illages. It serves as a trading-place, a strangers' room, a
sleeping-room for unmarried youths, and a general council-chamber. Here
Nigel found the hermit and Moses enjoying a good meal when he arrived,
to which he and the professor sat down after paying their respects to
the chief.

"The Orang-Kaya hopes that we will stay with him some time and help to
defend the village," said Van der Kemp, when they were all seated.

"Of course you have agreed?" said Nigel.

"Yes; I came for that purpose."

"We's allers ready to fight in a good cause," remarked Moses, just
before filling his mouth with rice.

"Or to die in it!" added Verkimier, engulfing the breast of a chicken at
a bite. "But as zee pirates are not expected for some days, ve may as
vell go after zee mias--zat is what zee natifs call zee orang-utan. It
is a better word, being short."

Moses glanced at the professor out of the corners of his black eyes and
seemed greatly tickled by his enthusiastic devotion to business.

"I am also," continued the professor, "extremely anxious to go at zee
bootterflies before--"

"You die," suggested Nigel, venturing on a pleasantry, whereat Moses
opened his mouth in a soundless laugh, but, observing the professor's
goggles levelled at him, he transformed the laugh into an astounding
sneeze, and immediately gazed with pouting innocence and interest at his
plate.

"Do you always sneeze like zat?" asked Verkimier.

"Not allers," answered the negro simply, "sometimes I gibs way a good
deal wuss. Depends on de inside ob my nose an' de state ob de wedder."

What the professor would have replied we cannot say, for just then a
Dyak youth rushed in to say that an unusually large and gorgeous
butterfly had been seen just outside the village!

No application of fire to gunpowder could have produced a more immediate
effect. The professor's rice was scattered on the floor, and himself
was outside the head-house before his comrades knew exactly what was the
matter.

"He's always like that," said the hermit, with a slight twinkle in his
eyes. "Nothing discourages--nothing subdues him. Twice I pulled him
out of deadly danger into which he had run in his eager pursuit of
specimens. And he has returned the favour to me, for he rescued me once
when a mias had got me down and would certainly have killed me, for my
gun was empty at the moment, and I had dropped my knife."

"Is, then, the orang-utan so powerful and savage?"

"T