“It was two hours before the dawn when word was passed to the stockade from outlying watchers that the white robbers were coming down to their boat. In a very short time every armed man from one end of Patusan to the other was on the alert, yet the banks of the river remained so silent that but for the fires burning with sudden blurred flares the town might have been asleep as if in peacetime. A heavy mist lay very low on the water, making a sort of illusive grey light that showed nothing. When Brown’s longboat glided out of the creek into the river, Jim was standing on the low point of land before the Rajah’s stockade—on the very spot where for the first time he put his foot on Patusan shore. A shadow loomed up, moving in the greyness, solitary, very bulky, and yet constantly eluding the eye. A murmur of low talking came out of it. Brown at the tiller heard Jim speak calmly: ‘A clear road. You had better trust to the current while the fog lasts; but this will lift presently.’ ‘Yes, presently we shall see clear,’ replied Brown.
“The thirty or forty men standing with muskets at ready outside the stockade held their breath. The Bugis owner of the prau, whom I saw on Stein’s verandah, and who was amongst them, told me that the boat, shaving the low point close, seemed for a moment to grow big and hang over it like a mountain. ‘If you think it worth your while to wait a day outside,’ called out Jim, ‘I’ll try to send you down something—a bullock, some yams—what I can.’ The shadow went on moving. ‘Yes. Do,’ said a voice, blank and muffled out of the fog. Not one of the many attentive listeners understood what the words meant; and then Brown and his men in their boat floated away, fading spectrally without the slightest sound.
“Thus Brown, invisible in the mist, goes out of Patusan elbow to elbow with Cornelius in the stern-sheets of the longboat. ‘Perhaps you shall get a small bullock,’ said Cornelius. ‘Oh yes. Bullock. Yam. You’ll get it if he said so. He always speaks the truth. He stole everything I had. I suppose you like a small bullock better than the loot of many houses.’ ‘I would advise you to hold your tongue, or somebody here may fling you overboard into this damned fog,’ said Brown. The boat seemed to be standing still; nothing could be seen, not even the river alongside, only the water-dust flew and trickled, condensed, down their beards and faces. It was weird, Brown told me. Every individual man of them felt as though he were adrift alone in a boat, haunted by an almost imperceptible suspicion of sighing, muttering ghosts. ‘Throw me out, would you? But I would know where I was,’ mumbled Cornelius surlily. ‘I’ve lived many years here.’ ‘Not long enough to see through a fog like this,’ Brown said, lolling back with his arm swinging to and fro on the useless tiller. ‘Yes. Long enough for that,’ snarled Cornelius. ‘That’s very useful,’ commented Brown. ‘Am I to believe you could find that backway you spoke of blindfold, like this?’ Cornelius grunted. ‘Are you too tired to row?’ he asked after a silence. ‘No, by God!’ shouted Brown suddenly. ‘Out with your oars there.’ There was a great knocking in the fog, which after a while settled into a regular grind of invisible sweeps against invisible tholepins. Otherwise nothing was changed, and but for the slight splash of a dipped blade it was like rowing a balloon car in a cloud, said Brown. Thereafter Cornelius did not open his lips except to ask querulously for somebody to bale out his canoe, which was towing behind the longboat. Gradually the fog whitened and became luminous ahead. To the left Brown saw a darkness as though he had been looking at the back of the departing night. All at once a big bough covered with leaves appeared above his head, and ends of twigs, dripping and still, curved slenderly close alongside. Cornelius, without a word, took the tiller from his hand.”
XLIV
“I don’t think they spoke together again. The boat entered a narrow by-channel, where it was pushed by the oar-blades set into crumbling banks, and there was a gloom as if enormous black wings had been outspread above the mist that filled its depth to the summits of the trees. The branches overhead showered big drops through the gloomy fog. At a mutter from Cornelius, Brown ordered his men to load. ‘I’ll give you a chance to get even with them before we’re done, you dismal cripples, you,’ he said to his gang. ‘Mind you don’t throw it away—you hounds.’ Low growls answered that speech. Cornelius showed much fussy concern for the safety of his canoe.
“Meantime Tamb’ Itam had reached the end of his journey. The fog had delayed him a little, but he had paddled steadily, keeping in touch with the south bank. By-and-by daylight came like a glow in a ground glass globe. The shores made on each side of the river a dark smudge, in which one could detect hints of columnar forms and shadows of twisted branches high up. The mist was still thick on the water, but a good watch was being kept, for as Tamb’ Itam approached the camp the figures of
