e made signs. At night she looked
into my face. And she was sad! Her eyes were tender and frightened; her
voice soft and pleading. Once I murmured to her, 'You shall not die,'
and she smiled . . . ever after she smiled! . . . She gave me courage to
bear weariness and hardships. Those were times of pain, and she soothed
me. We wandered patient in our search. We knew deception, false hopes;
we knew captivity, sickness, thirst, misery, despair . . . . Enough! We
found them! . . ."

He cried out the last words and paused. His face was impassive, and he
kept still like a man in a trance. Hollis sat up quickly, and spread his
elbows on the table. Jackson made a brusque movement, and accidentally
touched the guitar. A plaintive resonance filled the cabin with confused
vibrations and died out slowly. Then Karain began to speak again. The
restrained fierceness of his tone seemed to rise like a voice from
outside, like a thing unspoken but heard; it filled the cabin and
enveloped in its intense and deadened murmur the motionless figure in
the chair.

"We were on our way to Atjeh, where there was war; but the vessel ran on
a sandbank, and we had to land in Delli. We had earned a little money,
and had bought a gun from some Selangore traders; only one gun, which
was fired by the spark of a stone; Matara carried it. We landed. Many
white men lived there, planting tobacco on conquered plains, and Matara
. . . But no matter. He saw him! . . . The Dutchman! . . . At last!
. . . We crept and watched. Two nights and a day we watched. He had a
house--a big house in a clearing in the midst of his fields; flowers and
bushes grew around; there were narrow paths of yellow earth between the
cut grass, and thick hedges to keep people out. The third night we came
armed, and lay behind a hedge.

"A heavy dew seemed to soak through our flesh and made our very entrails
cold. The grass, the twigs, the leaves, covered with drops of water,
were gray in the moonlight. Matara, curled up in the grass, shivered
in his sleep. My teeth rattled in my head so loud that I was afraid
the noise would wake up all the land. Afar, the watchmen of white men's
houses struck wooden clappers and hooted in the darkness. And, as every
night, I saw her by my side. She smiled no more! . . . The fire of
anguish burned in my breast, and she whispered to me with compassion,
with pity, softly--as women will; she soothed the pain of my mind; she
bent her face over me--the fa