glass bottles—old bottles—Tuan no want old bottle—Baboo and Aboo Din, the
father, put them on deck so when Orang Kayah’s men come out of jungle and
drop from trees on deck they cut their feet on glass. Baboo is through talking,—
Tuan no whip Baboo!”
There was the pathetic little quaver in his voice that I knew so well.
“But they were monkeys, Baboo, not pirates.”
Baboo shrugged his brown shoulders and kept his eyes on my feet.
“Allah is good!” he muttered.
Allah was good; they might have been pirates.
The snarl of the tiger was growing more insistent and near. I gave the order, and
the boat backed out into mid-stream.
As the sun was reducing the gloom of the sylvan tunnel to a translucent twilight,
we floated down the swift current toward the ocean.
I had given up all hope of finding the shipwrecked men, and decided to ask the
government to send a gunboat to demand their release.
As the bow of the launch passed the wreck of the Bunker Hill and responded to
the long even swell of the Pacific, Baboo beckoned sheepishly to Aboo Din, and
together they swept all trace of his adventure into the green waters.
Among the souvenirs of my sojourn in Golden Chersonese is a bit of amber-
colored glass bearing the world-renowned name of a London brewer. There is a
dark stain on one side of it that came from the hairy foot of one of Baboo’s
“pirates.”