Page 43 - Malay sketches

THE MURDER OF THE HAWKER

hawker's boat, and suggested that it would be a good
thing to rob him. They said they were afraid, and
some other men coming up asked one of those to
whom the proposal had been made what they were
v
advised him to have
talking about, and, being told,
nothing to do with the business and the party
dispersed.
That at 8 heard
evening, P.M., several people
"
cries of I am from the
help, help, being killed,"
river, and five or six men ran out of their houses
down* to the bank, a distance of only fifty yards,
whence they saw, in the brilliant moonlight, Ngah
Prang and two other men in the hawker's boat, the
hawker flat on his back while one man had
lying
both hands at his throat, another held his wrists,
and the third his feet ; but it is said that those on
the bank heard a noise of rapping as though feet
were kicking or hands beating quickly the deck of
the boat. It lasted for a moment and then
only
there was silence.
As those who had been roused by the cries came
down the bank they called to the men in the boat,
barely twenty feet away, and lighted at their work
by the brilliancy of an Eastern moon, to know what
they were doing ; they even addressed them by
their names, but these gave no answer, and, getting
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