CHAPTER XXV.

AN EXCITING TIME.

Singapore!

The chain rattled through the hausehole with a deafening roar, and the great ship swung at anchor in the Roads.

A tropical sun beat fiercely down on the awnings, and Rupert Dale, leaning over the rail, gazed shorewards at the great plain framed in cocoanut palms--the Cathedral spire rising white and dazzling out of the green, fan-like leaves. To the left the brown slopes of Fort Canning, crowned with its giant flagstaff and fluttering flags. Round the ship a score or more of sampans tossed and jostled each other in the sparkling sea, their copper-skinned owners--naked to the loins--gesticulating and shouting in a language which sounded harsh and vehement to his unaccustomed ears. A strong, pungent odour of hot spice in which cinnamon predominated filled the air, while kites and eagles wheeled and swooped round him above the dancing waves.

Singapore! The gate of mystic, far Cathay! China--Japan--Siam--Borneo! Lovely Java, sea-girt Celebes. The spice islands! Lands of wonder and romance. The great Unknown, his future Home!

What a revelation it had been to him--the wonderful voyage. He had never been abroad before, and "foreign parts"--as anywhere out of England was called in Devonshire--were still a closed book.

Egypt! The Desert seen from the Suez Canal had impressed him. The Red Sea, with a distant glimpse of Mount Ararat, had brought the Bible story of the Israelite wanderings right before his eyes, for was not that the very "Wilderness" all round him? What was he but a wanderer in a strange land, surrounded by the desert of the sea--the promised land a mere speck on the chart--a tiny island away in the far north-west. The dear homeland, his home which he would never see again.

Then the miracle happened. First at Gib, then at Malta, Aden, Colombo, Penang, and now here. All along the vast ocean journey, four weeks long, wherever the great ship touched, there ashore flew the old flag, his flag. There stood his own countrymen on guard beneath its folds. Home? Why, he had brought it with him. There it was ashore now, and there stood his blood brother, white-helmeted, his bayonet flashing in the sun for witness of his birthright.

Rupert could hear a band playing somewhere ashore, and as though in answer to his thoughts across the water there floated the heart-swelling strain of "Home, Sweet Home." He listened entranced till the air died away and all was silent. Then came the stirring crash of the National Anthem. He remembered the last time he had heard it. At the Moreton flower-show. It brought back in a flash to him the faint damp scent of moss and roses. That happy summer day. Home and all it stood for was here! It was good to be a Briton and feel this glorious freedom, this great sense of fellowship, of ownership.

"You will be getting sunstroke if you stand there with your helmet off, Cotton."

He started--the spell was broken. His fellow-passenger, a grey-haired, clean-shaven man of fifty, with whom he had struck up a friendship during the voyage, stood behind him with a smile on his kindly face, which was lighted by a pair of keen, grey eyes.

"It sounds good to us exiles--the old tune--doesn't it? 'What does he know of England who only England knows?' Eh? The chap who wrote that must have known something of our Empire--what? And yet there are millions of fools in the old country this moment who neither know nor care whether the Empire exists or not; while the very bread they eat is bought with the blood of those who created it! Look at that long wharf over there. See those piles of bales? That is cotton pieces from Manchester. See those chests piled under that big shed? Tea--cheap 'Straits' tea--shilling a pound in any little grocer's shop at home! See that steamer loading those sacks, there, that black-funnelled one? That's sago, that the kiddies eat at home."

"Wonderful!" Rupert echoed, and then he sighed. He had left the old country--a felon. He had found a new world, a free man!--with his country's flag flying a welcome. And yet----

"Do you see that little cruiser over there?" Patterson continued excitedly. "It's hard to realise that she's the only British warship within a thousand miles of this--the most important trade-route in the world. No, that's not a British ship--that big battleship over there is a German, and that other with four big black funnels is a Jap, and the one beyond is a Russian. Bit of a shock, isn't it, when you recognise what a tiny thing the British Navy is compared to the Colonial Empire it has to defend?"

Rupert nodded. His head was in a whirl--and his heart. He had reached the end of his journey. He was free! And yet----

"By the by, have you decided what you're going to do? My offer is still open. Your mining knowledge would be very useful to me in Borneo, although you haven't got the certificate of the School of Mines. It will be rough work--dangerous work at times, as I told you, for we are going up to the unknown interior where the Head-hunting Muruts live, and you may not see civilisation again for twelve months."

Rupert looked him in the face. Patterson was a "white man" he knew. A straight man.

"I have thought it all over, and I decided last night to accept your offer if you are still willing to take me after you have heard why I am here. I can't explain everything, but what I shall tell you is only what you ought to know. Come down to my cabin and I will tell you who I am."

In the saloon of the boat--deserted now--where they had spent so many happy weeks, sharing storm and sunshine, dangers and pleasures, unconsciously growing to know one another, as men ashore never can.

A genuine friendship, backed by respect, had been formed between Rupert and Patterson. The former had only just realised what this friendship had done for him.

What it meant for him now! He, who had been for so many months a convict, cut off from all communications with his fellows--a mere machine, a cypher! Number 381!

Patterson had offered him a job. Work after his own heart. It was only now, at the last moment, that Rupert realised he could not accept it, could not continue the friendship that had commenced, and which meant so much to him, unless he told Patterson who _and what he was_!

An escaped convict, a felon with a price on his head!

A nice companion for this straight, clean Englishman, who proposed to take him, alone, in the vast interior of wild Borneo.

To speak, to confess, meant losing his first, only friend. It meant losing the chance of work. It might mean that he would be arrested and sent back to England and prison!

But he had to play the game! It is curious how little things affect one at a great crisis of one's life. Rupert had known he would have to leave Patterson and refuse his offer--or else speak and tell him his history, and, sub-consciously, he had decided to say nothing, make some excuse for refusing his offer and just leave Singapore, alone.

It was the sight of the Union Jack flying from the shore, the sound of the old English tune, "Home, Sweet Home," that had suddenly turned the scales and made him decide to leave his fate in Patterson's hands.

He thought of his father, of little Marjorie, his sister. And last of Ruby, the woman he loved!

They would have asked him to play the game.

So, over a final drink in the empty saloon, Rupert told his new friend, already his old friend, Jim Patterson, the story of his life, his imprisonment and escape from Dartmoor. He refrained from mentioning any names; he made no attempt to defend himself.

When he had finished Patterson ordered another drink, and then lit a cheroot. Having got his "smoke" well under way he rose and held out his hand.

Rupert took it hesitatingly. "I'm glad you told me, Cotton," Patterson said. "I rather flatter myself that I'm a judge of character. I knew the moment I saw you that you had a 'history.' I didn't want to know it, but I guess you feel better for having told me. A man who has gone through the fires and has got his fingers burnt is worth twice as much as the fellow who has never fought and blundered, suffered and gone on fighting. Now then, shut down on the past and ... get ashore!"

"You--you still want me to come with you?" Rupert stammered. "You still trust me?"

Patterson laughed. "Now, more than ever."

Half an hour later Rupert's bag was put into a long boat with Mr. Patterson's more bulky luggage. There was a choppy sea on and it was not an easy task to get into the boat as it rose and fell at the ship's gangway. At last they pushed off, Patterson sitting beside Rupert in the stern, with their baggage piled in front of them. The six Malays bent to their long, thin paddles with short, jerky strokes, and the light boat flew through the white-topped waves towards the shore beneath the slopes of Fort Canning, where the Union Jack still fluttered a welcome.

* * * * *

A long canoe cut out of a single giant tree, with a palm leaf awning covering the stern portion, under which two white men inclined on a mat, while eight brawny Malays, sitting crossed-legged with their backs to them, bent their bronze-coloured bodies from which the sweat poured in streams to the regular strokes of their paddles. In the stern, behind the awning, sat the steersman, an old, parchment-faced Dyak with a small white goatee beard, fierce, pig-like eyes, and a broad slit of a mouth which dripped a blood-red juice as he chewed his betelnut quid.

He was the guide, an old "Gutta-hunter" who knew this trackless forest, these giant mountains through which the great river flowed three long weeks' journey to the sea. Here, in the far interior, where no white men had been before, it had become a clear, swift stream, with constant rapids, up which the narrow canoe had to be dragged by the crew waist-deep in the rushing white-foamed water as it swirled and tumbled over the jagged rocks.

Tropical vegetation hung in thick green masses to the water's edge, while the blacker mass of foliage of colossal trees whose huge trunks shot up a hundred feet or more without a branch, shut in the landscape on every hand.

"'This is the forest primeval, only more so,'" Patterson quoted gaily, "and, if it wasn't for the leeches, not a bad place after all."

These pests hung on every leaf and blade of grass and, with outstretched head, waited the passer-by on whom they instantly fixed, to worm through puttie or breeches, through coat and shirt, until the flesh was reached and the blood-sucking head inserted beneath.

For nearly nine months now Patterson and Rupert had been travelling--prospecting and working--in this wild and dangerous region. For Rupert, nine months of keen excitement, which had almost wiped out the dreadful past. But, deep in his heart, was embedded the memory of the woman he still loved; and the memory of his father and the little homestead among the Devonshire moorlands.

The one thing he could never forget was that he would, perhaps for ever, remain an exile. Yet he dreamed of returning home one day, of seeing his loved ones again--if only for a few brief hours.

The sun was below the mountain tops, and it was almost time to think of selecting a camping-place for the night. Patterson stretched himself and sat up.

"Where shall we land?" he asked in Malay.

"I don't know--wherever your honour wishes," the helmsman replied. "Your honour knows best."

Before Patterson could reply a huge tree on the right bank, not twenty yards ahead, crashed down right across the stream, its great branches throwing up a column of water, while its dense top was locked in the foliage of the other bank.

"Murut! Murut!" shouted the Malays. "Turn quick! Quick!"

The water swirled beneath the swift strokes of the paddles as they turned the canoe in its own length. A sudden crack with the rending sound of a falling tree caused them to pause with paddles in the air, as another giant of the forest crashed down the stream below them. Instantly a shot rang out from the jungle and the air was filled with yells of "Hoot-ka-Poot," the dread war-cry of the Head-hunting Muruts.

Naked figures climbed over the fallen trees that hemmed them in, and musket shots from both banks added to the din, though the bullets whizzed high overhead or harmlessly struck the water.

At the first alarm Rupert and Patterson had seized their rifles and opened fire, Patterson shouting orders to keep the canoe in mid-stream.

"Fire at the men on the tree ahead, Cotton," he said. "We must force a passage up stream.... Good shot!" as a Murut who had reached the middle of the tree threw up his arms and toppled face down into the stream.

Two more were lying limp in the tangle of branches and another went splashing and spluttering past the canoe, the swift running current red with his blood. Suddenly the man in the bows leaped up with a shriek that ran high above the noise of the fight, his eyes starting from his head with horror, as he stared at a tiny bamboo shaft that he held in his left hand, while his right plucked convulsively at his side, from which a few drops of blood were oozing. Slowly he sank to his knees, while his fellow paddlemen huddled away from him, muttering the dread words, "Upas, Upas poison! He's hit!"

As the cruel poison began to work, the poor fellow's face became livid and his limbs contorted with agony, and soon he lay a knotted and inanimate mass of twisted limbs in the bottom of the canoe.

The deadly blow-pipe is the Murut's chief weapon, for guns are few and only obtained where the Arab trader has penetrated to buy "gutta" and other jungle produce. The blow-pipe is about six feet long and is bored with wonderful skill from a perfectly straight piece of seasoned hard wood. Its darts are made from bamboo, thin as a knitting needle, and with a very sharp point, which is nearly cut through, so that it breaks off in the wound before the dart can be withdrawn. A piece of pith that exactly fits the bore of the tube is fixed to the other end of the dart, and so powerful is this primitive weapon that a skilled warrior can blow a dart with extreme accuracy to forty or even fifty yards range.

The Malay next Rupert dropped his paddle, which floated away, and when he looked at him he saw a thin line of blood running down his face from a hole in his left temple. He was stone dead, but still squatted in his place. A bullet now broke the steersman's, Unju's, paddle, and the canoe began to drift towards the bank.

It had all happened so quickly that they had scarcely time to realise their danger, and it was not till a shower of spears had wounded Unju and killed the other two Malays, that Patterson saw they were almost ashore.

"Quick, Cotton, paddle for your life!" he shouted, and, seizing a paddle, he tried to turn the bow of the canoe to the stream again.

But it was too late, a score of naked forms leapt from the bank and threw themselves upon the canoe, which filled with water, and surrounded by shrieking savages was soon fast wedged in the undergrowth on the wear side.

It would have gone hard with the two white men, for a dozen spears were poised against them, when Unju, the Dyack, yelling his war-cry, leapt into the midst of the Muruts, his heavy parang swung by an arm of steel, cleaving through skull and shoulder, breast or back, and sending death and destruction on every side. In a moment he had cleared a circle round the canoe. Suddenly a shot rang out, and Unju collapsed into Rupert's arms, and an instant later a tall native with a Winchester repeating rifle in his hand, stepped from behind a tree, and, signing to the Muruts to keep back, approached the canoe.

He wore a short Arab coat, a pair of tight-fitting "sluar," and a small handkerchief turban of stiff gold embroidery round his head. An acquiline nose, two piercing black eyes set very close together, and a small black moustache that covered but did not hide a thin, cruel mouth, showed that the newcomer was not a Murut. He addressed Patterson in Malay with the peculiar drawl of the Brunie noble.

"Surrender, and the Muruts shall not kill you. Touch not your guns but step up upon the land."

He then turned to the Muruts and gave some orders in their own language. Unju had sat up, and Rupert was trying to staunch the bullet wound in his left shoulder. With Patterson's assistance they lifted him from the canoe and laid him against a tree on the river bank. The Muruts were cutting branches of trees and with a few rattans soon constructed a rough litter.

What fate awaited them Rupert hardly dared to guess. That their lives had been spared was evidently due to the presence of the Brunie chief, whom they learnt later on was an outlaw and a desperado called Mat Salleh, who, in his young days, had been a pirate and was a native of Suloo, an island of the north coast. Old Unju knew him well by reputation, and seemed to fear him far more than he did the Muruts, whom he really despised. Mat Salleh had obtained a great influence over the Muruts of the interior, who believed him to be invulnerable and possessed with supernatural power.

When the litter was ready, Mat Salleh ordered them to march behind it, and surrounded by armed Muruts and preceded by others carrying the gory heads of the poor Malays, they started up a steep mountain track through the gloom of the dark jungle. After about an hour's march they emerged from the forest into a large clearing, where paddy and sweet potatoes were planted. At the top of a conical hill in the centre of the clearing was a high stockade of bamboo enclosing some dozen houses on piles and thatched with palm leaves. As the long procession entered the clearing, a great hubbub arose out in the village. The deep notes of a big war gong mingled with the shrill cries of the women, who poured out of a gateway and danced down towards the approaching warriors. The sun had set and it was nearly dark, though a bright moon lighted up the clearing, throwing the stockade and houses into black relief against the opal sky.

Rupert glanced at Patterson. The latter shrugged his shoulders. "We're in for it, I'm afraid, Cotton. Sorry, old man, but while there's life there's hope!"

As they entered the stockade flames shot up from a huge fire that had just been lit inside, and the ruddy glow thrown on the bronze figures of the men and the naked bodies of the women who surrounded them, made a scene so weird and eerie that Rupert's blood ran cold with dread of what was about to happen in this devils' cauldron. At one end of the enclosure was a long house with an open verandah about six feet above the ground, against which was placed a single bamboo in which notches had been cut to form steps.

By this Mat Salleh and the Murut chiefs mounted, and squatting round a huge jar began to refresh themselves by sucking a reed that was inserted in the top. Similar jars were placed near the fire, and groups of warriors quickly surrounded them. Patterson and Rupert were dragged to the fire, and poor wounded Unju was also dragged there by a horrible old hag, who appeared to be the mistress of the ceremonies. The women now took the heads, still dripping with blood, and began to slowly dance round the fire, chanting a deep song with a high wailing note at the end of each stave. Their long black hair hung straight to their waists, they were naked save for a dark cloth of bark round their loins. The great wooden gong beat time and throbbed on the still night air. Gradually the time became faster, and men and women from the drinking jars joined in the dance. The gory heads were tossed from hand to hand, and it was evident to the unfortunate prisoners that the drink was beginning to inflame the dancers.

Spears and parangs flashed in the firelight, and old Unju, who had hitherto remained motionless, stirred uneasily and at last spoke to Patterson in a low voice.

"Beware, O chief, for they will take our heads presently when their blood is fired by drink."

Patterson nodded. "I'm afraid I've given you a poor run for your money, Cotton," he whispered. Rupert smiled. "I'm all right. Glad we're together."

At this moment a band of women were seen advancing from the chief's house, leading two youths who were to be initiated as warriors. They each carried a head by the hair and were led into the circle of dancers. The same old hag who had conducted the dance now smeared the youths with blood, shrieking an invocation, to which the crowd replied at intervals with a shout of "Augh!" Next an old warrior stepped forward and broke off their two front teeth with the aid of a stone and a short iron instrument, afterwards filing the stumps off to the gums.

This was done to enable the sumpitan or blowpipe to be used with greater facility and is the sign of manhood. More jars of tapi (rice spirit) were broached, and every one gave themselves up to drinking.

Patterson whispered to Unju and asked him if he was able to walk, to which the old man replied that he could walk all night if his head remained on his shoulders--about which he expressed some misgivings.

"Listen," said Patterson, "in a short time the moon will be down. They have put green boughs on the fires to smoke the heads while they drink. It is pitch dark under the stockade, and most of the men are already drunk. If we can crawl one by one to the stockade, without being seen, we can overpower the man at the gate, and, once outside, Unju must guide us to the river. It is a desperate venture, but to remain here is certain death."

Unju shook his head. On the whole, he preferred to remain where he was. Their lives were in the hands of fate. To go or stay--it would come to the same thing in the end.

Patterson turned impatiently to Rupert. "What do you say? At least we shall be doing something, and, anyway, get a fight for our lives. This inaction is getting on my nerves."

Rupert managed to laugh. "It is a bit dull. I almost feel as if I were watching my own head being smoke-dried over that beastly fire."

It was agreed that at a signal from Patterson each man should begin to creep towards the stockade, keeping as far apart as possible. If one was discovered and caught the other two were to make a dash for it, trusting to the excitement and drunken confusion to get away.

Patterson drew a ring off his finger, a plain gold band, and gave it to Rupert, asking him (in the event of his getting away and Patterson being caught) to give it to a certain person he named and whose address Rupert would find at the National Bank, Singapore.

"Anything I can do for you, old man, if--if you're unlucky?"

Rupert thought for a moment. "There is a girl I love called Ruby Strode. You will probably find her at the Ingenue Theatre, London. Tell her that I understood and appreciated everything she did on my behalf--tell her she was my last thought."

"Right-ho," Patterson replied cheerily. "Now, crawl a few feet away and lie low until you hear me whistle twice. Then make for the stockade on your hands and knees. Each man for himself, remember. It's our only chance."

Rupert gripped his hand. The next moment he found himself alone. By the faint light of the flames from the fire he could see the hideous, naked figures of the Muruts dancing to and fro, men and women. They reeled, leapt, staggered. The rice spirit was doing its deadly work, and already they were mad with excitement.

Suddenly above the noise Rupert heard two long, low whistles. He turned over on his hands and knees. But, as he did so, he heard a wild yell.

The hag-like woman had seen him. Patterson was discovered, too.

A score of writhing, steel-coloured, blood-stained bodies reeled towards them, closed round them, cutting off all chance of escape.

Rupert saw Patterson rise to his feet. He followed his example, giving himself up for lost. The flames from the bough-fed fire leaped up brightly for a moment, then died down again, making the night inky-black.