“I ordered my gig manned at once; but Jim’s rowers, under the impression that their lives hung on a thread while they had that madman in the boat, made such excellent time that before I had traversed half the distance between the two vessels I caught sight of him clambering over the rail, and of his box being passed up. All the brigantine’s canvas was loose, her mainsail was set, and the windlass was just beginning to clink as I stepped upon her deck: her master, a dapper little half-caste of forty or so, in a blue flannel suit, with lively eyes, his round face the colour of lemon-peel, and with a thin little black moustache drooping on each side of his thick, dark lips, came forward smirking. He turned out, notwithstanding his self-satisfied and cheery exterior, to be of a careworn temperament. In answer to a remark of mine (while Jim had gone below for a moment) he said, ‘Oh, yes. Patusan.’ He was going to carry the gentleman to the mouth of the river, but would ‘never ascend.’ His flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic. Had Mr. Stein desired him to ‘ascend,’ he would have ‘reverentially’—(I think he wanted to say respectfully—but devil only knows)—’ reverentially made objects for the safety of properties.’ If disregarded, he would have presented ‘resignation to quit.’ Twelve months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius ‘propitiated many offertories’ to Mr. Rajah Allang and the ‘principal populations,’ on conditions which made the trade ‘a snare and ashes in the mouth,’ yet his ship had been fired upon from the woods by ‘irresponsive parties’ all the way down the river; which causing his crew ‘from exposure to limb to remain silent in hidings,’ the brigantine was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar, where she ‘would have been perishable beyond the act of man.’ The angry disgust at the recollection, the pride of his fluency, to which he turned an attentive ear, struggled for the possession of his broad simple face. He scowled and beamed at me, and watched with satisfaction the undeniable effect of his phraseology. Dark frowns ran swiftly over the placid sea, and the brigantine, with her fore-topsail to the mast and her main-boom amidships, seemed bewildered amongst the cat’s-paws. He told me further, gnashing his teeth, that the Rajah was a ‘laughable hyæna’ (can’t imagine how he got hold of hyænas); while somebody else was many times falser than the ‘weapons of a crocodile.’ Keeping one eye on the movements of his crew forward, he let loose his volubility—comparing the place to a ‘cage of beasts made ravenous by long impenitence.’ I fancy he meant impunity. He had no intention, he cried, to ‘exhibit himself to be made attached purposefully to robbery.’ The long-drawn wails, giving the time for the pull of the men chatting the anchor, came to an end, and he lowered his voice. ‘Plenty too much enough of Patusan.’ he concluded, with energy.
“I heard afterwards he had been so indiscreet as to get himself tied up by the neck with a rattan halter to a post planted in the middle of a mud-hole before the Rajah’s house. He spent the best part of a day and a whole night in that unwholesome situation, but there is every reason to believe the thing had been meant as a sort of joke. He brooded for a while over that horrid memory, I suppose, and then addressed in a quarrelsome tone the man coming aft to the helm. When he turned to me again it was to speak judicially, without passion. He would take the gentleman to the mouth of the river at Batu Kring (Patusan town ‘being situated internally,’ he remarked, ‘thirty miles’). But in his eyes, he continued—a tone of bored, weary conviction replacing his previous voluble delivery—the gentleman was already ‘in the similitude of a corpse.’ ‘What? What do you say?’ I asked. He assumed a startlingly ferocious demeanour, and imitated to perfection the act of stabbing from behind. ‘Already like the body of one deported,’ he explained, with the insufferably conceited air of his kind after what they imagine a display of cleverness. Behind him I perceived Jim smiling silently at me, and with a raised hand checking the exclamation on my lips.
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