not,
neither do they spin. Their wives do that occasionally, making a
few sarongs for home use and an odd one for the market. Cocoanuts,
pineapples, a little patch of paddy with a dozen half-wild chickens,
and perchance, if they are not Mohammedans, a pig with its litter,
afford them sustenance. For their day's beating they were to receive
fifteen cents apiece. They were all ranged in line and counted,
after which we took up our march through a plantation of tapioca,
the brush standing about level with our heads. Chinese coolies
were working about its roots keeping down the great pest of Malayan
farmers,--lallang grass. The tapioca was broken in places by a few
acres of pepper vines and again by neglected coffee shrubs.

Our procession was truly formidable. Fifty or more natives went on
ahead making a path. Then we followed, fifteen in number, each with
a native to carry his gun. The rear was brought up by twoscore more
and half as many dogs. Three-quarters of an hour's walk brought us
to our first beat. The head shikaris placed us in an open position,
from fifty to one hundred yards apart, facing the jungle. The beaters,
in the meantime, had gone by a long detour around the jungle to drive
whatever it contained within reach of our guns.

In the second of these beats (I described the first in the opening of
this chapter) a deer ran out far in advance of the pigs. We caught
but a fleeting glimpse of it above the grass. My gun and that of my
neighbor went off simultaneously. The deer disappeared. We rushed
to the spot and found the leaves dyed with blood. Then commenced a
chase, which, although fruitless, was well worth the exertion. All
the panorama of tropical life seemed to lay in our tracks. For
an half-hour we traversed the rolling plain with its burden of
grass. Some smoker dropped a match in it, and in an instant it was
all ablaze, spreading away like a whirlwind, burning only the very
tips, toward a distant jungle. Then we dove into a bosky wood by
a narrow winding path, and through a stream of water. The path was
like a tunnel, the dense foliage shutting it in on both sides and
above. The thorns of the rattans reached down and tore our clothes,
and long trailing rubber-vines caught up our helmets and held our
feet. In a marshy bit of jungle, a small colony of unwieldy sago
palms found root, while pitcher-plants and orchids hung from almost
every limb. Clumsy gray iguanas and long-tailed lizards of a brilliant