gy yellow handkerchief knotted about his
throat, and both throat and face were seamed with wrinkles--so thickly
seamed that at first glance you might take them for tattoo-marks; but I
had time for a second, for without troubling to meet my eyes he nodded
towards the Rajah.

"I've cut a day's work and travelled out from Plymouth to get a sight of
him; and I've a wife will pull my hair out when I get home and she finds
I haven't been to the docks to-day; and I've had no breakfast but thirty
grains of opium; but he's worth it."

"Thirty grains of opium!" I stared at him, incredulous. He did not
turn, but, still with his eyes on the valley below us, stretched out a
hand. It's fingers were gnarled, and hooked like a bird's claw, and on
the little finger a ruby flashed in the morning sunlight--not a large
ruby, but of the purest pigeon's-blood shade, and in any case a stone of
price.

"You see this? My wife thinks it a sham one, but it's not. And some
day, when I'm drunk or in low water, I shall part with it--but not yet.
You've an eye for it, I see,"--and yet he was not looking towards me,--
"but the Rajah, yonder, and I are the only two within a hundred miles
that can read what's in the heart of it."

He gazed for a second or two at the stone, lifted it to his ear as if
listening, and lowering his hand to the turf, bent over it and gazed
again. "Ay, _he_ could understand and see into you, my beauty!
_He_ could hear the little drums tum-a-rumbling, and the ox-bells and
bangles tinkling, and the shuffle of the elephants going by; _he_ could
read the lust in you, and the blood and the sun flickering and licking
round the _kris_ that spilt it--for it's the devil you have in you, my
dear. But we know you--he and I--he and I. Ah! there you go," he
muttered as the hounds broke into cry, and the riders swept round the
edge of the copse towards the sound of a view-halloo. "There you go,"
he nodded after the Rajah; "but ride as you will, the East is in you,
great man--its gold in your blood, its dust in your eyelids, its own
stink in your nostril; and, ride as you will, you can never escape it."

He clasped his knees and leaned back against the slope, following the
grey horse and its rider with idolatrous gaze; and I noted that one of
the clasped hands lacked the two middle fingers.

"You know him?" I asked. "You have seen him out there, at Sarawak?"

"I never saw him; but I heard of him." He smiled to himself. "It