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Updated: June 1, 2025
'Yes, that was well done; but you must borrow it for the day. Run and fetch it at once; we have a long walk before us. "So I ran back, and without telling Aoodya, who was washing her linen behind the house, slipped the pearl off the child's neck and returned to Hamid. I found him, with two spears in his hand, waiting for me. He gave me one, and forth we set.
'My son, beneath this spot there has been fire, and still the men of Cagayan walk warily and go not without their spears. For you it is different; yet when you come upon aught that puzzles you, it were well to put no questions even to yourself. "'Not even about this? I asked, and showed him the purse and stone which Aoodya had tossed to me.
For as the Berbalang fell, the bough seemed to rip away from where his cheek had rested, and Aoodya, with my child in her arms, swung back under my feet and dropped like a stone into the lake. "I can't tell you, sir, how long I lay stretched out along that trunk, with the Berbalang's knife still pinned through my hand. I was staring down into the water.
At that distance they seemed harmless enough, and, barring the strangeness of the spot, might have been an ordinary party of islanders forming up for a dance. But when, all of a sudden, the ring came to a standstill, and a figure stepped out of it towards the bundle in the centre, my wits came back to me, and I flung up both arms, shouting 'Aoodya! Aoodya!
"I strolled down the verandah to our quarters in search of Aoodya, but the room was empty; and after that I'm afraid I smoked and sulked for the rest of the day, until nightfall. After playing the Hadji Hamid through his meal I went out to our favourite seat on the edge of the dry ditch, when she came to me out of nowhere across the withered grass of the compound.
You may think it odd that he never troubled about my being an unbeliever for of course he held by the Prophet, and so did all the islanders, Aoodya included. But in fact, though his people called themselves Mahommedans, each man treated his religion much as he chose, and Hamid talked to me as freely as if I had been his son.
"But of course it was not all right; and after two days spent with this dismal secret between us, and Aoodya all the while play-acting at her old tricks of love for me and the babe as if, God knows, I doubted they, and not the horror, were her real self I could stand it no longer, but did what I ought to have done before; sought out my master and made a clean breast of it.
As I closed on my man, he swerved and began to clamber out along the trunk; and over his shoulder I saw Aoodya, with the babe in the crick of her arm, upon a bough which swayed and sank beneath her. "I clutched at his ankle. He reached back with a hiss of his breath and jabbed his knife down on my left hand, cutting across the two middle fingers and pinning me through the small bones to the trunk.
Aoodya had risen and was standing by the cradle, with one hand on its edge; in the other was the lamp a clam-shell fastened in a split handle of bamboo, and holding a pith wick and a little oil.
The guard at the gate scarcely looked up, and if the thing hadn't been impossible, there, in the broad daylight, I could have fancied he saw no one. I turned to Aoodya and took her hands, for she was trembling from head to foot. At my touch she burst out sobbing, clung to my shoulder and begged me to protect her. "'Why, of course I will, said I, more cheerfully than I felt by a long sight.
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