e captor,
said in a soft sing-song voice:--

"Tuan Consul, Baboo want to go with the Heaven-Born to Pahang.
Baboo six years old,--can fight pirates like Aboo Din, the father. May
Mohammed make Tuan as odorous as musk!"

"You are a boaster before Allah, Baboo," I said, smiling.

Baboo dropped his head in perfectly simulated contrition.

"I have thought much, Tuan."

News had come to me that an American merchant ship had been wrecked
near the mouth of the Pahang River, and that the Malays, who were at
the time in revolt against the English Resident, had taken possession
of its cargo of petroleum and made prisoners of the crew.

I had asked the colonial governor for a guard of five Sikhs and a
launch, that I might steam up the coast and investigate the alleged
outrage before appealing officially to the British government.

Of course Baboo went, much to the disgust of Aboo Din, the syce.

I never was able to refuse the little fellow anything, and I knew if
I left him behind he would be revenged by running away.

I had vowed again and again that Baboo should stay lost the next
time he indulged in his periodical vanishing act, but each time when
night came and Aboo Din, the syce, and Fatima, the mother, crept
pathetically along the veranda to where I was smoking and steeling
my heart against the little rascal, I would snatch up my cork helmet
and spring into my cart, which Aboo Din had kept waiting inside the
stables for the moment when I should relent.

Since Baboo had become a hero and earned the appellation of the
Harimau-Anak, his vanity directed his footsteps toward Kampong Glam,
the Malay quarter of Singapore. Here he was generally to be found,
seated on a richly hued Indian rug, with his feet drawn up under him,
amid a circle of admiring shopkeepers, syces, kebuns, and fishermen,
narrating for the hundredth time how he had been caught at Changhi
by a tiger, carried through the jungle on its back until he came to
a great banian tree, into which he had crawled while the tiger slept,
how a sladang (wild bull) came out of the lagoon and killed the tiger,
and how Tuan Consul and Aboo Din, the father, had found him and kissed
him many times.

Often he enlarged on the well-known story and repeated long
conversations that he had carried on with the tiger while they were
journeying through the jungle.

A brass lamp hung above his head in which the cocoanut oil sputtered
and burned and cast a fitful half-light abo