Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 174: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

168 was a sort of hell; but I’m glad I went there. I wasn’t in the place a year, and yet those months have changed my life. I know that, John. Damned funny thing, the world! It was just a fluke it ever happened.” He went on to tell Eade how he had met Madame Scala by chance on the Singapore praya. He wasn’t much of a psychologist, but it’s pretty clear to every one that certain personalities blend, so to speak, whilst others clash. Madame Scala, whom he called Valérie, had liked him from the first. And he had liked her —and that was a mild way of putting it. That was why he had gone to Singan in the first place, though he had thought he was a fool for doing so. It was like buying a pig in a poke; but the uncertainty of the whole business had rather appealed to him. : in the Café Riche, behind the Singapore Club, and hated the man the moment he saw him. A big, broad shouldered fellow, with black eyes, curly hair and a black mustache—a kind of cross between an operatic tenor, the traditional bandit and the reigning mon- arch of some tinpot principality. Scala fancied himself no end; he was conceited about his physical strength, his good looks, his brains and money. Though he was a Sicilian by birth, he had been educated in Holland. His mother was probably Dutch. Anyway, as a young man he had gone to Java, where he had had something to do with a big shipping firm in Surabaya. The company had agents in most of the Oriental ports, and Scala had spent a good many years knocking around the Indies and all the coast from Rangoon to Shanghai. At one time he had been posted in Bangkok, whence he had been sent to Saigon; and there he had fallen in with old Le Camus and his daughter. Le Camus was a French colonial official who had come into a good deal of money. In spite of his daughter, he couldn’t tear himself away from Cochin- | E HAD MET Scala the next day CHARLES GILSON China, because of opium. He was living a life of ease and idleness, with the opium smoker’s extravagant ideas, when he fell into Scala’s clutches. Before then, Scala had discovered Singan—a little island, not more than twenty miles across, lying not far from the beaten track between Macassar and Balikh Papan in Borneo, due south of the Little Paternoster Islands, and north- west of the Spermonde Archipelago. Scala had landed there at some time or other and made friends with the sultan. He was quick enough to see possibilities in the place. The virgin jungle was thick with mature and healthy rubber trees, and only wanted clearing. ; He got Le Camus to come into the business, and it was the old man’s money that bought a good third of the island. The sultan had had a taste of Occidental civilization, and wanted more of it; to which end he found a banking account in Paris more than helpful. He did the grand tour, not in the approved manner of an Eastern potentate—for no one had ever heard of him—but with the sole idea of exploring all the dissolute haunts he could find between Port Said and Mont- martre. He duly returned to Singan with en- larged ideas and a lightened purse. By that time Scala’s scheme was well under way. He had got a gang of Chinese coolies down: from Hainan to do the clearing work; and Liu Tang had started off as foreman. In course of time the astute Chinese became a partner, for it was he who suggested the main lines upon which the business should be run. For Scala soon found out that rubber planting wasn’t as profitable as he had thought, especially as his so-called expert, Mr. Eugene Pai, let him down badly more than onee. Besides, there was too much competition in the field. And then came the government restriction of output in British Malaya; and that was Scala’s chance. Liu Tang fixed it with Japanese estates in the peninsula who were ready to dodge . the government and anxious to get rid of © comicloooks.com