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The brig's boat could when the frequency of lightning abated approach unseen close to the beach, and the defeated party, either stealing out one by one or making a rush in a body, would embark and be received in the brig. This plan was explained to Jaffir, who heard it without the slightest mark of interest, being apparently too busy eating.
Do you understand, O big man?" "The chap has plenty of sense," muttered Lingard to himself, and when they stood side by side on the deck, he said: "But there may be enemies on the beach, O Jaffir, and they also may shout to deceive my men. So let your hail be Lightning! Will you remember?" For a time Jaffir seemed to be choking. "Lit-ing! Is that right? I say is that right, O strong man?"
The last breath would be time enough if they were to spear me at his feet. But alas! the bush is full of Tengga's men, the beach is open and I could never even hope to reach the gate." Jorgenson, with his hands deep in the pockets of his tunic, listened, looking down. Jaffir showed as much consternation as his nature was capable of. "Our refuge is with God," he murmured. "But what is to be done?
"Too late," said Jaffir, "we are ten only, and at sunrise we go out to die." He went to the cabin door and hesitated there with a puzzled air, being unused to locks and door handles. "What are you going to do?" asked Lingard. "I shall swim back," replied Jaffir. "The message is spoken and the night can not last forever." "You can stop with me," said Lingard, looking at the man searchingly.
One of these, chancing to take up Venice Preserved for the second time, admired the sublime friendship between Pierre and Jaffir, and fell to musing on the virtues of outlaws, the loyalty of the hulks, the honor of thieves, and the immense power that a few men can wield if they bring their whole minds to bear upon the carrying out of a single will.
And then he went on to relate, how, driven steadily down to the sea, Hassim, with a small band of followers, had been for days holding the stockade by the waterside. "But every night some men disappeared," confessed Jaffir. "They were weary and hungry and they went to eat with their enemies.
This was the preliminary fight of a civil war, fostered by foreign intrigues; a war of jungle and river, of assaulted stockades and forest ambushes. In this contest, both parties according to Jaffir displayed great courage, and one of them an unswerving devotion to what, almost from the first, was a lost cause.
It was a great shock to Hassim, but the sort of half smile with which he had been listening to Jaffir never altered its character. It was the Princess Immada who cried out in distress and wrung her hands. A deep silence fell.
All was still as far as the eye could reach over the black water. A slight breeze came along it and Jaffir on the brink, waiting for a canoe, shivered a little. At the same moment Carter, exhausted by thirty hours of uninterrupted toil at the head of whites and Malays in getting the yacht afloat, dropped into Mrs.
Before a month elapsed Hassim, though still chief of an armed band, was already a fugitive. He kept up the struggle, however, with some vague notion that Lingard's arrival would turn the tide. "For weeks we lived on wild rice; for days we fought with nothing but water in our bellies," declaimed Jaffir in the tone of a true fire-eater.
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