MALAY SKETCHES
up from off the hawker, untied the boat, one taking a pole and another the rudder and disappeared down the river. The hawker did not move. He was dead.
The witnesses of this tragedy appear then to have returned to their homes and slept peacefully. Several of them naïvely remarked that they heard the next day that the hawker had been found dead in his boat, and it appears that when one of these witnesses, on the following day, met one of the murderers, he asked him what he was doing in Lenggang's boat, and the man replied that they were robbing him, that he held the hawker by the throat, the others by the hands and feet, but that really they had got very little for their trouble.
Meanwhile the three murderers told several of the eye-witnesses of the affair that, if they said anything, it would be the worse for them, and nothing particular occurred till a notice was posted in the Mosque calling upon any one who knew anything about Lenggang's death to report it to the village Headman. Then Ngah Prang, who apparently was the original instigator of the job, as so often happens, thought he would save himself at the expense of his friends, and actually went himself to make a report, and, meeting on the way one of the
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