d, one by one, gone
off to bed, each to his own quarters.

Middleton was staying with me at the time, and he and I sat in silence
looking at the light upon the river, and each thinking his own thoughts.
Middleton was the first to speak.

'That was a curious myth you were telling us, about the _Polong_, the
Familiar Spirits,' he said. 'I have heard of it before from natives, but
there is a thing I have never spoken of, and always swore that I would
keep to myself, that I have a good mind to tell you now, if you will
promise not to call me a liar.'

'That is all right,' said I. 'Fire away.'

'Well,' said Middleton, puffing at his pipe, 'you remember Juggins, of
course? He was a naturalist, you know, and he came to stay with me
during the close season[13] last year. He was hunting for bugs and
that sort of thing, and he used to fill my bungalow with all sorts of
rotting green stuff, that he brought in from the jungle. He stopped
with me for about ten days, and when he heard that I was bound for a
trip up into the Sakai country, he said he would come too. I did not
mind much, as he was a decent beggar enough, in spite of his dirty
ways, so I said all right, and we started up together. When we got
well up into the Sakai country, we had to leave our boats behind at
the foot of the rapids, and leg it for the rest of the time. We had
not enough bearers with us to take any food, and we lived pretty well
on what we could get, yams, and tapioca, and Indian corn, and soft
stuff of that sort. It was new to Juggins, and it used to give him
awful gripes, but he stuck to it like a man.

[Footnote 13: Close season = From November to February, when the
rivers on the East Coast are closed to traffic by the North-East
Monsoon.]

'Well, one evening, when the night was shutting down pretty fast,
Juggins and I got to a fairly large camp of Sakai in the middle of a
clearing, and of course all the beggars bolted into the jungle when we
approached. We went on up to the largest hut of the lot, and there we
found a woman lying by the side of her dead child. It was as stiff as
Herod, though it had not been born more than half an hour, I should say,
and I went up into the house thinking I might be able to do something
for the poor, wretched mother. She did not seem to see it, however, for
she bit and snarled at me like a wounded animal, so I let her be, and
Juggins and I took up our quarters in a smaller hut near by, which
seemed