Part 2

“It was less than a day’s journey, and when we got there it wasn’t above ten o’clock in the morning, and there, like as if a chap had hoisted a mattress and stuck it between two of the branches, away up in a big tree, we saw Kadjaman’s house; but there wasn’t a sign of the owner nor of Ting. We didn’t go to knock at the door. We all sat down in the undergrowth which hid us while giving us a view of the premises above, and there we waited. I didn’t know what Tuan proposed to do to get the child back, but I did know one thing, he was going to get it back now he’d found the address. I reckoned he’d kill Kadjaman and then climb for the child; but I was wrong as it turned out.

“I nodded off to sleep, for I was bone tired with the journey, and I’d been dozing maybe an hour when Tuan joggled me awake. I looked up and there was Ting crawling along a branch twenty foot up, following in the track of a big monk that was Kadjaman’s twin brother if it wasn’t himself. You could see at a glance that the child had joined up with the monkey folk in the three months he’d been with them.

“But I wasn’t bothering about that, I was watching Tuan. Tuan had his blowgun with him. It was a better weapon and twice as deadly as a Colt’s automatic. It was death itself, for the dart was poisoned. Tuan was standing up and leaning back with the gun to his lips. Up above, against the sprinkling light through the leaves, Kadjaman made a target as big as a barn door and not more than twenty-five feet off and Tuan with that infernal gun could hit the middle of a sixpence somewhere about the same distance. So there didn’t seem much chance for the monkey, did there?

“Well, all of a sudden I heard the ‘phut’ of the blowgun, and right on it Ting, up in the branches, let a squeal out of him and I saw he’d been hit, hit right in the neck where the big vein is and where the poison of the dart would act quickest.

“Then he came tumbling, kicking, and catching at twigs, bang into the bushes, dead as Pharaoh’s aunt. Tuan gave the body a stir with his foot to see if it was dead all right, and finding it so was satisfied. He didn’t bother about Kadjaman, though he could have killed him easy enough. He’d got his son back, anyhow, and stopped him from going lower than he’d gone. You see he wasn’t a chap to believe in _Tarzan of the Apes_ or _Mowgli_, seeing that he knew what the jungle is and what monkeys are, and what men can become.

“Tuan wasn’t a popsy-wopsy father by no means, but I’ve often thought it’s chaps like Tuan, stuck by nature in the door in old days, that’s stopped humans from backsliding into beasts—but maybe I’m wrong.”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the August 7, 1921 issue of The Popular magazine.]