bend, and was out
of sight of the steamer.

So likewise was the sampan from which the Malay had come, while one of
its occupants steered it into the dinghy's course, and the other
crouched in the forward part with a keen-headed limbing or spear.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

HOW BOB AND OLD DICK FINISHED THEIR DAY.

The very motion of the boat lulled its occupants into a deeper sleep as
they glided on and on down the swift deep river, with the tall waving
palms and the dark undergrowth ever slipping by the travellers, who had
embarked now upon a journey whose end was death.

The sampan floated quietly on in attendance, and the Malay, whose hand
was twisted in the boat's painter, kept beneath the bows of the little
boat with merely his face above water, the dinghy now floating down
stern foremost, and, having been guided into the swiftest part of the
stream, always faster and faster towards its journey's end.

Utterly unconscious of danger, and dreaming comfortably of being in a
land of unlimited do-nothingism, Dick's head lay across the gunwale of
the boat in terrible proximity to the Malay's kris; while Bob, with his
chin on his chest, was far away in his old home, in a punt of which he
had lost the pole, and it was being whirled along faster and faster
through the shallows towards the mill down at the bend of the river.

He was very comfortable, and in spite of an uneasy position his sleep
was very sweet, unconscious as he was of anything having the semblance
of danger.

And now the dinghy was a good half mile below where the steamer was
moored. They had passed the last house standing on its stout bamboo
props, some distance above, and the river had curved twice in its bed,
so that they had long been concealed from any one upon the deck, and
still the Malays hesitated, or rather waited the time to make their
spring. They had no special enmity against the occupants of the dinghy
in particular, but they were three of the most daring followers of Rajah
Gantang, who had assumed the part of fishermen in a sampan, with a rough
cast net, so as to hang about the neighbourhood of the "Startler," and
pick up information for their chief, who, so far from being, with his
two prahus, _hors de combat_, was merely lying-up in a creek hidden by
bamboos and palms, awaiting his time to take deadly vengeance upon the
destroyers of his stockade and miners of his income from the passing
boats.

The opportunity of cutting off a cou