III

For two years at short intervals we visited him.  We came to like him, to trust him, almost to admire him.  He was plotting and preparing a war with patience, with foresight—­with a fidelity to his purpose and with a steadfastness of which I would have thought him racially incapable.  He seemed fearless of the future, and in his plans displayed a sagacity that was only limited by his profound ignorance of the rest of the world.  We tried to enlighten him, but our attempts to make clear the irresistible nature of the forces which he desired to arrest failed to discourage his eagerness to strike a blow for his own primitive ideas.  He did not understand us, and replied by arguments that almost drove one to desperation by their childish shrewdness.  He was absurd and unanswerable.  Sometimes we caught glimpses of a sombre, glowing fury within him—­a brooding and vague sense of wrong, and a concentrated lust of violence which is dangerous in a native.  He raved like one inspired.  On one occasion, after we had been talking to him late in his campong, he jumped up.  A great, clear fire blazed in the grove; lights and shadows danced together between the trees; in the still night bats flitted in and out of the boughs like fluttering flakes of denser darkness.  He snatched the sword from the old man, whizzed it out of the scabbard, and thrust the point into the earth.  Upon the thin, upright blade the silver hilt, released, swayed before him like something alive.  He stepped back a pace, and in a deadened tone spoke fiercely to the vibrating steel:  “If there is virtue in the fire, in the iron, in the hand that forged thee, in the words spoken over thee, in the desire of my heart, and in the wisdom of thy makers,—­then we shall be victorious together!” He drew it out, looked along the edge.  “Take,” he said over his shoulder to the old sword-bearer.  The other, unmoved on his hams, wiped the point with a corner of his sarong, and returning the weapon to its scabbard, sat nursing it on his knees without a single look upwards.  Karain, suddenly very calm, reseated himself with dignity.  We gave up remonstrating after this, and let him go his way to an honourable disaster.  All we could do for him was to see to it that the powder was good for the money and the rifles serviceable, if old.

But the game was becoming at last too dangerous; and if we, who had faced it pretty often, thought little of the danger, it was decided for us by some very respectable people sitting safely in counting-houses that the risks were too great, and that only one more trip could be made.  After giving in the usual way many misleading hints as to our destination, we slipped away quietly, and after a very quick passage entered the bay.  It was early morning, and even before the anchor went to the bottom the schooner was surrounded by boats.