Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/38

 was not looking for trouble, if it might by any means be shirked.

Some ten days later another incident occurred to break upon his peace. Pi-Noi, in common with all the people of her race and other nocturnal animals, was a restless bedfellow, waking at frequent intervals through the night, and being given at such times to prowling about the house in search of scraps of food to eat and tobacco to smoke. Kria detested this peculiarity, since it emphasized the difference of race and of degrees of civilization which yawned between him and his wife, but he ignored it until one evening, when he had waked to find her gone, and had wide-eyed awaited her return for something over an hour. Then he went in search of her.

He hunted through the hut in vain: passed to the door, and finding it open, climbed down the stair-ladder into the moonlight night. A big fire had been lighted that evening, to the windward of the house, in order that the smoke night drive away the sand-flies, and in the warm, raked-out wood ashes Kria found his wife. She was sleeping "as the devils sleep," with her little, perfectly formed body, draped only by the offending girdle, stretched at case upon its breast, and with her face nestling cozily upon her folded arms. All about her the soft gray ashes were heaped, and her skin was seen, even in the moonlight, to be plastered thickly with great smears of the stuff. To Kria, a Malay of the Malays, whose only conception of comfort, propriety, and civilization was that prevailing among his people, this