’"I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of a fool he was,” gasped the dying Brown.  “He a man!  Hell!  He was a hollow sham.  As if he couldn’t have said straight out, ‘Hands off my plunder!’ blast him!  That would have been like a man!  Rot his superior soul!  He had me there—­but he hadn’t devil enough in him to make an end of me.  Not he!  A thing like that letting me off as if I wasn’t worth a kick! . . .”  Brown struggled desperately for breath. . . .  “Fraud. . . .  Letting me off. . . .  And so I did make an end of him after all. . . .”  He choked again. . . .  “I expect this thing’ll kill me, but I shall die easy now.  You . . . you here . . .  I don’t know your name—­I would give you a five-pound note if—­if I had it—­for the news—­or my name’s not Brown. . . .”  He grinned horribly. . . .  “Gentleman Brown.”

’He said all these things in profound gasps, staring at me with his yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged, brown face; he jerked his left arm; a pepper-and-salt matted beard hung almost into his lap; a dirty ragged blanket covered his legs.  I had found him out in Bankok through that busybody Schomberg, the hotel-keeper, who had, confidentially, directed me where to look.  It appears that a sort of loafing, fuddled vagabond—­a white man living amongst the natives with a Siamese woman—­had considered it a great privilege to give a shelter to the last days of the famous Gentleman Brown.  While he was talking to me in the wretched hovel, and, as it were, fighting for every minute of his life, the Siamese woman, with big bare legs and a stupid coarse face, sat in a dark corner chewing betel stolidly.  Now and then she would get up for the purpose of shooing a chicken away from the door.  The whole hut shook when she walked.  An ugly yellow child, naked and pot-bellied like a little heathen god, stood at the foot of the couch, finger in mouth, lost in a profound and calm contemplation of the dying man.

’He talked feverishly; but in the middle of a word, perhaps, an invisible hand would take him by the throat, and he would look at me dumbly with an expression of doubt and anguish.  He seemed to fear that I would get tired of waiting and go away, leaving him with his tale untold, with his exultation unexpressed.  He died during the night, I believe, but by that time I had nothing more to learn.

’So much as to Brown, for the present.

’Eight months before this, coming into Samarang, I went as usual to see Stein.  On the garden side of the house a Malay on the verandah greeted me shyly, and I remembered that I had seen him in Patusan, in Jim’s house, amongst other Bugis men who used to come in the evening to talk interminably over their war reminiscences and to discuss State affairs.  Jim had pointed him out to me once as a respectable petty trader owning a small seagoing native craft, who had showed himself “one of the best at the taking of the stockade.”  I was not very surprised to see him, since any Patusan trader venturing as far as Samarang would naturally find his way to Stein’s house.  I returned his greeting and passed on.  At the door of Stein’s room I came upon another Malay in whom I recognised Tamb’ Itam.