The man’s limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours.  In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise.  The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more.  “That showed them what we could do,” said Brown to me.  “Struck the fear of sudden death into them.  That was what we wanted.  They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night.  Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before.  That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head.”

’As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips.  “Two hundred to one.  Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . .”  His own eyes were starting out of their sockets.  He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit.  There are sights one never forgets.

’Furthermore, to draw the enemy’s fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water.  This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere.  “There’s nobody,” opined some of the men.  It is “onnatural,” remarked the Yankee.  Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy.  Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men’s ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river.  He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage.  This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting.  On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah’s men.  It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall.  The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds.  It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said.  There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people.  The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim’s hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood.  The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river.  A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah.  The Rajah’s youths jostled them rudely.  Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands:  they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly.  Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours.