Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/368

 was almost turned to dust. He took a handful of it, pressed it to his opened lips, and breathed very hard

The following day he asked the old woman, who had taken care of him, where the rice-floor was which stood in the grounds of Adinda’s house. The woman rejoiced to hear him speak, and ran through the village to seek the floor. When she could point out the new proprietor to Saïdjah, he followed her silently, and being brought to the rice-floor, he counted thereupon thirty-two lines

Then he gave the woman as many piastres as were required to buy a buffalo, and left Badoer. At Tjilang-kahan, he bought a fishing-boat, and, after having sailed two days, arrived in the Lampoons, where the insurgents were in insurrection against the Dutch rule. He joined a troop of Badoer men, not so much to fight as to seek Adinda; for he had a tender heart, and was more disposed to sorrow than to bitterness.

One day that the insurgents had been beaten, he wandered through a village that had just been taken by the Dutch army, and was in flames. Saïdjah knew that the troop that had been destroyed there consisted for the most part of Badoer men. He wandered like a ghost among the houses, which were not yet burned down, and found the corpse of Adinda’s father with a