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When, in compliance with Lingard's abrupt demand, Almayer consented to wed the Malay girl, no one knew that on the day when the interesting young convert had lost all her natural relations and found a white father, she had been fighting desperately like the rest of them on board the prau, and was only prevented from leaping overboard, like the few other survivors, by a severe wound in the leg.
The captain started and looked at his son half doubtingly, and as if he believed that this was some hallucination; but just then he raised his eye, and there, faintly seen in the evening haze, was the long low form of a prau just coming out from the projecting land. "Hah!" he ejaculated, "we have left it too long. Morgan, go and take command, and send here the major, Small, and two men.
As he gazed after the retiring prau, with its dusky crew, a vessel, similar in shape and size, and which had been lying close alongside of the Petrel, heaved up her anchor and set sail. "Where are they likely to be going?" Mark asked. "Trading among the islands. They are rare fellows for pushing their way in a slow fashion, but are not such business people as the Chinese."
For there in front was the prau coming rapidly on, full of bloodthirsty pirates, who had ceased firing as they saw their prey within their grasp; while behind was the volcano, whose eruption was minute by minute growing more terrible, and around them the luridly lit-up waters of the old crater in which they were, boiling up, hissing, and emitting great puffs of steam, where, as the cutter rocked and plunged, it seemed to be only a matter of moments before she would be engulfed sucked down, as it were, into the awful depths below!
A broad beach of the whitest sand lined the inner part of the bay, backed by a mass of cocoa-nut palms, among which the huts were concealed, and surmounted by a dense and varied growth of timber. Canoes and boats of various sizes were drawn up on the beach and one or two idlers, with a few children and a dog, gazed at our prau as we came to an anchor.
The Malays stopped rowing, but let her run. Nothing would have tempted them within oar's-length of that prau. "See here, Sidin," I protested, "I go ashore to meet the kapala's men." "We do not go," the fellow said. "If you go, Tuan, you die: the priest has laid the cholera on board that prau. It has come to this shore. Do not go, Tuan." "She hasn't touched the land yet," I said.
The current which had brought us through the narrow strait now ceased, and we were obliged to row, which with our short and heavy prau was slow work. I went on shore several times, but the rocks were so precipitous, sharp, and honeycombed, that I found it impossible to get through the tangled thicket with which they were everywhere clothed.
He was a trader after the Wajo manner, and in a stout sea-going prau armed with two guns and manned by young men who were related to his family by blood or dependence, had come in there to buy some birds of paradise skins for the old Sultan of Ternate; a risky expedition undertaken not in the way of business but as a matter of courtesy toward the aged Sultan who had entertained him sumptuously in that dismal brick palace at Ternate for a month or more.
Arriving late in the afternoon, the soldiers quickly surrounded the town before any Moro could escape in his prau, and the rapidity with which the Philippine Mohammedan can drop from his house, built on poles over the water, and paddle away is little less than miraculous.
I shall follow and strike and, alone, pay the price of blood. A great wind was sweeping towards the setting sun over the empty river. I cried, 'By your side I will go! He lowered his head in sign of assent. It was his destiny. The sun had set, and the trees swayed their boughs with a great noise above our heads. "On the third night we two left our land together in a trading prau.
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