inmate of the house who remained uninjured.
He of the Hairy Face killed quickly and silently, while there were yet some alive
to resist him. Then, purring gently, he drank a deep draught of blood from each
of his slaughtered victims. At last he reached Che’ Sĕman, and Mînah, seeing
him approach, made a feeble effort to evade him. Then began a fearful scene, the
tiger playing with, and torturing the girl, just as we all have seen a cat do with a
maimed mouse. Again and again Mînah crawled feebly away from her
tormentor, only to be drawn back again just when escape seemed possible. Again
and again she lay still in the utter inertia of exhaustion, only to be quickened into
agonised movement once more by the touch of the tiger's cruel claws. Yet so
cunningly did he play with her, that, as Mat described it, a time as long as it
would take to cook rice had elapsed, before the girl was finally put out of her
misery.
Even then He of the Hairy Face did not quit the scene of slaughter. Mat, as he
lay trembling in the shelf overhead, watched the tiger, through the long hours of
that fearful night, play with the mangled bodies of each of his victims in turn. He
leaped from one to the other, inflicting a fresh blow with teeth or claws on their
torn flesh, with all the airy, light-hearted agility and sinuous grace of a kitten
playing with its shadow in the sun. Then when the dawn was breaking, the tiger
tore down the door, leaped lightly to the ground, and betook himself to the
jungle.
When the sun was up, an armed party of neighbours came to the house to see if
ought could be done. But they found the place a shambles, the bodies hardly to
be recognised, the floor-laths dripping blood, and Mat lying face downward on
the shelf, with his reason tottering in the balance. The bodies, though they had
been horribly mutilated, had not been eaten, the tiger having contented himself
with drinking the blood of his victims, and playing his ghastly game with them
till the dawn broke.
This is, I believe, the only recorded instance in the Peninsula of a tiger having
dared to attack men within their closed houses; and the circumstances are so
remarkable in every way, that I, for one, cannot find it in me to greatly blame the
Malays for attributing the fearlessness of mankind, and the lust for blood
displayed by Him of the Hairy Face, to the fact that he owed his existence to
magic agencies, and was in reality no mere wild beast, but a member of the race
upon which he so cruelly preyed.