to attack To' Kaya Stia-wangsa at
Penjum. The latter village was at that time inhabited by more Chinese
than Malays. It was the nearest point on the river to the gold mines of
Jalis, and at the back of the squalid native shops, that lined the river
bank, a well-worn footpath led inland to the Chinese alluvial washings.
Almost in the centre of the long line of shops and hovels which formed
the village of Penjum, stood the thatched house in which To' Kaya
Stia-wangsa lived, with forty or fifty women, and about a dozen male
followers. The house was roofed with thatch. Its walls were fashioned
from plaited laths of split bamboo, and it was surrounded by a high
fence of the same material. This was the place which was to be Wan
Lingga's object of attack.

A band of nearly a hundred men followed Wan Lingga from Atok. Their way
lay through a broad belt of virgin forest, which stretches between Atok
and Penjum, a distance of about half a dozen miles. The tramp of the men
moving in a single file through the jungle, along the narrow footpath,
worn smooth by the passage of countless naked feet, made sufficient
noise to scare all living things from their path. The forests of the
Peninsula, even at night, when their denizens are afoot, are not
cheerful places. Though a man lie very still, so that the life of the
jungle is undisturbed by his presence, the weird night noises, that are
borne to his ears, only serve to emphasise the solitude and the gloom.
The white moonlight straggles in patches through the thick canopy of
leaves overhead, and makes the shadows blacker and more awful by the
contrast of light and shade. But a night march through the forest is
even more depressing, when the soft pat of bare feet, the snapping of a
dry twig, a whispered word of warning or advice, the dull deep note of
the night-jar, and the ticking of the tree insects alone break the
stillness. Nerves become strung to a pitch of intensity which the
circumstances hardly seem to warrant, and all the chances of evil, which
in the broad light of day a man would laugh to scorn, assume in one's
mind the aspect of inevitable certainties.

I speak by the book; for well I know the depression, and the fearful
presentiment of coming evil, which these night marches are apt to
occasion; and well can I picture the feelings and thoughts which must
have weighed upon Wan Lingga, during that four hours' silent tramp
through the forest.

He was playing his last card. If h