THE PASSING OF PĔNGLIMA PRANG SĔMAUN
Whilst the Pĕnglima was running the gauntlet of the guard-boats his late companions, the men of Lambor, some twenty or thirty in number, were having a worse experience on shore.
Being a large party and in their haste not over-cautious, they were, of course, discovered as they tried to break through the line of stockades. Some were shot, others were speared and krised in hand-to-hand encounters, while a few got away to the forest under cover of the darkness. But when these stragglers fully realised that it was a choice between the enemy and painful wandering in a swampy and well-nigh impenetrable jungle, with the prospect of starvation and a lingering death, they chose rather to return to the light and a speedier reckoning.
None of this band returned to Lambor, and if they sought their fate and made an unprovoked attack upon Haji Mûsah it is not altogether surprising that to this day there is no wasted affection between the people of Lambor and the Lower Perak Chiefs.
All through that sultry day, as one by one these doomed men appeared from the jungle fastness and went down before the weapons of their adversaries, waiting tirelessly expectant in the certainty that no
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