Mohammedanism suited the Moros, especially in the loose form they practised. Langworthy was on the island when I came there. He ran as wild and loose as his pirate ancestors, until Langworthy got hold of him. The first had been diluted by the military government, and Jeffol had got most of the second. His elder brother was datto, as their father had been, but this brother had inherited little of either his father's authority or his father's taste for deviltry. The jacket was his most prized possession, next to his anting-anting. His hands went easily to the knives at his waist, and against his hide-sleeping or waking-he wore a sleeveless fighting-jacket with verses from the Koran on it. His face was cheerful, intelligent and almost handsome, and he carried himself with a swagger. Tall for a Moro, nearly as tall as I am, he had a deceptive slimness that left you unprepared for the power in his snake-smooth muscles. Jeffol was a good Moro-a good companion in a fight or across a table. He was likely to return from a fishing trip with anything-except fish. Her sarong was a gold-threaded kain sungkit, so no doubt he brought her over from Borneo. There are any number of dialects down there-jumbles of Malay, Tagalog, Portuguese, and what not. Her dialect wasn't that of the village, but you couldn't tell from that. She wasn't exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn't belong to a man you were afraid of. She was small and trimly fleshed, with proper pride in her flesh. She was a sleek brown woman with the knack of twisting a sarong around her hips so that it became part of her-a trick a woman has with a potato sack or hasn't with Japanese brocade. You can find her in Nome, in Cape Town, and in Durham, and in skin of any shade but, since the Tawi Tawis are the lower end of the Sulu Archipelago, she was brown this time. She was woman, complaisant woman, of the sort whose no always becomes yes between throat and teeth. If he had been a Maya or a Ghurka he would have laid Levison's arm open with a machete or a kukri instead of a kris, but that would have made no difference in the end. SAY it happened on one of the Tawi Tawis.
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