returned, more or less dissatisfied, some five days later, he found that Haji Äli
and his sons had disappeared. They had fled down river on a dark night, without
a soul being made aware of their intended departure. They had neither stayed to
reap their crops, which now stood ripening in the fields; to sell their house and
compound, which had been bought with good money,—'dollars of the whitest,'
as the Malay phrase has it,—nor yet to collect their debts. This is a fact; and to
one who knows the passion for wealth and for property, which is to be found in
the breast of every Sumatran Malay, it is perhaps the strangest circumstance of
all the weird events, which go to make up the drama of the Were-Tiger of Slim.
There is, to the European mind, only one possible explanation. Haji Äli and his
sons had been the victims of foul play. They had been killed by the simple
villagers of Slim, and a cock-and-bull story trumped up to account for their
disappearance. This is a very good, and withal a very astute explanation,
showing as it does a profound knowledge of human nature, and I should be more
than half inclined to accept it as the correct one, but for the fact that Haji Äli and
his sons turned up in quite another part of the Peninsula some months later. They
have nothing out of the way about them to mark them from their fellows, except
that Haji Äli goes lame on his right leg.
Footnotes:
[9] Isa = The hour of evening prayer.