The weather improved every hour, and after a fine run of about twenty-four hours over that part of the Malay Sea, our three voyagers were lowered over the steamer’s side in their canoe when within sight of the great island of Borneo.

“I’m sorry,” said the captain at parting, “that our courses diverge here, for I would gladly have had your company a little longer.  Good-bye.  I hope we’ll come across you some other time when I’m in these parts.”

“Thanks—­thanks, my friend,’” replied Van der Kemp, with a warm grip of the hand, and a touch of pathos in his tones.  “I trust that we shall meet again.  You have done me good service by shortening my voyage considerably.—­Farewell.”

“I say, Moses,” shouted one of the seamen, as he looked down on the tiny canoe while they were pushing off.

“Hallo?”

“Keep your heart up, for—­we’ll try to ’do to oders all around de t’ing what’s good an’ true!’”

“Das de way, boy—­’an’ oders, ’turning tit for tat, will do de same to you!’”

He yelled rather than sang this at the top of his tuneful voice, and waved his hand as the sharp craft shot away over the sea.

Fortunately the sea was calm, for it was growing dark when they reached the shores of Borneo and entered the mouth of a small stream, up which they proceeded to paddle.  The banks of the stream were clothed with mangrove trees.  We have said the banks, but in truth the mouth of that river had no distinguishable banks at all, for it is the nature of the mangrove to grow in the water—­using its roots as legs with which, as it were, to wade away from shore.  When darkness fell suddenly on the landscape, as it is prone to do in tropical regions, the gnarled roots of those mangroves assumed the appearance of twining snakes in Nigel’s eyes.  Possessing a strongly imaginative mind he could with difficulty resist the belief that he saw them moving slimily about in the black water, and, in the dim mysterious light, tree stems and other objects assumed the appearance of hideous living forms, so that he was enabled to indulge the uncomfortable fancy that they were traversing some terrestrial Styx into one of Dante’s regions of horror.

In some respects this was not altogether a fancy, for they were unwittingly drawing near to a band of human beings whose purposes, if fully carried out, would render the earth little better than a hell to many of their countrymen.

It is pretty well known that there is a class of men in Borneo called Head Hunters.  These men hold the extraordinary and gruesome opinion that a youth has not attained to respectable manhood until he has taken the life of some human being.

There are two distinct classes of Dyaks—­those who inhabit the hills and those who dwell on the sea-coast.  It is the latter who recruit the ranks of the pirates of those eastern seas, and it was to the camp of a band of such villains that our adventurers were, as already said, unwittingly drawing near.