ience of the thing evidently appealed strongly to their utilitarian minds.
Blood-money in past times, I was assured by Ma- lays and Sâkai alike, had always been paid in this manner when it was due from the semi-wild tribes of the interior. It was the custom; and Sentul's relatives were urgent in their prayers to me to accept the proposal. Instead, I exacted a heavy fine of getah* and other jungle produce from the tribe to which Ku-ish, the Porcupine, belonged. This was regarded as a monstrous injustice by the Sakai, and as an inadequate indemnity by the Malays; and I thus gave complete dissatisfaction to all parties concerned, as is not infrequently the fate of the adjudicating white man. However, as the Oriental proverb has it, "an order is an order till one is strong enough to lisobey it"; so the fine was paid by the Sakai and accepted by the Malays with grumblings of which I only heard the echoes.
The really remarkable features of the incidents related are that Ku-ish ever plucked up the courage to quit the jungles with which he was familiar and to penetrate alone into the Malayan country, and that he, the son of a down-trodden race, dared for once to pay a portion of the heavy debt of vengeance for long years of grinding cruelty and wicked wrong which the Sakai owe to the Malays.
- Ch Gutta-reha.
