sought in the dark, and felt many trunks—soon found the well-known roughness on the south side of a tree, and thrust his finger into a hole which Si-Panteh had cut with his parang[1] to exorcise the pontianuk[2] who was the cause of his mother’s toothache, a short time before the birth of Panteh’s little brother. That was the Ketapan he looked for.
Yes, this was indeed the spot where he had looked upon Adinda for the first time with quite a different eye from his other companions in play, because she had for the first time refused to take part in a game which she had played with other children—boys and girls—only a short time before. There she had given him the ‘melatti.’ He sat down at the foot of the tree, and looked at the stars; and when he saw a shooting-star he accepted it as a welcome of his return to Badoer, and he thought whether Adinda would now be asleep, and whether she had rightly cut the moons on her rice floor. It would be such a grief to him if she had omitted a moon, as if thirty-six were not enough! . . . And he wondered whether she had made nice ‘sarongs’ and ‘slendangs?’ And he asked himself, too, who would now be dwelling in her father’s house? And he thought of his youth, and of his mother; and how that buffalo had saved him from the tiger, and he thought of what would have become of Adinda if that buffalo had
