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-CHAPTER 39
'All the events of that night have a great importance, since they brought about a
situation which remained unchanged till Jim's return.
Jim had been away in the interior for more than a week, and it was Dain Waris who had
directed the first repulse.
That brave and intelligent youth ("who knew how to fight after the manner of white
men") wished to settle the business off- hand, but his people were too much for him.
He had not Jim's racial prestige and the reputation of invincible, supernatural
power.
He was not the visible, tangible incarnation of unfailing truth and of
unfailing victory.
Beloved, trusted, and admired as he was, he was still one of them, while Jim was one of
us.
Moreover, the white man, a tower of strength in himself, was invulnerable,
while Dain Waris could be killed.
Those unexpressed thoughts guided the opinions of the chief men of the town, who
elected to assemble in Jim's fort for deliberation upon the emergency, as if
expecting to find wisdom and courage in the dwelling of the absent white man.
The shooting of Brown's ruffians was so far good, or lucky, that there had been half-a-
dozen casualties amongst the defenders.
The wounded were lying on the verandah tended by their women-folk.
The women and children from the lower part of the town had been sent into the fort at
the first alarm.
There Jewel was in command, very efficient and high-spirited, obeyed by Jim's "own
people," who, quitting in a body their little settlement under the stockade, had
gone in to form the garrison.
The refugees crowded round her; and through the whole affair, to the very disastrous
last, she showed an extraordinary martial ardour.
It was to her that Dain Waris had gone at once at the first intelligence of danger,
for you must know that Jim was the only one in Patusan who possessed a store of
gunpowder.
Stein, with whom he had kept up intimate relations by letters, had obtained from the
Dutch Government a special authorisation to export five hundred kegs of it to Patusan.
The powder-magazine was a small hut of rough logs covered entirely with earth, and
in Jim's absence the girl had the key.
In the council, held at eleven o'clock in the evening in Jim's dining-room, she
backed up Waris's advice for immediate and vigorous action.
I am told that she stood up by the side of Jim's empty chair at the head of the long
table and made a warlike impassioned speech, which for the moment extorted
murmurs of approbation from the assembled headmen.
Old Doramin, who had not showed himself outside his own gate for more than a year,
had been brought across with great difficulty.
He was, of course, the chief man there.
The temper of the council was very unforgiving, and the old man's word would
have been decisive; but it is my opinion that, well aware of his son's fiery
courage, he dared not pronounce the word.
More dilatory counsels prevailed. A certain Haji Saman pointed out at great
length that "these tyrannical and ferocious men had delivered themselves to a certain
death in any case.
They would stand fast on their hill and starve, or they would try to regain their
boat and be shot from ambushes across the creek, or they would break and fly into the
forest and perish singly there."
He argued that by the use of proper stratagems these evil-minded strangers
could be destroyed without the risk of a battle, and his words had a great weight,
especially with the Patusan men proper.
What unsettled the minds of the townsfolk was the failure of the Rajah's boats to act
at the decisive moment. It was the diplomatic Kassim who
represented the Rajah at the council.
He spoke very little, listened smilingly, very friendly and impenetrable.
During the sitting messengers kept arriving every few minutes almost, with reports of
the invaders' proceedings.
Wild and exaggerated rumours were flying: there was a large ship at the mouth of the
river with big guns and many more men--some white, others with black skins and of
bloodthirsty appearance.
They were coming with many more boats to exterminate every living thing.
A sense of near, incomprehensible danger affected the common people.
At one moment there was a panic in the courtyard amongst the women; shrieking; a
rush; children crying--Haji Sunan went out to quiet them.
Then a fort sentry fired at something moving on the river, and nearly killed a
villager bringing in his women-folk in a canoe together with the best of his
domestic utensils and a dozen fowls.
This caused more confusion. Meantime the palaver inside Jim's house
went on in the presence of the girl.
Doramin sat fierce-faced, heavy, looking at the speakers in turn, and breathing slow
like a bull.
He didn't speak till the last, after Kassim had declared that the Rajah's boats would
be called in because the men were required to defend his master's stockade.
Dain Waris in his father's presence would offer no opinion, though the girl entreated
him in Jim's name to speak out.
She offered him Jim's own men in her anxiety to have these intruders driven out
at once. He only shook his head, after a glance or
two at Doramin.
Finally, when the council broke up it had been decided that the houses nearest the
creek should be strongly occupied to obtain the command of the enemy's boat.
The boat itself was not to be interfered with openly, so that the robbers on the
hill should be tempted to embark, when a well-directed fire would kill most of them,
no doubt.
To cut off the escape of those who might survive, and to prevent more of them coming
up, Dain Waris was ordered by Doramin to take an armed party of Bugis down the river
to a certain spot ten miles below Patusan,
and there form a camp on the shore and blockade the stream with the canoes.
I don't believe for a moment that Doramin feared the arrival of fresh forces.
My opinion is that his conduct was guided solely by his wish to keep his son out of
harm's way.
To prevent a rush being made into the town the construction of a stockade was to be
commenced at daylight at the end of the street on the left bank.
The old nakhoda declared his intention to command there himself.
A distribution of powder, bullets, and percussion-caps was made immediately under
the girl's supervision.
Several messengers were to be dispatched in different directions after Jim, whose exact
whereabouts were unknown.
These men started at dawn, but before that time Kassim had managed to open
communications with the besieged Brown.
'That accomplished diplomatist and confidant of the Rajah, on leaving the fort
to go back to his master, took into his boat Cornelius, whom he found slinking
mutely amongst the people in the courtyard.
Kassim had a little plan of his own and wanted him for an interpreter.
Thus it came about that towards morning Brown, reflecting upon the desperate nature
of his position, heard from the marshy overgrown hollow an amicable, quavering,
strained voice crying--in English--for
permission to come up, under a promise of personal safety and on a very important
errand. He was overjoyed.
If he was spoken to he was no longer a hunted wild beast.
These friendly sounds took off at once the awful stress of vigilant watchfulness as of
so many blind men not knowing whence the deathblow might come.
He pretended a great reluctance.
The voice declared itself "a white man--a poor, ruined, old man who had been living
here for years."
A mist, wet and chilly, lay on the slopes of the hill, and after some more shouting
from one to the other, Brown called out, "Come on, then, but alone, mind!"
As a matter of fact--he told me, writhing with rage at the recollection of his
helplessness--it made no difference.
They couldn't see more than a few yards before them, and no treachery could make
their position worse.
By-and-by Cornelius, in his week-day attire of a ragged dirty shirt and pants,
barefooted, with a broken-rimmed pith hat on his head, was made out vaguely, sidling
up to the defences, hesitating, stopping to listen in a peering posture.
"Come along! You are safe," yelled Brown, while his men
stared.
All their hopes of life became suddenly centered in that dilapidated, mean
newcomer, who in profound silence clambered clumsily over a felled tree-trunk, and
shivering, with his sour, mistrustful face,
looked about at the knot of bearded, anxious, sleepless desperadoes.
'Half an hour's confidential talk with Cornelius opened Brown's eyes as to the
home affairs of Patusan.
He was on the alert at once.
There were possibilities, immense possibilities; but before he would talk
over Cornelius's proposals he demanded that some food should be sent up as a guarantee
of good faith.
Cornelius went off, creeping sluggishly down the hill on the side of the Rajah's
palace, and after some delay a few of Tunku Allang's men came up, bringing a scanty
supply of rice, chillies, and dried fish.
This was immeasurably better than nothing.
Later on Cornelius returned accompanying Kassim, who stepped out with an air of
perfect good-humoured trustfulness, in sandals, and muffled up from neck to ankles
in dark-blue sheeting.
He shook hands with Brown discreetly, and the three drew aside for a conference.
Brown's men, recovering their confidence, were slapping each other on the back, and
cast knowing glances at their captain while they busied themselves with preparations
for cooking.
'Kassim disliked Doramin and his Bugis very much, but he hated the new order of things
still more.
It had occurred to him that these whites, together with the Rajah's followers, could
attack and defeat the Bugis before Jim's return.
Then, he reasoned, general defection of the townsfolk was sure to follow, and the reign
of the white man who protected poor people would be over.
Afterwards the new allies could be dealt with.
They would have no friends.
The fellow was perfectly able to perceive the difference of character, and had seen
enough of white men to know that these newcomers were outcasts, men without
country.
Brown preserved a stern and inscrutable demeanour.
When he first heard Cornelius's voice demanding admittance, it brought merely the
hope of a loophole for escape.
In less than an hour other thoughts were seething in his head.
Urged by an extreme necessity, he had come there to steal food, a few tons of rubber
or gum may be, perhaps a handful of dollars, and had found himself enmeshed by
deadly dangers.
Now in consequence of these overtures from Kassim he began to think of stealing the
whole country.
Some confounded fellow had apparently accomplished something of the kind--single-
handed at that. Couldn't have done it very well though.
Perhaps they could work together--squeeze everything dry and then go out quietly.
In the course of his negotiations with Kassim he became aware that he was supposed
to have a big ship with plenty of men outside.
Kassim begged him earnestly to have this big ship with his many guns and men brought
up the river without delay for the Rajah's service.
Brown professed himself willing, and on this basis the negotiation was carried on
with mutual distrust.
Three times in the course of the morning the courteous and active Kassim went down
to consult the Rajah and came up busily with his long stride.
Brown, while bargaining, had a sort of grim enjoyment in thinking of his wretched
schooner, with nothing but a heap of dirt in her hold, that stood for an armed ship,
and a Chinaman and a lame ex-beachcomber of
Levuka on board, who represented all his many men.
In the afternoon he obtained further doles of food, a promise of some money, and a
supply of mats for his men to make shelters for themselves.
They lay down and snored, protected from the burning sunshine; but Brown, sitting
fully exposed on one of the felled trees, feasted his eyes upon the view of the town
and the river.
There was much loot there.
Cornelius, who had made himself at home in the camp, talked at his elbow, pointing out
the localities, imparting advice, giving his own version of Jim's character, and
commenting in his own fashion upon the events of the last three years.
Brown, who, apparently indifferent and gazing away, listened with attention to
every word, could not make out clearly what sort of man this Jim could be.
"What's his name?
Jim! Jim!
That's not enough for a man's name." "They call him," said Cornelius scornfully,
"Tuan Jim here.
As you may say Lord Jim." "What is he?
Where does he come from?" inquired Brown. "What sort of man is he?
Is he an Englishman?"
"Yes, yes, he's an Englishman. I am an Englishman too.
From Malacca. He is a fool.
All you have to do is to kill him and then you are king here.
Everything belongs to him," explained Cornelius.
"It strikes me he may be made to share with somebody before very long," commented Brown
half aloud. "No, no.
The proper way is to kill him the first chance you get, and then you can do what
you like," Cornelius would insist earnestly.
"I have lived for many years here, and I am giving you a friend's advice."
'In such converse and in gloating over the view of Patusan, which he had determined in
his mind should become his prey, Brown whiled away most of the afternoon, his men,
meantime, resting.
On that day Dain Waris's fleet of canoes stole one by one under the shore farthest
from the creek, and went down to close the river against his retreat.
Of this Brown was not aware, and Kassim, who came up the knoll an hour before
sunset, took good care not to enlighten him.
He wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would
be discouraging.
He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty
messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to
the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board.
After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-
book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on.
Big job.
Detain the man."
The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and
was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by
the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches.
What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.'
CHAPTER 40
'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy.
For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was
the person to work with.
He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get
hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity
for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that
imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man.
He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate.
Everything was in coming to a clear understanding.
Of course they would share.
The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery
(he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and...He would
impose modest conditions.
Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed.
They would work like brothers till...till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that
would settle all accounts.
With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now.
The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away.
Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second
string. But the principal thing was to get
something to eat from day to day.
Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach
a lesson to those people who had received him with shots.
The *** of battle was upon him.
'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly
from Brown, in Brown's own words.
There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts
with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of
purpose, a strange vengeful attitude
towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all
mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of
wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God.
No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was
exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the
desperate position in which he found
himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned
treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man,
and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand
manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite
of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it
strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames.
Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at
it from the hillock, peopling it with images of *** and rapine.
The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of
fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert.
Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of
low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man,
solitary and looking very small, strolled
out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless
buildings at the end.
Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming
back for some object of domestic use.
Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other
side of the creek.
A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his
friends. He moved leisurely.
Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a
sort of second in command.
This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle
lazily.
When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered
his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks.
He prided himself on being a dead shot.
He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches
of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look.
The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed
to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees.
In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping
his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there ***'s health would never
be a source of anxiety to his friends any more."
The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on
all-fours.
In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise.
The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more.
"That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me.
"Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted.
They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night.
Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before.
That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his
head."
'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his
blue lips. "Two hundred to one.
Two hundred to one ... strike terror,...terror, terror, I tell you...."
His own eyes were starting out of their sockets.
He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy,
glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his
miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit.
There are sights one never forgets.
'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been
hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to
the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water.
This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at
him from anywhere.
"There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee.
Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy.
Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning
him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to
come up the river.
He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage.
This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided
and to weaken them by fighting.
On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis
chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire;
his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men.
It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old
muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall.
The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds.
It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said.
There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people.
The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow,
the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a
ruin reeking with blood.
The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river.
A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the
Rajah.
The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely.
Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a
sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they
departed very much frightened; only old
Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly.
Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders
in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours.
'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with
arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of
the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and
came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth.
Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street,
revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of
roofs, the fragments of wattled walls
jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the
vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings,
revealed in patches by the swaying flames,
seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land.
A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise,
extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river,
all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the
river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might
have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall
of an immensely distant waterfall.
It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking
at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a
feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall.
Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away,
taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea.
It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away.
However, he didn't try this.
For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he
perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street,
where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses.
They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of
smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed
to Kassim's diplomacy.
Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily.
'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat,
and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch
it.
At this all the others shook off their despondency.
Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully.
He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark.
The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared.
A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out.
"I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of
the hill followed.
"I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and
instantly all the rifles went off.
The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown
and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a
profound, weary groan floated up from the
creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison
turning the blood cold in the veins.
Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere
beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown.
"What does it mean?"..."Do you hear on the hill?
Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three
times.
Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer.
"Speak," cried Brown, "we hear."
Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting
continually on the edge of the vague waste- land, proclaimed that between the men of
the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the
white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no
speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang
out.
"Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt.
Cornelius translated.
The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!"
went on complaining in moans.
While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the
boat, he had been safe enough.
It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on
her off-side, as it were.
The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven
yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush
on the other bank.
'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot
in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled
the beholders.
The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping
with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had
stirred a bitter rage.
That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a
few feet away.
You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by
volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark.
Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself
opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted.
He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped
out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs
point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach.
Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of
lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered
his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover.
With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back
to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children
will not willingly allow to die.
'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under
their bowed heads.
They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes,
listening to their comrade below.
He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange
confidential note of pain.
Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard
muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint.
Never for a moment did he cease.
'"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the
Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down.
"That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting.
"There's no encouragement for wounded men here.
Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter,
cap'n."
"Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and
then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water.
Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly.
"Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing."
'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn
was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as
one might stare at the unscalable side of a
mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere.
"What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him.
Cornelius listened.
A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb,
and others responded, pulsating and droning.
Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part
lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur.
"He has come," said Cornelius.
"What? Already?
Are you sure?" Brown asked.
"Yes! yes!
Sure. Listen to the noise."
"What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown.
"For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no
more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no
better."
"Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?"
"He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared.
"What do you mean?
Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark.
"Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you.
He is just like a fool.
You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous.
"You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius.
"He is not afraid--not afraid of anything.
He will come and order you to leave his people alone.
Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child.
He will come to you straight."
Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me.
"Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man
with a gun to shoot him.
Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything
you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like.
Ha! ha! ha!
Fine ..."
He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his
shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew,
sitting amongst the cold ashes and the
litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.'