he
sunlight never falls, become strangely pallid, and the constant agony of
mind scores deep lines on cheek and forehead. The food, too, is bad.
Rice the fugitive must have, or the loathsome dropsical swellings,
called _basal_, soon cripple the strongest limbs; but a Malay cannot
live on rice alone, and the sour jungle fruits, and other vegetable
growths, with which he ekes out his scanty meals, wring his weakened
stomach with constant pangs and aches. All these things Wan Bong now
experienced, as he daily shifted his camp, from one miserable
halting-place to another; but a greater pain than all the rest was soon
to be added to his cup of bitterness. He was an opium smoker, and his
hoarded store of the precious drug began to run very low. At last the
day came on which it was exhausted, and Wan Bong was driven to
desperation. For some twenty-four hours he strove against the
overpowering longing for that subtle drug that leads the strongest will
captive, but the struggle was all in vain. When, at length, the physical
pain had become so intense that Wan Bong could neither stand, nor sit,
nor lie down for more than a minute at a time, nor yet could still the
moans which the restless torture drew from him, he despatched one of his
boys to seek for the supply of opium, which alone could assuage his
sufferings.

The boy left him, and his two other companions, in a patch of the high
grass, which the Malays call _resam_, that chanced to grow at the edge
of the forest near Batu Nering. He promised to return to him as soon as
the opium should have been procured. But Che' Wan Ahman's people had
anticipated that Wan Bong would, sooner or later, be forced to purchase
opium, and no sooner had the messenger presented himself at the shop of
the Chinese trader, who sold the drug, than he found himself bound hand
and foot. He was carried before Che' Wan Ahman's representative, and
interrogated. He denied all knowledge of Wan Bong's hiding-place; but
Malays have methods of making people speak the truth on occasion. They
are grim, ghastly, blood-curdling methods, that need not be here
described in detail; suffice it to say that the boy spoke.

That evening, as the short twilight was going out in the sky, and the
flakes of scarlet-dyed clouds were paling overhead, a body of men crept,
with noiseless feet, through the clump of long grass in which Wan Bong
was hiding. They saw him sitting on the earth, bent double over his
folded arms, rocki