ngard twenty men and
a prau to make war in Wajo. The men are good and look at the prau; it
is swift and strong." I must say, Tom, the prau is the best craft of
the kind I have ever seen. I said you paid him well for the help. "And
I also would pay," says he, "if you let me have a few guns and a little
powder for my men. You and I shall share the loot of that ship outside,
and Tuan Lingard will not know. It is only a little game. You have
plenty of guns and powder under your care." He meant in the Emma. On
that I spoke out pretty straight and we got rather warm until at last
he gave me to understand that as he had about forty followers of his own
and I had only nine of Hassim's chaps to defend the Emma with, he could
very well go for me and get the lot. "And then," says he, "I would be so
strong that everybody would be on my side." I discovered in the course
of further talk that there is a notion amongst many people that you have
come to grief in some way and won't show up here any more. After this
I saw the position was serious and I was in a hurry to get back to the
Emma, but pretending I did not care I smiled and thanked Tengga for
giving me warning of his intentions about me and the Emma. At this he
nearly choked himself with his betel quid and fixing me with his little
eyes, muttered: "Even a lizard will give a fly the time to say its
prayers." I turned my back on him and was very thankful to get beyond
the throw of a spear. I haven't been out of the Emma since.

IX

The letter went on to enlarge on the intrigues of Tengga, the wavering
conduct of Belarab, and the state of the public mind. It noted every
gust of opinion and every event, with an earnestness of belief in their
importance befitting the chronicle of a crisis in the history of an
empire. The shade of Jorgenson had, indeed, stepped back into the life
of men. The old adventurer looked on with a perfect understanding of
the value of trifles, using his eyes for that other man whose conscience
would have the task to unravel the tangle. Lingard lived through those
days in the Settlement and was thankful to Jorgenson; only as he lived
not from day to day but from sentence to sentence of the writing, there
was an effect of bewildering rapidity in the succession of events that
made him grunt with surprise sometimes or growl--"What?" to himself
angrily and turn back several lines or a whole page more than once.
Toward the end he had a heavy frown of perplexit