but
it was like getting hold of an apparition, a wraith, a portent. What did
it mean? What to do with it? Was it too late to conciliate him? Hadn't
he better be killed without more delay? But what would happen then?
Wretched old Allang went nearly mad with apprehension and through the
difficulty of making up his mind. Several times the council was broken
up, and the advisers made a break helter-skelter for the door and out
on to the verandah. One--it is said--even jumped down to the
ground--fifteen feet, I should judge--and broke his leg. The royal
governor of Patusan had bizarre mannerisms, and one of them was to
introduce boastful rhapsodies into every arduous discussion, when,
getting gradually excited, he would end by flying off his perch with a
kriss in his hand. But, barring such interruptions, the deliberations
upon Jim's fate went on night and day.

'Meanwhile he wandered about the courtyard, shunned by some, glared at
by others, but watched by all, and practically at the mercy of the first
casual ragamuffin with a chopper, in there. He took possession of a
small tumble-down shed to sleep in; the effluvia of filth and rotten
matter incommoded him greatly: it seems he had not lost his appetite
though, because--he told me--he had been hungry all the blessed time.
Now and again "some fussy ass" deputed from the council-room would
come out running to him, and in honeyed tones would administer amazing
interrogatories: "Were the Dutch coming to take the country? Would the
white man like to go back down the river? What was the object of coming
to such a miserable country? The Rajah wanted to know whether the white
man could repair a watch?" They did actually bring out to him a nickel
clock of New England make, and out of sheer unbearable boredom he busied
himself in trying to get the alarum to work. It was apparently when
thus occupied in his shed that the true perception of his extreme peril
dawned upon him. He dropped the thing--he says--"like a hot potato,"
and walked out hastily, without the slightest idea of what he would,
or indeed could, do. He only knew that the position was intolerable. He
strolled aimlessly beyond a sort of ramshackle little granary on posts,
and his eyes fell on the broken stakes of the palisade; and then--he
says--at once, without any mental process as it were, without any stir
of emotion, he set about his escape as if executing a plan matured for a
month. He walked off carelessly to give h