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Updated: June 9, 2025
"For this was it you risked your life going to Mandakan," said Pango Dooni, angrily, to his son; "for a maid with a body like a withered gourd." Then all at once, with a new look in his face, he continued softly: "Thou hast the soul of a woman, but thy deeds are the deeds of a man. As thy mother was in heart so art thou." Day was breaking over Mandakan, and all the city was a tender pink.
In his dreams he thought he was in the Dakoon's Palace at Mandakan with a thousand men before him, and three men came forward and gave him a sword.
He put spurs to the sorrel. As he did so, dark figures sprang up on all sides of him. Without a word he drove the excited horse at his assailants. Three caught his bridle-rein, and others snatched at him to draw him from his horse. "Hands off!" he cried, in the language of Mandakan, and levelled his pistol. "He is English!" said a voice. "Cut him down!" "I am the Governor's son," said the lad.
It was sacred, yet it was not solemn; peaceful, yet not sombre; rather gentle, aspiring, and clear. The people were not of the city alone, but they had been gathered from all parts of the land many thousands, who were now come on a pilgrimage to Mandakan. At the head of the procession was a tall, lithe figure, whose face shone, and whose look was at once that of authority and love.
A crocodile slipped off a log into the water he knew that sound; a rank odour came from the river bank he knew the smell of the hippopotamus. These very things gave him new courage. Since he came from Eton to Mandakan he had hunted often and well, and once he had helped to quarry the Little Men of the Jungle when they carried off the wife and daughter of a soldier of the Dakoon.
"There is a maid in Mandakan," interrupted Tanga-Dahit, "and these two years she has lain upon her bed, and she may not be moved, for the bones of her body are as the soft stems of the lily, but her face is a perfect face, and her tongue has the wisdom of God." "You ride to her through the teeth of danger?" "She may not come to me, and I must go to her," answered the hillsman.
He had gone to the Palace that morning as Colonel Cumner had commanded, that he might receive the thanks of the Dakoon for the people of Mandakan; but he had tired of the great place, and had come back to play at chuck-farthing. Already he had won everything the other possessed, and was now playing for his dinner.
When Cumner's Son first set out from Mandakan he could scarcely see at all, and he kept his way through the native villages more by instinct than by sight. As time passed he saw more clearly; he could make out the figures of natives lying under trees or rising from their mats to note the flying horseman. Lights flickered here and there in the houses and by the roadside.
And Pango Dooni sat on the ground near them and pondered, and no man broke his meditation. When the two hours were gone, they mounted again and rode on through the dark villages towards Mandakan. It was just at the close of the hour before dawn that the squad of troopers who rode a dozen rods before the columns, heard a cry from the dark ahead. "Halt-in the name of the Dakoon!"
The saddest person in Mandakan was the present Dakoon, in his palace by the Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which was guarded by four sacred warriors in stone and four brown men armed with the naked kris. The Dakoon was dying, though not a score of people in the city knew it.
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