The surging mass of nakedness below caught sight of him, and another yell rent the air, quite distinct from the first, for Malayan and Kling, Tamil and Siamese, Dyak and Javanese, Hindu, Bugis, Burmese, and Lascar, recognized the famous White Rajah of Borneo, the man who, all unaided, had broken the power of the savage head-hunting Dyaks, and driven from the seas the fierce Malayan pirates. The yell was not a cheer. It was a tribute that a tiger might make to his tamer.
The Rajah understood. He was used to such sinister outbursts of admiration, for he never took his eyes from the course. He was secure on his throne now, but I could not but wonder if that yell, which sent a strange thrill through me, did not bring up recollections of one of the hundred sanguinary scenes through which he and his great uncle, the elder Rajah Brooke, had gone when fighting for their lives and kingdom.
The Sultan of Johore's griffin won, and the Rajah stepped back to congratulate him. I, too, passed over to where he stood, and the kindly old Sultan took me by the hand.
"I have a very tender spot in my heart for all Americans," the Rajah replied to his Highness's introduction. "It was your great republic that first recognized the independence of Sarawak."
As we chatted over the triumph of Gladstone, the silver bill, the tariff, and a dozen topics of the day, I was thinking of the head-hunters of whom I had read in the morning paper. I was thinking, too, of how this man's uncle had, years before, with a boat's crew of English boys, carved out of an unknown island a principality larger than the state of New York, reduced its savage population to orderly tax-paying citizens, cleared the Borneo and Java seas of their thousands of pirate praus, and in their place built up a merchant fleet and a commerce of nearly five millions of dollars a year. The younger Rajah, too, had done his share in the making of the state. In his light tweed suit and black English derby, he did not look the strange, impossible hero of romance I had painted him; but there was something in his quiet, clear, well-bred English accent, and the strong, deep lines about his eyes and mouth, that impressed one with a consciousness of tremendous reserve force. He spoke always slowly, as though wearied by early years of fighting and exposure in the searching heat of the Bornean sun.
