There was a scuffle in the outer office, and a thin, piping voice
was calling down all the curses of the Koran on the heads of my great
top-heavy Hindu guards.
"Sons of dogs," I heard in the most withering contempt, "I will see
the Tuan Consul. Know he is my father."
A tall Sikh, with his great red turban awry and his brown kaki uniform
torn and soiled, pushed through the bamboo chicks and into my presence.
He was dragging a small bit of naked humanity by the folds of its
faded cotton sarong.
The powerful soldier was hot and flushed, and a little stream of
blood trickling from his finger tips showed where they had come in
contact with his captive's teeth. It was as though an elephant had
been worried by a pariah cur.
"Your Excellency," he said, salaaming and gasping for breath.
"It is Baboo, the Harimau-Anak!"
Baboo wrenched from the guard's grasp and glided up to my desk. The
back of his open palm went to his forehead, and his big brown eyes
looked up appealingly into mine.
"What is it, Tiger-Child?" I asked, bestowing on him the title the
Malays of Kampong Glam had given him as a perpetual reminder of his
famous adventure.
Dimples came into either tear-stained cheek. He smoothed out the rents
in his small sarong, and without deigning to notice his late captor,
said in a soft sing-song voice:--
"Tuan Consul, Baboo want to go with the Heaven-Born to Pahang.
Baboo six years old,--can fight pirates like Aboo Din, the father. May
Mohammed make Tuan as odorous as musk!"
"You are a boaster before Allah, Baboo," I said, smiling.
Baboo dropped his head in perfectly simulated contrition.
"I have thought much, Tuan."
News had come to me that an American merchant ship had been wrecked
near the mouth of the Pahang River, and that the Malays, who were at
the time in revolt against the English Resident, had taken possession
of its cargo of petroleum and made prisoners of the crew.
I had asked the colonial governor for a guard of five Sikhs and a
launch, that I might steam up the coast and investigate the alleged
outrage before appealing officially to the British government.
Of course Baboo went, much to the disgust of Aboo Din, the syce.
I never was able to refuse the little fellow anything, and I knew if
I left him behind he would be revenged by running away.
I had vowed again and again that Baboo should stay lost the next
time he indulged in his periodical vanishing act, but each time when
night came and Aboo Din, the syce, and Fatima, the mother, crept
pathetically along the veranda to where I was smoking and steeling
my heart against the little rascal, I would snatch up my cork helmet
and spring into my cart, which Aboo Din had kept waiting inside the
stables for the moment when I should relent.
Since Baboo had become a hero and earned the appellation of the
Harimau-Anak, his vanity directed his footsteps toward Kampong Glam,
the Malay quarter of Singapore. Here he was generally to be found,
seated on a richly hued Indian rug, with his feet drawn up under him,
amid a circle of admiring shopkeepers, syces, kebuns, and fishermen,
narrating for the hundredth time how he had been caught at Changhi
by a tiger, carried through the jungle on its back until he came to
a great banian tree, into which he had crawled while the tiger slept,
how a sladang (wild bull) came out of the lagoon and killed the tiger,
and how Tuan Consul and Aboo Din, the father, had found him and kissed
him many times.
Often he enlarged on the well-known story and repeated long
conversations that he had carried on with the tiger while they were
journeying through the jungle.
A brass lamp hung above his head in which the cocoanut oil sputtered
and burned and cast a fitful half-light about the box-like stall.
Only the eager faces of the listeners stood out clear and distinct
against the shadowy background of tapestries from Madras and Bokhara,
soft rich rugs from Afghanistan and Persia, curiously wrought finger
bowls of brass and copper from Delhi and Siam, and piles of cunningly
painted sarongs from Java.
Close against a naked fisherman sat the owner of the bazaar in tall,
conical silk-plaited hat and flowing robes, ministering to the wants
of the little actor, as the soft, monotonous voice paused for a brief
instant for the tiny cups of black coffee.
I never had the heart to interrupt him in the midst of one of these
dramatic recitals, but would stand respectfully without the circle
of light until he had finished the last sentence.
He was not frightened when I thrust the squatting natives right
and left, and he did not forget to arise and touch the back of his
open palm to his forehead, with a calm and reverent, "Tabek, Tuan"
(Greeting, my lord).
So Baboo went with us to fight pirates.
He unrolled his mat out on the bow where every dash of warm salt
water wet his brown skin, and where he could watch the flying fish
dash across our way.
He was very quiet during the two days of the trip, as though he were
fully conscious of the heavy responsibility that rested upon his young
shoulders. I had called him a boaster and it had cut him to the quick.
We found the wreck of the Bunker Hill on a sunken coral reef near the
mouth of the Pahang River, but every vestige of her cargo and stores
was gone, even to the glass in her cabin windows and the brasses on
her rails.
We worked in along the shore and kept a lookout for camps or signals,
but found none.
I decided to go up the river as far as possible in the launch in
hope of coming across some trace of the missing crew, although I
was satisfied that they had been captured by the noted rebel chief,
the Orang Kayah of Semantan, or by his more famous lieutenant, the
crafty Panglima Muda of Jempol, and were being held for ransom.
It was late in the afternoon when we entered the mouth of the Sungi
Pahang.
Aboo Din advised a delay until the next morning.
"The Orang Kayah's Malays are pirates, Tuan," he said, with a sinister
shrug of his bare shoulders, "he has many men and swift praus; the
Dutch, at Rio, have sold them guns, and they have their krises,--they
are cowards in the day."