and
the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a
profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint
whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood
cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct
incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire,"
shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill?
Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius
translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we
hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a
herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land,
proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan
and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no
faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard
volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly
grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below
the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on
complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the
slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough.
It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and
jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and
dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that
place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other
bank.

'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation
of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed
appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down,
in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they
seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage.
That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the
stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that
the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message,
alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated
to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when
Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his
shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the
trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's
stomach.