you do not wish to wake.  “He thinks he has made me harmless, does he?” mumbled Brown very low. . . .  “Yes.  He is a fool.  A little child.  He came here and robbed me,” droned on Cornelius, “and he made all the people believe him.  But if something happened that they did not believe him any more, where would he be?  And the Bugis Dain who is waiting for you down the river there, captain, is the very man who chased you up here when you first came.”  Brown observed nonchalantly that it would be just as well to avoid him, and with the same detached, musing air Cornelius declared himself acquainted with a backwater broad enough to take Brown’s boat past Waris’s camp.  “You will have to be quiet,” he said as an afterthought, “for in one place we pass close behind his camp.  Very close.  They are camped ashore with their boats hauled up.”  “Oh, we know how to be as quiet as mice; never fear,” said Brown.  Cornelius stipulated that in case he were to pilot Brown out, his canoe should be towed.  “I’ll have to get back quick,” he explained.

’It was two hours before the dawn when word was passed to the stockade from outlying watchers that the white robbers were coming down to their boat.  In a very short time every armed man from one end of Patusan to the other was on the alert, yet the banks of the river remained so silent that but for the fires burning with sudden blurred flares the town might have been asleep as if in peace-time.  A heavy mist lay very low on the water, making a sort of illusive grey light that showed nothing.  When Brown’s long-boat glided out of the creek into the river, Jim was standing on the low point of land before the Rajah’s stockade—­on the very spot where for the first time he put his foot on Patusan shore.  A shadow loomed up, moving in the greyness, solitary, very bulky, and yet constantly eluding the eye.  A murmur of low talking came out of it.  Brown at the tiller heard Jim speak calmly:  “A clear road.  You had better trust to the current while the fog lasts; but this will lift presently.”  “Yes, presently we shall see clear,” replied Brown.

’The thirty or forty men standing with muskets at ready outside the stockade held their breath.  The Bugis owner of the prau, whom I saw on Stein’s verandah, and who was amongst them, told me that the boat, shaving the low point close, seemed for a moment to grow big and hang over it like a mountain.  “If you think it worth your while to wait a day outside,” called out Jim, “I’ll try to send you down something—­a bullock, some yams—­what I can.”  The shadow went on moving.  “Yes.  Do,” said a voice, blank and muffled out of the fog.  Not one of the many attentive listeners understood what the words meant; and then Brown and his men in their boat floated away, fading spectrally without the slightest sound.