So Baboo went with us to fight pirates.
He unrolled his mat out on the bow where every dash of warm salt water wet his
brown skin, and where he could watch the flying fish dash across our way.
He was very quiet during the two days of the trip, as though he were fully
conscious of the heavy responsibility that rested upon his young shoulders. I had
called him a boaster and it had cut him to the quick.
We found the wreck of the Bunker Hill on a sunken coral reef near the mouth of
the Pahang River, but every vestige of her cargo and stores was gone, even to the
glass in her cabin windows and the brasses on her rails.
We worked in along the shore and kept a lookout for camps or signals, but found
none.
I decided to go up the river as far as possible in the launch in hope of coming
across some trace of the missing crew, although I was satisfied that they had
been captured by the noted rebel chief, the Orang Kayah of Semantan, or by his
more famous lieutenant, the crafty Panglima Muda of Jempol, and were being
held for ransom.
It was late in the afternoon when we entered the mouth of the Sungi Pahang.
Aboo Din advised a delay until the next morning.
“The Orang Kayah’s Malays are pirates, Tuan,” he said, with a sinister shrug of
his bare shoulders, “he has many men and swift praus; the Dutch, at Rio, have
sold them guns, and they have their krises,—they are cowards in the day.”
I smiled at the syce’s fears.
I knew that the days of piracy in the Straits of Malacca, save for an occasional
outbreak of high-sea petty larceny on a Chinese lumber junk or a native trader’s
tonkang, were past, and I did not believe that the rebels would have the
hardihood to attack, day or night, a boat, however unprotected, bearing the
American flag.
For an hour or more we ran along between the mangrove-bordered shores