Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/76

 large patches. Whatever the origin of the stain the Pĕnghûlu and his people were afforded no opportunity of examining it more closely, for Abdulrahman and Abas, truculent to the last, followed them out.

of the compound and barred the gate against them. Then the Pĕnghûlu, taking a couple of his people with him, set off on foot for Tanjong Mâlim in the neighbouring district of Bĕrnam, where lived the white man under whose administrative charge the Slim valley had been placed. He went with many misgivings, for he had had some experience of the easy scepticism of white folk; and when he returned, more or less dissatisfied some days later, he learned that Haji Ali and his sons had disappeared. They had fled down river on a dark night, without a soul being made aware of their intended departure. They had not stayed to reap their crop, which even then was ripening in the fields; to dispose of their house and compound, upon which they had expended, not only labour, but "dollars of the whitest," as the Malay phrase has it; not even to collect their debts, which chanced to be rather numerous. This was the fact which struck the white district officer as by far the most improbable incident of any connected with the strange story of the were-tiger of Slim, and for the moment it seemed to hint to admit of only one explanation. Haji Ali and his sons had been the victims of foul play. They had been quietly done to death by the simple villagers of Slim, and a cock-and-bull story had been trumped up to account for their disappearance.