Tuan Marop, down there in Borneo, was capable of cutting out morethan his right eye if it offended him. Perhaps Kray was right inguessing that Tuan was akin to those who have saved us in the pastfrom backsliding into beasts.
Kray’s little son was playing with the big Siberian pup in thedoorway. From where I sat I could see the child and the dog, andbeyond them and framed by the door opening the pine-clad mountainscutting the blue sky of summer, and beyond these Omstjall, the snowpeak and grandfather of the glacier that takes its name.
Kray has given up hunting these five years and is now manager of theSellagman Salmon Canning Company, at least he looks after the fishingand the canning and gets two thousand dollars a year for the job,while I expect the real manager, the man who looks after the New Yorkoffice and the prospectuses and so forth, gets ten—maybe more. I don’tknow, neither does Kray, neither does he care. He says he has huntedeverything in his time but the dollar, and that a free life in theopen air is all he wants now that he has done with hunting and gotmarried. He was sixty-seven years old when he married and didn’t lookmore than fifty, so he says; he doesn’t look more than fifty to-day,at a little distance.
He has hunted everywhere and shot everything and he started hisbusiness at twenty so that when he married he had been at the jobnearly fifty years. That is a long time, for a year in the wilds islonger than a year in a city and the risks are greater.
Said Kray, looking at the child and the pup: “Olaff takes after hismother, don’t he? Same flax-colored hair coming. First I thought hewas going to be darker, but it’s coming true enough. Scandinavianflax, there’s no other color like it. Gets on with the pup, don’t he?I saw the old dog lickin’ them both yesterday same as if Olaff washers, too. I’ve sent her off to the Skagga fjord till the autumn.”
“The big Siberian dog I saw here last?”
“Yes, the mother of that pup. I’ve sent her off till the autumn. Olaffwill be bigger then.”
“But why did you send her off—because she was treating Olaff as if hewere her pup?”
“Well, not exactly,” said Kray, “and yet maybe that was a bit of thereason. But mainly I expect it was something that happened years agothat rattled me; thirty years ago it was when I was with Becconi inBorneo on the exploring job. He was after minerals and if he’d stuckto them in his drinks as well as his prospectin’ he’d have pulledthrough; but the whisky did him. I’d been out East with a chap calledMilner hunting, and we struck Sarawak coast. Milner was going homefrom there, and I was paid off with a bonus. I could have gone backwith him to England, and maybe would only for this chap Becconi whohappened along while we were waiting at Bintulu for a boat.
“Boats in those days weren’t plentiful along the coast, and you didn’toften know where they were going when they came, but as long as theytook you somewhere else it didn’t much matter. That’s how we wereplaced at Bintulu when out of the sea haze one day a littlepaddle-wheel boat came snortin’ and tied up to the rotten old wharfwhere the Sea Dyak children used to sit fishing when they weren’tplaying headhunting with wooden parangs.
“The Tanjong Data was the name of the boat, and she was bound forRejang and Kuching and ports beyond with a mixed cargo and a bigmonkey for the Dutch government that had been caught somewheres to thenorth of the Tubao River. The ...