“I didn’t know he was your brother,” I said to her.
“All Laos are brother and sister,” she replied.
Well, I’ve found it best to keep out of native feuds and family jangles.
“Some old village quarrel back of it,” I thought.
――――
All night it rained, and in the morning the river was talking to the
cliffs in a louder voice. And the water was up and coming. Bits of drift
were floating.
Among the traders I found Pra Oom Bwaht settled in a little hut off by
himself. He had scant store of Karen cloths, Laos baskets, some hammered
brass. He was sitting on a big box, and it was covered with a mat woven
of tree-cotton fiber. He arose to meet me and came to the door.
“Let us chat here,” he said. “I like the sun better than the shade.”
It was queer to deny me a seat beside him, I thought; but I let it pass.
I was not paying much attention to details then.
So we sat in the doorway and watched the rain and heard the river
talking to Kalgai Gorge. Trade was slack and would be until the greater
rains came bearing boats and rafts from above and over and beyond, from
up the river and the little rivers coming into it.
I could make nothing of Pra Oom Bwaht, I say. I left him and went out to
chaffer a bit.
“Who knows the Karen fool?” Ali Beg, just down from Szechuan after
trading rifles to Chinese Mohammedans for opium, demanded of me from the
door of his own place.
“Why?” I asked.
“He trades like a fool, letting a rupee’s worth go for a pice.”
“Let him,” I laughed, “so long as he keeps away from me.”
“And yours?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Come in and drink of tea with me,” he invited.
So I went in and we sat eye to eye, face to face, across his little
teakwood table, each squatting on his heels, and drank tea and talked of
many things.
“Now that we have said all the useless things, tell me what is at the
bottom of thy heart,” Ali demanded. Up there the important things are
kept for the dessert of the talk.
He was an old friend, with his coal-black eyes, great hairy arms and
rippling black beard.
“Thus it was, heart of my soul,” I said, laying hold of a lock of his
beard up under his green turban, in token of entire truth-telling. “Thus
it was”—and I tugged at the lock of beard. So I told him the tale, from
the time of my going to Karen until the time of my coming to Kalgai town
and the arrival of Pra Oom Bwaht.
He sat a long time in silence.
Then he reached into his robe and drew out a fine dagger of Sikh smithy
work, hammered, figured on the blade, keen, heavy of hilt; in the tip of
the handle a ball of polished steel, hollow and filled with mercury. It
was a throwing knife.
“Take this,” Ali urged. “I taught thee how to cast it at a foe years ago
when we first went up the great river together. I go from here to-night
by boats toward Maulmain. It will fall out with thee as it will fall
out.”
I took the dagger because it was Ali’s gift, not because I was afraid.
Why should I fear anything that walked on two legs or four? Even though
it wore a tail or horns?
At nightfall I went back to my house on the rock spit. The stream was
roaring now—like a baby lion.
Nagy N’Yang was sitting in the open doorway as I came up the path. I saw
she had her chin in her hand and was thinking deeply.
“I saw him,” I made answer to the question in her eyes.
“Did he receive you well?”
“Except that he did not have me to sit beside him on his big trader’s
box in his hut, but took me to the doorway to talk. It was not
friendly.”
“Aha!” Just like that—soft, thoughtful.
“But what do I care for him, with his Karen cloths or hammered brass?” I
chattered at her. “Come to me, Sweet One of a Thousand Delights.”
――――
So the days and the evenings and nights went by, and the greater rains
followed the lesser. The river crept up and up and up, roaring now to
the cliffs, like old lions.
Then came a day when on going home at eve I stooped at the river’s brim
near the house we had on the rock spit, and felt of the water. It was
chilled. “The flood is full,” I thought. I had felt the snow-chill from
the Tibetan Himalayas in hoary Salwin’s yellow flood. When that comes,
the utmost sources of the world have been tapped for flood water.
“The river will begin to fall to-morrow,” I told Nagy N’Yang when I came
into the place. “We will go soon after, when the big trading is over.”
She smiled at me. Then she patted with her soft hand the place where she
had tattooed on my brow the mark of the third eye of Siva. It was
healed.
“I care not where we go, or if we go or stay, so long as you are with
me,” she whispered, close against my side.
After the evening meal we sat in the doorway and heard the river
talking. Often the big whirlpool sighed or moaned.
“It will almost cover our rock spit,” I said. I knew by the lift of it
by day and the noise of it by night that the flood was a mighty one and
would spend its chief force that night.
She nodded and nestled closer to me.
Out of the shade before us a greater shade silently loomed.
“I greet you, my sister and brother,” Pra Oom Bwaht said, standing
before us.
Nagy N’Yang shivered against my side. I felt the dagger under my robe.
A single beam from our brazier inside struck across his twisty face. He
stretched out his hand toward Nagy N’Yang.
“A gift for my sister,” he said.
She half reached her hand out, took it back, reached again and took it
back; then, as if impelled by a force too strong to resist, reached
again. Into her palm dropped something that shone for a tiny space in
the yellow gleam of the brazier’s ray. She shut her hand—caught it to
her breast. I thought it was a tiny golden bangle—then.
“Come,” said Pra Oom Bwaht. “Let us walk apart for a moment. I have
family matters to talk over. Your husband will permit.”
I wanted her to protest, but she did not. She got up calmly and went
with him out onto the rock spit. I was between them and the mainland.
They could not go away by river. No harm would come to her, it seemed.
“Some tribal custom to be attended to,” I thought. It is best not to be
too curious about such matters up among the hills of Burma and Siam,
ma’am. If you are, your wife suffers, not you.
For a long time I could hear them talking out there in the dark, with
the river talking in between whiles. Once I heard a sound like a great
sigh or sobbing moan. “The whirlpool at the river’s bed,” I thought,
“taking in a great tree or raft.”
Soon after that the back mat of the house lifted, and I thought they had
come in by that way. I sat, peering into the gloom inside, ready to
greet them, when something crashed on to the back of my head and I
forgot for a time.
I came back to memory in a daze and feeling much pain in my head. The
brazier flared beside me. Bending over me was Pra Oom Bwaht, with a
knife in his hand.
“Son of a pig!” he said.
“Where is Nagy N’Yang?” I asked.
He smiled at me—his cursed twisty smile.
“On the river’s brink she waits, bound to a great teak log lodged at the
end of the spit,” he cried hoarsely. “When the flood comes to its full,
she will float away—”