LITMIR.BIZ

      Baboo and the Sikh

      “It was as though an elephant had been worried by a pariah cur”

      “Your Excellency,” he said, salaaming and gasping for breath.

      “It is Baboo, the Harimau-Anak!”

      Baboo wrenched from the guard’s grasp and glided up to my desk. The back of his open palm went to his forehead, and his big brown eyes looked up appealingly into mine.

      “What is it, Tiger-Child?” I asked, bestowing on him the title the Malays of Kampong Glam had given him as a perpetual reminder of his famous adventure.

      Dimples came into either tear-stained cheek. He smoothed out the rents in his small sarong, and without deigning to notice his late captor, said in a soft sing-song voice:—

      “Tuan Consul, Baboo want to go with the Heaven-Born to Pahang. Baboo six years old—can fight pirates like Aboo Din, the father. May Mohammed make Tuan as odorous as musk!”

      “You are a boaster before Allah, Baboo,” I said, smiling.

      Baboo dropped his head in perfectly simulated contrition.

      “I have thought much, Tuan.”

      News had come to me that an American merchant ship had been wrecked near the mouth of the Pahang River, and that the Malays, who were at the time in revolt against the English Resident, had taken possession of its cargo of petroleum and made prisoners of the crew.

      I had asked the colonial governor for a guard of five Sikhs and a launch, that I might steam up the coast and investigate the alleged outrage before appealing officially to the British government.

      Of course Baboo went, much to the disgust of Aboo Din, the syce.

      I never was able to refuse the little fellow anything, and I knew if I left him behind he would be revenged by running away.

      I had vowed again and again that Baboo should stay lost the next time he indulged in his periodical vanishing act, but each time when night came and Aboo Din, the syce, and Fatima, the mother, crept pathetically along the veranda to where I was smoking and steeling my heart against the little rascal, I would snatch up my cork helmet and spring into my cart, which Aboo Din had kept waiting inside the stables for the moment when I should relent.

      Since Baboo had become a hero and earned the appellation of the Harimau-Anak, his vanity directed his footsteps toward Kampong Glam, the Malay quarter of Singapore. Here he was generally to be found, seated on a richly hued Indian rug, with his feet drawn up under him, amid a circle of admiring shopkeepers, syces, kebuns, and fishermen, narrating for the hundredth time how he had been caught at Changhi by a tiger, carried through the jungle on its back until he came to a great banian tree, into which he had crawled while the tiger slept, how a sladang (wild bull) came out of the lagoon and killed the tiger, and how Tuan Consul and Aboo Din, the father, had found him and kissed him many times.

      Often he enlarged on the well-known story and repeated long conversations that he had carried on with the tiger while they were journeying through the jungle.

      A brass lamp hung above his head in which the cocoanut oil sputtered and burned and cast a fitful half-light about the box-like stall.

      Only the eager faces of the listeners stood out clear and distinct against the shadowy background of tapestries from Madras and Bokhara, soft rich rugs from Afghanistan and Persia, curiously wrought finger bowls of brass and copper from Delhi and Siam, and piles of cunningly painted sarongs from Java.

      Close against a naked fisherman sat the owner of the bazaar in tall, conical silk-plaited hat and flowing robes, ministering to the wants of the little actor, as the soft, monotonous voice paused for a brief instant for the tiny cups of black coffee.

      I never had the heart to interrupt him in the midst of one of these dramatic recitals, but would stand respectfully without the circle of light until he had finished the last sentence.

      He was not frightened when I thrust the squatting natives right and left, and he did not forget to arise and touch the back of his open palm to his forehead, with a calm and reverent, “Tabek, Tuan” (Greeting, my lord).

      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 against a swiftly flowing, muddy current.

      The great tangled roots of these trees stood up out of the water like a fretwork of lace, and the interwoven branches above our heads shut out the glassy glare of the sun. We pushed on until the dim twilight faded out, and only a phosphorescent glow on the water remained to reveal the snags that marked our course.

      The launch was anchored for the night close under the bank, where the maze of mangroves was beginning to give place to the solid ground and the jungle.

      Myriads of fireflies settled down on us and hung from the low limbs of the overhanging trees, relieving the hot, murky darkness with their thousands of throbbing lamps.

      From time to time a crocodile splashed in the water as he slid heavily down the clayey bank at the bow.

      In

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