Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 205: what you’re looking at

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

The Story of William Hyde lying between warm blankets upon a bed of dry leaves. My broken forearm was set in two clever splints, my waist was con- strained in bandages that were as a corset for stiffness and tightness, and there was a bandage about my head. And darting in and out of the tent, hovering solicitously about me, were the three Christian Dyak boys with whom I had come “in” for Coelogyne Lowii, the ‘‘Flower of Mercy” of Borneo. It all seemed a dream. But it was no dream. I had stumbled upon my own camp for a surety and, also, for the very good reason that the boys had awaited me there. They said they knew I never would be able to get inside the Jallan Batoe. And when I told them that I had been inside the Jallan Batoe they only shook energetically their dangling earrings. “da, ndal’”’ they said; then added, as if that was proof conclusive, ‘‘You were gone only four days, twan.”’ “Yes,” I agreed; ‘‘and for three of those four days your master was in the Jallan. Batoe. Or rather, I was in the Jallan Batoe three nights and two days.” But they would not believe me; they only carefully scrutinized that bandage on my head; and, indeed; I did not blame them so much for doubting me. I myself could hardly believe that all that had happened to me, had happened in so short a space as two days and three nights. “Your head has been wandering away from your body, tuan,” they finally told me. “For a week, ever since the night you stum- bled into camp you have been talking, mas- ter, of strange things.” “What!” And-I sat up. “Have I been here a week?” They nodded so i Cchemanthy that the fringes of black hair upon their low fore- heads leaped up and down as in a dance. “But—but that thudding against the tent, that booming in the air—is that still the rain?” Again they nodded. For a week, unceas- ingly, it had been raining, they said. And it continued to rain, ceaselessly, with that great hollow booming, for weeks, for what seemed to me an endless time—a whole month—the while I lay in that tent and convalesced. Once I asked them what they had done with my hickory shirt. They brought it to me. When I looked at the collar of that shirt I found upon it the blood-prints of a 203 hand. I compared those prints, when they were rebandaging my waist, with those red open wounds in my flesh. They were the same, I knew then. The Poonan did not know. what had happened to me; only Lip-Plak- Tengga and perhaps my own Golden Feather of Flame knew what had happened to me; for none of the Poonan had seen me lying as good as dead upon that sunken © lava path. The High Priestess had pointed the way, no doubt, and that Monster Man had dragged me by. the collar of my hickory shirt out through that tunnel to the jungle outside. For the marks upon my body and upon the collar of that hickory shirt were the same. They were the marks of the blood-besmeared, long-fingered, enormous hands of the Monster Man. My life had been spared by Lip-Plak-Tengga. She had loved me—yes. At the end of a month the rain ceased, and, my arm having knit, I prevailed upon my Dyak boys, after a deal of cajoling, to climb up that dripping overgrown slope. But no tunnel remained. The squalls and heavy downpour of the last month had caused an avalanche down the slope which had broken in the rock roof of the entrance to that tunnel, and had packed before it a solid wall of matted growths, sodden, heavy earth and huge uprooted trees. We started digging at that wall; but the rainy season was on us then, and, a week later, we had to quit work. With the orchids I already had plucked from the dark jungle, ere I went into the Jallan Batoe, and which my Dyak boys had carefully nurtured and kept for me, I loaded down the gobang. We paddled then along the Loeang into the Barito, and so down that river to Banjermasin. There, at Banjermasin, with the money realized from those orchids, I chartered and provisioned a large tambangan, hired a crew of twelve Tring Dyak boys instead of my former three, and went “in” again. I found on the spot where I last had camped, a water-khor or water-hole, from which a small stream ran down into the Loeang. I knew thereupon that the river from the Jallan Batoe, dammed up by that choked tunnel, had wormed a way under- ground and here, at last, had spouted to the surface. When we reached that caved- in and choked tunnel the digging we had done some months before was entirely ob- (E(0) .OOKS MIG (Elo) are war + by : wth «Ss Fgh 2 EP Ot Ls ee