r banian tree and sleep. Big
sladang come, fight kuching. Baboo sorry for good kuching. Baboo hid
from sladang,--Aboo Din no whip Baboo?"

His voice dropped to a pathetic little quaver, and he put up his
hands with an appealing gesture; but his brown legs were drawn back
ready to flee should Aboo Din make one hostile move.

"Baboo," I said, "you are a hero!"

Baboo opened his little black eyes, but did not dispute me.

"You shall go to Mecca when you grow up, and become a Hadji, and when
you come back the high kadi shall take you in the mosque and make
a kateeb of you," said I. "Now put your forehead to the ground and
thank the good Allah that the kuching had eaten dog before he got you."

Baboo did as he was told, but I think that in his heart he was more
grateful that for once he had evaded a whipping than for his remarkable
escape. A little later the punghulo came up with a half-dozen shikaris,
or hunters, and a pack of hunting dogs. The men skinned the mutilated
carcass of the only "good tiger" I met during my three years' hunting
in the jungles of this strange old peninsula.

BABOO'S PIRATES

An Adventure in the Pahang River

There was a scuffle in the outer office, and a thin, piping voice
was calling down all the curses of the Koran on the heads of my great
top-heavy Hindu guards.

"Sons of dogs," I heard in the most withering contempt, "I will see
the Tuan Consul. Know he is my father."

A tall Sikh, with his great red turban awry and his brown kaki uniform
torn and soiled, pushed through the bamboo chicks and into my presence.

He was dragging a small bit of naked humanity by the folds of its
faded cotton sarong.

The powerful soldier was hot and flushed, and a little stream of
blood trickling from his finger tips showed where they had come in
contact with his captive's teeth. It was as though an elephant had
been worried by a pariah cur.

"Your Excellency," he said, salaaming and gasping for breath.

"It is Baboo, the Harimau-Anak!"

Baboo wrenched from the guard's grasp and glided up to my desk. The
back of his open palm went to his forehead, and his big brown eyes
looked up appealingly into mine.

"What is it, Tiger-Child?" I asked, bestowing on him the title the
Malays of Kampong Glam had given him as a perpetual reminder of his
famous adventure.

Dimples came into either tear-stained cheek. He smoothed out the rents
in his small sarong, and without deigning to notice his lat