‘Tamb’ Itam took the paddle from Jim’s hands, it being unseemly that he should sit while his lord paddled.  When they reached the other shore his master forbade him to come any farther; but Tamb’ Itam did follow him at a distance, walking up the slope to Doramin’s campong.

’It was beginning to grow dark.  Torches twinkled here and there.  Those they met seemed awestruck, and stood aside hastily to let Jim pass.  The wailing of women came from above.  The courtyard was full of armed Bugis with their followers, and of Patusan people.

’I do not know what this gathering really meant.  Were these preparations for war, or for vengeance, or to repulse a threatened invasion?  Many days elapsed before the people had ceased to look out, quaking, for the return of the white men with long beards and in rags, whose exact relation to their own white man they could never understand.  Even for those simple minds poor Jim remains under a cloud.

’Doramin, alone! immense and desolate, sat in his arm-chair with the pair of flintlock pistols on his knees, faced by a armed throng.  When Jim appeared, at somebody’s exclamation, all the heads turned round together, and then the mass opened right and left, and he walked up a lane of averted glances.  Whispers followed him; murmurs:  “He has worked all the evil.”  “He hath a charm.” . . .  He heard them—­perhaps!

’When he came up into the light of torches the wailing of the women ceased suddenly.  Doramin did not lift his head, and Jim stood silent before him for a time.  Then he looked to the left, and moved in that direction with measured steps.  Dain Waris’s mother crouched at the head of the body, and the grey dishevelled hair concealed her face.  Jim came up slowly, looked at his dead friend, lifting the sheet, than dropped it without a word.  Slowly he walked back.

’"He came!  He came!” was running from lip to lip, making a murmur to which he moved.  “He hath taken it upon his own head,” a voice said aloud.  He heard this and turned to the crowd.  “Yes.  Upon my head.”  A few people recoiled.  Jim waited awhile before Doramin, and then said gently, “I am come in sorrow.”  He waited again.  “I am come ready and unarmed,” he repeated.

’The unwieldy old man, lowering his big forehead like an ox under a yoke, made an effort to rise, clutching at the flintlock pistols on his knees.  From his throat came gurgling, choking, inhuman sounds, and his two attendants helped him from behind.  People remarked that the ring which he had dropped on his lap fell and rolled against the foot of the white man, and that poor Jim glanced down at the talisman that had opened for him the door of fame, love, and success within the wall of forests fringed with white foam, within the coast that under the western sun looks like the very stronghold of the night.  Doramin, struggling to keep his feet, made with his two supporters a swaying, tottering group; his little eyes stared with an expression of mad pain, of rage, with a ferocious glitter, which the bystanders noticed; and then, while Jim stood stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm round the neck of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his son’s friend through the chest.