilies, had brought him only to the stables.
"I was running," he told himself with a
chuckle, "I was running after some Oriental
love-story in the servants' quarters!"
Brushing through the flowery corridor, he re-
turned, slowly, aware of the morning dampness,
and of a comical chagrin. Chatra and the grooms,
hereafter, might sing back and forth unmolested.
Before the clump of lilies where his pursuit had
begun, he halted in the path, to study the dim
prospect stretching far below in steep undulation.
From this hanging garden, as from a green
parapet or jutting prow of foliage, he could see
only a region of sky and darkness, floored with a
billowing pallor of clouds which reflected up-
ward, faintly, the thin but increasing light of


92 THE TWISTED FOOT
dawn. The world below was a plain of milky
vapor that shaded, without edge or limit, into no-
thing. Yet close beneath his feet, straight down-
ward as in a pit, there glowed a sullen, ragged
light, a quaking subterranean flame. He craned
over the verge. Sheer underneath, by the stream-
ing fire-points of bamboo torches, a little squad
of hill-men were toiling like ants upon the road.
Enormous shadows of their heads, arms, and
shovels, quick intercrossing legs that spindled to
a hundred yards of altitude, went rioting in sil-
houette across the nearer clouds like a combat of
phantoms. Unconscious of their own gigantic
turmoil over the landscape, the coolies worked
steadily, mending the highway, where clustered
their flaming fasces of bamboo splinters. The
road itself, slanting from left to right, showed
like a fish-hook of orange metal, with the barb
bent downward into the night. Though half a
mile distant by carriage, in depth the squad of
laborers stood so near that David could distin-
guish their flattened profiles against the torch-
light in the thin white steam of mountain exhala-
tions, and could plainly tell one man from an-
other as they toiled and shifted. It was the more
strange, therefore, to see, vastly menacing above
and beyond their preoccupation, the stilted giants
fighting that vague war of shadows.
Four dull booming notes, in slow succession,


THE SHADOWS 93
rose through the clouds to remind him. A time-
log, beaten in one of those drowned villages far
below, was thumping out the hour.
"Time to get ready," thought the young man;
and turning promptly, he rounded the clump of
lilies, regained his bull-hide sandals, and once
more headed for his bath.
He had long stood by his window, dressed and
helmeted, and was beginning to fidget with his
watch, when along the drive came a quick patter
of little hoofs and a rumble of wheels. The coach-
man in the vermilion lacquer hat, perched high
on a vehicle of Brobdingnag, pulled up his Lilli-
putian horses at the door of Miss Arnot's room.
Barefoot servants scurried out with luggage;
Chatra came swaying, her arms full of wraps, to
stand humbly and languidly by the carriage step;
then quickly, with a light, firm tread, her mistress
followed across the veranda, and entered the
leathern gulf of the "mylord."
"Good-morning!" The girl, answering Da-
vid's salute, looked up with a pale, sad, yet
friendly countenance, to where he stood beside
a pillar. In white from helmet to point of toe,
she wore at her throat some black thing, which
in the lamplight seemed hardly darker than her
eyes. "Thank you for sending this."
She raised from her lap, and let fall again, the
small packet tied with party-colored twine.


94 THE TWISTED FOOT
"I can never thank you enough," she contin-
ued, "for the offer you made me last night. We
shall meet at the train? I've a great many
questions to ask you."
David, replying, found his confusion divided.
He rejoiced to meet her brave and steady look;
but still more, to find that not even the silver
locket contained her likeness in the world.
"Your carriage follows mine?" she asked.
"Directly." As he answered, David suddenly
discovered, to his annoyance, that down the whole
length of the veranda no sign appeared of his own
carriage. "My villains will soon be along"
Miss Arnot smiled and nodded. The coach-
man wagged his conical vermilion headpiece,
lifted his reins, and cracked his gilt fishing-rod
like a rifle. "Hrri! hrri!" he cried. And before
the servants ended their salaams, the four little
Sandalwoods jumped forward at a gallop.
As the portly carriage swept out of lamplight
into darkness, a nimble figure in a golden-bowl
hat and mottled sarong hopped up into the rum-
ble. It was only Miss Arnot's groom, who had
stood hidden, apparently, in the shadow of the
leaders. Yet something in the hurried motion
caught David's eye, and for a moment left him
staring after, down the dark incline.
A moment only: the young man had no thought
of being left behind.


THE SHADOWS 95
"Sidin!" He turned on his boy. "Sidin,
where are my horses? Where are they? Run
quickly. My horses. Fetch them!"
Like a deer into the bush, Sidin jumped
through the bank of lilies, and was off toward
the stables, his feet slapping hard and loud along
the volcanic path. The noise of the carriage-
wheels had died away before his brown face and
white jacket again burst the lilies apart, as though
he were riding in on surf.
"Master, they come," he reported, smiling.
"Your men harness them rapidly. There was
error. One of those foolish grooms" — Sidin
pointed with his chin, Malay fashion, after the
departing equipage — "they carried word to the
stables, saying master required no horses to-day,
but to-morrow. Now the horses come. All is
well."
David smote the pillar with hii hand.
"Is it, though?" he asked himself. "I doubt
that!"
Distressed, irresolute, he paced a turn or so in
the veranda. All seemed far from well. If only
he could be sure.
"Run back," he ordered Sidin. "Run to the
stables. Tell the men to hurry."
The brown chamberlain bounded away, fleet
servant to a generous master. The glossy leaves
closed over him. There followed a long delay,


96 THE TWISTED FOOT
measured by louder peals of crowing from the
gamecocks under the clouds, and once by a dis-
tant and widespread grumble, or snoring thun-
der, where some volcano turned over in its sleep.
From black, the night was changing to intense
and sorrowful blue. Still no horses came for him,
while every moment hers carried her farther down
the mountain.
"And she's alone in the carriage!" To this
fact, as to a magnet, his thoughts now sprang and
cohered. "Alone, with that packet in her lap.
She thanked me for sending it. Why, Chatra
came and begged for it! And Chatra sang, and
somebody answered. And then he — somebody
— ran off toward the stables. And then my horses
were not wanted to-day!"
The summary was all too plain. At its con-
clusion, David found himself in the driveway,
straining his -eyesight toward where the stables
lay hidden behind dark masses of rattan.
"Why don't they come?" he raged. Minute
after minute was slipping by, with no sound from
the stables. By this time, Miss Arnot's carriage
would have doubled the first great spur, and be
winding back on the next level below. She was
getting a long start. "Too long. Much too long.
— Why don't they bring those horses!"
David got nothing from his scrutiny of the
dark. The volcano growled no longer, the shrill


98 THE TWISTED FOOT
the hill-men's shadows now waged a tumult more
sharply defined, more near and black and intel-
ligible, though not less than colossal, even in re-
duction. The crawling mist had withered the war
of gods into a labor of titans.
On all this David cast a negligent eye, for his
ear was not yet satisfied. Up from the lighted pit
came only a scraping of shovels, and a slow thud
of tamping-rods. At last, however, grinding
through these noises, the carriage-wheels drew
nearer and nearer, down a sharp declivity on the
left.
The coolies peered up hill, shouted commands
to each other, gave here and there a final hurried
thump to the repairs, and, catching up their
torches, dodged across the road. As men and
flambeaux vanished under the base of David's
battlement, so the whole pantomime of shadows
took flight. The torches, now ranged out of sight
below the bank, threw into white relief the op-
posing cloud-wall, and lighted the empty road
with fitful, streaming glory, as for a procession
of barbaric royalty.
The procession was slow in coming; but pre-
sently the four Sandalwood ponies descended into
view, stepping gingerly on the loosened earth, and
picking their way. Points of metal flickered on
their harness. The coachman's red hat shone as
though wet with fresh blood, and his long whip


THE SHADOWS
99
glistened in a drooping curve. Miss Arnot re-
mained invisible. David caught only a glimmer
from white linen, where she leaned back in the
deep recess of the carriage.
Instantly, parallel with their descent, a black
extravagance towered into action: along the rear-
ing cloud, as on a marble screen, tossed the in-
tense and magnified shadows of horses' heads;
the coachman's lifted fists clutching a web of reins,
his flat nose, beneath his conical hat, rose next and
slanted downward, tall as a tree; then a huge ra-
diation of spokes revolved through an arc wider
than a windmill's. The body of the carriage
passed in a bulk of silhouette, without form.
And then David, watching, had called aloud;
for what came last came incredible, like a por-
tent in the heavens.
Drawn slowly across the shining cloud, ap-
peared the giant similitude of a fa&e. Even in the
wavering projection of that stupendous scale,
it was a face well known and startling. The
rounded nose, the thick lips parted in a smile,
were not to be mistaken.
"Rosario!" cried the young man from his hill-
top ; and again in wonder and dismay," Rosario!"
The black portrait blurred like a column of
smoke, as the native groom, perching in the rum-
ble, suddenly turned his head.


CHAPTER IX
DOWN HILL
That was enough. What David saw, below,
had neither sense nor connection; but as he
shouted the name, the figure in the rumble had
started, turned its head, and caused Rosario's
likeness to melt from the cloud.
"It was! It is!" repeated the young man, see-
ing in a daze the carriage go lumbering past the
repairs, gather headway, and spin round the fish-
hook bend of the road.
"Master, your horses," murmured Sidin, at his
elbow. "Your horses are at the door."
David caught the native by the sleeve, and
pointed down hill.
"Quickly!" he cried in the vernacular. "I
must run after them. Quickly! How?"
The brown chamberlain kept a level head.
Upward, over his shoulder, he flung the com-
mand : —
"Coachman! Follow us by the road! Gallop!"
Downward, with a jerk of the chin, he indi-
cated a gap in the foliage.
"This way, master. Follow me."


DOWN HILL
101
He flung himself recklessly over the precipice,
as it seemed, and was gone. David swung after,
fell his own height, landed ankle-deep in soft
earth, and went, ploughing an almost perpendic-
ular furrow down the mountain-side. His hel-
met flew off into the night, like a clumsy bird.
Below him the whiteness of Sidin's jacket slid
with amazing velocity toward the torchlight, in a
luminous cloud of reddish dust. Along with both
men, and from behind, rolled and bounded many
small round things, as though the mountain had
let slip an avalanche of skulls or lively cannon
balls. Once David snatched at the appearance
of a bush, which came up loose in his hand, with
the facility of a dream; and as he shot down
toward the glare of the flambeaux, he found, in
passing astonishment, that this thing he bran-
dished was a potato-stalk. He flung it away, dug
both hands deep into the sliding ' dust, and so
retarded, fell unhurt over a bank between the
torch-bearers. Turnips, carrots, and other half-
recognized European vegetables fell with him,
showering from the uprooted garden.
Sidin hauled him to his feet, crying, as before:
"This way, master!"
Through jostling torches, the two men ran
straight on across the road, and jumped down
from the glare into a drenching darkness of rat-
tans, among which they tumbled in a blind, trans-


102 THE TWISTED FOOT
verse descent. A path seemed to slant and dodge
drunkenly underfoot. By turns David ran, fell
without warning, rolled, gained his footing, dove
through rattans as through torn paper, rose from
all-fours, and ran down the mountain again in
flying leaps and bounds. He cared nothing when
he fell, seeing clearly that by this breakneck
course he should soon drop once more upon the
meandering road. Now and then, in a bit of clear-
ing, he shook the dew from his eyes and saw over-
head, where clouds were parting, the still, blue,
swimming light of day.
He weltered through a green surge of stag-horn
ferns, when Sidin clutched him aside from a hid-
den brink.
"There!" cried the boy.
Mylord and ponies stood motionless in the
road, under their very noses. Two orange lamps
glowed brightly in a kind of slanting dell.
Miss Arnot's voice rose, clear and cool as a part
of the morning stillness.
"I shall do nothing of the sort," she declared.
"Go back to your place!"
A softer voice replied, in half-audible per-
suasion. It came from the farther side of the
carriage, where a golden-bowl hat glimmered
vaguely. The rumble showed vacant. The
groom, it seemed, — Rosario, or the likeness of
Rosario, — stood pleading by the step.


DOWN HILL
103
"Nonsense!" the girl retorted sharply. "Drive
on, coachman. This fellow is impudent."
The driver, whether or not he understood, sat
on his box like a statue.
"Drive on!" repeated her resolute voice.
And then, while David slid crashing down the
bank, she had cried out in surprise. The golden
bowl bobbed up, a white sleeve shot into the car-
riage, snatched, and whipped back. David sprang
to the nearer step just as the groom leaped down
from the farther, and scurried for the bushes.
"Oh!" cried Miss Arnot, in a mixture of in-
dignation and relief. She raised her hands toward
David, showing them empty. "See! He took it
— what you gave me!"
"I'll get it back," panted the rescuer; and
ducking under her ponies' heads, he ran toward
the place where the groom had jumped down
into the foliage. v
Half-way, David regained his common-sense,
pulled up short in the road, and faced about.
"You're more important than that thing," he
asserted. "We must let it go. I can't leave you
here."
The white figure leaning from the mylord gave
a little gesture of disappointment.
"I'm perfectly safe."
David stood in a quandary.
"With that coachman? — He disobeys you.


104 THE TWISTED FOOT
And your maid there is in it, I suspect." He
ground his fists together. "I can't — I can't
leave you behind, alone."
A bedraggled but calm little person stood be-
fore him.
"Master, here am I." Sidin, the forgotten,
smiled pleasantly in the twilight. Like all natives,
he could follow the pantomime of white strangers.
"Allow me that driver's kriss, and I will guard."
David gave a chuckle of content.
"Sidin, you're a brick." He ran to the front
wheel, jerked the coachman by the ankle, and
cried up at him fiercely, —
"Give this man your kriss!"
The driver stared in cunning stupidity, then
folded down a sash devoid of weapons, and
grinned. But quick as a cat, Sidin was already
climbing the spokes, and in a trice had pulled
from under the box-cushion a carved hilt em-
bedded in a wooden sheath.
"Abis!" he grunted, thrusting the kriss into
his own sash. "Ready, master. I guard. Drive
on, kalang! — thou lying chew-bacon!"
Once more, but now smiling, David turned to
the white figure in the shadow.
"You can trust this boy Sidin," he began.
"Shall I go—"
"Oh, please!" she urged. "If you can.—It
was his. Gerald sent it to me."


DOWN HILL
105
"Good; I will. Drive ahead, Sidin."
With two strides and a plunge, David had lost
her, and was aware only of darkness, of wet earth
sliding with him, of wet ferns that fetched away
in a tangle, and of wet rattan scratching his face
with many drooping points. Then came a sharp
anxiety, as he rose from hands and knees, to lis-
ten through the underbrush. Which way might
be Rosario's? This perpendicular jungle was all
alike in the gloom, a vague wet forest, scented
powerfully with sulphur from the furrow his boot-
heels left in volcanic earth, and with a pungent
aroma, like that of camomile, from torn shrubs.
"Which way?" thought David. It was mad-
dening to consider, while he listened, that below
somewhere the thief meantime made flying
strides down the mountain. No way but down;
yet that way meant a score of different directions
— to left, to right, or straight ahead —with no
trail in the dark.
"Useless!" he grunted. And overcome by this
aspect of his chase, he began to clamber down
slowly and mechanically, intending to regain the
road and await her carriage on its next long tack
through the woods.
Within three steps, however, he was running
and tumbling again in the soaked undergrowth. A
new motive possessed him, not to be denied, — a
chill fury which took the place of reason, resolve,


106 THE TWISTED FOOT
or guiding purpose. What had she said ?" It was
his." It was his, this needle in a haystack. It was
for him, the godlike young stranger buried in a
palm grove among a labyrinth of distant islands,
that she wished this turmoil to continue. Gerald
— Gerald was the name; always, at every turn,
Gerald. For a time, as David fell crashing down-
ward, the unworthy despair sat heavy on him,
like a weight upon his shoulders. Then by de-
grees he threw this off and ran free, urged by a
better impulse, a dogged loyalty to his own lost
cause. And at last, when he scrambled out all
unexpectedly on the next level of the road, he con-
fronted a sight at which hope sprang up afresh,
and with hope, the full ardor of a sportsman for
the chase.
This new reach of highway was not empty. The
azure dawn revealed, close at hand, a little knot
of burden-bearers. Above them reared two
shapes on horseback. A well-fed Chinaman, in
silks of a pale and vernal green, sat resting his
pony for the climb. With huge diamonds in her
ears, his best wife waited beside him, her slant
eyes fixed on her saddlebow in conscious pro-
priety.
"Baba," said David, saluting. "Baba, have
you seen a man pass?"
The plump equestrian merchant nodded cour-
teously. His eyes twinkled with the ready humor


DOWN HILL
107
of one who had overlooked few details in a busy
life.
"Sir," he answered, sharpening the low Malay
with his Chinese brogue, "sir, a man ran down
into the road as you have run."
"Which way then, Baba?"
"A thief: I said so." The sumptuous horse-
man nodded in satisfaction. His black eyes
brightened with an approving light. "A thief.
He wore at his girdle a sirih bag, and stopped to
put something inside it. Then he ran so." And
the Chinaman jerked his thumb toward a pointed
arch of bamboo, below the road.
"I thank you, Baba," cried David heartily, as
he swung down again into the dusky forest.
Here, though he left daylight behind, his race
was not so encumbered. Now and then he struck
the jointed pillar of a bamboo, and recoiled with
aching ribs; but underfoot the ferns and wiry
creepers had given way to short tough grass and
herbs, on a convex slope which tilted less violently
down to the next ravine. Dodging and doubling
like a half-back through a crowded field, David
made such speed that the brushing of his passage
stirred the leaves continuous as a wind.
Presently, even while he galloped, this steady
rustling surprised him by its magnitude. He
seemed to disturb the very treetops, like a giant.
And why did the noise precede him in a whisper-


108 THE TWISTED FOOT
ing rush that grew louder and louder, as though
the invisible spur of the mountain, ahead, rever-
berated his echoes throughout the cool, deep
morning?
A running volley of squeaks, of cries half
smothered among leaves and switching branches,
began to answer his question. Below him, the
feathery heads of a little grove drooped in the
dawn, without a breath to sway them. Yet
straight across their surface went a narrow swath
of motion, a single wave where the bamboo fronds
violently tossed. Black imps appeared and dis-
appeared through this arboreal tumult, pawing
and elbowing like swimmers who romp in a green
surf.
"Monkeys," thought the runner. "My friends
of last night. The bush-apes."
And then he understood their commotion. It
traveled far below him, but in a straight line.
The black and hairy tribe could neither gambol so
fast, nor keep up such a derisive squabble, unless
they, too, were giving chase.
"It's Rosario. They're following him." The
discovery sent David thundering faster down the
slope. "My friend, I have your line now! — I've
got him, by Darwin and Hanuman!"
So, following the revel of the apes where they
swam through their leafy element, he shot out
of the woods, across the road again, and down


DOWN HILL
109
through another hanging forest. A path, well
beaten, swerved suddenly to join his course. Now
he ran with speed redoubled, exulting; for on
either hand the mountain dropped through an
impenetrable net of lianas, pierced only by this
path. No choice of direction: even here the tough
serpentine creepers had been chopped with diffi-
culty, and their loose ends dangled close and
heavy, like cordage cut away in shipwreck. Ro-
sario might not choose but stay in the path.
Now, also, David could fall into that long,
skipping step which devours the ground, and
which, to down-hill running, imparts a joy like
the joy of flight. He drank the fragrant air be-
fore him. His descent outstripped the descent of
morning, and left it lingering far above on the
mountain peaks; for once, over a cleared terrace,
he shot past a cluster of woven huts all punc-
tured with ruby points of light, and showing — a
night-piece in transparency — the black shapes
of mountaineers huddled round a [brazier, like
an arrested puppet-show inside a great basket,
lighted by a handful of coals. The sight recalled
to David, as he ran, that other plaited hut in a
palm grove, at dawn. He passed an embowered
hamlet all asleep, except for its white-bearded
chieftain, who in ghostly robe stood smoking
pensively a long cigarette before his gate, revolv-
ing statecraft for his family of neighbors. And


110 THE TWISTED FOOT
next, overhead, the bush-apes perched like dim
clusters of uneasy fruit, their chattering silenced
and their fickle interest gone. After that, a fleet-
ing impression of sounds buried among the trees:
drums beat in feeble monotony, and scattered
choirs — of many voices, from many places, but
one in key and rhythm — chanted the Koran of
the Prophet, to greet the day. Down into a wak-
ing valley the path sped like an arrow, and David
with it.
"Rot!" He slid to a standstill, blockaded; for
suddenly another path forked before him, down
to the left. And this time there appeared neither
Chinaman nor monkey to point the way. David
stood alone on an open scar of red earth.
Far off, above the wooded belt where chimara
tops prolonged their sage-green mist, a range of
deep blue Fujiyamas interlocked in jagged pro-
file against the morning. The slant edge of one
glowed white-hot, like a steel rail in a foundry.
Here and there, aloft in broader incandescence,
floating wisps of crater smoke already caught the
sunrise. Below, the whole valley lay smothered
in cool fog, white as cotton, through which rose
palm-heads like tattered islands. The beating of
drums, the chanting of the Koran, rose louder
from the near edge of this vaporous lake.
"I've lost him," David grumbled. "Once he
gets down into that —"


DOWN HILL
111
With strong disfavor, he considered the forking
paths. The left branch wound along the crinkled
edge of a spur. The right branch tumbled as in
a series of cascades, disappeared under the trees,
and reappeared, no wider than a ribbon, in a
misty clearing.
On this David's glance lingered, without de-
cision. He was still at a loss, when into the clear
space darted the figure of a man running. It was
the counterfeit groom, and no other; for above
his twinkling legs was kilted a sarong of many
colors, and on his head bobbed a Mambrino's
helmet of gold lacquer.
David leaped into the right-hand path. Know-
ing his own pace, and having seen Rosario's, he
felt certain that the pursuit would end within a
quarter-mile. Under the trees he dashed, and
through the clearing; then, down a wet little path
that struggled through reeds and\ wamp grass,
he held the fugitive at last in view.
Both men were now at top speed. David saw
the other toss back over his shoulder one quick,
startled glance, and then pump hard with tense
arms in a desperate endeavor to spurt. But the
short legs could ply no faster; the long were gain-
ing.
Ahead, the marshy lane broke open, to end in
a white gleam of shallow water. A little moun-
tain lake closed the vista, lying still as a dream


112 THE TWISTED FOOT
under the rising mist. Beside a ragged jetty of
piled stones, in an open-work bamboo pavilion,
squatted a gay company of men in colored silks,
upholding stiffly a mushroom clump of gilt um-
brellas.
Straight past these bounded Rosario, across
the tiny sunken jetty, and down, as it seemed,
into the water.
David ran up in time to see the fellow shove
off frantically with a paddle, glide out from shore,
and sitting on the thwart of a dugout, begin to
lash the water with stroke upon stroke.
"All right, Rosario!" David called after him,
laughing. "Plenty of boats here. We 'll hold a
regatta!"
It was not so easy. Before he could reach the
other dugouts lying at the end of the jetty, he
found himself blocked by an angry swarm of na-
tives, — no common men, but martial aristocrats
in gorgeous raiment, with kriss-hilts of chased
gold, and proud, courtly faces in which a live pas-
sion of anger only heightened the cool and con-
temptuous dignity.
"Let me pass!" began David impatiently.
"Sir, you shall not!" A slim young patrician,
crowned haughtily by a Mussulman's turban of
primrose-yellow satin, raised his hand with per-
emptory grace. "Call back your servant. This
lake is forbidden. No man shall pass here."


CHAPTER X
the lake isle
"Forbidden?"
"Forbidden, sir." The young Mussulman in-
clined his primrose turban, but stood firm.
Past his shoulder David could see Rosario
flailing the water, with a play of back muscles
that wrinkled the white jacket. The dugout
swam deep, weighted with a cargo of bilge or
rain, which quivered round the robber's feet, and
shone like quicksilver. The escape would be slow.
It was none the easier to watch.
"Who forbids?" David met stare with stare,
coolness with coolness. "Who are you?"
What lay behind such unwonted impudence,
he could not guess. But this imperious native
spoke like one having authority.
"It matters little who I am," was the calm
retort. "My orders matter greatly. This lake is
at present forbidden to any man short of Regent
or Resident. Call back your servant."
The young man's turban, and the arrogant
poise of his head, gave him almost an appearance
of being tall and masterful; his face, delicately
modeled, and of a brown hardly deeper than


THE LAKE ISLE 115
jumbled stones to where the jetty slumped among
reeds and shallow water; then waving courte-
ously his slim brown hand, he installed David in
the craft which waited there, —a rude catamaran,
or fragmentary pontoon, of three dugouts lashed
together with areng fibre, decked amidships, and
covered by a scant awning of palm thatch. "Will
two paddlers suffice you, sir? — Amat!" he
called ashore; "Amat! Ali! Bring fresh matting
for this gentleman, and row him well!"
Two humble natives came running to obey.
They hopped aboard, caught up their paddles,
and perched on the edge of the catamaran. David,
sitting comfortably under the little thatched
marquee, was still wondering at this strange and
fortunate reversal of policy, when his helper
stooped toward him for a parting word.
"If this matter," murmured the quiet voice,
"if this should come to the ears of his High —"
the man coughed — "of our friend, you will tell
him what my attitude was?"
His level tone, his gentle brown eyes, his
swarthy face masked with impassive refinement,
could not hide the fact that the young Mussul-
man was worried.
"You will not fail, sir?" he begged. "Above
all things, our friend wishes not to displease the
Nail of the Universe!"
David's nod was benign as a monarch's.


116 THE TWISTED FOOT
"Be content," he answered.
As the two broad paddles struck the water, he
went gliding past the jetty, calm and cross-legged,
like a Buddha. Yet fairly launched, he caught
himself grinning.
"False pretenses somewhere," he chuckled.
"I'm a friend to his Highness, and dear old
chums with the Nail of the Universe!"
Turning, David glanced astern. The proud
young chieftain watched him doubtfully, — a
splendid figure in the misty light. The still
though passionate face, now darkened with per-
plexity; his glowing turban, his silk skirt pat-
terned in ripples of dull blue and mellow brown,
his jeweled hilt in a gold sheath; the man's
speech, of purest Malay, — these, but above all,
his unaccountable change of front, gave to the
whole scene a droll, Arabian air of mystery.
"Can't be helped." David dismissed the puzzle,
and faced toward the bow. "False pretenses or
not, I 'll catch this fellow."
The chase, indeed, would soon be over. Off
the port bow, a thin white smoke drifted to join
a rolling cumulus bank of vapor. Elsewhere the
lake stretched in shallow, aerial blue under the
sunrise. The fugitive's gleaming head-piece rose
and fell with every beat of his paddle, in a
dogged but losing rhythm. His water-logged lit-
tle prau, the black tip of an arrow-head sketched


118 THE TWISTED FOOT
"Oh, sir," mourned the fellow. "Oh, sir, do
you dare?"
Amat, in the stern, rebuked him harshly.
"Does my lord the crocodile devour shrimps?"
he sneered. "Go on, Ali. We are safe enough.
This gentleman from Europe will take the blame."
The small catamaran once more forged ahead.
The mist, now rolling clear of the island, left it
stripped of motion, bare to confront the morn-
ing, — a lofty clump of green waringin foliage,
wet and glistening, save where one gigantic top
shone leather-brown. A stillness like enchant-
ment brooded upon trees and water.
Why any man in broad daylight could dread
a landfall on so innocent a bit of grove, floating
so peacefully in a lake pale and tranquil as the
sky, David could not guess; the fact had neither
probability nor motive, and seemed, like that
queer embargo at the jetty, some freak of child's
play; and yet, while he measured the distance
between craft, and to the shore, he felt a transient
wonder which was half disquietude. A forbidden
lake; a pair of boatmen, one frightened and one
grim; a "Nail of the Universe," who must not be
roused to anger, — these figments took on a sud-
den reality, here in the splendor of the tropic
morning, before this dense peak of isolated forest
charmed into fairy stillness.
It was no time, however, for subtleties or rid-


THE LAKE ISLE 119
dies. David could hear Rosario panting at each
stroke, the bilge-water swashing fore and aft to
the same rhythm.
"Stop!" called Ali, in a sort of choking dismay.
"Stop there!"
At his cry, as if obeying, the dugout grounded.
Half-tumbling, half-leaping, Rosario was over-
board, ankle-deep, ran splashing among reeds
to the shore, took the low bank at a bound, and
hurled himself through the bushes, out of sight.
David's pontoon rushed softly into the sludge.
Before he could rise from his mat, the two na-
tives had flung down their paddles, sprung ashore,
and snatched off their varicolored turbans. Then
each man, with his arms behind his back, wound
the gay cotton tightly round both fists, and
struck a posture of submission.
"Ampun Tuan-ku" they wailed in unison,
standing self-bound like a pair of captives; "be-
ribu-ribu ampun! — Pardon, my lord, a thou-
sand-thousand pardons!"
Their entreaty rose, melodious and mournful,
from the water's edge. No voice replied. Again
they called, as though imploring the empty air,
or some invisible genius of the shore. A family
of lizards, sunning themselves on the dewy bank,
scuttled off among dead leaves. Rosario's rustling
passage through the bush had ceased like the
dying of a wind. Reflected sunshine, rippling up


120 THE TWISTED FOOT
from the troubled margin of the lake, played
oozily across the green banyan covert. The island
returned to its dreaming.
"Ampun, Tuan-ku!" crooned the boatmen,
side by side; and twisting their ligatures afresh,
bent their bare heads in the presence of nothing
but water, trees, and the brilliant morning.
Plainly, this pair of suppliants would stir no
farther. And of a sudden it came strongly upon
David that he, alone, must penetrate this enigma-
tic bush, and with bare hands capture a thief who
would certainly be armed, and more certainly in
hiding, ready, at bay.
He snatched up the bow paddle, and jumped
ashore; then, twirling the great blade lightly, he
caught the balance, and took firm grip of the
haft.
"Anyhow," he decided, "I can spank him!"
He climbed the bank, but paused to consider.
Rosario had gone to cover straight ahead, through
those branches. Were it not better, then, to steal
roundabout, meet ambush with detour, and sur-
prise the lurker from behind?
"He's lying doggo, somewhere. Kriss — or
gun, perhaps — against this paddle of mine:
that's giving odds. We'll do a' hike.' Here goes."
Turning a flank of solid greenery, David set
foot in a wider recess of the shore, a tiny crescent
of tender grass curving between grove and lake.








THE LAKE ISLE 121
He stood in his tracks, and stared, and forgot his
errand.
The isle contained another visitor.
Over the turf lay spread a glorious rug, on
which knelt a young man, praying. With his
back turned on the sunrise, he was bowing toward
Mecca, in the west. As he fell prostrate, his
shadow shrank home beneath him; as he rose
again to his knees, it darted at full length across
the lawn. A pair of sandals, very small, and of
rich leather, stood at the edge of the carpet; and
beside them glistened a kriss in a heavy golden
scabbard, with a golden hilt in which great uncut
rubies caught the sunshine like drops of fire.
Sombre to his waist, the stranger wore a black
fez encircled with some verse from the Koran in
Arabic letters of gold thread, and a plain, close-
fitting jacket of black silk; but from his waist to
his powerful, slim ankles flowed a hirong miracu-
lous in its blending of soft colors.
At sight of this, David understood why his boat-
men had quailed. The pattern on the sarong was
a variant of the Fighting Deer, worn by no man
but of the blood royal.
Raja, prince, king, whatever the man was, he
continued his devotions. A slight rustle of silks,
and now and then a fervent whisper, were the
only sounds in this mosque of green leaves.
At last the stranger quietly rose, thrust his deli-


122 THE TWISTED FOOT
cate brown feet into the little sandals, took up the
golden kriss, and slowly turned. His deliberate,
haughty movement brought a transformation al-
most dazzling. The priest became a warrior; for
the whole front of his black silk jacket glittered
with martial frogs and loops embroidered in gold.
On his uplifted fez the verse from the Koran
shone like a challenge.
"Wanneer kwam je?" The question came
swift and threatening. His Highness, for a Malay,
stood very tall in his sandals. A wondrous pair
of eyes, angry and beautiful, blazed from under
his feminine lashes. Every line in his face —
nostrils, brows, dark-red lips — every line quiv-
ered in a curve, at once dainty and perilous. He
frowned. "Wanneer kwam je?"
David, conscious of muddy legs, wet, frowzled
hair, and clothes everywhere stained with green
grass, made Ms best bow.
"I regret, Your Highness," he replied, "that
I have disturbed your devotions; also that I can-
not speak Dutch."
The stranger's face grew brighter.
"No more can I, really." He smiled, like a
lonesome boy who has found a playmate. "Eng-
lish? I'm very glad to hear the sound of it."
He frowned again. "You have n't anything to
do, have you, with these Dutch officials? Please
tell me frankly."


124 THE TWISTED FOOT
ing of his lacquered hat, swaggered Rosario. In
the dress and with all the saucy manner of a
groom, he was puffing a long palm-sheathed cigar-
ette.
"Good-morning, gentlemen!" The late fugi-
tive, now at ease, blew out a wreath of smoke,
and grinning broadly, watched it loiter upward
in the sunlight. "Ah, my word, you know, what
an extraordiny jolly little spot for us to be meet-
ing m!


CHAPTER XI
THE WRITTEN STONE
The splendid stranger drew back, gathering his
pictured skirt in folds, as though to save the Bat-
tle of Deer from all ignoble contact.
"Who is this fellow?" Questioning David, he
stared over Rosario's head, with a smile that was
half disgust, half-languid amusement. "If this
— er — specimen is European, he will remove
his hat; if Asiatic, his boots!"
Rosario made no motion, but stood unabashed,
smirking and smoking.
"I 'll show you, sir!" David gripped the shoul-
der of this too affable culprit, and holding him
tightly, ransacked the sirih bag at his waist,
jerked away his sash and shook it, pulled off his
golden hat and head-kerchief underneath. The
scuffle bore no result, beyond a squeak of indig-
nant terror from Rosario, and a cry of rage from
David.
"He's thrown it away!" exclaimed the captor,
and flung the captive aside, revengefully.
Stooping, Rosario picked up his scattered ap-
parel, put it on, adjusted all to a nicety, and began
hunting for his cigarette throughout the grass.


126 THE TWISTED FOOT
"I am still in the dark," observed his Highness,
not without asperity. "Thrown what away?"
"What he stole. What I was after." With the
eloquence of defeat, David poured out a fiery ex-
planation. "There!" he concluded. "The last
time I saw this fellow, he was playing white man
and sugar-planter; now he's playing sais. Any-
how he's a thief, who bribes coachmen and maid-
servants to rob ladies on the highway. He got
away with that packet. I saw him. And the
Chinaman saw, when he stuffed it into his betel
kit. And now he 's hidden it!"
Rosario, having found his cigarette by the
smoke, pounced on it like a jackdaw, caught it
up, and waved it in graceful deprecation.
"What nonsense, gentlemen!" he interrupted
soothingly. "Ah by Jove, now, what nonsense!
Be-cause, Mr. Bowman, you have not one bally
bit of proof, have you, to show at present moment?
By force of muscle, you may dislocate and ruff
my clothes all day. But that proves nothing, and
besides is jolly bad form. Ha ha!"
The royal figure, erect in his gold-emblazoned
tunic, had watched both the speakers as calmly
as though holding a court martial. Now he be-
stowed on David a hardly perceptible nod, and
let his curved eyelids droop in restrained but quiz-
zical comprehension.
"Of course I believe you," he murmured, aside.


THE WRITTEN STONE 127
David thanked him with a bow.
"That's all very well," struck in Rosario
pertly. "Nothing but speak-so! It is merely —
ah — testament by hear-tell!"
The unknown prince ignored this chatter, and
seemed lost in mournful thought. Suddenly his
eyes grew brighter. Raising his head, he ap-
peared to listen after some far-off sound.
"I am not so sure of that," he murmured in
soliloquy. "There, I think, is proof enough.
Hark!"
Somewhere beyond the shores of the lake, a
hurried staccato drumming, hollow but dead, deep
without resonance, came nearer, swelled fitfully
in scattered relays, and for a time filled the coun-
tryside. From gardo to gardo along the roads,
watchmen were beating on their time-logs the
rapid alarm which proclaims a robber at large.
The message, startling the whole valley from
mountain to mountain with a sort of wooden
thunder, recalled to David, curiously, the drum-
ming of myriad partridges in his northern woods,
at home. Station to station, village to village
spread the alarm, each log echoing loudly to the
next, — " Robbery — robbery — a robbery!"
"There it goes!" cried David. "That boy
Sidin found time to pass the word. What do you
say now, Rosario?"
The fellow said nothing, for a time, but only


128 THE TWISTED FOOT
tilted his golden hat and stood listening, like a
robin after worms. The morning air throbbed and
rumbled accusations, that compassed him about.
His thick lips never lost their smirk, or his lus-
trous, dilated eyes their look of ready cunning.
"What do I say?" he mocked. Then, twirl-
ing his cigarette in supple fingers, he stood and
listened roguishly. "What I say? O my dear
chaps, I am not easy to be strike dumb!"
Plainly, he was nursing some joke, — a secret
which tickled his fancy, and with which he was
loath to part.
The dull hubbub of the alarm traveled, divid-
ing and spreading until it was hushed in distance.
"Ha ha!" Rosario suddenly wheeled on his
foes, a brisk and beaming malignant. "Now,
then, gentlemen! Now I say it. Your brain are
very slow. You think, now all the villages, all the
hills know what. I have done. Good! You think,
now you have catched me! Ah my word, you
suppose my mind is slow interior like yours. No,
gentlemen!" Rosario grinned, like a pampered
child brimming with self-esteem. "Ah, no! It
is nimble, very, very nimble interior is my mind.
Now see it. You give me for the custody, to some
Dutchman with the great pad-belly of rice, and
shave head. Very well."
He wheeled, menacingly, on the stranger.
"And you," he cried in triumph; "it is very


THE WRITTEN STONE 129
well, also, for you to stand so proud, looking
through my poor body so transparently. You!
Ho ho! Come, give me to the Dutch officer!
Give! And me, what do I say? I only say,' Look,
Dutchman: here in your district, here on this
island, is not less a person than his Highness
the Sultan of —"'
"Stop there!" Without a gesture, the haughty
and emblazoned Malay cut short this tirade. His
face remained calm, but for an instant his wonder-
ful eyes burned yet more wonderful, in anger and
contempt. "You have said enough. Go back to
your stables!"
Rosario doffed his gleaming hat in mockery.
"Thank you so much," he chuckled. "I shall
go when I — ah — when I jolly well please."
Replacing the bowl on top of his mottled kerchief,
he snapped its band under his chin as daintily as
a girl; then stood at ease, one arm akimbo, the
other holding out at full length his cigarette,
which he studied with pert sagacity, through
half-closed eyes. "Suppose," he slowly contin-
ued, "suppose we make bargain? Your High-
ness never mentions me, let us say. Good! I
engage, of my part, no word shall reach the Nail
of the Universe. Come, now?"
The young Sultan, whatever place he governed,
could govern his own temper.
"Sir," — with an air of extreme weariness, he


130 THE TWISTED FOOT
turned quietly to David, — "I am not well used
to dealing with the coolie class of half-breeds.
Neither are you, I dare say. How shall we tell
this stable parrot that we have not the slightest
wish to trade or bargain with it?"
David came forward with savage alacrity.
"I'll get you rid of him, sir." He caught Ro-
sario by the wrist, and jerking him out of his fine
attitude, dragged him headlong round the screen
of foliage, to the bank where he had landed.
"Now then! You see your boat. Get aboard,
and go!"
In a babble of protestations, Rosario went spin-
ning down among the reeds, flung by the out-
stretched arm like a heaved lead. He sprawled on
his face before the two boatmen, who had sud-
denly dropped on their knees at the water's edge.
Rosario scrambled to his feet, cursing volubly.
But Amat and Ali, kneeling bareheaded in the
sun, remained oblivious to his outcry, nor looked
up until another voice addressed them from the
bank.
"Boatmen!" Their Sultan spoke as one who
did not stoop to reprimand. "Boatmen, that
person on this island is your only disgrace. Re-
move it."
The pair sprang up, light-footed, to earn their
pardon. Unbinding their hands from the ikat-
diri, they bowed low together.


THE WRITTEN STONE 131
"Remove him to the shore," repeated the Sul-
tan. "Give him to my guards. Let him not
escape."
Without staying to see his order executed, the
speaker beckoned to David, and turned calmly
away.
"If you don't mind ?" he said, with a friendly
smile.
Side by side they reentered the privacy of the
little lawn, passed the riot of glorious colors
where the prayer-rug lay, and halted, face to face
in the warm and fragrant recess. The two men
were a good pair. Courtly poise, and warlike
habit of authority, made the Sultan's presence a
fair match for David's stature. Each regarded
the other with the same smile of humorous an-
noyance, on the common level of perplexity.
"Do you know," began the prince, "that fel-
low really had us. He's put me in a most vexing
position."
"I'm sorry, Your Highness," replied David.
"Sincerely."
"Oh, as to that—" The other waved his
trouble aside; then, with an impulse both frank
and shy, he put forth his hand. "I like your ways.
Mr. — Mr. Bowman? So, I believe, that little
ass called you?"
David laughed, and shook hands.
"But," continued the quiet voice, "I do wish


132 THE TWISTED FOOT
you'd drop all those beastly 'sirs' and 'high-
nesses.' If you could guess how deadly dull —
Well, my life's made a burden, with — what do
you call it again ? — ceremony! Adat here, adat
there! Oh, ceremony!" And the Sultan, with a
whimsical groan which ended in a laugh, wagged
his head ruefully, like a brown Henry V. "Cere-
mony ! — Suppose I call you Bowman: will you
call me plain Rama? Let's talk simply, you
know. Of course, my real name is Sri Rama Vic-
rama Sangsaperba, Souria Alem, and so on; and
I'm sultan of — no matter — a place you never
heard of, up north, across the Line."
David, bowing, smiled with sudden enlighten-
ment. All the while his memory had been groping
and striving; and now he recalled where, many
months ago, many miles away, he had seen this
olive countenance with its curved lines, by turns
so mobile and so impassive, so clouded in mourn-
ful pride or alight with boyish pleasure.
"If you wish it," he replied. "As a matter
of fact, though, I could name your kingdom up
there. I saw you once, not incognito. Do you re-
member, at the Hongkong races, an ugly little
gray gelding named Chop-Chop?"
The Sultan widened his great eyes. He gave a
subdued cry.
"Remember?" His laugh sounded like a mel-
low bell. "My Chop-Chop? Why, that pony


THE WRITTEN STONE 133
beat Bintang, my roan stallion, by half a head!
Never enjoyed a better surprise in my life! Re-
member? I bought Chop-Chop next day, just for
that. Happy Valley meeting, two years ago." All
clouds had left the Sultan's face. He talked in a
low, even, melodious cadence, too polite for eager-
ness; but his curved lips quivered gleefully, and
his fine white teeth flashed. "I bought the horse
from a little chap — let me see — a little chap
named Pryce."
"Right." David joined his laugh, for the royal
animation was catching. "I got Pryce that pony,
from the North of China, — snapped him out of
a herd of griffins."
His companion flung dignity and custom so far
to the winds as to pat him on the elbow.
"No! Did you?" The ruler of men had van-
ished; in his place stood a delighted lover of
horses. "You discovered my Chop-Chop? You
can always be proud of that! — I say, Bowman,
you'll have to stay over with me, down here, and
see me through this affair. I was being bored flat.
You must stay!"
Sri Rama Vicrama had somehow, quietly and
decorously, slipped his black silken cuff, heavy
with crusted gold, under David's plain sleeve of
white drill; and with the same gentle insistence,
had begun pressing forward, to where the alley
of moss opened among the leaves.


134 THE TWISTED FOOT
At the risk of discourtesy, David hung back.
"I'm afraid," he protested, "that we must n't
forget. The robbery, you see, and this fellow
Rosario. You said— He can place you in a
trying position?"
His companion unlocked arms, halted, and
swore a round oath by the name of the Prophet.
"Can? The beggar has, already!" His High-
ness remained silent for a time, frowning at the
sunlit water. "Horses," he declared, from out
this meditation, "horses drive everything else out
of my head, you know." Presently he turned,
with a negligent but gracious air, inviting David
to follow. "Come inside here, till I show you
this matter."
Erect and lithe, with a swaying gait in which
every movement was a piece of regal composure,
he entered the gap in the waringin grove, and
began slowly to thread a winding path among the
branches. David came after, wondering. Sandals
and boots alike trod silently in deep moss, delicate
as peach-bloom, inimitably green. The pleasant
odor of the moss, at each bruising footfall, rose
like virtue under adversity, in the immemorial
comparison; and through it, steeping the cool
heart of the wood, drifted the alluring smell of
fresh water, and all those dewy fragrances which
hover about fresh water, — from roots, from
small hidden blossoms, from leaves long chilled


THE WRITTEN STONE 135
by the night, and now stirring in early sun-
light.
"Here," said the Sultan, after a final turn of
the maze. "One moment, please."
It seemed as fitting as an act of ritual, that he
should lower his voice, and that, pausing where
the moss spread wide in the green carpet of a
fairy ring, he should put off the sandals from his
feet. The two men faced a circular bower, walled
with heavy leaves, among which twined and
twisted, like bootlaces and torn basket-work,
long creepers and banyan roots all furred with
brilliant moss. The place contained three things:
a mixture of light and shadow as mottled as the
Deer Fight on the Sultan's skirt; a huge bundle
of mossy pillars, great and small contorted alike,
where an aged banyan reared its trunk; and close
under this, coated with the same living green, the
long, low mound of a grave.
"Here," continued the Sultan, quietly as be-
fore, "is the tomb of my ancestor."
Behind his back, David, with the awkward-
ness of a Western barbarian, was tugging off his
boots. The speaker turned, and caught him in
the act.
"I did n't expect that." The heavy Malayan
lips parted in a smile, but not of ridicule. The
liquid Malayan eyes conveyed more than the
words. "I — Well, I'll remember it, Bowman."


136 THE TWISTED FOOT
Silent again, they stood beside each other in the
woodland sepulchre. Overhead, a fitful series of
squeaks, petulant and evil, disturbed their soli-
tude. David, looking up into the sunlight, saw
the banyan top shining leathery-brown aloft.
What, from the lake, he had taken for dead leaves
on a blasted tree, was a sleeping multitude of
flying-foxes, that hung head downward in pon-
derous hanks and bundles. It was strange to see,
against the blue sky, a pinnacle of arborescence
that was not vegetable, but animal.
"They won't overhear us." The Sultan glanced
up at the giant bats, with a smile; then lower-
ing his eyes, regarded soberly the mound below
the banyan pillars. "And I can trust you. So
here's my secret." He pointed at the grave.
"What do you see there?"
The burial-place was ancient, for even in that
profound shelter its contour showed sunken,
worn by the attrition of years. Midway, a slight
convexity heaved the moss, — the outline of a
round stone, like a buckler smoothly covered
with green velvet.
"A stone," replied David.
The Sultan nodded his fez.
"A stone," he echoed. "That stone is written
upon, like the Batu Tulis; but not with the cursed
inscription of idolaters. It lies above my great
ancestor, Sri Rama Vicrama, called the Sultan


THE WRITTEN STONE 139
and shade, flickering in the banyan chapel,
shifted curiously on a face gray and still with
wrath. "What dog has — " Again he choked.
"Do you see? The stone has been — already!
Before me — before the time!"
David, though chafing to be gone, had stood
by, with no choice but to watch. The Sultan's
cry, and that strange look of petrified anger, now
brought him quickly beside the mound.
Circling the green buckler of the imbedded
stone, ran a tawny line drawn in fresh earth, a
crack no wider than a thread.
"What devil did this?" whispered the Sul-
tan to himself, furiously. Furiously bending, he
thrust his fingers into the cracked moss, and
pried. The red earth gaped. Rama caught a
fresh grip, heaved, tugged at full stretch. "What
devil—"
The heavy stone, in shape a double convex,
tilted and fell clear of its socket, disclosing an
under surface bare and brown, chiseled with
writing either in Arabic or in Kawi, shallow, yet
clear as in the days when the great kingdom
Majapahit fell.
"What is this?"
David and Prince Rama stared together, —
first into the earthen socket, then at each other,
then down again like men who had found a
treasure.


140 THE TWISTED FOOT
Rosario's cunning had its limit. He had not
known the story of this grave. The cavity, a deep
bowl filled with quivering sunlight and black pat-
tern of leaves, held also a small packet wrapped
in manila paper, sealed with red wax.


CHAPTER XII
WAITING
Rama was the first to speak.
"What does that mean?" His eyes were blaz-
ing, his cheeks even paler than before. "More
insolence from that sais of yours?"
He rose with the packet in his hand, and seeing
David's involuntary motion to take it, drew back
haughtily.
David made a conciliatory gesture.
"My thief," he assented. "Rosario. That is
what he stole from the lady. He chose to hide it
here."
"Hide it? In the Sultan Muda's grave? Un-
der the Written Stone?" Rama swore in a pas-
sionate whisper, and drew breath with a rasping
sound. "The dog! Let us go—"
He turned violently, as though to rush out
through the banyan corridor; but checking that
impulse, flung the packet down among the f rangi-
pani blossoms, bent over the grave, lifted the
stone, and carefully replaced it in the socket, so
that the written side lay uppermost, bare and
brown, like a dull scarab set in emerald fur. This


WAITING
145
of a tiger. David, watching while he followed,
was divided between strong liking and equally
strong impatience. This cool young prince was
not to be hurried; and meantime, somewhere on
the broadside of Java, Mary Arnot was kept
waiting.
They gained the dazzling shore of the island.
The Sultan raised his arm. A stir passed through
the varicolored group on the distant jetty, and at
once the threefold bundle of canoes detached
itself from the shade of land, to glide rapidly
across the water, with many quick paddles glis-
tening, and its golden thatch bright in the sun.
Enchanted stillness covered lake and mountains,
while the craft brushed in among the reeds.
Rama and David embarked, silent as knights
entering a magic shallop. Then back toward
land they slid, to the drip of shining blades, over
a pale, hot mirror deep as the inverted sky.
At the jetty, the young Moslem captain met
them, lowering his primrose turban in a deep
sembah. Some new and greater anxiety lined his
face.
"Dato Hasan," said the Sultan, climbing forth
upon the stones, and halting, erect and grave
among his courtiers; "Dato Hasan, I have made
you the Bantara of my person, and given you my
sword to bear." He glanced at a long sword of
ceremony, which the young man carried on his


146 THE TWISTED FOOT
right shoulder. "Bear it worthily. Suffer not the
sword to rust, nor its eyes to be eaten out."
Dato Hasan listened humbly to this formula,
and bowed low.
"Where is your prisoner?" continued Rama.
"Set him before me."
The sword-bearer raised a woeful counte-
nance.
"Turn aside your anger," he stammered.
"The fellow had not the strength of devils, but
the cunning. He overthrew his guards, Abdur-
rahman and Majang Koro. He fled." Hasan
pointed up the marshy path that struggled in-
land. "Like a wild colt, into the mountains —"
"Enough!" The Sultan's fez flashed upward
and backward. He seemed visibly taller. "Sa-
tan," he cried in fury, "Satan has been busy with
my morning!"
Dato Hasan, nursing the long symbol of his
office, drew back, humiliated, among the silken
courtiers, who shifted uneasily and hung their
heads in disgrace. Their master, shaking with
passion, poured out a torrent of words from
which they shrank without a murmur, without so
much as an eyelid raised in defense.
At the very height and flaming climax of this
outburst, David moved audaciously alongside,
shoulder to shoulder, till his lips approached the
royal ear.


148 THE TWISTED FOOT
"They'll never catch him, you know," laughed
Rama. Mischievous as a boy, he watched them
file away through the marshy path, to scatter like
skirmishers among the distant trees. "Your
plan, Bowman, promises better sport. Let them
chase about. The sun's hot. Serves them right."
He beckoned imperiously to the young Dato
Hasan, who stood waiting beside the bamboo
tent.
"This finery," said he, "belies my description
in the passport card. It might be awkward to
explain. Come. Help me change."
Followed by the discomfited sword-bearer, he
left the jetty, and disappeared into a neighboring
clump of bamboo. David sat in the pavilion, and
raged with helpless impatience. Time, unheeded
in Oriental transactions, dragged by to the low
sound of lake-water lapping among the deserted
boats. Morning became noon. When at last the
Sultan came forth again, he was in plain dress,
without ornament or weapon, — black fez, severe
white tunic, and a skirt painted in lozenges of
burnt orange and dull brown. By this sober
transformation, he appeared like some young
Arab merchant, uncommonly proud and hand-
some. Dato Hasan came slowly after, directing
three servants who carried baskets.
"Bowman, this is a pleasant place," drawled
the prince, stooping to enter the small pavilion.


WAITING
149
"Let us eat beside the lake, where it's cool. Here
comes tiffin. Plain fare, you know. I'm not a
Christian, so I don't drink."
Tiffin they had, accordingly, in their shelter of
clean thatch, an airy chamber walled with spa-
cious and glowing landscapes — the lake asleep
under a fierce white noon, volcanoes notching
the lofty horizon with dark green pinnacles — a
world of stillness, poignant color, and great dis-
tances, set in panels of bamboo framework, but
pictured in limitless sunlight and the incompar-
able purity of mountain air. Barefoot hill-men,
reverently mute, glided into and from the pavilion,
kneeling to serve the dishes, —j pastoral dishes
of rice, bamboo pith, and savory beans; of wood-
birds and young water-fowl stewed in cocoanut
milk; of tiny red fishes heaped in curry; of pine-
apples from the hot lowlands, and artful jel-
lies disguised as fruit, with fresh rind seemingly
intact. Ashore, from time to time, Dato Hasan's
yellow turban shone like a great blossom among
the roadside trees, as he craned out to guard the
approaches.
"And now," yawned the Sultan at last, "now,
Bowman, it is the hour to sleep." Throughout
tiffin, he had discoursed lazily of horses, their
speed, their ancestry, their exploits in Poona,
Buitenzorg, Mosul, or Shanghai; but more and
more his voice had drooped, his eyes grown heavy.


150 THE TWISTED FOOT
"To sleep, eh? It is very pleasant. You, too, will
be wishing to sleep."
David's temper, long smouldering, broke out
in flame.
"I want to be off," he retorted angrily. "Just
that, and no more. Hand over what belongs to
me, and let me go."
"Dear fellow," replied his host, with a smile,
friendly but obstinate; "dear fellow, there's no
such hurry. Too hot, besides."
The speaker curled himself into the shadiest
corner of the pavilion, stretched his limbs lux-
uriously as a cat, subsided on the matting, and
with cheek upon arm, dropped at once into the
sweet oblivion of Eastern slumber.
David sat and listened to his breathing, the
only sound among the mountains. The longer he
listened, the more he grew enraged. It quickly
became unbearable.
"Rama!" he cried.
The sleeper made no stir.
"Rama!" David brought down his heel so heav-
ily that the pavilion shook. "Where's my packet?"
The royal sluggard allowed one eye to open,
and blissfully to close.
"I don't remember." The words died in a
broken whisper, a blur of meaningless and meas-
ureless content. "Wait till — catch that fellow
—you go to sleep, too."


WAITING
151
It was useless. A caravan of packets would not
summon this Malay from his afternoon stupor.
David might glower as he pleased; he saw him-
self at a deadlock, simple yet effective, not to be
broken either by force or by entreaty. He could
only wrap himself in patience, wait, stick closer
to Rama than a brother, seize a more fortunate
mood, watch the chance. He chose another cor-
ner of the floor, and stretching out, resigned him-
self to smoke. Even the black Paiacombo tobacco
brought no comfort; it might not cloud that vista,
all too clear and dismal, into which his busy plans
unfolded.
"Suppose I do get it back?" he pondered.
"Suppose I do overtake her? It's all for the
other man. Gerald: that was his name. Some-
thing she 'll cry over, and keep the rest of her
life. And my part — that's all. 'Thank you so
much; good-by!'"
He flung away his cigarette. It fell into the
lake with a slight hiss. Rama's quiet breathing
succeeded, tranquil accompaniment to vexing
thought.
Thanks, and good-by; that indeed was the
end of the vista. All for the other man — the
handsome stranger in the hut — Villameres's
Englishman. For another man, now dead.
Thanks, and good-by. On the heels of this,
why should there steal in (welcome and unwel-


152 THE TWISTED FOOT
come, like a bit of solace he had not asked for)
the memory of her eyes in the hill-garden and by
the roadside? They were not dark, after all, but
blue — a deep and changing blue.
When he woke, the lake was of that color, and
the evening air, and all the mountains but a few
far peaks tipped with amber sunset.
"Silam." The Sultan's voice rose, meditative,
through the dusk. "Silam. It is twilight."
Propped on elbow, Rama lay staring mourn-
fully over the bamboo rail, far out across the
evening water. His face, his pose, in that uncer-
tain light, were full of unutterable weariness and
sadness. He seemed a mystical ancient figure of
Melancholy, questioning the world in vain.
"Alone." He was murmuring to himself.
"The soul of man is alone—like a bird flying
on the face of dark waters."
He turned slowly, to find David watching. His
face brightened somewhat.
"Awake, Bowman?" He roused, but lan-
guidly. "Sleep is a great mystery. It always
leaves me sad, you know. 'In sleep I feel myself
to be a mortal,'—so said Sikander of the Two
Horns. What is it you call him? Alexander the
Great ? — Ah, that must have been a man! His
life had a purpose."
The lapping water played an interlude round
their pavilion.


WAITING
153
"What were we going to do?" The Sultan
puckered his brows. "I forget."
"Catch my thief on the island," David replied.
"The thief who lifted your Written Stone."
Rama gathered himself upright, and stretched
his arms.
"True," he yawned. "That is better than
nothing. Not much. But let us go."
At the door he paused, and gave some order to
a squatting guard, who rote and flitted ghost-like
from the jetty.
"That leaves us free," he explained. "I sent
my men home. Have we matches?"
The two companions chose a light canoe, and
paddled slowly out into the lake, munching bis-
cuits for their supper. Overhead, where the sun-
set faintly tinged the upper air, the flying-foxes
wavered in erratic flight; the vesper chanting of
the Koran made its mournful circuit among the
villages; a few ruddy points of lamplight, skirt-
ing the shore, blinked slowly behind trees, or
quickly behind the moving legs of unseen bearers;
dogs barked, and voices of men traveling some
mountain trail half a day's journey upward, came
floating down in fragments almost articulate.
Presently, dead ahead, the island of the old Sul-
tan Muda reared from dusky indigo its crag of
darkness.
With David's help, the truant prince hid their


154 THE TWISTED FOOT
canoe deep among bushes. Then through the
mossy lane both men stole into a deeper black-
ness, the heart of the island.
"Here's fun." Rama crouched under the
corded banyan fringe. His pessimism had van-
ished at prospect of a night's entertainment.
"Wait," he whispered grimly, "till I catch that
confounded lip-lap!"
They waited. Sounds of evening diminished
into hush of night. The banyan covert, deep as a
mine-shaft, held at the top a shimmering pallor
studded with tropic stars; at bottom, only a dense
perfume of frangipani, and a white blur where
the flowers themselves, at the grave-head across
the circle, caught the dregs of starlight. Lake,
populous valley, woods to the least tree-point,
mountains to the farthest crater, slumbered in a
universal calm. Not a paddle could strike the
water, without being heard inside this leafy mau-
soleum.
No one came. The air grew colder. Time
passed. A few light ripples disturbed the shore,
and lightly ended. Then stillness closed in,
heavier than before.
Suddenly the Sultan leaned over athwart the
gloom.
"Some one," he breathed in David's ear. "By
the tree. Quiet. I felt him."
David listened, leaning forward, and straining


THE DESSA
159
low in the draught of their own motion. Two
bronze men carried them, running with a glint
of muscles in the hurried light, as though twin
statues had sprung to life, and revived Athenian
games down a tossing aisle of bamboo shadows.
They approached, halted, and bowed low, reveal-
ing the serious brown faces of Amat and Ali.
The Sultan drew his first long breath of relief.
"Now then," he commanded cheerfully,
"home to bed!"
They followed the torches, winding upward
and steeply upward under whispering trees, in a
smooth beaten path; through plaited bamboo
gates, at last, that shone like woven gold; then
among the woodland huts and flowering fruit-
trees of a small dessa, — a village all asleep and
motionless, like a stage background.
"There's your house, Bowman," declared the
Sultan wearily. He pointed to a neat hutch of
basket-work, fresh and yellow among its tawny
neighbors. "I had it built for you this afternoon.
Good-night." He turned off, but paused. "Oh,
and I say, — my Chinese tailor's going to make
you fresh clothes overnight. Give Amat yours
for the pattern. Sleep well!"
The parting advice was easier to give than to
follow. David, stretched on a clean new cot in
his tiny chamber, lay wakeful for a long time,
staring through the open door at a band of


THE DESSA
161
fairy pink, trailed a slow procession under the
fruit-blossoms, like eastern Hours passing in a
pageant. The dessa, though quiet, had been long
awake; for all these meek brown girls, slender
and straight under head-burdens, and swaying
with the gait of goddesses, already were filing
home from some distant bazaar. They vanished,
murmuring. Naked children scampered in the
clean little street, their bellies tight-ballooned
with fatness. Nearer to hand, in the shade of a
rice-barn shaped like a cradle, two withered old
men squatted on a purple carpet of fallen jambu
petals, and held serene discourse.
"A real chief," said one proudly. "See how he
walks, there! A true prop of the old banyan, this
prince!"
"True," assented the other, squirting from
stained lips a blood-red stream of betel. "Great
are his comeliness and valor. See how all the
women leave their batik frames, to watch. So
they sing in the pantun : —
* Hang Casturi passes the door, —
The young wife runs from her husband's arms!'"
The first elder thoughtfully nodded.
"Great is youth," he replied, with smiling re-
gret. "But this prince — he cares not for the
women. His breed is the fighting breed. That
young Dato Hasan is a mere dandy, who spends


164 THE TWISTED FOOT
gloomy than a bankrupt. He had failed in his
mission; he lingered here alone, as far from its
purpose as when, on that morning in the banca,
he had first opened the silver locket; he sat a
prisoner to hospitality, bound by the whims of
this arbitrary friend, this petted monarch, who
was in no hurry. Worst of all, thought David,
even while he fumed, he liked the man.
Thus dejected, he was listening without com-
fort to the song of the bell-bird, when up beside
his veranda bobbed a neat little piebald turban,
and a keen little swarthy face, with twinkling
eyes inquisitive and friendly, like a mongoose
peering over a threshold.
"Sidin!" cried the young man, with a start of
surprise that was almost hope. "Sidin!"
It was no other. The small chamberlain from
the mountain top, smiling, competent, very much
alive and awake, bade him good-morning. The
man still wore at his waist the kriss of Her faith-
less coachman. He carried himself like one who
enjoys importance.
"What's happened, Sidin? Are you here
alone?"
"Alone, Tuan." Sidin fumbled in the folds of
his red sash. "I bring the lady's message, paper-
writing."
He pulled out a folded sheet of thin Dutch
paper. David read his own name, written in a


THE DESSA
165
hand which he had never seen before, and was
never to forget. The other words, inside, were
set to music for all time, accompanied, twined
beyond extrication, with that song pouring from
the high trees.
Dear Mr. Bowman, — You will understand
why I was so selfish, yesterday morning, as to send
you into danger. I did not think. Every scrap
from Gerald is precious to me, and I wanted
that one. I have been dreading, and hoping, to
hear once more from him. — Please forgive me.
Mrs. Hemmes and her husband appeared
here — contrary to our plans — and have per-
suaded me to turn back for a week or two at their
cinchona plantation, Batu Blah. It is beyond
the upper fork of the Arvana road, on the right-
hand branch. They both join me in hoping that
you will be able to come up and see us. We arrive
there this evening.
Sincerely yours,
Mary Arnot.
Your boy Sidin is invaluable. He brought me
here to the station quite safely, went back to dis-
cover your whereabouts, and reports that you are
in excellent hands.
Sidin appeared to be smiling, but inoffensively,
downward at his own toes.
"Where is she? What did she tell you?"


THE DESSA 169
i
"Something." Rama's curved lips pouted. He
listened in a brown study, though all the leaves
again were still. "Honest people would climb by
this path, — not break their necks. That beast of
a Regent may have sent somebody. If it's a spy
from his Kraton, we'll —"
He beckoned to Amat, who sprang on foot.
"Go see, thou." He pointed into the laurel.
The guide was gone a noticeable time. The
soft crashing of ferns and branches rose, accel-
erated, then seemed to split in twain. Half the
sound fled off, abated; half quietly returned.
Amat's face, as he slipped through the laurels
into the path, wore a look surlier than ever, yet
altered and puzzled.
"It ran, lord," he reported, with gruff submis-
sion. "I could not catch. It might be larger than a
tiger's head, what I saw. I could not tell, for the
bushes. The thing was red — red as tupai tanah."
"Lead up, then," commanded Rama curtly.
"To the pool."
They started on, without further parley. But
after a few steps, the Sultan fell back beside
David.
"Do you understand that?" he grumbled.
"" Tupai tanah. It was following, too. Something
red as a ground-squirrel ? — No more do I."
He clambered away once more, nimble and
silent, but shaking his head like a man ill pleased.


CHAPTER XIV
THE GEEEN POOL
A mingled music, like that of harps and little
bells, came dropping through the boughs. Clear, •
sweet, in perfect time, the tinkling measures
flowed on without beginning or end, doubling
and returning upon themselves as eddies wander
in a brook.
The three men, climbing a short flight of
earthen stairs, gained level ground among rasa-
mala pillars and banyans buttressed with huge
roots. The grove reared from a wide terrace,
carpeted with grass and purple violets. Deep in
shade, a low building of whitewashed stone ran
out bare flanking walls to inclose part of the
wood in a hollow square, like a compound.
By the vaulted door, an old Chinaman sat fan-
ning his stomach with a palm-leaf, smoking a
conical cigarette, and listening sagely to the
widespread chime of hidden music.
"Mandi, baba," growled Amat, wasting no
ceremony.
The slant-eyed proprietor of the bath rose,
grinned, and waved his fan to usher them down a^


THE GREEN POOL 171
flagstone passage, slit into many narrow doors
along each wall, and roofed only with sunshine
and drooping leaves.
"Here you are," announced the Sultan, point-
ing to one gap in these catacombs, and entering
its neighbor. "Amat will watch our clothes.
First man in!"
David came out, naked, with a whoop. The
Chinaman beckoned him, flourishing a towel,
from a cross corridor. Through this he ran, to
emerge, delighted, on the cement platform of the
swimming-pool.
Walled with white masonry, green hanging
vines, and flame-colored masses of hibiscus, a
deep little tarn of emerald lay still under arching
trees. Cool shadows, golden wriggles of sunlight,
swam and played in it, making mysterious designs
on a bottom of gray cobblestones worn smooth in
some mountain torrent. From close by, among
leaves, the same unending music poured quietly
into this retreat, and filled the air with a mellow
concord as of harp-strings and temple-bells.
"First man, Rama!"
David took his header, in a curve like a leaping
salmon. Bathed in cool green light, he glided
along bottom; then rose to float deliciously in the
flickering sunshine; then romped at full speed,
face under, through a glorious riot of spray.
Banyan ropes, festooned from tree to tree


172 THE TWISTED FOOT
across the pool, served as rustic swings and life-
lines. On one of these he hoisted himself, to sit
balancing, and churn the water with his legs.
Swimming in this bower, to the music of metallo-
phones and bamboo chimes, was a different sport
from swimming in the Sulu Sea, where he had
last practiced it, alone with the moon.
"Pretty stroke, Bowman, that of yours."
Rama poised on the edge of the pool, a live
statue of Mercury cast in new bronze. He
laughed, clove air and water in a single arrowy
flash, and rigid as a blade from finger to toe, shot
through the green translucency without a stroke.
"Worth coming for, isn't it?" he puffed,
swarming up beside David, like a gymnast on a
trapeze. "So glad you care about this sort of
thing." He shook the water from his eyes, and
laughed again. "You can't guess, old chap,
what it means to have good company — the kind
that will enjoy things — like you."
He plashed with his feet, smiling radiantly.
"Why," David ventured, "won't Dato
Hasan?"
"He! swim!" The naked Sultan, in making
a gesture of disdain, fell backward off the rope.
"Hasan's an ass!" he sputtered, climbing up
again and perching. "Of course he's my sword-
bearer, and all that, but — Honestly, Bowman,
you have no idea what a dull life those chaps lead


THE GREEN POOL 173
me, at home. Dull. Nothing ever happens.
Nothing!"
The banyan cable swayed with his vehemence.
From the surrounding leaves, the tranquil forest-
music chimed its interlude.
"I was made for war," he continued sadly.
"And there are no more wars."
He pondered awhile, spreading and contract-
ing his toes luxuriously in the clear water.
"If there were any" — He glanced sidelong at
his companion — "if there were, Bowman, you
might not find so much fault with — with my
courage."
"I said nothing," David protested, "I meant
nothing of that sort."
The Sultan shook his head.
"I know what you think," he retorted sor-
rowfully. "White men believe nothing. I know
many beautiful stories, many terrible stories, all
true, and all very strange. If I told you one, —
the best one, — you would laugh at me inside
yourself. I know." He looked up with a mournful
smile. "Yet I am not a liar. Neither was my
father, who told me; nor his father, who told him.
They were all princes. They would not lie, in
private matters. They were all princes, and what
you call gentlemen. Last night, by the great
Sultan Muda's grave, when the wet shadow slid
by in the dark, you had no fear, because you


174 THE TWISTED FOOT
had no knowledge or belief. Does that make me
a coward?" Rama's eye glowed suddenly, his
voice rang out with a kind of hopeless indignation.
"Am I? Because the night is filled with things
you never heard of ? — things that princes have
known from the old times, but any broker would
laugh at in Singapore, where nothing is true ex-
cept dollars and drink, whiskey and the rate of
exchange ? — Their beliefs! Chiss!"
He hung his head, and peered into the green
depths.
"I do not laugh," said David.
Rama nodded.
"No. And you showed respect, out there by
the grave." The Sultan's manner grew more
composed. "Still, you think I was afraid, of
something quite— Nevermind. These matters
are hard to explain."
The two naked truants, swinging side by side,
kicked up a thunder of foam, then watched it
subside into bubbles.
"Much too hard," David assented thought-
fully. "You know, Rama, I don't mind telling
— Well, sometimes, the less said about courage
the better."
"Ah!" his companion murmured, with a quiet
air of satisfaction. "So you will own up, too. I
was waiting. Now, this ape-foot hantu thing?
What is your idea of that?"


THE GREEN POOL 175
David, busily collecting the strands of his nar-
rative, watched the last bubble float and dissolve.
"It begins with a silver locket," he answered
slowly. "No, first I fell overboard." Thus,
fairly started, he recounted his whole adventure.
The forest orchestra played its low, tinkling ac-
companiment, as to a story told on the stage.
"Now you know as well —as well as I, almost."
Almost; David was hugging to himself the se-
cret of that reservation, when Rama gave a short,
musical laugh, and another of his glances, side-
long, up and away, quicker than the visit of a
humming-bird.
"You saw her only once ?" he chuckled. "And
even before you had seen her — oho!"
"Well?" David's tone was passably cool.
"Where's the joke?"
The Sultan's features became a study in cour-
teous gravity.
"Your body is whiter than cotton," he ob-
served, in sly approval. "Why is your face the
color of that hibiscus on the wall?"
David swung glowering, unable to retort.
"No; I can't understand," the Sultan reflected,
smiling mischief. "Here you have undergone
many troubles, and long journeys — as faithful
as Hang Tuah to his rajah. And this ape-foot
thing comes after, always, in the dark. You had
only seen the woman's picture; never heard her


176 THE TWISTED FOOT
voice, which might have been sharper than a
kite's whistle. And yet you have said to yourself,
secretly, 'All this I will do, and more; for the
woman is mine!'"
"Not at all!" cried David, with a start both of
anger and guilt. "Her man is dead. I told you,
Rama."
His tormentor laughed quietly, without mirth.
"Yes, that man is dead. You're alive." Rama
stared wistfully into the pool. "It is thus always,
brother. A man dies. His horse will whinny for
days, and paw in the stall through night after
night, and refuse grain, listening for his step.
His step, that no longer bends the grass. But
with women! Next day his woman will sit laugh-
ing, and eating sweetmeats, and buying new silks
of some box-wallah from the land of Kling. A
good friend of mine died, and his — Ah! I have
seen that, also; and it has made me sad."
"It's not so, Rama, with this girl."
"No?" The royal misogynist waved his legs,
despondent as before. "How can you tell?"
"One has only to see her."
"It may be," agreed the Sultan gloomily.
"There must be another kind, or else the old tales
and poems lie. I have never seen such a woman."
Suddenly he glanced up. "But this one, Bow-
man: suppose she could forget her dead man,
and remember only you? How then?"


THE GREEN POOL 177
"If I thought she was that kind," said David
hastily, "I should n't be here."
Metallophones and bamboo bells played their
interlude again, while the young Sultan, his
curved brows drawn together, considered this
puzzling answer.
"My thought flies one way, yours another."
He stretched out his bare arm parallel with
David's. "Look. It's the different color of our
skins. I can't understand you." Dropping his
arm, he dropped the problem also. "Never
mind. You shall have your dead man's packet,
Bowman. I 'll give it to you when we dress.
Come! Another dive!''
He hoisted both feet out of water, set them
precariously on the banyan cable, stood upright
wavering with arms outspread like a dancer on a
slack wire, ran a few steps, then clinging wildly
with both fingers and toes, fell underneath the
rope in a swing that shot David off upon the
water as flat and sprawling as a starfish.
"Come on!" laughed the Sultan. "A dive
from the trees!"
He shinned up the swaying cable, with David
in close pursuit, hand over hand. Ten feet above
the pool, a great bough forked and spread hori-
zontal between layers of sunny leafage. See-
sawing on this, the two men could look down
through chinks upon the whole inclosure of the


178 THE TWISTED FOOT
bath: the red-tiled roof of the Chinaman's quar-
ters; the cross pattern of open corridors, like
hedge-tops in a maze; the sharp edge of volcano
spur slicing up through the forest on the one
hand, slicing down on the other; and over the
opposite wall of the swimming-pool, a bamboo
platform built among trees outside, where
squatted an orchestra of little boys, — their
music now stopped, and all of them, with friendly
nods and grins, hailing the pair of naked gentle-
men perched on the bough.
"Here goes!" cried the Sultan gayly.
Joining his palms in the devotional attitude
of diving, he was about to bend forward. The
movement switched a frond of leaves across his
face. Rama brushed them away, but almost in
the same contortion snatched at them again, tot-
tered, caught hold, and saved himself from fall-
ing.
"See, Bowman! Look!" He jerked his chin
rapidly, like a snake striking, toward the roof-
less corridors of the dressing compartments. "A
man — running — on the wall! Look! He
climbed over, from outside!"
The long, pliant bough sprang with his ar-
rested motion, and swayed under them; plunging
foliage crossed and recrossed before their eyes.
As through a thicket in a gale, David caught only
a glimpse or two, in flying patches of vision; but


THE GREEN POOL 179
he seemed to see or guess the passage of some-
body, something, that bounded along the edge of
the corridors, and dropped from sight among
them.
"Rama! Clothes, our clothes! Is the
packet —?"
The Sultan nodded, as he gathered himself
again, for the downward swoop.
"Yes. Inside there. Quickly, Bowman!"
David shot from the bough in a breakneck
dive. Even as he fell, he saw Rama hurtling
through the air beside him. They bobbed up in
the same boiling circle of foam, kicked each other
in their battle for headway, and raced through
the pqol like a frantic pair of water-spaniels.
Above the hiss and welter of swimming, they
heard a brief outcry, — the voice of Amat, ring-
ing through the pent space of the corridors.
White hand and brown touched the goal to-
gether. Body to body, the swimmers heaved over
the edge of the main platform, slipped and
rolled on the warm cement, sprang afoot, and ran
stumbling into the passage-way.
"Ah!" cried the Sultan sharply, with the
gesture of a man in pain.
His exclamation resounded through that con-
finement like a note of singing, bandied from wall
to blazing wall. Both men stood dripping, before
the little cells which held their clothing. David's


180 THE TWISTED FOOT
door, Rama's door, alike remained safely closed.
But in front of them, on the flagstones, scowling
up into the hot sunlight which he would never
behold again, lay the surly, faithful guardian,
Amat. A thread of crimson showed below his
right nostril.
"It followed us," said his master, in a dull,
dogmatic voice. "Up the hill. It did follow us,
you see."
The body at their feet relaxed, with a final
movement which bore sinister resemblance to
life.
"On the head," was David's only answer.
He pointed to a loose flag that lay across the cor-
ridor, like a plate spun in a children's game. "It
was done with that."
He looked at the Sultan, the Sultan at him,
stolidly, without moving. Into the silence and
glaring heat of the passage-way, stole the happy
tinkle of "Onang-Onang," played faintly among
the trees. Amat lay supine, his sulky face turned
awry, as if the tune disturbed him in his sleep.


182 THE TWISTED FOOT
then, and then briefly, did the Sultan unfold his
mind.
"See, my friend —" He looked down, be-
tween pity and wrath, at the figure stowed so help-
lessly on a wide counterpane of violets, shaded
by rattans. "This coolie was my servant. Mine,
and faithful. Whoever it was that did this —"
Rama stopped, but his eyes burned like brown
coals. He fumbled at the collar of his tunic,
undid a button, and pulled out, in a little pour-
ing loop of bright links, the slack of a gold
chain. It dangled on his breast; while rummaging
again he felt for something under his waist-
knot.
"This," he pointed a trembling figure at
Amat's body, "comes from this." It was the
small oblong packet, twine and seals intact,
which he now held in his other hand. "I pro-
mised you, Bowman, to give it back. But light
promises break before heavy ones." Rama
tossed his head, and swept the jungle with his
eyes, challenging. In pose, in feature, and in
words, he underwent a singular transformation;
as though by stepping across an unseen line he
had left the present, receded a hundred years,
and taken on the look and habit of a warlike past.
"And now I promise that this thing shall hang
here about my neck, till I have found those who
killed my servant."


THE HIGHWAY 183
Again his slim brown fingers worked busily.
Snapping a hidden spring in the gold links, he
parted them asunder, wound the chain cunningly
in and out, round and round, under the Japan-
ese fibre, until with another snap of the clasp
the packet fell knotted securely on his breast.
"Come and take it!" he cried, strutting forth,
in game-cock bravado, to where the sun blazed
over a little clearing. He struck the suspended
token with his palm, calling aloud. "Night or
day, it is here for you! Come and take it!"
The unmoving landslide of the woods, fern,
frond, and orchid, gave back only heat and
silence. So, thought David, he himself once
shouted over against the concealing trees, and
got no answer. Even the music was still. The
Chinaman gave a nervous cackle, not under-
standing this parade.
"Bearers will come up for him," said Rama,
returning quietly, and nodding toward the sleeper
in his bed of violets. "You, Bowman, will go
down with me? We have only begun."
They scrambled down the path, through leaves
and flowers, toward the dessa, listening warily
for noises in the bush. None came, save when
now and then a bird darted off, with a quick flirt
of sound from leaf and feather, like cards shuf-
fled in a pack.
As he slid open the rear gate of the village,


186 THE TWISTED FOOT
Rama laid his own little hand on the blade,
and measured carefully its cruel grace; then gave
a quick start, and looked up in dismay.
"Death," he whispered.
Another measurement, by the same formula,
left him staring.
"It is death, Bowman. Pati, says the steel.
It comes out death, and a coffin."
By his first impulse, Rama flung down the
kriss upon a divan; by his second, he recovered
it and stood-as though gazing into the future.
"You will smile again at my courage," he
declared. "So let it stay. At least we can clean
the rust off."
On the table stood a bowl heaped with fruit.
The Sultan took a pineapple, stabbed it through
and through, then with a red silk scarf wiped
the juice from the blade.
"Let it be so. Death." Sheathing the unlucky
weapon, he poked it under his sash, in front.
"Now tiffin." He clapped his hands for a servant.
"And after tiffin, we go to show ourselves, where
men may see what hangs about my neck."
While they ate, the fitful rain of the tropics
darkened all the place, filling the air like a down-
pour of black sand, and splashing white among
the leaves. The sun blazed again, as though
switched on all at once. And when David and
the Sultan passed through the dessa gate, to


188 THE TWISTED FOOT
below, romped in the torrent, swam and dove, or,
in the washing-pools, flogged the boulders with
colored specks of cloth. The afternoon was like
spring, fresh and warm; a pleasant haze every-
where teased the eye to linger in space; and
round the encircling volcanoes — engraved to
their peaks in fine lines of tillage, or tossing and
sweeping, farther off, as sharp billows of misty
blue — nothing moved but a cloud-shadow trail-
ing from slope to slope its thunderous indigo
blot, or boys' kites darting and tumbling like
white pigeons, or a dazzling ostrich plume of
crater-smoke, that puffed up, stretched into a
horizontal wisp, grew cinder-black along its
lower edge, and slowly dissolved. Nearer to
hand, the sides of the valley climbed up gradatim
from the muddy river, terrace on rice-field ter-
race, each turf-topped cloison of bank holding
the blue sky and gleaming clouds reflected, and
spouting to its lower neighbor a bright runnel, so
that a multitudinous tinkle of water filled the
landscape unceasingly.
"Our man is not there," grumbled the Sultan,
as from time to time footsteps pattered in the
highway.
No one passed but hill-men on quiet errands.
Now and then, a girl in pale kabaia glided meekly
up or down the road, swaying like a flower on
the stalk. Men, skirted in decent colors, halted,


190 THE TWISTED FOOT
road, travelers of a different sort went past, at
intervals: some tired ploughman, shouldering his
frail, crooked plough, and leading his buffalo, a
clay-blue monster tied through the nostrils with a
yellow withe; or filing wearily up the slope, mus-
cular matrons, their feet and hands mud-painted
from the transplanting of young paddy.
All these passed in review; evening crept up-
ward from the valley; and David might hope
that now the Sultan had run out the full tether of
his patience.
"Dateng lihat! Dateng lihat /" crooned a
voice near by, ascending. "Ini malem! Ini
malem /" The words rose gently and musically,
like an invocation. "Come see! Come see! This
evening!"
Over the brink of the highway climbed three
young men dressed as for holiday, slim and
supple, close interlocked in friendship, with arms
twined about shoulders. The youth in the middle
could read; for it was he who chanted slowly,
while his companions bent wondering eyes upon
a green-paper scroll which he bore and studied.
"Dateng lihat ! — De Paris Cinematograph!"
sang the youthful scholar. "Gambar idup jang
paling besar, jang paling bam di Azia Timur!
Pake Lampu Electrik 1"
"But that cannot be!" scoffed one of his un-
lettered mates. "Pictures that live? No, no! I


THE HIGHWAY 191
have seen the Horse-Comedy in a tent, with
tigers, elephants, and painted men tumbling to
brass music. And as for lamps, Aladdin could
summon djinns! That I know. But pictures
cannot live! This paper lies, for money!"
The trio halted in the road, to argue.
"May I have a goitre, but they do live!"
bawled the reader at last. He shook the green
paper fiercely, and plucked the loose skin of his
throat, in asseveration. "May I have a goitre, if
this is not true! It is not a lie, neither magic.
They come and go like wayang acting plays on a
screen!"
His opponent caught sight of David and the
Sultan watching them from under the rattans.
"The gentlemen! Leave it to our lords the
gentlemen! They know all things."
The three mountaineers crossed the road and
louted low.
"Is it not true, my lords," implored the reader,
"that by virtue of your wisdom living men and
women appear from the bowels of a lamp, and
perform most wonderful and silly deeds? Is
there not a Comedy of the Electric Lamp?"
The Sultan returned an equivocal nod, like a
wayside cadi who would not bestow judgment
rashly.
"Give me the printed paper," he answered.
"Let me read the words."
«


192 THE TWISTED FOOT
■
It was the programme for a show of moving
pictures, of which the glory was set forth in elo-
quent Malay. Wonder followed wonder, through
ten divisions of fine print: from Number One,
Kabakaran, the House on Fire, with the Smiting
of the Tong-Tong, and the Arrival of the Pump
Profession, to Number Ten, Dansa Nama de
Cake Walk. The comedy would be performed
that evening in a spacious tent, at the Fork of the
Roads near Batu Blah.
"All this is possible," pronounced the Sultan
gravely. "I have seen such doings."
The young mountaineers bowed a graceful
sembah, gave thanks in quiet chorus, and with-
drew. As they climbed, the words of the scholar
floated down, exulting over ignorance.
"We shall see all," he declared, in triumph;
"all, as the paper promises. And brass music in a
great tent, like the tent of your Horse-Comedy;
and all the people from nine villages; and many
booths with lanterns under the trees, and eatings
going forward, and drinkings!"
Their forms and voices vanished among the
steep trees.
"It is a sign." From watching thoughtfully
the sunset hills, Rama rose to his feet. "We shall
go up to this tent. All the people from round
about shall see us there."
He started forward. The spectacle of the sun,


THE HIGHWAY
193
a fiery disk wheeling daintily down the hot rim of
a western spur, checked him as with a sudden
reminder.
"Wait a bit, Bowman. I forgot my prayers last
night. See. It's just as the Koran says: 'The
long shadows fall prostrate, praising God, morn-
ing and evening.'" He faced the departing light,
and instantly, alone with his faith, began his
solemn reverences, — now standing erect, now
bending with hands on knees, now crouching to
lay his forehead on the ground. He whispered
fervently. "Allah, the great, the merciful and
loving-kind, King of the Judgment Day. . . ."
The sun went down. Night filled the valley and
ran brimming over the high ravines. In the rice-
field terraces, thousands of fireflies hovered like
ineffectual sparks, and on the nearest pools,
winked among paddy-blades, and were tenderly
reflected in the water.
At last the Sultan rose, a shadowy figure in the
gloom.
"It is time to follow," he said.
Up a winding ribbon of gray, less and less
vague under increasing starlight, the two men
marched toward the upper crossways, and the
Comedy of the Electric Lamp.


CHAPTER XVI
LAMP-COMEDY
The road ascended by cranks, and double turns,
_ and sweeping arcs. It plunged through central
darkness in the angle of a wooded ravine; or lift-
ing a sharp curved sabre of lava-crest, high over
black treetops, it let the travelers cross the bare
heavens on a bridge, with nothing below either
hand but a field of stars, — as though the world
were set up edgewise.
"Night is our friend," declared the Sultan,
waving an arm toward the starry gulf. "We shall
reach the end of our desires, Bowman, before
morning. I feel that. It has come strong inside
me. The kriss of Mataram has death on its
point. We shall know that riddle, also. The
night is good."
He marched on, his spirits evidently rising
from level to level, with the altitude. David,
meanwhile, made a skeptical follower: the con-
stellations round about, the scented darkness
below, held no presages for him; his own kriss,
tucked under his armpit, was an incumbrance
which, but for politeness, he would gladly have


LAMP-COMEDY 195
tossed away; and trudging behind his companion,
he smiled to see how powerfully the prospect of a
little fun could operate. The Sultan still might
talk revenge as loftily as he chose, and climb with
Tarquin's ravishing strides; but what now drew
him so cheerfully up the mountain was — for a
good guess — nothing more than the Comedy of
the Lamp.
"Punch and Judy," thought David. "A boy
on circus day!"
He himself would not grumble; of the cross-
ways up there, one was the right road, the road
to Batu Blah.
And now, wherever the black mountain but-
tresses heaved against the stars, came little hu-
man lights which traveled up or down, blinking
among trees or bobbing in furrowed fields, but
all converging toward one region of the night.
Voices called. Neighbors chatted with neigh-
bors, in separate rills of talk that flowed together,
single files of gossip that joined and advanced,
like the moving lamps, in one direction. From
hidden paths alongside, small men and women
rose out of a bush or slid down a bank into the
highway; paused, group by group, to light their
torch of bamboo slivers; then climbed onward
in a growing procession.
Under this escort David and Rama came to
the Fork of the Roads.


196 THE TWISTED FOOT
It was here the torches had gathered, and still
came trooping. Fringed with pendent boughs,
a cavernous white tent glimmered softly, like a
shapeless balloon with fire in its belly. Round
it, a crowded camp was already springing up, —
lighted booths for the hungry, surrounded by
pleasant fumes of rice and sawah fish a-cooking;
lighted counters for the thirsty, with candle-
flame refracted through red and yellow bottles
of sherbet; an instantaneous bazaar of colored
sarongs, hanging on lines from tree to tree, like
rich arras in a wood; and humbler shops on tres-
tled boards, where home-made cigarettes lay
next to sugared tamarinds, and Swedish matches
among plough-points fresh from the forge, like
devils' hoofs all in a row. The delta between the
roads had become a colony, busy as Dido's bee-
hive, but quieter, and happier.
"Ah! How good it smells!" sighed Rama,
sniffing the aroma from sago-wrapped tobacco,
and spiced cookery, and areca juice, and trodden
grass. "Ah, how good! And how Hasan, that
she-ass belonging to Satan, would pinch his nose
at it!" He slipped his arm through David's,
and loitered in the loitering crowd. "Thank
your prophet, Bowman, we gave Hasan the slip,
and all his kind!"
He wriggled forward, murmuring courtesies
to clear the way, and gained places for both of


200 THE TWISTED FOOT
nozzle of the machine, to study this living magic
at the source; in part because, at every sound
outside the open door, he strained both eye and
ear for movements of travel on the highway; in
part because there crept over him that gradual
unrest which comes, or seems to come, from
being watched by a person unknown and un-
discoverable, in a crowd. He caught himself
peeping at his neighbors, and fidgeting.
"Rama," he leaned across, to whisper; "Rama,
when you stood up then, — what was it?"
The Sultan could not take his eyes from the
shivering gray light on the screen. A nervous
Parisian bridegroom there, dressed for his wed-
ding, now ran at top speed through fragments of
suburban and rural scenery, leading a furious
pack of shopkeepers, peasants, garbage-men,
gendarmes, dogs, and fat women, to the Inevi-
table Catastrophe in a duck-pond.
"When I stood up? Oh, yes," came the an-
swer. Rama nodded impatiently toward his
left shoulder. "Over there — clear over — by
the canvas. Your friend the stable parrot. He
saw us. It's all right."
David looked sharply along the row. They
themselves were visible enough, in the stray
gleam from a lamp outdoors. The shimmering
screen, also, threw reflections that revealed a
few dusky faces near by. But elsewhere, the ,


202 THE TWISTED FOOT
skirts. She tossed her head with a flounce of
amazingly yellow hair, raised a powerful voice,
and began to sing.
"What action!'' whispered Rama. "Look, by
Jove! What an action that girl has!"
It was the lady of the anonymous hotel at
Sourabaya, the daughter of music and tempera-
ment, Miss Mary Naves. Prancing like a filly,
she crossed and recrossed the lighted circle, her
body swaying backward at a ridiculous angle, her
feet climbing as on a treadmill, her hands flap-
ping loosely to the rhythm of brass music. Back
and forth she went, singing loudly, — a vivid
carnival figure in scarlet, black, and yellow.
"What energy!" exclaimed the Sultan, again
and again. "What action! My word, what an
action! It beats the gee-gees, eh?" He nodded,
approving critically. "Her hair is bright as new
hemp. I say, Bowman, is your young lady any-
thing like her?"
The audience did not share his delight. They
watched the dancer with a sedate pity, like men
long schooled in the traditions not only of music
but of grace in women; and when Miss Naves
had cut her highest caper, run trippingly from
the platform, and disappeared behind the cur-
tain, all hands rose in silence to file out. The
foreign artist had won a few tolerant grins, but
nothing more.
t i


204 THE TWISTED FOOT
no hurry." The Sultan turned away, sighing.
"Should like to see that girl, though, close to."
Poor Mary Naves could ill spare any such bits
of admiration. Fate, at that moment, was dealing
her a measure of something else. The Australian,
carrying a lantern, had slouched behind the white
screen.
"Crying, are you?" he snarled. "Well, you
got the right! You got the right to cry!"
A new kind of Living Comedy flickered, black
and magnified, on the deserted theatre, — an
after-piece more simple, direct, and real than any
which had played by invention. The Austra-
lian's lean and hulking silhouette overtopped the
sheet. Below, another shadow sprang into place,
— the likeness of Mary Naves, who sat with her
head propped in her hands, and wept.
"You know why, too!" rose the spiteful voice
of her master. "They all saw it, an' so did I, an'
so did you! What in God's world ever tempted
me to hire — An' every night the same! Why,
you know what you are? You 're a failure!
Rank. That's What!" He broke into loud and
virulent oaths. "Voice? About as much as a
More-pork! Go on, cry—"
The shadow of Mary Naves made no reply,
but cowered somewhat lower, and shook some-
what more than the guttering lantern warranted.
"Cry! Y' ought to, you —"


LAMP-COMEDY 209
"Ah!" He loosed a great breath, as though
relieved from pressure; and gripping David's
hand secretly, "Bowman," he whispered, "it is
true! The old tales and poems do not lie!"
There was no time to ask his meaning. White
man and Malay stood side by side, admiring her
together, when suddenly past them ran a tall
woman in white, headlong for the centre of the
group.
"O lady, lady!" wailed poor Mary Naves,
flinging her big arms helplessly over the bridle-
rein, and mingling her hemp-colored hair with
the bay locks of the pony, "O Miss Arnot, you
was good to me aboard ship! You 're a wo-
wo-woman!" The mane stifled her blubbering.
"You can help me! Can't you? Can't you? I
want to go home, and I ain't got any!"
The other Mary, dismissing her own troubles,
bent over this lowly namesake. They two had
withdrawn, apart and alone, like Rama at his
evening prayers. The rude glow of the lanterns,
tossed upward from beneath, showed David
more than he had guessed, even at the outset.
The girl's face above him was the face in the
silver locket, not only alive, but endowed with
the further life of pity and sisterhood.


CHAPTER XVII
BATU BLAH
The planter's wife backed her little Timor mare
alongside, to give that reinforcement which wo-
man has ready for woman. They held a con-
clave in the open road, with no men admitted.
The bright-haired fugitive told her story, dolorous
bit by bit, through the pony's mane.
"Poor thing!" The matron's voice escaped
their privacy. "No . . . Quite right, Mary dear
. . . No: we can't leave her in such . . . Why,
of course!"
Miss Amot laid her hand on the other Mary's
shoulder, and sat thinking. Her eyes lighted;
a whimsical smile played about them, and trem-
bled at her lips. David knew that smile as well
as though he had seen it before. She spoke, —
at some length, but in what manner he could not
hear. Mrs. Hemmes made a quick gesture of
surprise, laughed once outright, and shook with
silent mirth.
"But seriously," continued the girl, "I do
need one. Chatra forced me to dismiss her . . .
And in this way, at least to Singapore . . ."


212 THE TWISTED FOOT
"O Mary, my dear," laughed his wife. "What
next? A parable: I've seen a parable acted! Do
you always pick your servants out of byways and
hedges?"
Miss Arnot could parry questions, not without
skill.
"No," she retorted slyly. "Chatra came re-
commended by you, Kate. This poor silly thing
is quite honest. We talked, on board ship."
Hemmes cantered back, presently, with the
blonde Amazon skipping beside his pony.
"All settled. Come on!" he cried gayly. The
little squadron started up-hill once more, the
lantern-coolies ahead, Miss Naves between the
two horsewomen, Rama and David marching
as rear-guard. The stalwart proprietor of Batu
Blah rode alongside, in high spirits.
"My word, we frightened the accordeon fel-
low!" he proclaimed. "What do you suppose,
Kate? That man in the tent was old Shypoo
Anderson, no less! Used to hang round Cossack,
in the eighties, — my bachelor days. Hardest
case on the beach; always beast-o, he was, un-
commonly beast-o, even for Cossack. What?
Just now? No, he gave us no trouble. I knew
him too well. Badly wanted, in too many towns.
Old Shypoo Anderson!"
The big planter laughed, like a man sharply
reminded of other days, — of the rough days


BATU BLAH
213
when he was younger, lighter in the saddle,
handier with ropes and oars. While the company
climbed, horse and foot, he beguiled their way
with tales and memories; for this bulky married
man, it seemed, had been a rover among tropic
islands, and still carried in his head queer ports
and forsaken harbors, as a citizen carries the
names of familiar streets.
"Shypoo Anderson! How much a man for-
gets!" he lamented. "And Tin-ribs, and Don-
garra, and the smell of Peed's store!" His talk,
now fairly turned loose, went ranging among old
times and odd places, — east and west from
the Maldives to Christmas, north and south from
Macquarie to "Eight-Piecee-Hill" of the Lu-
Chus. A chance word from David brought him
quickly back to the rear. "Philippines, did
you say, Mr. Bowman? Why, then you must
know . . ."
Thus, chatting steadily, he marshaled them
past the tall Split Rock which gave its name to
his plantation, and up a carriage-road winding
under dark cinchonas. A stone bungalow, white-
washed, and lighted by small veranda lamps,
glimmered before them like a frosted birthday
cake of Doric outlines. The troop swung round
the back-nets of a tennis-court, rode through
a dense and spacious flower-garden, and halted
at the veranda.


BATU BLAH
215
Miss Arnot looked a good deal puzzled.
"I don't quite follow."
"I mean," said the Sultan, — and he lifted
the packet by its gold chain, — "you never
asked me why. You thought, and said, 'Keep
it.' You honored a stranger; and suddenly,—
that is double honor."
She laughed, and put the compliment aside,
motioning toward his chair.
"A man's face often speaks for him, Tuan
Rama."
"It may be." He sat down, beside David; and
for a time, smiling and meditating, looked out
across the vague epaulment of garden flowers,
to where the heat-lightning fluttered the clouds
above the plains. "It may be. Yet there's
something more. And what? It is hard to say
— hard. See: it is thus. A butterfly hawk —
very tiny — flies, very quick, from one tree to
another tree. What man will take a pen, and
draw you the line that bird has drawn? Or what
strong man will break that line? The bird spun
it, of air. It is a thing done, forever. An act.
Stronger than iron, but not seen at all. So be-
tween souls . . ."
Rama's voice, gentle and persuading, trailed
off into silence. His brown hand, groping before
him as for some word at the finger-tips, dropped
into his lap.


218 THE TWISTED FOOT
Perak's name. He was marching among ten
thousand men. But the rajah's daughter took
the single blossom from her hair, and tossed it
down to him — to him alone. And Perak, catch-
ing it, marched on. — That is all my story."
The speaker leaned back in his chair, but
watched Miss Arnot eagerly, with wide, serious
eyes. David watched also. The lamplight
touched her hair in bronze gleams, powdery
specks of radiance, like the sunshine motes in a
darkened room. She sat looking out from the
veranda, thoughtfully. Over a dark fringe of
cinchonas, the clouds came rolling up, now and
then blanched by the warm lightning, that struck
through them as through ragged paper-lanterns.
Thunder had been grumbling in the plains; and
now a nearer burst of it came shuddering up
the ravine, like surf crashing into a split pro-
montory.
"I think," said Mary Arnot, when the sound
rolled aside, "I think I understand you, Tuan
Rama." Turning, she met his eyes; her own,
dark blue and lighted from within, answered him
frankly and freely. "Your story makes me very
proud, and very glad. If I could show you that I
understand—" She paused, recalling something.
A fine color flushed in her cheeks. "Will this
help, in part? We, in our tongue, have a poet
who tells us — how is it, again ? —


220 THE TWISTED FOOT/
friendly, but there was trouble in it, and altera-
tion. "Thank you, Mr. Bowman; and you, Tuan
Rama. — Yes, Kate, I 'm coming." She drew
back, as Mrs. Hemmes arrived. "Good-night!"
The two women had hardly disappeared into
the house, when the clouds, rolling up from the
plains, carried the breastwork of cinchona tops,
and swept overhead. Thunder shook the whole
plantation; the air became a subtle white flame,
quivering everywhere, and showing all the leaves
a brilliant green, all the garden flowers motionless,
bright red and vivid white. Then in blinding
darkness, without wind, a few heavy drops of rain
spat on the driveway and the steps.
"Shower's coming," said David, gruffly.
"Let's to quarters."
In the bachelors' wing, a low, detached build-
ing on the right, their veranda lamps burned
under a trellis or pergola. Toward this the two
friends ran, pelted with multiplying drops.
Once in shelter between the lamps, Rama
broke out laughing, quietly. The rain had
streaked his face like tears, and beaded the links
of his chain with pendants brighter than glass.
"Not to her!" he panted, holding David's arm.
"Not to her! Don't try, my dear chap." His big
eyes danced in shrewd and sober mockery. "You
cannot talk to women! You have a heart of gold,
but the brains of a buffalo!"


CHAPTER XVIII
AMOK
David, by no means in such high feather, flung
his borrowed kriss clattering on the table.
"I dare say they're not very good," he growled.
"What?" laughed Rama. "What are not?"
"My brains," came the surly answer. "But
they let me see one thing plain enough."
"Really?" mocked the Sultan. "And what
is that?"
David looked down, askance, at the gold chain,
the bright beads of water, and the packet.
"That thing," he replied.
"Oh, this?" Rama dandled the necklace,
proudly. "It's all right, dear chap. She said so.
Don't fret. We understand each other, that girl
and I."
David wheeled short, and began a little sentry-
go up and down the veranda. As he paced, the
lightning came and went in unequal flashes, that
turned the flame of the lamp to a colorless smoke,
and the projecting vines of the trellis, outside,
to a sharp black network aching on the retina.
Rama suddenly blocked the way.


AMOK
223
rounded them into a droll circle — a grimace
that in every line spelled amazement and chagrin.
"I never thought of it!" he declared. "You're
right, very right. I never thought." He stared at
the lamp, discomfited. "You people always put
the women first, don't you? I forgot."
David made no reply.
"We can watch," the culprit suggested lamely.
"We must watch, all night."
The two men regarded each other silently,
with the same queer look of concern, of an anxiety
to which neither of them could put a name. Each
waited for the other to speak, and then, turn-
ing irresolutely to the edge of their little cloister,
stood looking out into the rain. The night held
but one sound, the sound of water: an immense
continual splashing, mixed with a clean quick spat-
ter among the leaves of the jutting trellis. Flash
followed flash, now separate, now slurred into
a long, throbbing unity of brilliance, as though
some reckless child were playing with all the
lights of the world. The great raindrops, fall-
ing perpendicular, glittered like steel bullets, or
hopped upon the ground as white and lively as
hail. The reddish floor of the tennis-court, the
gray lines cutting it into squares, every wire in
the mesh of the back stop-nets, shivered out with,
unearthly prominence. Colors glowed: the green
enamel of dripping leaves; the pink rose-petal


224 THE TWISTED FOOT
of a folded cloud; the sky, in rents and patches,
midsummer blue. Darkness erased all these, —
no common darkness, but something final and
savage, like the loss of sight forever. Thunder
followed, as if numberless hawsers were parting
all at once, and colossal planks cracking into
splinters. Then, quickly as it had come, the
storm swept up the mountain and away. Stars,
brightly washed, glittered above the cinchonas.
The last departing flash lighted the last of the
rain.
"Did you see ?" David laid his hand on Rama's
arm. Both men leaned out from the veranda steps.
Some one had appeared for an instant; some
one in white, running toward them, through a
shower like Danae's turned to silver. This per-
son arrived in a hurry, splashing through puddles.
"Mr. Bowman!" came a breathless whisper.
"Mr. Bowman!"
The runner had stopped.
"Here!" called David. "What is it?"
Under the trellis and up the steps fluttered
Mary Naves, clutching her garments about her.
Rain had darkened the yellow hair, and beaten
it profusely. The lamps — dull from the recent
excess of light — disclosed a face whiter than
her dress.
She looked straight at David, catching her
breath, and nodding as if he already understood.


226 THE TWISTED FOOT
He moved across, and stood beside Mary
Naves.
"Where is it now ?" he asked, in a grave, con-
siderate voice. "Which way did it go, this face
in the red cloth?"
The trembling messenger roused herself, to
wave one hand vaguely.
"Behind the house. Round the house, be-
hind."
Rama beckoned to David, with an air of
command.
"Take your weapon, there. Blow out the
lamps."
Leaving the bachelors' wing in darkness, they
cleared the props of the trellis, crossed the drive-
way, clung to the grass borders and the deeper
shadow of the garden, and thus ran silently
toward the bungalow. Great stars burned over-
head, in all quarters of heaven. Water still
gushed from spouts and channels, but with di-
minishing noises-. The night was clear, the air
cold and nipping.
They skirted the main veranda, now dark as
a tunnel, except where the upper halves of three
farthest windows glowed above their black
screens. To David, as he and his leader stole
by the first of these, it was strange and startling
to hear Mr. Hemmes's jovial voice inside his
room.


AMOK
227
"Good to be home again, is n't it, Kate?" A
yawn followed this domestic sentiment. "I must
go, presently, and see the bachelors are all stowed
comfy, I suppose."
The bachelors won past without detection.
Like a burglar reconnoitring, with every sense
at full stretch, David caught a fluttering sound
behind him. He turned. Mary Naves tagged at
heel, wringing her hands like a dim and stalwart
Lady Macbeth.
"Go back!" he whispered fiercely. "Go
back! We can't have you —"
"I don't dare to," she wailed. "I can't stay —
in the dark."
David took her hand quietly.
"Is that Miss Arnot's room?" He pointed his
kriss at the middle square of orange light. "Is
her door locked? And yours the next ? — Good!
— Now, do you care anything about her?"
The girl sobbed out something incoherent, but
nodded vigorously.
"Then go inside your room, and listen. Either
you don't care — a straw — or else go! Watch
by your front window, there. If anybody comes
but us, call for Mr. Hemmes. Go, I tell you!"
The poor Amazon gathered all her forces, and
made for the veranda, casting many a fearful
glance behind her into the gloom.
Racing through wet grass and shallow puddles,


228 THE TWISTED FOOT
David overtook the Sultan round the corner of
the bungalow. They now advanced by starlight
only, and with increasing caution at every step,
their hearing so confused by the widespread
trickle of waters draining off the mountain-side,
that constantly they stopped and listened to
imaginary footfalls. On their left hand loomed
the whitewashed bungalow, glimmering faint
and unsubstantial as a cloud. For fear of being
seen on this background, they kept a good offing.
"Behind the house," their frightened spy had
said; but when at last, creeping quickly from
bush to bush, they had outflanked the rear ver-
anda, they found themselves the only prowling
shadows there. The back of the building showed
as another dark, pillared corridor; and though a
line of darker upright forms stood along it, like
posted sentinels, these gradually resolved them-
selves into nothing more dreadful than the back
doors of room after room, all safely shut.
Down this long line Rama flitted confidently,
his bare feet making no sound on the wet earth.
David, in boots, labored to maintain both equal
pace and equal silence.
They had crossed a tiled walk which joined the
rear veranda to some outlying kitchen, and had
run almost the whole length of the bungalow,
when suddenly both stopped, colliding in the
darkness.


230 THE TWISTED FOOT
ground felt sopping under hands and knees, the
air bitterly cold.
"Quiet!" whispered his companion. "Some-
thing else comes."
A slow tread, softly crunching the wet sand in
the driveway, drew toward them from the main
bungalow. It stopped. Some yards off, a large
white figure halted. Mr. Justus Hemmes had
evidently come to bid his bachelors good-night,
and found their lamps put out; for a moment
later the white bulk moved away, the footsteps
departed. In deep bass notes, like the drone of a
good-natured bumble-bee, the planter hummed
an air as he went back to his wife. He would re-
port all quiet.
"Now!" whispered Rama, with fiery satisfac-
tion. "Now we have it to ourselves."
As the minutes lagged by, this opinion seemed
literally true. The veranda before them, over-
hung by the trellis, showed black and impene-
trable as the face of a rock; and yet, had any-
thing moved never so lightly inside, the watchers
would have known. So, at least, thought David;
for now that all the little noises of draining water
had passed away, and left only a crisp, irregular
dripping among the trees, he felt no other change
in the stillness roundabout. Muscles in arm and
shoulder began to ache, from their cramping in
the long suspense.


232 THE TWISTED FOOT
rushed together in a knot. He plunged at random,
caught a naked arm, and threw one man clear of
the scrimmage. As he did so, the other two stag-
gered apart, and began a singular dance, face to
face, dodging each other.
"Keep off! Keep off!" panted Rama's voice.
"Don't come between! Take your own —Amok,
amok!"
The cry ended in a hurried clash and grat-
ing, as when a carver whets knife on steel. The
dancers had wheeled close, and jumped asunder.
David obeyed the voice, turned to meet the
fresh onslaught of the man he had flung aside.
From the gray stripe of the service-line, a sprawl-
ing black shape recoiled and came at him. He
had time to see this rise off the ground; to pull
the scabbarded kriss from his armpit, to draw, to
balance it in his hand; but also, and as a lifelong
wonder, to find that no white man could use any
such weapon. He tossed it away, and welcomed
his enemy with bare fists.
He delivered a clean blow, acknowledged by a
grunt. But a sting under the left ear told him
that something sharp had missed his throat, and
that the outcome lay between boxer and fencer.
David laughed, and caught a glimpse of the tropic
stars. It had never entered any dream, that he
should fight for dear life on a tennis-court.
His man returned, ready, but circling wide.


AMOK
233
David kept his guard partly by shadow, partly
by the dim whiteness of a breech-clout. This flew
toward him, low and wriggling. He struck out
with all his might, felt a hot pain slice along his
forearm, and heard, rather than saw, a solid
body fall at his feet.
He was not surprised that it lay there without
moving; for his fist had gone home at full swing,
and was numb from the shock.
Behind him, the whetting and grating had
stopped. A sick man lay on the ground, and
coughed.
"Oh, the good fight!" Rama was chanting, in
ecstasy. "Oh, the good fight!"
As David turned, he saw a light coming swiftly
toward them from the bungalow.
"What's wrong, gentlemen ?" sounded the deep
voice of Mr. Hemmes. He carried a small tin
lamp in one hand, and with the other shaded his
eyes. "I thought you were both in bed. What's
happened?"
Suddenly there was no more coughing.
"I don't know," said David. "Fetch your
lamp, and see."
The planter crossed the court, and bending,
brought his forehead below the lamp, so that he
had the air of a stout miner dressed in white
pajamas. He peered about him, then puckered
his lips for a mute whistle.


AMOK
235
practiced eye. "And the bleached hair — see!
The brute's done a lot of diving somewhere, in
salt water. Used to see 'em like that, down on
the Northwest pearl-banks, in my old shelling
days. But here — how did he get here?"
As the big man knit his brows over this puz-
zle, the updrawn knee fell toppling sidewise, in
a lax movement which cast the whole leg free of
shadows.
"And that!" growled the planter.
David and Rama glanced at each other, but
did not speak.
The brown foot, thus exposed, was like some
relic of torture, — a broad, splay thing, with the
great toe wrenched over at right angles.
"Fa-wing," said Hemmes, nodding as at a
familiar sight. "I'd forgotten the word. Fa-
wing. Many a slippery clay path that beggar's
climbed, in the rains, to grow such an ugly claw.
Has n't he, though?"
Brief silence fell.
"A sad, empty doing." The Sultan spoke to
himself, in the quiet music of his own language.
He drew a long breath, wearily, and let the
Mataram kriss drop unregarded to the ground.
"This ape-foot man assaulted bravely. And
for me, Sikander of the Two Horns never made
a fight so beautiful. Not a scratch on my body.
And yet —" He raised his eyes mournfully.


236 THE TWISTED FOOT
They were red, heavy, and sated. "Yet I have
no pleasure to look on this. No, none."
The burly Mr. Hemmes frowned at him
shrewdly; then at David, like one who desired
much information, and that right soon.
"I 'll tell you," stammered the young man
weakly. Tired to the bone, aching at every joint,
he shivered in the raw night air. "Come see my
man, first."
On the way, they passed a gold chain shin-
ing among the scars of many footprints; but
no one stooped then to pick it from the mud.
They crossed — the planter shielding his lamp —
toward where a second figure lay crucifixion-wise
in one corner of a service-court.
"A white man?" cried Rama; and then, an-
swering himself, — " Almost."
This body, stripped to the loin-band, gleamed
as wet as the other. Except for one red bruise
from cheek-bone to ear, it was of a pale yellow
brown, the true half-breed color.
"Your stable parrot."
And seeing it lie there naked, David saw for
the first time how Rosario's cropped head and
coarse, humorous mouth were those, also, of the
pale man who had steered the banca. Even
now, he saw it only by hard work. Stupid: he
laughed out loud, queerly and thickly.
"I hit him with my fist," he said, in a slurring


AMOK
237
voice that he had not intended. "Could n't use
your knife, old fellow. Not fair, that way. Only
took my fist, and — and I hit him — and some-
thing got stuck in my arm, I think —"
He wondered why the big proprietor of Batu
Blah should catch at him so roughly. It hurt his
arm. Dizzy with pain and resentment, he shook
the man off, only to see him set down his lamp
in the mud, and take hold again with both hands.
"Help me get his coat off, Tuan Rama. By
Jove, there's a mess for you! Handkerchief in
his pockets? Good." Mr. Hemmes gave orders
in a brisk undertone. "Right round, under the
shoulder. Tight. More yet. Twist, hard. Now
get him to the house."
David felt himself raised and carried like a
feather. Had his legs only reached the ground,
he would have balked. They ought to reach;
they were infinitely long, his feet excessively light
and distant. He wanted to say something.
"Slipped ?" a voice grumbled. "Set him down.
Twist it harder. Never mind if it smarts, my
boy."
At last he could dig both heels into the mud,
at the edge of the tennis-court. He struggled
feebly to go back, like a dazed man dragged
away from football.
"The chain, Rama," he stuttered. "The gold
chain. By the lamp."


238 THE TWISTED FOOT
"Oh, yes," came the answer. "I 'll get it. Wait
a bit."
The lamp spread a forlorn radiance, like a
solitary candle set on the floor of an immense
hall. The Sultan ran toward it, bent over it,
searched rapidly about.
"Not here," he called, in a tone of distress.
"Did you take it, Mr. Hemmes? It's not here.
Look!"
He straightened up, and stood pointing at the
ground.
Both service-courts lay bare in the lamplight.
The body of David's antagonist was gone.


CHAPTER XIX
THE PACKET
The chill had left the morning air. A delicate
vernal sunshine brightened the mountain peaks,
and softened, for mile on downward mile, the
green map of the plains unrolled in far perspec-
tive. It was that time of day when lizards, like
bronze ornaments quickened into life, crawl out
to sun themselves and catch the earliest flies.
In a veranda chair, David lay dozing. A vol-
uminous white and blue kimono, buift to cover
Justus Hemmes, furnished a drapery more than
ample for him, bandages and all. Not to stir,
had been his orders for the day.
"I don't want to," he thought sleepily.
Through his lashes, he could watch the blue
mountains, ridged with sunlight, and full of
crinkled shadows. This was effort enough; this,
with now and then a lazy roving of the eyes, to
search along the blossoming garden. At its far
end, beside the graceful shaft of a lakka tree,
David could follow the shining of Mary Arnot's
hair, as she bent among the flowers.
"No: this is good." He shut his eyes again.


240 THE TWISTED FOOT
What was it, somewhere, about another girl
doing that, — "herself a fairer flower"?
The only sounds, in all the wide morning, were
drowsy and comfortable. A mountaineer, idling
down some distant path, trailed his high, waver-
ing song like a filament of sorrow. Coolies, who
passed in the road, hailed one another musically,
or groaned out a patient "AH' il Allah," as they
shifted a piculan-burden wearily, to shoulder it
afresh.
This lofty garden was very peaceful. To lie
there motionless, with closed eyes, and a flutter
of warm breeze upon the face, gave a curiously
tranquil sense of being carried on the unbreath-
ing bosom of the mountain. And yet, while
David's body rested, his mind could not sink
back at ease. He lay thinking more and more
of another quiet place, where, as now, he had
touched the bottom of exhaustion. Pictures
thronged his memory, pictures and sounds: the
lighted hut in the cocoanut grove, with breakers
roaring far out as they charged the reef; the mes-
senger crawling under the floor, and his brown
arm rising like a snake; the smell of hot sealing-
wax, the scratching of an arrested pen, the silver
locket and the cover of "Punch" that lay beside
a streaming candle. All these, and more, dis-
tressed him with their new reality; but nothing so
much, as to perceive how utterly his chief errand


246 THE TWISTED FOOT
her sake; now for his friend's, — "Tuan Rama
left this with me, to give you."
She leaned across and took the packet, with-
out replying; then sat very still, her dark blue
eyes cast downward at it, in preoccupation. As
though compelled to act now or not at all, she
slipped the Japanese twine from the corners, and
unfolded the muddy paper. David stared at the
farthest rim of the plains.
"Gerald! Oh, poor boy, poor boy!"
David lost his jealousy of that name. He
dared not look at her until she spoke again.
"See! you were his friend. Yes, please read
it."
There were no tears in her eyes, only great sad-
ness and compassion, such as befits women who
see bravely and truly into life.
David took what she replaced in his hand, — a
wooden box, open, but with a slip of paper hiding
the contents. Under this lay coiled a necklace of
beads, small at either end of the string, large in
the middle, and all as red as Krishna's flowers on
the table. He glanced up, questioning.
"The old coral string I wore as a child," she
answered steadily. "He never forgot. We were
almost of an age, Gerald and I." Her eyes be-
came too star-like; she averted them, to watch
the golden river of rice eddying down the hills.
"He never forgot. Poor Gerald! He was a very



TlAX RAMA LEFT THIS WITH ME, TO GIVE YOU