people soon spied the trail of a man and a woman, and, following it,
they crowded down to the place where the boat had been moored. Here they
squatted on the ground and began to smoke. '_Rej-a-roj!_'--'She is
lost!'--they said laconically, in the barbarous jargon of the jungle
people, and then relapsed into silence.

'May they be devoured by a tiger!' snarled Ku-ish, the Porcupine, deep
down in his throat, and, at the word, all his hearers shuddered. The
curse is the most dreadful that the jungle people know, and if you
shared your home with the great cats, as they do, you would regard it
with equal fear and respect. Ku-ish said little more, but he went back
to the camp and unslung an exceedingly ancient match-lock, which hung
from a beam of the roof in the Chief's hut. It was the only gun in the
camp, and was the most precious possession of the tribe, but no man
asked him what he was doing, or tried to stay him when he presently
plunged into the jungle heading down stream.

Two days later, in the cool of the afternoon, Kria left Chep in the
house busy with the evening's rice, and, accompanied by a small boy, his
son by a former marriage, he went to seek for fish in one of the swamps
at the back of the village. These marshy places, which are to be found
in the neighbourhood of many Malay _Kampongs_, are ready-made rice
fields, but since the cultivation of a _padi_ swamp requires more
exacting labour than most Malays are prepared to bestow upon it, they
are often left to lie fallow, while crops are grown in clearings on the
neighbouring hills. In dry weather the cracked, parched earth, upon
which no vegetation sprouts, alone marks the places which, in the rainy
season, are pools of stagnant water, but so sure as there is a pond,
there also are the little muddy fish which the Malays call _ruan_ and
_sepat_. Where they vanish to when the water in which they live is
licked up by the sunrays, or how they support life during a long season
of drought, no man clearly knows, but it is believed that they burrow
deep into the earth, and live in the moist mud underfoot until better
times come with the heavy tropic rain.

Kria carried two long _joran_, or native fishing rods, over his
shoulder, and his little naked son pattered along at his heels, holding
a tin containing bait in his tiny hands. The boy crooned to himself,
after the manner of native children, but his father walked along in
silence. Arrived at the swamp, which was