When he had finished Patterson ordered another drink, and then lit a cheroot. Having got his "smoke" well under way he rose and held out his hand. Rupert took it hesitatingly. "I’m glad you told me, Cotton," Patterson said. "I rather flatter myself that I’m a judge of character. I knew the moment I saw you that you had a ’history.’ I didn’t want to know it, but I guess you feel better for having told me. A man who has gone through the fires and has got his fingers burnt is worth twice as much as the fellow who has never fought and blundered, suffered and gone on fighting. Now then, shut down on the past and ... get ashore!" "You—you still want me to come with you?" Rupert stammered. "You still trust me?" Patterson laughed. "Now, more than ever." Half an hour later Rupert’s bag was put into a long boat with Mr. Patterson’s more bulky luggage. There was a choppy sea on and it was not an easy task to get into the boat as it rose and fell at the ship’s gangway. At last they pushed off, Patterson sitting beside Rupert in the stern, with their baggage piled in front of them. The six Malays bent to their long, thin paddles with short, jerky strokes, and the light boat flew through the white-topped waves towards the shore beneath the slopes of Fort Canning, where the Union Jack still fluttered a welcome. * * * * * A long canoe cut out of a single giant tree, with a palm leaf awning covering the stern portion, under which two white men inclined on a mat, while eight brawny Malays, sitting crossed-legged with their backs to them, bent their bronze-coloured bodies from which the sweat poured in streams to the regular strokes of their paddles. In the stern, behind the awning, sat the steersman, an old, parchment-faced Dyak with a small white goatee beard, fierce, pig-like eyes, and a broad slit of a mouth which dripped a blood-red juice as he chewed his betelnut quid. He was the guide, an old "Gutta-hunter" who knew this trackless forest, these giant mountains through which the great river flowed three long weeks’ journey to the sea. Here, in the far interior, where no white men had been before, it had become a clear, swift stream, with constant rapids, up which the narrow canoe had to be dragged by the crew waist-deep in the rushing white-foamed water as it swirled and tumbled over the jagged rocks. Tropical vegetation hung in thick green masses to the water’s edge, while the blacker mass of foliage of colossal trees whose huge trunks shot up a hundred feet or more without a branch, shut in the landscape on every hand. "’This is the forest primeval, only more so,’" Patterson quoted gaily, "and, if it wasn’t for the leeches, not a bad place after all."