Page 295 - Malay sketches

NAKODAH ORLONG

When Nakodah Orlong fell, and the rest of us
got away behind the great tree, this boy stayed by
the dead man, and as he was right in the line of the
thickest the
cross-fire, Alang pulled body as close
to the bank as he could, and there remained from
morning till evening, making no sign, but simply
declining to abandon the corpse. A man even
came out from the stockade and attacked him with
a kris, wounding him on the hand, but Alang beat
him off. After the final charge, when our people
passed close by him, it was he who saw the Malays
retire, and he allowed us all to go away and leave
him without giving any indication of his where-
abouts.
Then, the coast being clear, unable to carry the
body so great a distance, he dragged it into the
river and was swimming down stream with it when
the boat met him.
I went down to the boat to see Nakodah
Orlong ;
he looked just as I had seen him last, except that
his hair and clothes were drenched with water and
there was a great hole in the centre of his forehead,
marking, no doubt, the track of an iron bullet from
a swivel-gun. Of that, however, he could never
have been conscious, nor yet of the devotion of the
man whose life had been in extremest peril through-
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