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Virginia slept in a room with three Dyak women. It was to this apartment that
the chief finally consented to dispatch two of his warriors. The men crept
noiselessly within the pitch dark interior until they came to the sleeping form of
one of the Dyak women. Cautiously they awoke her.
"
Where is the white girl?" asked one of the men in a low whisper. "Muda Saffir
has sent us for her. Tell her that her father is very sick and wants her, but do
not mention Muda Saffir's name lest she might not come."
The whispering awakened Virginia and she lay wondering what the cause of the
midnight conference might be, for she recognized that one of the speakers was a
man, and there had been no man in the apartment when she had gone to sleep
earlier in the night.
Presently she heard some one approach her, and a moment later a woman's voice
addressed her; but she could not understand enough of the native tongue to
make out precisely the message the speaker wished to convey. The words "father,"
"sick," and "come," however she finally understood after several repetitions, for
she had picked up a smattering of the Dyak language during her enforced
association with the natives.
The moment that the possibilities suggested by these few words dawned upon
her, she sprang to her feet and followed the woman toward the door of the
apartment. Immediately without the two warriors stood upon the verandah
awaiting their victim, and as Virginia passed through the doorway she was seized
roughly from either side, a heavy hand was clapped over her mouth, and before
she could make even an effort to rebel she had been dragged to the end of the
verandah, down the notched log to the ground and a moment later found herself
in a war prahu which was immediately pushed into the stream.
Since Virginia had come to the long-house after her rescue from the ourang
outangs, supposedly by von Horn, Rajah Muda Saffir had kept very much out of
sight, for he knew that should the girl see him she would recognize him as the
man who had stolen her from the Ithaca. So it came as a mighty shock to the girl
when she heard the hated tones of the man whom she had knocked overboard
from the prahu two nights before, and realized that the bestial Malay sat close
beside her, and that she was again in his power. She looked now for no mercy,
nor could she hope to again escape him so easily as she had before, and so she
sat with bowed head in the bottom of the swiftly moving craft, buried in
anguished thoughts, hopeless and miserable.
Along the stretch of black river that the prahu and her consort covered that night
Virginia Maxon saw no living thing other than a single figure in a small sampan
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