Page 41 - Malay sketches

IV

THE MURDER OF THE HAWKER

It is a damned and bloody work,
The graceless action of a heavy hand
King John

afternoon, in 1892, a foreign Malay named
ONE
Lenggang, who made a living by hawking
in a boat on the Perak River, left Bota with his
usual cargo and a hundred dollars which his cousin,
the son of the Penghulu, had been keeping for him.
He was alone in the boat and dropped down stream,
he would call at some of the that
saying villages
line at intervals the banks of the river.
The next day this man's dead body, lying partly
under a mosquito curtain, was discovered in the
boat as it drifted past the village of Pulau Tiga.
The local headman viewed but saw nothing to
it,
arouse his suspicions, for the boat was full of
valuables and a certain amount of money, while
nothing in it seemed to have been disturbed, and
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