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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dragon's blood, by Henry Milner Rideout
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Dragon's blood
+
+Author: Henry Milner Rideout
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2003 [EBook #10321]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRAGON'S BLOOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sjaani and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+DRAGON'S BLOOD
+
+by
+
+HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT
+
+with illustrations by HAROLD M. BRETT
+
+1909
+
+
+
+
+To
+CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND,
+  15 Hollis Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts
+
+Dear Cope,
+
+Mr. Peachey Carnehan, when he returned from Kafiristan, in bad shape but
+with a king's head in a bag, exclaimed to the man in the newspaper
+office, "And you've been sitting there ever since!" There is only a pig
+in the following poke; and yet in giving you the string to cut and the
+bag to open, I feel something of Peachey's wonder to think of you,
+across all this distance and change, as still sitting in your great
+chair by the green lamp, while past a dim background of books moves the
+procession of youth. Many of us, growing older in various places,
+remember well your friendship, and are glad that you are there, urging
+our successors to look backward into good books, and forward into life.
+
+    Yours ever truly,
+        H. M. R.
+_Sausalito, California_.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I. A LADY AND A GRIFFIN
+    II. THE PIED PIPER
+   III. UNDER FIRE
+    IV. THE SWORD-PEN
+     V. IN TOWN
+    VI. THE PAGODA
+   VII. IPHIGENIA
+  VIII. THE HOT NIGHT
+    IX. PASSAGE AT ARMS
+     X. THREE PORTALS
+    XI. WHITE LOTUS
+   XII. THE WAR BOARD
+  XIII. THE SPARE MAN
+   XIV. OFF DUTY
+    XV. KAÚ FAI
+   XVI. THE GUNWALE
+  XVII. LAMP OF HEAVEN
+ XVIII. SIEGE
+   XIX. BROTHER MOLES
+    XX. THE HAKKA BOAT
+   XXI. THE DRAGON'S SHADOW
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_"Good-by! A pleasant voyage"_ ... Frontispiece
+
+_Rudolph was aware of crowded bodies, of yellow faces grinning_
+
+_He let the inverted cup dangle from his hands_
+
+_He went leaping from sight over the crest_
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+A LADY AND A GRIFFIN
+
+It was "about first-drink time," as the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, bound
+for Shanghai and Japan ports, observed to his friend Cesare Domenico, a
+good British subject born at Malta. They sat on the coolest corner in
+Port Said, their table commanding both the cross-way of Chareh Sultan el
+Osman, and the short, glaring vista of desert dust and starved young
+acacias which led to the black hulks of shipping in the Canal. From the
+Bar la Poste came orchestral strains--"Ai nostri monti"--performed by a
+piano indoors and two violins on the pavement. The sounds contended with
+a thin, scattered strumming of cafe mandolins, the tinkle of glasses,
+the steady click of dominoes and backgammon; then were drowned in the
+harsh chatter of Arab coolies who, all grimed as black as Nubians, and
+shouldering spear-headed shovels, tramped inland, their long tunics
+stiff with coal-dust, like a band of chain-mailed Crusaders lately
+caught in a hurricane of powdered charcoal. Athwart them, Parisian
+gowns floated past on stout Italian forms; hulking third-class
+Australians, in shirtsleeves, slouched along toward their mail-boat,
+hugging whiskey bottles, baskets of oranges, baskets of dates; British
+soldiers, khaki-clad for India, raced galloping donkeys through the
+crowded and dusty street. It was mail-day, and gayety flowed among the
+tables, under the thin acacias, on a high tide of Amer Picon.
+
+Through the inky files of the coaling-coolies burst an alien and
+bewildered figure. He passed unnoticed, except by the filthy little Arab
+bootblacks who swarmed about him, trotting, capering, yelping
+cheerfully: "Mista Ferguson!--polish, finish!--can-can--see nice Frencha
+girl--Mista McKenzie, Scotcha fella from Dublin--smotta picture--polish,
+finish!"--undertoned by a squabbling chorus. But presently, studying his
+face, they cried in a loud voice, "Nix! Alles!" and left him, as one not
+desiring polish.
+
+"German, that chap," drawled the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, lazily,
+noticing the uncertain military walk of the young man's clumsy legs, his
+uncouth clothes, his pale visage winged by blushing ears of coral pink.
+
+"The Eitel's in, then," replied Cesare. And they let the young Teuton
+vanish in the vision of mixed lives.
+
+Down the lane of music and chatter and drink he passed slowly, like a
+man just wakened,--assailed by Oriental noise and smells, jostled by the
+races of all latitudes and longitudes, surrounded and solitary, unheeded
+and self-conscious. With a villager's awkwardness among crowds, he made
+his way to a German shipping-office.
+
+"Dispatches for Rudolph Hackh?" he inquired, twisting up his blond
+moustache, and trying to look insolent and peremptory, like an
+employer of men.
+
+"There are none, sir," answered an amiable clerk, not at all impressed.
+
+Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first
+plunge into the foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading
+shyly toward the Quai François Joseph. He slipped through the barrier
+gate, signaled clumsily to a boatman, crawled under the drunken little
+awning of the dinghy, and steered a landsman's course along the shining
+Canal toward the black wall of a German mail-boat. Cramping the Arab's
+oar along the iron side, he bumped the landing-stage. Safe on deck, he
+became in a moment stiff and haughty, greeting a fellow passenger here
+and there with a half-military salute. All afternoon he sat or walked
+alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a fierce and gloomy stare the
+squalid front of wooden houses on the African side, the gray desert
+glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Canal stretching
+southward into the unknown.
+
+He composed melancholy German verses in a note-book. He recalled famous
+exiles--Camoens, Napoleon, Byron--and essayed to copy something of all
+three in his attitude. He cherished the thought that he, clerk at
+twenty-one, was now agent at twenty-two, and traveling toward a house
+with servants, off there beyond the turn of the Canal, beyond the curve
+of the globe. But for all this, Rudolph Hackh felt young, homesick,
+timid of the future, and already oppressed with the distance, the age,
+the manifold, placid mystery of China.
+
+Toward that mystery, meanwhile, the ship began to creep. Behind her,
+houses, multi-colored funnels, scrubby trees, slowly swung to blot out
+the glowing Mediterranean and the western hemisphere. Gray desert banks
+closed in upon her strictly, slid gently astern, drawing with them to
+the vanishing-point the bright lane of traversed water. She gained the
+Bitter Lakes; and the red conical buoys, like beads a-stringing, slipped
+on and added to the two converging dotted lines.
+
+"Good-by to the West!" thought Rudolph. As he mourned sentimentally at
+this lengthening tally of their departure, and tried to quote
+appropriate farewells, he was deeply touched and pleased by the sadness
+of his emotions. "Now what does Byron say?"
+
+The sombre glow of romantic sentiment faded, however, with the sunset.
+That evening, as the ship glided from ruby coal to ruby coal of the
+gares, following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her
+search-light along arsenically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced the
+deck in a mood much simpler and more honest. In vain he tried the
+half-baked philosophy of youth. It gave no comfort; and watching the
+clear desert stars of two mysterious continents, he fell prey to the
+unbounded and unintelligible complexity of man's world. His own career
+seemed no more dubious than trivial.
+
+Succeeding days only strengthened this mood. The Red Sea passed in a
+dream of homesickness, intolerable heat, of a pale blue surface
+stretched before aching eyes, and paler strips of pink and gray coast,
+faint and distant. Like dreams, too, passed Aden and Colombo; and then,
+suddenly, he woke to the most acute interest.
+
+He had ignored his mess-mates at their second-class table; but when the
+new passengers from Colombo came to dinner, he heard behind him the
+swish of stiff skirts, felt some one brush his shoulder, and saw,
+sliding into the next revolving chair, the vision of a lady in white.
+
+"_Mahlzeit_" she murmured dutifully. But the voice was not German.
+Rudolph heard her subside with little flouncings, and felt his ears grow
+warm and red. Delighted, embarrassed, he at last took sufficient courage
+to steal side-glances.
+
+The first showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in
+the plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very
+charming, with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her spoon
+that, to Rudolph's eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he was
+shocked to encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance, from
+large, dark-blue eyes, not devoid of amusement.
+
+"She laughs at me!" fumed the young man, inwardly. He was angry,
+conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own
+boldness. "I have been offensive. She laughs at me." He generalized from
+long inexperience of a subject to which he had given acutely interested
+thought: "They always do."
+
+Anger did not prevent him, however, from noting that his neighbor
+traveled alone, that she must be an Englishwoman, and yet that she
+diffused, somehow, an aura of the Far East and of romance. He shot many
+a look toward her deck-chair that evening, and when she had gone below,
+strategically bought a cigar, sat down in the chair to light it, and by
+a carefully shielded match contrived to read the tag that fluttered on
+the arm: "B. Forrester, Hongkong."
+
+Afterward he remembered that by early daylight he might have read it for
+nothing; and so, for economic penance, smoked to the bitter end, finding
+the cigar disagreeable but manly. At all events, homesickness had
+vanished in a curious impatience for the morrow. Miss Forrester: he
+would sit beside Miss Forrester at table. If only they both were
+traveling first-class!--then she might be a great lady. To be enamored
+of a countess, now--A cigar, after all, was the proper companion of
+bold thoughts.
+
+At breakfast, recalling her amusement, he remained silent and wooden. At
+tiffin his heart leaped.
+
+"You speak English, I'm sure, don't you?" Miss Forrester was saying, in
+a pleasant, rather drawling voice. Her eyes were quite serious now, and
+indeed friendly. Confusion seized him.
+
+"I have less English to amuse myself with the ladies," he answered
+wildly. Next moment, however, he regained that painful mastery of the
+tongue which had won his promotion as agent, and stammered: "Pardon. I
+would mean, I speak so badly as not to entertain her."
+
+"Indeed, you speak very nicely," she rejoined, with such a smile as no
+woman had ever troubled to bestow on him. "That will be so pleasant,
+for my German is shocking."
+
+Dazed by the compliment, by her manner of taking for granted that future
+conversation which had seemed too good to come true, but above all by
+her arch, provoking smile, Rudolph sat with his head in a whirl, feeling
+that the wide eyes of all the second-cabiners were penetrating the
+tumultuous secret of his breast. Again his English deserted, and left
+him stammering. But Miss Forrester chatted steadily, appeared to
+understand murmurs which he himself found obscure, and so restored his
+confidence that before tiffin was over he talked no less gayly, his
+honest face alight and glowing. She taught him the names of the strange
+fruits before them; but though listening and questioning eagerly, he
+could not afterward have told loquat from pumelo, or custard-apple
+from papaya.
+
+Nor could this young man, of methodical habits, ever have told how long
+their voyage lasted. It passed, unreal and timeless, in a glorious mist,
+a delighted fever: the background a blur of glossy white bulkheads and
+iron rails, awnings that fluttered in the warm, languorous winds, an
+infinite tropic ocean poignantly blue; the foreground, Miss Forrester.
+Her white figure, trim and dashing; her round blue eyes, filled with coy
+wonder, the arch innocence of a spoiled child; her pale, smooth cheeks,
+rather plump, but coming oddly and enticingly to a point at the mouth
+and tilted chin; her lips, somewhat too full, too red, but quick and
+whimsical: he saw these all, and these only, in a bright focus,
+listening meanwhile to a voice by turns languid and lively, with now and
+then a curious liquid softness, perhaps insincere, yet dangerously
+pleasant. Questioning, hinting, she played at motherly age and wisdom.
+As for him, he never before knew how well he could talk, or how
+engrossing his sober life, both in his native village on the Baltic and
+afterward in Bremen, could prove to either himself or a stranger.
+
+Yet he was not such a fool, he reflected, as to tell everything. So far
+from trading confidences, she had told him only that she was bound
+straight on to Hongkong; that curiosity alone had led her to travel
+second-class, "for the delightful change, you know, from all such
+formality"; and that she was "really more French than English." Her
+reticence had the charm of an incognito; and taking this leaf from her
+book, he gave himself out as a large, vaguely important person
+journeying on a large, vague errand.
+
+"But you are a griffin?" she had said, as they sat together at tea.
+
+"Pardon?" he ventured, wary and alarmed, wondering whether he could
+claim this unknown term as in character with his part.
+
+"I mean," Miss Forrester explained, smiling, "it is your first visit to
+the Far East?"
+
+"Oh, yes," he replied eagerly, blushing. He would have given worlds to
+say, "No."
+
+"Griffins are such nice little monsters," she purred. "I like them."
+
+Sometimes at night, waked by the snores of a fat Prussian in the upper
+berth, he lay staring into the dark, while the ship throbbed in unison
+with his excited thoughts. He was amazed at his happy recklessness. He
+would never see her again; he was hurrying toward lonely and uncertain
+shores; yet this brief voyage outvalued the rest of his life.
+
+In time, they had left Penang,--another unheeded background for her
+arch, innocent, appealing face,--and forged down the Strait of Malacca
+in a flood of nebulous moonlight. It was the last night out from
+Singapore. That veiled brightness, as they leaned on the rail, showed
+her brown hair fluttering dimly, her face pale, half real, half magical,
+her eyes dark and undefined pools of mystery. It was late; they had been
+silent for a long time; and Rudolph felt that something beyond the
+territory of words remained to be said, and that the one brilliant epoch
+of his life now drew madly to a close.
+
+"What do you think of it all?" the woman asked suddenly, gravely, as
+though they had been isolated together in the deep spaces of the
+same thought.
+
+"I do not yet--Of what?" rejoined Rudolph, at a loss.
+
+"Of all this." She waved an eloquent little gesture toward the
+azure-lighted gulf.
+
+"Oh," he said. "Of the world?"
+
+"Yes," she answered slowly. "The world. Life." Her tone, subdued and
+musical, conveyed in the mere words their full enigma and full meaning.
+"All this that we see."
+
+"Who can tell?" He took her seriously, and ransacked all his store of
+second-hand philosophy for a worthy answer,--a musty store, dead and
+pedantic, after the thrilling spirit of her words. "Why, I think--it
+is--is it not all now the sense-manifest substance of our duty? Pardon.
+I am obscure. '_Das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht_' No?"
+
+Her clear laughter startled him.
+
+"Oh, how moral!" she cried. "What a highly moral little griffin!"
+
+She laughed again (but this time it was like the splash of water in a
+deep well), and turned toward him that curiously tilted point of chin
+and mouth, her eyes shadowy and mocking. She looked young again,--the
+spirit of youth, of knowledge, of wonderful brightness and unbelief.
+
+"Must we take it so very, very hard?" she coaxed. "Isn't it just a place
+to be happy in?"
+
+As through a tumult he heard, and recognized the wisdom of the ages.
+
+"Because," she added, "it lasts such a little while--"
+
+On the rail their hands suddenly touched. He was aware of nothing but
+the nearness and pallor of her face, the darkness of her eyes shining up
+at him. All his life seemed to have rushed concentrating into that one
+instant of extreme trouble, happiness, trembling fascination.
+
+Footsteps sounded on the deck behind them; an unwelcome voice called
+jocosely:--
+
+"Good efening!" The ship's doctor advanced with a roguish, paternal air.
+"You see at the phosphor, not?"
+
+Even as she whipped about toward the light, Rudolph had seen, with a
+touch of wonder, how her face changed from a bitter frown to the most
+friendly smile. The frown returned, became almost savage, when the fat
+physician continued:--
+
+"To see the phosphor is too much moon, Mrs. Forrester?"
+
+Had the steamer crashed upon a reef, he would hardly have noticed such a
+minor shipwreck. Mrs. Forrester? why, then--When the doctor, after
+ponderous pleasantries, had waddled away aft, Rudolph turned upon her a
+face of tragedy.
+
+"Was that true?" he demanded grimly.
+
+"Was what true?" she asked, with baby eyes of wonder, which no longer
+deceived, but angered.
+
+"What the doctor said." Rudolph's voice trembled. "The tittle--the title
+he gave you."
+
+"Why, of course," she laughed.
+
+"And you did not tell me!" he began, with scorn.
+
+"Don't be foolish," she cut in. From beneath her skirt the toe of a
+small white shoe tapped the deck angrily. Of a sudden she laughed, and
+raised a tantalizing face, merry, candid, and inscrutable. "Why, you
+never asked me, and--and of course I thought you were saying it all
+along. You have such a dear, funny way of pronouncing, you know."
+
+He hesitated, almost believing; then, with a desperate gesture, wheeled
+and marched resolutely aft. That night it was no Prussian snores which
+kept him awake and wretched. "Everything is finished," he thought
+abysmally. He lay overthrown, aching, crushed, as though pinned under
+the fallen walls of his youth.
+
+At breakfast-time, the ship lay still beside a quay where mad crowds of
+brown and yellow men, scarfed, swathed, and turbaned in riotous colors,
+worked quarreling with harsh cries, in unspeakable interweaving uproar.
+The air, hot and steamy, smelled of strange earth. As Rudolph followed a
+Malay porter toward the gang-plank, he was painfully aware that Mrs.
+Forrester had turned from the rail and stood waiting in his path.
+
+"Without saying good-by?" she reproached him. The injured wonder in her
+eyes he thought a little overdone.
+
+"Good-by." He could not halt, but, raising his cap stiffly, managed to
+add, "A pleasant voyage," and passed on, feeling as though she had
+murdered something.
+
+He found himself jogging in a rickshaw, while equatorial rain beat like
+down-pouring bullets on the tarpaulin hood, and sluiced the Chinaman's
+oily yellow back. Over the heavy-muscled shoulders he caught glimpses of
+sullen green foliage, ponderous and drooping; of half-naked barbarians
+that squatted in the shallow caverns of shops; innumerable faces, black,
+yellow, white, and brown, whirling past, beneath other tarpaulin hoods,
+or at carriage windows, or shielded by enormous dripping wicker hats, or
+bared to the pelting rain. Curious odors greeted him, as of sour
+vegetables and of unknown rank substances burning. He stared like a
+visionary at the streaming multitude of alien shapes.
+
+The coolie swerved, stopped, tilted his shafts to the ground. Rudolph
+entered a sombre, mouldy office, where the darkness rang with tiny
+silver bells. Pig-tailed men in skull-caps, their faces calm as polished
+ivory, were counting dollars endlessly over flying finger-tips. One of
+these men paused long enough to give him a sealed dispatch,--the message
+to which the ocean-bed, the Midgard ooze, had thrilled beneath his
+tardy keel.
+
+"Zimmerman recalled," the interpretation ran; "take his station; proceed
+at once."
+
+He knew the port only as forlorn and insignificant. It did not matter.
+One consolation remained: he would never see her again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+THE PIED PIPER
+
+A gray smudge trailing northward showed where the Fa-Hien--Scottish
+Oriental, sixteen hundred tons--was disappearing from the pale expanse
+of ocean. The sampan drifted landward imperceptibly, seeming, with
+nut-brown sail unstirred, to remain where the impatient steamer had met
+it, dropped a solitary passenger overside, and cast him loose upon the
+breadth of the antipodes. Rare and far, the sails of junks patched the
+horizon with umber polygons. Rudolph, sitting among his boxes in the
+sampan, viewed by turns this desolate void astern and the more desolate
+sweep of coast ahead. His matting sail divided the shining bronze
+outpour of an invisible river, divided a low brown shore beyond, and
+above these, the strips of some higher desert country that shone like
+snowdrifts, or like sifted ashes from which the hills rose black and
+charred. Their savage, winter-blasted look, in the clear light of an
+almost vernal morning, made the land seem fabulous. Yet here in reality,
+thought Rudolph, as he floated toward that hoary kingdom,--here at last,
+facing a lonely sea, reared the lifeless, inhospitable shore, the
+sullen margin of China.
+
+The slow creaking of the spliced oar, swung in its lashing by a
+half-naked yellow man, his incomprehensible chatter with some fellow
+boatman hidden in the bows, were sounds lost in a drowsy silence,
+rhythms lost in a wide inertia. Time itself seemed stationary. Rudolph
+nodded, slept, and waking, found the afternoon sped, the hills gone, and
+his clumsy, time-worn craft stealing close under a muddy bank topped
+with brown weeds and grass. They had left behind the silted roadstead,
+and now, gliding on a gentle flood, entered the river-mouth. Here and
+there, against the saffron tide, or under banks quaggy as melting
+chocolate, stooped a naked fisherman, who--swarthy as his background but
+for a loin-band of yellow flesh--shone wet and glistening while he
+stirred a dip-net through the liquid mud. Faint in the distance harsh
+cries sounded now and then, and the soft popping of small-arms,--tiny
+revolts in the reign of a stillness aged and formidable. Crumbling walls
+and squat ruins, black and green-patched with mould--old towers of
+defense against pirates--guarded from either bank the turns of the
+river. In one reach, a "war-junk," her sails furled, lay at anchor, the
+red and white eyes staring fish-like from her black prow: a silly
+monster, the painted tompions of her wooden cannon aiming drunkenly
+askew, her crew's wash fluttering peacefully in a line of blue dungaree.
+
+Beyond the next turn, a fowling-piece cracked sharply, close at hand;
+something splashed, and the ruffled body of a snipe bobbed in the bronze
+flood alongside.
+
+"Hang it!" complained a voice, loudly. "The beggar was too--Hallo! Oh, I
+say, Gilly! Gilly, ahoy! Pick us up, there's a good chap! The bird
+first, will you, and then me."
+
+A tall young man in brown holland and a battered _terai_ stood above on
+the grassy brink.
+
+"Oh, beg pardon," he continued. "Took you for old Gilly, you know." He
+snapped the empty shells from his gun, and blew into the breech, before
+adding, "Would _you_ mind, then? That is, if you're bound up for
+Stink-Chau. It's a beastly long tramp, and I've been shooting all
+afternoon."
+
+Followed by three coolies who popped out of the grass with game-bags,
+the young stranger descended, hopped nimbly from tussock to gunwale, and
+perched there to wash his boots in the river.
+
+"Might have known you weren't old Gilly," he said over his shoulder.
+"Wutzler said the Fa-Hien lay off signaling for sampan before breakfast.
+Going to stay long?"
+
+"I am agent," answered Rudolph, with a touch of pride, "for Fliegelman
+and Sons."
+
+"Oh?" drawled the hunter, lazily. He swung his legs inboard, faced
+about, and studied Rudolph with embarrassing frankness. He was a
+long-limbed young Englishman, whose cynical gray eyes, and thin face
+tinged rather sallow and Oriental, bespoke a reckless good humor. "Life
+sentence, eh? Then your name's--what is it again?--Hackh, isn't it?
+Heywood's mine. So you take Zimmerman's place. He's off already, and
+good riddance. He _was_ a bounder!--Charming spot you've come to! I
+daresay if your Fliegelmans opened a hong in hell, you might possibly
+get a worse station."
+
+Without change of manner, he uttered a few gabbling, barbaric words. A
+coolie knelt, and with a rag began to clean the boots, which, from the
+expression of young Mr. Heywood's face, were more interesting than the
+arrival of a new manager from Germany.
+
+"It will be dark before we're in," he said. "My place for the night, of
+course, and let your predecessor's leavings stand over till daylight.
+After dinner we'll go to the club. Dinner! Chicken and rice, chicken and
+rice! Better like it, though, for you'll eat nothing else, term of
+your life."
+
+"You are very kind," began Rudolph; but this bewildering off-hand
+youngster cut him short, with a laugh:--
+
+"No fear, you'll pay me! Your firm supplies unlimited liquor. Much good
+that ever did us, with old Zimmerman."
+
+The sampan now slipped rapidly on the full flood, up a narrow channel
+that the setting of the sun had turned, as at a blow, from copper to
+indigo. The shores passed, more and more obscure against a fading light.
+A star or two already shone faint in the lower spaces. A second war-junk
+loomed above them, with a ruddy fire in the stern lighting a glimpse of
+squat forms and yellow goblin faces.
+
+"It is very curious," said Rudolph, trying polite conversation, "how
+they paint so the eyes on their jonks."
+
+"No eyes, no can see; no can see, no can walkee," chanted Heywood in
+careless formula. "I say," he complained suddenly, "you're not going to
+'study the people,' and all that rot? We're already fed up with
+missionaries. Their cant, I mean; no allusion to cannibalism."
+
+He lighted a cigarette. After the blinding flare of the match, night
+seemed to have fallen instantaneously. As their boat crept on to the
+slow creaking sweep, both maintained silence, Rudolph rebuked and
+lonely, Heywood supine beneath a comfortable winking spark.
+
+"What I mean is," drawled the hunter, "we need all the good fellows we
+can get. Bring any new songs out? Oh, I forgot, you're a German, too.--A
+sweet little colony! Gilly's the only gentleman in the whole half-dozen
+of us, and Heaven knows he's not up to much.--Ah, we're in. On our
+right, fellow sufferers, we see the blooming Village of Stinks."
+
+He had risen in the gloom. Beyond his shadow a few feeble lights burned
+low and scattered along the bank. Strange cries arose, the bumping of
+sampans, the mournful caterwauling of a stringed instrument.
+
+"The native town's a bit above," he continued. "We herd together here on
+the edge. No concession, no bund, nothing."
+
+Their sampan grounded softly in malodorous ooze. Each mounting the bare
+shoulders of a coolie, the two Europeans rode precariously to shore.
+
+"My boys will fetch your boxes," called Heywood. "Come on."
+
+The path, sometimes marshy, sometimes hard-packed clay or stone flags
+deeply littered, led them a winding course in the night. Now and then
+shapes met them and pattered past in single file, furtive and sinister.
+At last, where a wall loomed white, Heywood stopped, and, kicking at a
+wooden gate, gave a sing-song cry. With rattling weights, the door
+swung open, and closed behind them heavily. A kind of empty garden, a
+bare little inclosure, shone dimly in the light that streamed from a
+low, thick-set veranda at the farther end. Dogs flew at them, barking
+outrageously.
+
+"Down, Chang! Down, Chutney!" cried their master. "Be quiet, Flounce,
+you fool!"
+
+On the stone floor of the house, they leaped upon him, two red chows and
+a fox-terrier bitch, knocking each other over in their joy.
+
+"Olo she-dog he catchee plenty lats," piped a little Chinaman, who
+shuffled out from a side-room where lamplight showed an office desk.
+"Too-day catchee. Plenty lats. No can."
+
+"My compradore, Ah Pat," said Heywood to Rudolph. "Ah Pat, my friend he
+b'long number one Flickleman, boss man."
+
+The withered little creature bobbed in his blue robe, grinning at the
+introduction.
+
+"You welly high-tone man," he murmured amiably. "Catchee goo' plice."
+
+"All the same, I don't half like it," was Heywood's comment later. He
+had led his guest upstairs into a bare white-washed room, furnished in
+wicker. Open windows admitted the damp sea breeze and a smell, like foul
+gun-barrels, from the river marshes. "Where should all the rats be
+coming from?" He frowned, meditating on what Rudolph thought a trifle.
+Above the sallow brown face, his chestnut hair shone oddly,
+close-cropped and vigorous. "Maskee, can't be helped.--O Boy, one
+sherry-bitters, one bamboo!"
+
+"To our better acquaintance," said Rudolph, as they raised their
+glasses.
+
+"What? Oh, yes, thanks," the other laughed. "Any one would know you for
+a griffin here, Mr. Hackh. You've not forgotten your manners yet."
+
+When they had sat down to dinner in another white-washed room, and had
+undertaken the promised rice and chicken, he laughed again,
+somewhat bitterly.
+
+"Better acquaintance--no fear! You'll be so well acquainted with us all
+that you'll wish you never clapped eyes on us." He drained his whiskey
+and soda, signaled for more, and added: "Were you ever cooped up,
+yachting, with a chap you detested? That's the feeling you come to
+have.--Here, stand by. You're drinking nothing."
+
+Rudolph protested. Politeness had so far conquered habit, that he felt
+uncommonly flushed, genial, and giddy.
+
+"That," urged Heywood, tapping the bottle, "that's our only amusement.
+You'll see. One good thing we can get is the liquor. 'Nisi damnose
+bibimus,'--forget how it runs: 'Drink hearty, or you'll die without
+getting your revenge,'"
+
+"You are then a university's-man?" cried Rudolph, with enthusiasm.
+
+The other nodded gloomily. On the instant his face had fallen as
+impassive as that of the Chinese boy who stood behind his chair,
+straight, rigid, like a waxen image of Gravity in a blue gown.--"Yes, of
+sorts. Young fool. Scrapes. Debt. Out to Orient. Same old story. More
+debt. Trust the firm to encourage that! Debt and debt and debt. Tied up
+safe. Transfer. Finish! Never go Home."--He rose with a laugh and an
+impatient gesture.--"Come on. Might as well take in the club as to sit
+here talking rot."
+
+Outside the gate of the compound, coolies crouching round a lantern
+sprang upright and whipped a pair of sedan-chairs into position.
+Heywood, his feet elevated comfortably over the poles, swung in the
+lead; Rudolph followed, bobbing in the springy rhythm of the long
+bamboos. The lanterns danced before them down an open road, past a few
+blank walls and dark buildings, and soon halted before a whitened front,
+where light gleamed from the upper story.
+
+"Mind the stairs," called Heywood. "Narrow and beastly dark."
+
+As they stumbled up the steep flight, Rudolph heard the click of
+billiard balls. A pair of hanging lamps lighted the room into which he
+rose,--a low, gloomy loft, devoid of comfort. At the nearer table, a
+weazened little man bent eagerly over a pictorial paper; at the farther,
+chalking their cues, stood two players, one a sturdy Englishman with a
+gray moustache, the other a lithe, graceful person, whose blue coat,
+smart as an officer's, and swarthy but handsome face made him at a
+glance the most striking figure in the room. A little Chinese imp in
+white, who acted as marker, turned on the new-comers a face of
+preternatural cunning.
+
+"Mr. Wutzler," said Heywood. The weazened reader rose in a nervous
+flutter, underwent his introduction to Rudolph with as much bashful
+agony as a school-girl, mumbled a few words in German, and instantly
+took refuge in his tattered _Graphic_. The players, however, advanced in
+a more friendly fashion. The Englishman, whose name Rudolph did not
+catch, shook his hand heartily.
+
+"Mr. Hackh is a welcome addition." He spoke with deliberate courtesy.
+Something in his voice, the tired look in his frank blue eyes and
+serious face, at once engaged respect. "For our sakes," he continued,
+"we're glad to see you here. I am sure Doctor Chantel will agree
+with me."
+
+"Ah, indeed," said the man in military blue, with a courtier's bow.
+Both air and accent were French. "Most welcome."
+
+"Let's all have a drink," cried Heywood. Despite his many glasses at
+dinner, he spoke with the alacrity of a new idea. "O Boy, whiskey
+_Ho-lan suey, fai di_!"
+
+Away bounded the boy marker like a tennis-ball.
+
+"Hello, Wutzler's off already!"--The little old reader had quietly
+disappeared, leaving them a vacant table.--"Isn't he weird?" laughed
+Heywood, as they sat down. "Comes and goes like a ghost."
+
+"It is his Chinese wife," declared Chantel, preening his moustache. "He
+is always ashame to meet the new persons."
+
+"Poor old chap," said Heywood. "I know--feels himself an outcast and all
+that. Humph! With us! Quite unnecessary."--The Chinese page, quick,
+solemn, and noiseless, glided round the table with his tray.--"Ah, you
+young devil! You're another weird one, you atom. See those bead eyes
+watching us, eh? A Gilpin Homer, you are, and some fine day we'll see
+you go off in a flash of fire. If you don't poison us all first.--Well,
+here's fortune!"
+
+"Your health, Mr. Hackh," amended the other Englishman.
+
+As they set down their glasses, a strange cry sounded from below,--a
+stifled call, inarticulate, but in such a key of distress that all four
+faced about, and listened intently.
+
+"Kom down," called a hesitating voice, "kom down and look-see."
+
+They sprang to the stairs, and clattered downward. Dim radiance flooded
+the landing, from the street door. Outside, a smoky lantern on the
+ground revealed the lower levels.
+
+In the wide sector of light stood Wutzler, shrinking and apologetic,
+like a man caught in a fault, his wrinkled face eloquent of fear, his
+gesture eloquent of excuse. Round him, as round a conjurer, scores of
+little shadowy things moved in a huddling dance, fitfully hopping like
+sparrows over spilt grain. Where the light fell brightest these became
+plainer, their eyes shone in jeweled points of color.
+
+"By Jove, Gilly, they are rats!" said Heywood, in a voice curiously
+forced and matter-of-fact. "Flounce killed several this afternoon,
+so my--"
+
+No one heeded him; all stared. The rats, like beings of incantation,
+stole about with an absence of fear, a disregard of man's presence, that
+was odious and alarming.
+
+"Earthquake?" The elder Englishman spoke as though afraid of disturbing
+some one.
+
+The French doctor shook his head.
+
+"No," he answered in the same tone. "Look."
+
+The rats, in all their weaving confusion, displayed one common impulse.
+They sprang upward continually, with short, agonized leaps, like
+drowning creatures struggling to keep afloat above some invisible flood.
+The action, repeated multitudinously into the obscure background,
+exaggerated in the foreground by magnified shadows tossing and falling
+on the white walls, suggested the influence of some evil stratum, some
+vapor subtle and diabolic, crawling poisonously along the ground.
+
+Heywood stamped angrily, without effect. Wutzler stood abject, a
+magician impotent against his swarm of familiars. Gradually the rats,
+silent and leaping, passed away into the darkness, as though they heard
+the summons of a Pied Piper.
+
+"It doesn't attack Europeans." Heywood still used that curious
+inflection.
+
+"Then my brother Julien is still alive," retorted Doctor Chantel,
+bitterly.
+
+"What do you think, Gilly?" persisted Heywood.
+
+His compatriot nodded in a meaningless way.
+
+"The doctor's right, of course," he answered. "I wish my wife weren't
+coming back."
+
+"Dey are a remember," ventured Wutzler, timidly. "A warnung."
+
+The others, as though it had been a point of custom, ignored him. All
+stared down, musing, at the vacant stones.
+
+"Then the concert's off to-morrow night," mocked Heywood, with an
+unpleasant laugh.
+
+"On the contrary." Gilly caught him up, prompt and decided. "We shall
+need all possible amusements; also to meet and plan our campaign.
+Meantime,--what do you say, Doctor?--chloride of lime in pots?"
+
+"That, evidently," smiled the handsome man. "Yes, and charcoal burnt in
+braziers, perhaps, as Père Fenouil advises. Fumigate."--Satirical and
+debonair, he shrugged his shoulders.--"What use, among these thousands
+of yellow pigs?"
+
+"I wish she weren't coming," repeated Gilly.
+
+Rudolph, left outside this conference, could bear the uncertainty no
+longer.
+
+"I am a new arrival," he confided to his young host. "I do not
+understand. What is it?"
+
+"The plague, old chap," replied Heywood, curtly. "These playful little
+animals get first notice. You're not the only arrival to-night."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+UNDER FIRE
+
+The desert was sometimes Gobi, sometimes Sahara, but always an infinite
+stretch of sand that floated up and up in a stifling layer, like the
+tide. Rudolph, desperately choked, continued leaping upward against an
+insufferable power of gravity, or straining to run against the force of
+paralysis. The desert rang with phantom voices,--Chinese voices that
+mocked him, chanting of pestilence, intoning abhorrently in French.
+
+He woke to find a knot of bed-clothes smothering him. To his first
+unspeakable relief succeeded the astonishment of hearing the voices
+continue in shrill chorus, the tones Chinese, the words, in louder
+fragments, unmistakably French. They sounded close at hand, discordant
+matins sung by a mob of angry children. Once or twice a weary, fretful
+voice scolded feebly: "Un-peu-de-s'lence! Un-peu-de-s'lence!" Rudolph
+rose to peep through the heavy jalousies, but saw nothing more than
+sullen daylight, a flood of vertical rain, and thin rivulets coursing
+down a tiled roof below. The morning was dismally cold.
+
+"Jolivet's kids wake you?" Heywood, in a blue kimono, nodded from the
+doorway. "Public nuisance, that school. Quite needless, too. Some bally
+French theory, you know, sphere of influence, and that rot. Game played
+out up here, long ago, but they keep hanging on.--Bath's ready, when you
+like." He broke out laughing. "Did you climb into the water-jar,
+yesterday, before dinner? Boy reports it upset. You'll find the dipper
+more handy.--How did you ever manage? One leg at a time?"
+
+Echoes of glee followed his disappearance. Rudolph, blushing, prepared
+to descend into the gloomy vault of ablution. Charcoal fumes, however,
+and the glow of a brazier on the dark floor below, not only revived all
+his old terror, but at the stair-head halted him with a new.
+
+"Is the water safe?" he called.
+
+Heywood answered impatiently from his bedroom.
+
+"Nothing safe in this world, Mr. Hackh. User's risk." An inaudible
+mutter ended with, "Keep clean, anyway."
+
+At breakfast, though the acrid smoke was an enveloping reminder, he made
+the only reference to their situation.
+
+"Rain at last: too late, though, to flush out the gutters. We needed it
+a month ago.--I say, Hackh, if you don't mind, you might as well cheer
+up. From now on, it's pure heads and tails. We're all under fire
+together." Glancing out of window at the murky sky, he added
+thoughtfully, "One excellent side to living without hope, maskee
+fashion: one isn't specially afraid. I'll take you to your office, and
+you can make a start. Nothing else to do, is there?"
+
+Dripping bearers and shrouded chairs received them on the lower floor,
+carried them out into a chill rain that drummed overhead and splashed
+along the compound path in silver points. The sunken flags in the road
+formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire. A few
+grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles, or
+like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets. The
+smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of
+opium, grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations of ancient
+refuse, and (as the chairs jogged past the club, past filthy groups
+huddling about the well in a marketplace, and onward into the black yawn
+of the city gate) assailed the throat like a bad and lasting taste. Now,
+in the dusky street, pent narrowly by wet stone walls, night seemed to
+fall, while fresh waves of pungent odor overwhelmed and steeped the
+senses. Rudolph's chair jostled through hundreds and hundreds of
+Chinese, all alike in the darkness, who shuffled along before with
+switching queues, or flattened against the wall to stare, almost nose
+to nose, at the passing foreigner. With chairpoles backing into one shop
+or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he
+swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare
+bazaar. Overhead, a slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part,
+he swayed along indoors, beneath a dingy lattice roof. All points of the
+compass vanished; all streets remained alike,--the same endless vista of
+mystic characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets,
+under which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty
+white. From every shop, the same yellow faces stared at him, the same
+elfin children caught his eye for a half-second to grin or grimace, the
+same shaven foreheads bent over microscopical tasks in the dark. At
+first, Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this
+impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies parting the crowd, he
+detected, below or through their noise, from all the long
+cross-corridors a wide and appalling silence. Gradually, too, small
+sounds relieved this: the hammering of brass-work, the steady rattle of
+a loom, or the sing-song call and mellow bell of some burdened hawker,
+bumping past, his swinging baskets filled with a pennyworth of trifles.
+But still the silence daunted Rudolph in this astounding vision, this
+masque of unreal life, of lost daylight, of annihilated direction, of
+placid turmoil and multifarious identity, made credible only by the
+permanence of nauseous smells.
+
+Somewhere in the dark maze, the chairs halted, under a portal black and
+heavy as a Gate of Dreams. And as by the anachronism of dreams
+there hung, among its tortuous symbols, the small, familiar
+placard--"Fliegelman and Sons, Office." Heywood led the way, past two
+ducking Chinese clerks, into a sombre room, stone-floored, furnished
+stiffly with a row of carved chairs against the wall, lighted coldly by
+roof-windows of placuna, and a lamp smoking before some commercial god
+in his ebony and tinsel shrine.
+
+"There," he said, bringing Rudolph to an inner chamber, or dark little
+pent-house, where another draughty lamp flickered on a European desk.
+"Here's your cell. I'm off--call for you later. Good luck!"--Wheeling in
+the doorway, he tossed a book, negligently.--"Caught! You may as well
+start in, eh?--'Cantonese Made Worse,'"
+
+To his departing steps Rudolph listened as a prisoner, condemned, might
+listen to the last of all earthly visitors. Peering through a kind of
+butler's window, he saw beyond the shrine his two pallid subordinates,
+like mystic automatons, nodding and smoking by the doorway. Beyond
+them, across a darker square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living
+phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am
+lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism,
+shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he
+dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered desk, and
+buried his face.
+
+On the tin pent-roof, the rain trampled inexorably.
+
+At last, mustering a shaky resolution, he set to work ransacking the
+tumbled papers. Happily, Zimmerman had left all in confusion. The very
+hopelessness of his accounts proved a relief. Working at high tension,
+Rudolph wrestled through disorder, mistakes, falsification; and little
+by little, as the sorted piles grew and his pen traveled faster, the old
+absorbing love of method and dispatch--the stay, the cordial flagon of
+troubled man--gave him strength to forget.
+
+At times, felt shoes scuffed the stone floor without, and high, scolding
+voices rose, exchanging unfathomable courtesy with his clerks. One after
+another, strange figures, plump and portly in their colored robes,
+crossed his threshold, nodding their buttoned caps, clasping their hands
+hidden in voluminous sleeves.
+
+"My 'long speakee my goo' flien'," chanted each of these apparitions;
+and each, after a long, slow discourse that ended more darkly than it
+began, retired with fatuous nods and smirks of satisfaction, leaving
+Rudolph dismayed by a sense of cryptic negotiation in which he had been
+found wanting.
+
+Noon brought the only other interval, when two solemn "boys" stole in
+with curry and beer. Eat he could not in this lazaret, but sipped a
+little of the dark Kirin brew, and plunged again into his researches.
+Alone with his lamp and rustling papers, he fought through perplexities,
+now whispering, now silent, like a student rapt in some midnight fervor.
+
+"What ho! Mustn't work this fashion!" Heywood's voice woke him, sudden
+as a gust of sharp air. "Makee finish!"
+
+The summons was both welcome and unwelcome; for as their chairs jostled
+homeward through the reeking twilight, Rudolph felt the glow of work
+fade like the mockery of wine. The strange seizure returned,--exile,
+danger, incomprehensibility, settled down upon him, cold and steady as
+the rain. Tea, at Heywood's house, was followed by tobacco, tobacco by
+sherry, and this by a dinner from yesterday's game-bag. The two men said
+little, sitting dejected, as if by agreement. But when Heywood rose, he
+changed into gayety as a man slips on a jacket.
+
+"Now, then, for the masked ball! I mean, we can't carry these long
+faces to the club, can we? Ladies' Night--what larks!" He caught up his
+cap, with a grimace. "The Lord loveth a cheerful liar. Come ahead!"
+
+On the way, he craned from his chair to shout, in the darkness:--
+
+"I say! If you can do a turn of any sort, let the women have it. All the
+fun they get. Be an ass, like the rest of us. Maskee how silly! Mind
+you, it's all hands, these concerts!"
+
+No music, but the click of ivory and murmur of voices came down the
+stairway of the club. At first glance, as Rudolph rose above the floor,
+the gloomy white loft seemed vacant as ever; at second glance,
+embarrassingly full of Europeans. Four strangers grounded their cues
+long enough to shake his hand. "Mr. Nesbit,--Sturgeon--Herr
+Kempner--Herr Teppich,"--he bowed stiffly to each, ran the battery of
+their inspection, and found himself saluting three other persons at the
+end of the room, under a rosy, moon-bellied lantern. A gray matron,
+stout, and too tightly dressed for comfort, received him uneasily, a
+dark-eyed girl befriended him with a look and a quiet word, while a tall
+man, nodding a vigorous mop of silver hair, crushed his hand in a great
+bony fist.
+
+"Mrs. Earle," Heywood was saying, "Miss Drake, and--how are you,
+padre?--Dr. Earle."
+
+"Good-evening," boomed the giant, in a deep and musical bass. "We are
+very glad, very glad." His voice vibrated through the room, without
+effort. It struck one with singular force, like the shrewd, kind
+brightness of his eyes, light blue, and oddly benevolent, under brows
+hard as granite. "Sit down, Mr. Hackh," he ordered genially, "and give
+us news of the other world! I mean," he laughed, "west of Suez.
+Smoking's allowed--here, try that!"
+
+He commanded them, as it were, to take their ease,--the women among
+cushions on a rattan couch, the men stretched in long chairs. He put
+questions, indolent, friendly questions, opening vistas of reply and
+recollection; so that Rudolph, answering, felt the first return of
+homely comfort. A feeble return, however, and brief: in the pauses of
+talk, misgiving swarmed in his mind, like the leaping vermin of last
+night. The world into which he had been thrown still appeared
+disorderly, incomprehensible, and dangerous. The plague--it still
+recurred in his thoughts like a sombre motive; these friendly people
+were still strangers; and for a moment now and then their talk, their
+smiles, the click of billiards, the cool, commonplace behavior, seemed a
+foolhardy unconcern, as of men smoking in a powder magazine.
+
+"Clearing a bit, outside," called Nesbit. A little, wiry fellow, with
+cheerful Cockney speech, he stood chalking his cue at a window. "I say,
+what's the matter one piecee picnic this week? Pink Pagoda, eh? Mrs.
+Gilly's back, you know."
+
+"No, is she?" wheezed the fat Sturgeon, with something like enthusiasm.
+"Now we'll brighten up! By Jove, that's good news. That's worth hearing.
+Eh, Heywood?"
+
+"Rather!" drawled Rudolph's friend, with an alacrity that seemed half
+cynical, half enigmatic.
+
+A quick tread mounted the stairs, and into the room rose Dr. Chantel. He
+bowed gracefully to the padre's group, but halted beside the players.
+Whatever he said, they forgot their game, and circled the table to
+listen. He spoke earnestly, his hands fluttering in nervous gestures.
+
+"Something's up," grumbled Heywood, "when the doctor forgets to pose."
+
+Behind Chantel, as he wheeled, heaved the gray bullet-head and sturdy
+shoulders of Gilly.
+
+"Alone?" called the padre. "Why, where's the Mem?"
+
+He came up with evident weariness, but replied cheerfully:--
+
+"She's very sorry, and sent chin-chins all round. But to-night--Her
+journey, you know. She's resting.--I hope we've not delayed
+the concert?"
+
+"Last man starts it!" Heywood sprang up, flung open a battered piano,
+and dragged Chantel to the stool. "Come, Gilly, your forfeit!"
+
+The elder man blushed, and coughed.
+
+"Why, really," he stammered. "Really, if you wish me to!"
+
+Heywood slid back into his chair, grinning.
+
+"Proud as an old peacock," he whispered to Rudolph. "Peacock's voice,
+too."
+
+Dr. Chantel struck a few jangling chords, and skipping adroitly over
+sick notes, ran a flourish. The billiard-players joined the circle, with
+absent, serious faces. The singer cleared his throat, took on a
+preternatural solemnity, and began. In a dismal, gruff voice, he
+proclaimed himself a miner, deep, deep down:--
+
+
+"And few, I trow, of my being know,
+And few that an atom care!"
+
+
+His hearers applauded this gloomy sentiment, till his cheeks flushed
+again with honest satisfaction. But in the full sweep of a brilliant
+interlude, Chantel suddenly broke down.
+
+"I cannot," he declared sharply. As he turned on the squealing stool,
+they saw his face white and strangely wrought. "I had meant," he said,
+with painful precision, "to say nothing to-night, and act as--I cannot.
+Judge you, what I feel."
+
+He got uncertainly to his feet, hesitating.
+
+"Ladies, you will not be alarmed." The four players caught his eye, and
+nodded. "It is well that you know. There is no danger here, more than--I
+am since disinfected. Monsieur Jolivet, my compatriot--You see, you
+understand. Yes, the plague."
+
+For a space, the distant hum of the streets invaded the room. Then
+Heywood's book of music slapped the floor like a pistol-shot.
+
+"You left him!" He bounced from his chair, raging. "You--Pêng! Where's
+my cap?"
+
+Quick as he was, the dark-eyed girl stood blocking his way.
+
+"Not you, Mr. Heywood," she said quietly. "I must go stay with him."
+
+They confronted each other, man and woman, as if for a combat of will.
+The outbreak of voices was cut short; the whole company stood, like
+Homeric armies, watching two champions. Chantel, however, broke
+the silence.
+
+"Nobody must go." He eyed them all, gravely. "I left him, yes. He does
+not need any one. Personne. Very sudden. He went to the school sick this
+morning. Swollen axillae--the poor fool, not to know!--et
+puis--enfin--He is dead."
+
+Heywood pitched his cap on the green field of the billiard-cloth.
+
+"The poor pedagogue!" he said bitterly. "_He_ was going Home."
+
+Sudden, hot and cold, like the thrust of a knife, it struck Rudolph that
+he had heard the voice of this first victim,--the peevish voice which
+cried so weakly for a little silence, at early daylight, that very
+morning. A little silence: and he had received the great.
+
+A gecko fell from the ceiling, with a tiny thump that made all start. He
+had struck the piano, and the strings answered with a faint, aeolian
+confusion. Then, as they regarded one another silently, a rustle, a
+flurry, sounded on the stairs. A woman stumbled into the loft, sobbing,
+crying something inarticulate, as she ran blindly toward them, with
+white face and wild eyes. She halted abruptly, swayed as though to fall,
+and turned, rather by instinct than by vision, to the other women.
+
+"Bertha!" protested Gilly, with a helpless stare. "My dear!"
+
+"I couldn't stay!" she cried. "The amah told me. Why did you ever let me
+come back? Oh, do something--help me!"
+
+The face and the voice came to Rudolph like another trouble across a
+dream. He knew them, with a pang. This trembling, miserable heap, flung
+into the arms of the dark-eyed girl, was Mrs. Forrester.
+
+"Go on," said the girl, calmly. She had drawn the woman down beside her
+on the rattan couch, and clasping her like a child, nodded toward the
+piano. "Go on, as if the doctor hadn't--hadn't stopped."
+
+Heywood was first to obey.
+
+"Come, Chantel, chantez! Here's your song." He took the stool in
+leap-frog fashion, and struck a droll simultaneous discord. "Come on.--
+Well, then, catch me on the chorus!"
+
+
+"Pour qu' j' finisse
+Mon service
+Au Tonkin je suis parti!"
+
+
+To a discreet set of verses, he rattled a bravado accompaniment.
+Presently Chantel moved to his side, and, with the same spirit, swung
+into the chorus. The tumbled white figure on the couch clung to her
+refuge, her bright hair shining below the girl's quiet, thoughtful face.
+She was shaken with convulsive regularity.
+
+In his riot of emotions, Rudolph found an over-mastering shame. A
+picture returned,--the Strait of Malacca, this woman in the blue
+moonlight, a Mistress of Life, rejoicing, alluring,--who was now the
+single coward in the room. But was she? The question was quick and
+revolting. As quickly, a choice of sides was forced on him. He
+understood these people, recalled Heywood's saying, and with that, some
+story of a regiment which lay waiting in the open, and sang while the
+bullets picked and chose. All together: as now these half-dozen men
+were roaring cheerfully:--
+
+
+"Ma Tonkikí, ma Tonkikí, ma Tonkinoise,
+Yen a d'autr's qui m' font les doux yeux,
+Mais c'est ell' que j'aim' le mieux!"
+
+
+The new recruit joined them, awkwardly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+THE SWORD-PEN
+
+"Wutzler was missing last night," said Heywood, lazily. He had finished
+breakfast, and lighted a short, fat, glossy pipe. "Just occurred to me.
+We must have a look in on him. Poor old Wutz, he's getting worse and
+worse. Chantel's right, I fancy: it's the native wife." He rose, with a
+short laugh. "Queer. The rest never feel so,--Nesbit, and Sturgeon, and
+that lot. But then, they don't fall so low as to marry theirs."
+
+"By the way," he sneered, on the landing, "until this scare blows over,
+you'd better postpone any such establishment, if you intend--"
+
+"I do not," stammered Rudolph.
+
+To his amazement, the other clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"I say!" The sallow face and cynical gray eyes lighted, for the first
+time, with something like enthusiasm. Next moment they had darkened
+again, but not before he had said gruffly, "You're not a bad
+little chap."
+
+Morosely, as if ashamed of this outburst, he led the way through the
+bare, sunny compound, and when the gate had closed rattling behind
+them, stated their plans concisely and sourly. "No work to-day, not a
+stroke! We'll just make it a holiday, catchee good time.--What? No. Rot!
+I won't work, and you can't. That's all there is about that. Don't be an
+ass! Come along. We'll go out first and see Captain Kneebone." And when
+Rudolph, faithful to certain tradesmen snoring in Bremen, would have
+protested mildly, he let fly a stinging retort, and did not regain his
+temper until they had passed the outskirts of the village. Yet even the
+quarrel seemed part of some better understanding, some new, subtle bond
+between two lonely men.
+
+Before them opened a broad field dotted with curious white disks, like
+bone buttons thrown on a green carpet. Near at hand, coolies trotted and
+stooped, laying out more of these circular baskets, filled with tiny
+dough-balls. Makers of rice-wine, said Heywood; as he strode along
+explaining, he threw off his surly fit. The brilliant sunlight, the
+breeze stirring toward them from a background of drooping bamboos, the
+gabble of coolies, the faint aroma of the fermenting _no-me_ cakes,
+began, after all, to give a truant sense of holiday.
+
+Almost gayly, the companions threaded a marshy path to the river, and
+bargained with a shrewd, plump woman who squatted in the bow of a
+sampan. She chaffered angrily, then laughed at some unknown saying of
+Heywood's, and let them come aboard. Summoned by voluble scolding, her
+husband appeared, and placidly labored at the creaking sweep. They
+slipped down a river of bronze, between the oozy banks; and the
+war-junks, the naked fisherman, the green-coated ruins of forts, drifted
+past like things in reverie, while the men lay smoking, basking in
+bright weather. They looked up into serene spaces, and forgot the umbra
+of pestilence.
+
+Heywood, now lazy, now animated, exchanged barbaric words with the
+boat-woman. As their tones rose and fell, she laughed. Long afterward,
+Rudolph was to remember her, a wholesome, capable figure in faded blue,
+darting keen glances from her beady eyes, flashing her white teeth in a
+smile, or laughing till the green pendants of false jade trembled in
+her ears.
+
+"Her name is Mrs. Wu," said Heywood, between smoke-rings, "and she is a
+lady of humor. We are discussing the latest lawsuit, which she describes
+as suing a flea and winning the bite. Her maiden name was the Pretty
+Lily. She is captain of this sampan, and fears that her husband does not
+rate A. B."
+
+Where the river disembogued, the Pretty Lily, cursing and shrilling,
+pattering barefoot about her craft, set a matting sail and caught the
+breeze. Over the copper surface of the roadstead, the sampan drew out
+handily. Ahead, a black, disreputable little steamer lay anchored, her
+name--two enormous hieroglyphics painted amidships--staring a bilious
+yellow in the morning sun. Under these, at last, the sampan came
+bumping, unperceived or neglected.
+
+Overhead, a pair of white shoes protruded from the rail in a blue film
+of smoke. They twitched, as a dry cackle of laughter broke out.
+
+"Kut Sing, ahoy!" shouted Heywood. "On deck! Kneebone!"
+
+The shoes whipped inboard. Outboard popped a ruddy little face, set in
+the green circle of a _topi_, and contorted with laughter.
+
+"Listen to this, will ye!" cried the apparition, as though illustrating
+a point. Leaning his white sleeves on the rail, cigar in one fist,
+Tauchnitz volume in the other, he roared down over the side a passage of
+prose, from which his visitors caught only the words "Ginger Dick" and
+"Peter Russet," before mirth strangled him.
+
+"God bless a man," he cried, choking, "that can make a lonesome old
+beggar laugh, out here! Eh, what? How he ever thinks up--But he's took
+to writing plays, they tell me. Plays!" He scowled ferociously. "Fat lot
+o' good they are, for skippers, and planters, and gory exiles! Eh, what?
+Be-george, I'll write him a chit! _I'll_ tell him! Plays be damned; we
+want more stories!"
+
+Red and savage, he hurled the book fluttering into the sea, then swore
+in consternation.
+
+"Oh, I say!" he wailed. "Fish her out! I've not finished her. My
+intention was, ye know, to fling the bloomin' cigar!"
+
+Heywood, laughing, rescued the volume on a long bamboo.
+
+"Just came out on the look-see, captain," he called up. "Can't board
+you. Plague ashore."
+
+"Plague be 'anged!" scoffed the little captain. "That hole's no worse
+with plague than't is without. Got two cases on board, myself--coolies.
+Stowed 'em topside, under the boats.--Come up here, ye castaway! Come
+up, ye goatskin Robinson Crusoe, and get a white man's chow!"
+
+He received them on deck,--a red, peppery little officer, whose shaven
+cheeks and close gray hair gave him the look of a parson gone wrong, a
+hedge-priest run away to sea. Two tall Chinese boys scurried about with
+wicker chairs, with trays of bottles, ice, and cheroots, while he barked
+his orders, like a fox-terrier commanding a pair of solemn dock-rats.
+The white men soon lounged beside the wheel-house.
+
+"So you brought Mrs. Forrester," drawled Heywood.
+
+Rudolph, wondering if they saw him wince, listened with painful
+eagerness. But the captain disposed of that subject very simply.
+
+"_She's_ no good." He stared up at the grimy awning. "What I'm thinking
+is, will that there Dacca babu at Koprah slip me through his blessed
+quarantine for twenty-five dollars. What?"
+
+Their talk drifted far away from Rudolph, far from China itself, to
+touch a hundred ports and islands, Cebu and Sourabaya, Tavoy and
+Selangor. They talked of men and women, a death at Zamboanga, a birth at
+Chittagong, of obscure heroism or suicide, and fortunes made or lost;
+while the two boys, gentle, melancholy, gliding silent in bright blue
+robes, spread a white tablecloth, clamped it with shining brass, and
+laid the tiffin. Then the talk flowed on, the feast made a tiny clatter
+of jollity in the slumbering noon, in the silence of an ocean and a
+continent. And when at last the visitors clambered down the iron side,
+they went victorious with Spanish wine.
+
+"Mind ye," shouted Captain Kneebone, from the rail, "that don't half
+exhaust the subjeck o' lott'ries! Why, luck"--He shook both fists aloft,
+triumphantly, as if they had been full of money. "Just ye wait. I've a
+tip from Calcutta that--Never mind. Bar sells, when that fortch'n comes,
+my boy, the half's yours! Home we go, remember that!"
+
+The sampan drew away. Sweeping his arm violently, to threaten the coast
+of China and the whole range of his vision,--
+
+"You're the one man," he roared, "that makes all this mess--worth a
+cowrie!"
+
+Heywood laughed, waved his helmet, and when at last he turned, sat
+looking downward with a queer smile.
+
+"Illusions!" he chuckled. "What would a chap ever do without 'em? Old
+Kneebone there: his was always that--a fortune in a lottery, and then
+Home! Illusions! And he's no fool, either. Good navigator. Decent old
+beggar." He waved his helmet again, before stretching out to sleep. "Do
+you know, I believe--he _would_ take me."
+
+The clinkered hills, quivering in the west, sank gradually into the
+heated blur above the plains. As gradually, the two men sank
+into dreams.
+
+Furious, metallic cries from the Pretty Lily woke them, in the blue
+twilight. She had moored her sampan alongside a flight of stone steps,
+up which, vigorously, with a bamboo, she now prodded her husband. He
+contended, snarling, but mounted; and when Heywood's silver fell
+jingling into her palm, lighted his lantern and scuffed along, a
+churlish guide. At the head of the slimy stairs, Heywood rattled a
+ponderous gate in a wall, and shouted. Some one came running, shot
+bolts, and swung the door inward. The lantern showed the tawny, grinning
+face of a servant, as they passed into a small garden, of dwarf orange
+trees pent in by a lofty, whitewashed wall.
+
+"These grounds are yours, Hackh," said Heywood. "Your predecessor's boy;
+and there"--pointing to a lonely barrack that loomed white over the
+stunted grove--"there's your house. You draw the largest in the station.
+A Portuguese nunnery, it was, built years ago. My boys are helping set
+it to rights; but if you don't mind, I'd like you to stay on at my
+beastly hut until this--this business takes a turn. Plenty of time." He
+nodded at the fat little orange trees. "We may live to take our chow
+under those yet, of an evening. Also a drink. Eh?"
+
+The lantern skipped before them across the garden, through a penitential
+courtyard, and under a vaulted way to the main door and the road. With
+Rudolph, the obscure garden and echoing house left a sense of magical
+ownership, sudden and fleeting, like riches in the Arabian Nights. The
+road, leaving on the right a low hill, or convex field, that heaved
+against the lower stars, now led the wanderers down a lane of hovels,
+among dim squares of smoky lamplight.
+
+Wu, their lantern-bearer, had turned back, and they had begun to pass a
+few quiet, expectant shops, when a screaming voice, ahead, outraged the
+evening stillness.
+
+At the first words, Heywood doubled his pace.
+
+"Come along. Here's a lark--or a tragedy."
+
+Jostling through a malodorous crowd that blockaded the quarrel, they
+gained the threshold of a lighted shop. Against a rank of orderly
+shelves, a fat merchant stood at bay, silent, quick-eyed, apprehensive.
+Before him, like an actor in a mad scene, a sobbing ruffian, naked to
+the waist, convulsed with passion, brandished wild fists and ranted with
+incredible sounds. When breath failed, he staggered, gasping, and swept
+his audience with the glazed, unmeaning stare of drink or lunacy. The
+merchant spoke up, timid and deprecating. As though the words were
+vitriol, the other started, whirled face to face, and was seized with a
+new raving.
+
+Something protruded at his waistband, like a rudimentary, Darwinian
+stump. To this, all at once, his hand flung back. With a wrench and a
+glitter, he flourished a blade above his head. Heywood sprang to
+intervene, in the same instant that the disturber of trade swept his arm
+down in frenzy. Against his own body, hilt and fist thumped home, with
+the sound as of a football lightly punted. He turned, with a freezing
+look of surprise, plucked at the haft, made one step calmly and
+tentatively toward the door, stumbled, and lay retching and coughing.
+
+The fat shop-keeper wailed like a man beside himself. He gabbled,
+imploring Heywood. The young man nodded. "Yes, yes," he repeated
+irritably, staring down at the body, but listening to the stream
+of words.
+
+Murmurs had risen, among the goblin faces blinking in the doorway.
+Behind them, a sudden voice called out two words which were caught up
+and echoed harshly in the street. Heywood whipped about.
+
+"Never called me that before," he said quickly. "Come outside."
+
+He flung back a hurried sentence to the merchant, caught Rudolph's arm,
+and plunged into the crowd. The yellow men gave passage mechanically,
+but with lowering faces. Once free in the muddy path, he halted quickly,
+and looked about.
+
+"Might have known," he grumbled. "Never called me 'Foreign Dog' before,
+or 'Jesus man,' He set 'em on."
+
+Rudolph followed his look. In the dim light, at the outskirts of the
+rabble, a man was turning away, with an air of contempt or unconcern.
+The long, pale, oval face, the hard eyes gleaming with thought, had
+vanished at a glance. A tall, slight figure, stooping in his long robe,
+he glided into the darkness. For all his haste, the gait was not the
+gait of a coolie.
+
+"That," said Heywood, turning into their former path, "that was Fang,
+the Sword-Pen, so-called. Very clever chap. Of the two most dangerous
+men in the district, he's one." They had swung along briskly for several
+minutes, before he added: "The other most dangerous man--you've met him
+already. If I'm not mistaken, he's no less a person than the Reverend
+James Earle."
+
+"What!" exclaimed Rudolph, in dull bewilderment.
+
+"Yes," grunted his friend. "The padre. We must find him to-night, and
+report."
+
+He strode forward, with no more comment. At his side, Rudolph moved as a
+soldier, carried onward by pressure and automatic rhythm, moves in the
+apathy of a forced march. The day had been so real, so wholesome, full
+of careless talk and of sunlight. And now this senseless picture blotted
+all else, and remained,--each outline sharper in memory, the smoky lamp
+brighter, the blow of the hilt louder, the smell of peanut oil more
+pungent. The episode, to him, was a disconnected, unnecessary fragment,
+one bloody strand in the whole terrifying snarl. But his companion
+stalked on in silence, like a man who saw a pattern in the web of
+things, and was not pleased.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+IN TOWN
+
+Night, in that maze of alleys, was but a more sinister day. The same
+slant-eyed men, in broken files, went scuffing over filthy stone, like
+wanderers lost in a tunnel. The same inexplicable noises endured, the
+same smells. Under lamps, the shaven foreheads still bent toward
+microscopic labor. The curtained window of a fantan shop still glowed in
+orange translucency, and from behind it came the murmur and the endless
+chinking of cash, where Fortune, a bedraggled, trade-fallen goddess,
+split hairs with coolies for poverty or zero. Nothing was altered in
+these teeming galleries, except that turbid daylight had imperceptibly
+given place to this other dimness, in which lanterns swung like tethered
+fire-balloons. Life went on, mysteriously, without change or sleep.
+
+While the two white men shouldered their way along, a strange chorus
+broke out, as though from among the crowded carcasses in a butcher's
+stall. Shrill voices rose in unearthly discord, but the rhythm was
+not of Asia.
+
+"There goes the hymn!" scoffed Heywood. He halted where, between the
+butcher's and a book-shop, the song poured loud through an open doorway.
+Nodding at a placard, he added: "Here we are: 'Jesus Religion Chapel.'
+Hear 'em yanging! 'There is a gate that stands ajar.' That being the
+case, in you go!"
+
+Entering a long, narrow room, lighted from sconces at either side, they
+sat down together, like schoolmates, on a low form near the door. From a
+dais across at the further end, the vigorous white head of Dr. Earle
+dominated the company,--a strange company, of lounging Chinamen who
+sucked at enormous bamboo pipes, or squinted aimlessly at the vertical
+inscriptions on the walls, or wriggling about, stared at the
+late-comers, nudged their neighbors, and pointed, with guttural
+exclamations. The song had ended, and the padre was lifting up his
+giant's voice. To Rudolph, the words had been mere sound and fury, but
+for a compelling honesty that needed no translation. This man was not
+preaching to heathen, but talking to men. His eyes had the look of one
+who speaks earnestly of matters close at hand, direct, and simple. Along
+the forms, another and another man forgot to plait his queue, or squirm,
+or suck laboriously at his pipe. They listened, stupid or intent. When
+some waif from the outer labyrinth scuffed in, affable, impudent,
+hailing his friends across the room, he made but a ripple of unrest,
+and sank gaping among the others like a fish in a pool.
+
+Even Heywood sat listening--with more attention than respect, for once
+he muttered, "Rot!" Toward the close, however, he leaned across and
+whispered, "The old boy reels it off rather well to-night. Different to
+what one imagined."
+
+Rudolph, for his part, sat watching and listening, surprised by a new
+and curious thought.
+
+A band of huddled converts sang once more, in squealing discords, with
+an air of sad, compulsory, and diabolic sarcasm. A few "inquirers"
+slouched forward, and surrounding the tall preacher, questioned him
+concerning the new faith. The last, a broad, misshapen fellow with
+hanging jowls, was answered sharply. He stood arguing, received another
+snub, and went out bawling and threatening, with the contorted face and
+clumsy flourishes of some fabulous hero on a screen.
+
+The missionary approached smiling, but like a man who has finished the
+day's work.
+
+"That fellow--Good-evening: and welcome to our Street Chapel, Mr.
+Hackh--That fellow," he glanced after the retreating figure, "he's a
+lesson in perseverance, gentlemen. A merchant, well-to-do: he has a
+lawsuit coming on--notorious--and tries to join us for protection.
+Cheaper to buy a little belief, you know, than to pay Yamên fines.
+Every night he turns up, grinning and bland. I tell him it won't do, and
+out he goes, snorting like a dragon."
+
+Rudolph's impulse came to a head.
+
+"Dr. Earle," he stammered, "I owe you a gratitude. You spoke to these
+people so--as--I do not know. But I listened, I felt--Before always are
+they devils, images! And after I hear you, they are as men."
+
+The other shook his great head like a silver mane, and laughed.
+
+"My dear young man," he replied, "they're remarkably like you and me."
+
+After a pause, he added soberly:--
+
+"Images? Yes, you're right, sir. So was Adam. The same clay, the same
+image." His deep voice altered, his eyes lighted shrewdly, as he turned
+to Heywood. "This is an unexpected pleasure."
+
+"Quite," said the young man, readily. "If you don't mind, padre, you
+made Number One talk. Fast bowling, and no wides. But we really came for
+something else." In a few brief sentences, he pictured the death in the
+shop.--So, like winking! The beggar gave himself the iron, fell down,
+and made finish. Now what I pieced out, from his own bukhing, and the
+merchant's, was this:--
+
+"The dead man was one Aú-yöng, a cormorant-fisher. Some of his best
+birds died, he had a long run of bad luck, and came near starving. So he
+contrived, rather cleverly, to steal about a hundred catties of Fuh-kien
+hemp. The owner, this merchant, went to the elders of Aú-yöng's
+neighborhood, who found and restored the hemp, nearly all. Merchant lets
+the matter drop. But the neighbors kept after this cormorant fellow,
+worked one beastly squeeze or another, ingenious baiting, devilish--Rot!
+you know their neighborhoods better than I! Well, they pushed him
+down-hill--poor devil, showing that's always possible, no bottom! He
+brooded, and all that, till he thought the merchant and the Jesus
+religion were the cause of all. So bang he goes down the
+pole,--gloriously drunk,--marches into his enemy's shop, and uses that
+knife. The joke is now on the merchant, eh?"
+
+"Just a moment," begged the padre. "One thread I don't follow--the
+religion. Who was Christian? The merchant?"
+
+"Well, rather! Thought I told you," said Heywood. "One of yours--big,
+mild chap--Chok Chung."
+
+The elder man sat musing.
+
+"Yes," the deep bass rumbled in the empty chapel, "he's one of us.
+Extremely honest. I'm--I'm very sorry. There may be trouble."
+
+"Must be, sir," prompted the younger. "The mob, meanwhile, just stood
+there, dumb,--mutes and audience, you know. All at once, the hindmost
+began squalling 'Foreign Dog,' 'Goat Man.' We stepped outside, and
+there, passing, if you like, was that gentle bookworm, Mr. Fang."
+
+"Fang?" echoed the padre, as in doubt. "I've heard the name."
+
+"Heard? Why, doctor," cried Heywood, "that long, pale chap,--lives over
+toward the Dragon Spring. Confucian, very strict; keen reader; might be
+a mandarin, but prefers the country gentleman sort; bally
+mischief-maker, he's done more people in the eye than all the Yamên
+hacks and all their false witnesses together! Hence his nickname--the
+Sword-Pen."
+
+Dr. Earle sharpened his heavy brows, and studied the floor.
+
+"Fang, the Sword-Pen," he growled; "yes, there will be trouble. He hates
+us. Given this chance--Humph! Saul of Tarsus.--We're not the Roman
+Church," he added, with his first trace of irritation. "Always
+occurring, this thing."
+
+Once more he meditated; then heaved his big shoulders to let slip the
+whole burden.
+
+"One day at a time," he laughed. "Thank you for telling us.--You see,
+Mr. Hackh, they're not devils. The only fault is, they're just human
+beings. You don't speak the language? I'll send you my old teacher."
+
+They talked of things indifferent; and when the young men were stumbling
+along the streets, he called after them a resounding "Good-night!
+Thanks!"--and stood a resolute, gigantic silhouette, filling, as a right
+Doone filled their doorframe, the entrance to his deserted chapel.
+
+At his gate, felt Rudolph, they had unloaded some weight of
+responsibility. He had not only accepted it, but lightened them further,
+girt them, by a word and a look. Somehow, for the first time since
+landing, Rudolph perceived that through this difficult, troubled,
+ignorant present, a man might burrow toward a future gleam. The feeling
+was but momentary. As for Heywood, he still marched on grimly, threading
+the stuffed corridors like a man with a purpose.
+
+"No dinner!" he snapped. "Catchee bymby, though. We must see Wutzler
+first. To lose sight of any man for twenty-four hours, nowadays,--Well,
+it's not hardly fair. Is it?"
+
+They turned down a black lane, carpeted with dry rubbish. At long
+intervals, a lantern guttering above a door showed them a hand's-breadth
+of the dirty path, a litter of broken withes and basket-weavers' refuse,
+between the mouldy wall of the town and a row of huts, no less black and
+silent. In this greasy rift the air lay thick, as though smeared into
+a groove.
+
+Suddenly, among the hovels, they groped along a checkered surface of
+brick-work. The flare of Heywood's match revealed a heavy wooden door,
+which he hammered with his fist. After a time, a disgruntled voice
+within snarled something in the vernacular. Heywood laughed.
+
+"Ai-yah! Who's afraid? Wutzler, you old pirate, open up!"
+
+A bar clattered down, the door swung back, and there, raising a
+glow-worm lantern of oiled paper, stood such a timorous little figure as
+might have ventured out from a masquerade of gnomes. The wrinkled face
+was Wutzler's, but his weazened body was lost in the glossy black folds
+of a native jacket, and below the patched trousers, his bare ankles and
+coolie-sandals of straw moved uneasily, as though trying to hide behind
+each other.
+
+"Kom in," said this hybrid, with a nervous cackle. "I thought you are
+thiefs. Kom in."
+
+Following through a toy courtyard, among shadow hints of pigmy shrubs
+and rockery, they found themselves cramped in a bare, clean cell,
+lighted by a European lamp, but smelling of soy and Asiatics. Stiff
+black-wood chairs lined the walls. A distorted landscape on rice-paper,
+narrow scarlet panels inscribed with black cursive characters, pith
+flowers from Amoy, made blots of brightness.
+
+"It iss not moch, gentlemen," sighed Wutzler, cringing. "But I am ver'
+glad."
+
+Heywood flung himself into a chair.
+
+"Not dead yet, you rascal?" he cried. "And we came all the way to see
+you. No chow, either."
+
+"Oh, allow me," mumbled their host, in a flutter. "My--she--I will
+speak, I go bring you." He shuffled away, into some further chamber.
+
+Heywood leaned forward quickly.
+
+"Eat it," he whispered, "whether you can or not! Pleases the old one, no
+bounds. We're his only visitors--"
+
+"Here iss not moch whiskey." Wutzler came shambling in, held a bottle
+against the light, and squinted ruefully at the yellow dregs. "I will
+gif you a _kong_ full, but I haf not."
+
+He dodged out again. They heard his angry whispers, and a small
+commotion of the household,--brazen dishes clinking, squeals, titters,
+and tiny bare feet skipping about,--all the flurry of a rabbit-hutch in
+Wonderland. Once, near the threshold, a chubby face, very pale, with
+round eyes of shining jet, peered cautious as a mouse, and popped out of
+sight with a squeak. Wutzler, red with excitement, came and went like an
+anxious waiter, bringing in the feast.
+
+"Here iss not moch," he repeated sadly. But there were bits of pig-skin
+stewed in oil; bean-cakes; steaming buns of wheat-flour, stuffed with
+dice of fat pork and lumps of sugar; three-cornered rice puddings,
+_no-me_ boiled in plantain-leaf wrappers; with the last of the whiskey,
+in green cups. While the two men ate, the shriveled outcast beamed
+timidly, hovering about them, fidgeting.
+
+"Herr Hackh," he suddenly exclaimed, in a queer, strained voice, "you do
+not know how dis yong man iss goot! No! He hass to me--_immer_--" He
+choked, turned away, and began fussing with the pith flowers; but not
+before Rudolph had seen a line glistening down the sun-dried cheeks.
+
+"Stuff! Cadging for chow, does one acquire merit?" retorted Heywood,
+over his shoulder. "You talk like a bonze, Wutz." He winked. "I'd rather
+hear the sing-song box."
+
+"_Ach so_, I forget!" Still whimpering, Wutzler dragged something from a
+corner, squatted, and jerked at a crank, with a noise of ratchets. "She
+blay not so moch now," he snuffled. "Captain Kneepone he has gifen her,
+when she iss all op inside for him. I haf rebaired, but she blay only
+one song yet. A man does not know, Herr Hackh, what he may be. Once I
+haf piano, and viola my own, yes, and now haf I diss small, laffing,
+sick teufel!" He rose, and faced Heywood with a trembling, passionate
+gesture. "But diss yong man, he stand by der oldt fellow!" The streaming
+eyes blinked absurdly.
+
+Behind him, with a whirring sound, a metallic voice assailed them in a
+gabble of words, at first husky and broken, then clear, nasal, a voice
+from neither Europe nor Asia, but America:--
+
+
+"Then did I laff?
+Ooh, aha-ha ha ha,
+Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
+I could not help but laffing,
+Ooh, aha-ha ..."
+
+
+From a throat of tin, it mocked them insanely with squealing,
+black-hearted guffaws. Heywood sat smoking, with the countenance of a
+stoic; but when the laughter in the box was silent, he started abruptly.
+
+"We're off, old chap," he announced. "Bedtime. Just came to see you were
+all up-standing. Tough as ever? Good! Don't let--er--anything carry
+you off."
+
+At the gate, Wutzler held aloft his glow-worm lantern.
+
+"Dose fellows catch me?" he mumbled, "Der plagues--dey will forget me.
+All zo many shoots, _kugel_, der bullet,--'_gilt's mir, oder gilt es
+dir?_' Men are dead in der Silk-Weafer Street. Dey haf hong up nets, and
+dorns, to keep out der plague's-goblins off deir house. Listen, now, dey
+beat gongs!--But we are white men. You--you tell me zo, to-night!" He
+blubbered something incoherent, but as the gate slammed they heard the
+name of God, in a broken benediction.
+
+They had groped out of the cleft, and into a main corridor, before
+Heywood paused.
+
+"That devil in the box!" He shook himself like a spaniel. "Queer it
+should get into me so. But I hate being laughed at by--anybody."
+
+A confused thunder of gongs, the clash of cymbals smothered in the
+distance, maintained a throbbing uproar, pierced now and then by savage
+yells, prolonged and melancholy. As the two wanderers listened,--
+
+"Where's the comfort," said Heywood, gloomily, "of knowing somebody's
+worse off?--No, I wasn't thinking of Wutzler, then. Talk of germs! why,
+over there, it's goblins they're scaring away. Think, behind their nets
+and thorns, what wretches--women, too, and kids--may be crouched down,
+quaking, sick with terror. Humph!--I don't mind saying"--for a moment
+his hand lay on Rudolph's shoulder--"that I loathe giving this muck-hole
+the satisfaction--I'd hate to go Out here, that's all."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE PAGODA
+
+He was spared that inconvenience. The untimely rain and cold, some
+persons said, the few days of untimely heat following, had drowned or
+dried, frozen or burnt out, the seeds of peril. But accounts varied,
+reasons were plentiful. Soldiers had come down from the chow city,
+two-score _li_ inland, and charging through the streets, hacking and
+slashing the infested air, had driven the goblins over the walls, with a
+great shout of victory. A priest had freighted a kite with all the evil,
+then cut it adrift in the sky. A mob had dethroned the God of Sickness,
+and banished his effigy in a paper junk, launched on the river at night,
+in flame. A geomancer proclaimed that a bamboo grove behind the town
+formed an angle most correct, germane, and pleasant to the Azure Dragon
+and the White Tiger, whose occult currents, male and female, run
+throughout Nature. For any or all of these reasons, the town was
+delivered. The pestilence vanished, as though it had come but to grant
+Monsieur Jolivet his silence, and to add a few score uncounted living
+wretches to the dark, mighty, imponderable host of ancestors.
+
+The relief, after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a
+sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,--the bare experience
+seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The
+interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with
+Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at
+Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a
+native merchant, which began at four o'clock on melon-seeds, tea, black
+yearling eggs, and a hot towel, and ended at three in the morning on
+rice-brandy and betel served by unreal women with chalked faces and
+vermilion-spotted lips, simpering and melancholy. By day, there was
+work, or now and then a lesson with Dr. Earle's teacher, a little aged
+Chinaman of intricate, refined, and plaintive courtesy. Under his
+guidance Rudolph learned rapidly, taking to study as a prodigal might
+take to drink. And with increasing knowledge came increasing
+tranquillity; as when he found that the hideous cry, startling him at
+every dawn, was the signal not for massacre, but buffalo-milk.
+
+Then, too, came the mild excitement of moving into his own house, the
+Portuguese nunnery. Through its desolate, lime-coated spaces, his meagre
+belongings were scattered all too easily; but the new servants, their
+words and ways, not only kept his hands full, but gave strange food for
+thought. The silent evenings, timed by the plash of a frog in a pool, a
+cry from the river, or the sing-song of a "boy" improvising some endless
+ballad below-stairs; drowsy noons above the little courtyard, bare and
+peaceful as a jail; homesick moments at the window, when beyond the
+stunted orangery, at sunset, the river was struck amazingly from bronze
+to indigo, or at dawn flashed from pearl-gray to flowing brass;--all
+these, and nights between sleep and waking, when fancy peopled the
+echoing chambers with the visionary lives, now ended, of meek, brown
+sisters from Goa or Macao, gave to Rudolph intimations, vague, profound,
+and gravely happy, as of some former existence almost recaptured. Once
+more he felt himself a householder in the Arabian tales.
+
+And yet, when his life was growing all but placid, across it shot some
+tremor of disquieting knowledge.
+
+One evening, after a busy day among his piece-goods, he had walked
+afield with Heywood, and back by an aimless circuit through the
+twilight. His companion had been taciturn, of late; and they halted,
+without speaking, where a wide pool gleamed toward a black, fantastic
+belt of knotted willows and sharp-curving roofs. Through these broke the
+shadow of a small pagoda, jagged as a war-club of shark's teeth. Vesper
+cymbals clashed faintly in a temple, and from its open door the first
+plummet of lamplight began to fathom the dark margin. A short bridge
+curved high, like a camel's hump, over the glimmering half-circle of a
+single arch. Close by, under a drooping foreground of branches, a stake
+upheld an oblong placard of neat symbols, like a cartouche to explain
+a painting.
+
+"It is very beautiful," ventured Rudolph, twisting up his blond
+moustache with satisfaction. "Very sightly. I would say--picturesque, no?"
+
+"Very," said Heywood, absently. "Willow Pattern."
+
+"And the placard, so finishing, so artistic--That says?"
+
+"Eh, what? Oh, I wasn't listening." Heywood glanced carelessly at the
+upright sentence. That's a notice:--
+
+"'Girls May Not be Drowned in This Pond.'"
+
+He started on, without comment. Without reply, Rudolph followed,
+gathering as he walked the force of this tremendous hint. Slow,
+far-reaching, it poisoned the elegiac beauty of the scene, alienated the
+night, and gave to the fading country-side a yet more ancient look,
+sombre and implacable. He was still pondering this, when across their
+winding foot-path, with a quick thud of hoofs, swept a pair of
+equestrian silhouettes. It was half glimpse, half conjecture,--the tough
+little ponies trotting stubbornly, a rider who leaned across laughing,
+and a woman who gayly cried at him: "You really do understand me, don't
+you?" The two jogging shadows melted in the bamboo tracery, like things
+blown down the wind. But for years Rudolph had known the words, the
+laugh, the beguiling cadence, and could have told what poise of the head
+went with them, what dangerous glancing light. Suddenly, without reason,
+he felt a gust of rage. It was he that understood. It was to him these
+things belonged. The memory of her weakness was lost in the shining
+memory of her power. He should be riding there, in the dusk of this
+lonely and cruel land.
+
+Heywood had thrown after them a single gloomy stare, down the pointed
+aisle of bamboos.
+
+"Well matched!" he growled. "Chantel--He bounds in the saddle, and he
+bounds afoot!"
+
+Rudolph knew that he had hated Chantel at sight.
+
+He could not bring himself, next day, to join their party for tiffin at
+the Flowery Pagoda. But in the midst of his brooding, Teppich and the
+fat Sturgeon assailed the nunnery gate with pot-valiant blows and
+shouts. They had brought chairs, to carry him off; and being in no mood
+to fail, though panting and struggling, they packed him into a
+palanquin with many bottles of the best wine known to Fliegelman and
+Sons. By a short cut through the streets--where checkered sunshine,
+through the lattice roof, gave a muddy, subdued light as in a roiled
+aquarium--the revelers passed the inland wall. Here, in the shade,
+grooms awaited them with ponies; and scrambling into saddle, they
+trotted off through gaps in the bamboos, across a softly rolling
+country. Tortuous foot-paths of vivid pink wound over brilliant green
+terraces of young paddy. The pink crescents of new graves scarred the
+hillsides, already scalloped and crinkled with shelving abodes of the
+venerable dead. Great hats of farmers stooping in the fields, gleamed in
+the sun like shields of brass. Over knolls and through hollows the
+little cavalcade jogged steadily, till, mounting a gentle eminence, they
+wound through a grove of camphor and Flame-of-the-Forest. Above the
+branches rose the faded lilac shaft of an ancient pagoda, ruinously
+adorned with young trees and wild shrubs clinging in the cornices.
+
+At the foot of this aged fantasy in stone, people were laughing. The
+three riders broke cover in time to see Mrs. Forrester, flushed and
+radiant, end some narrative with a droll pantomime. She stood laughing,
+the life and centre of a delighted group.
+
+"And Gilbert Forrester," she cried, turning archly on her husband,
+"said that wasn't funny!"
+
+Gilly tugged his gray moustache, in high good-nature. Chantel, Nesbit,
+and Kempner laughed uproariously, the padre and the dark-eyed Miss Drake
+quietly, Heywood more quietly, while even stout, uneasy Mrs. Earle
+smiled as in duty bound. A squad of Chinese boys, busy with
+tiffin-baskets, found time to grin. To this lively actress in the white
+gown they formed a sylvan audience under the gnarled boughs and
+the pagoda.
+
+"Too late!" called the white-haired giant, indulgently, to the
+dismounting trio. "Mr. Hackh, you should have come spurring."
+
+Rudolph advanced, pale, but with a calmness of which, afterward, he was
+justly proud. The heroine of the moment turned toward him quickly, with
+a look more natural, more sincere, than she had ever given him.
+
+"Is this Mr. Hackh?" she said graciously. "I've heard so much about
+you!"
+
+The young man himself was almost deceived. Was there a German mail-boat?
+Was there a club, from which he had stolen out while she wept,
+ignominiously, in that girl's arms? And then of a sudden he perceived,
+with a fatuous pleasure, how well she knew him, to know that he had
+never spoken. His English, as he drew up a stool beside Miss Drake, was
+wild and ragged; but he found her an astonishing refuge. For the first
+time, he recalled that this quiet girl had been beautiful, the other
+night; and though now by day that beauty was rather of line than of
+color, he could not understand how it had been overlooked. Tiffin,
+meanwhile, sped by like an orgy. He remembered asking so many questions,
+about the mission hospital and her school for orphans, that the girl
+began at last to answer with constraint, and with puzzled, sidelong
+scrutiny. He remembered how even the tolerant Heywood shot a questioning
+glance toward his wine-glass. He remembered telling a brilliant story,
+and reciting "Old Captain Mau in Vegesack,"--rhymes long forgotten, now
+fluent and spontaneous. The applause was a triumph. Through it, as
+through a haze, he saw a pair of wide blue eyes shining with startled
+admiration.
+
+But the best came when the sun had lowered behind the grove, the company
+grown more silent, and Mrs. Forrester, leaning beside the door of the
+tower, turned the great pegs of a Chinese lute. The notes tinkled like a
+mandolin, but with now and then an alien wail, a lament unknown to the
+West. "Sing for us," begged the dark-eyed girl; "a native song." The
+other smiled, and bending forward as if to recollect, began in a low
+voice, somewhat veiled, but musical and full of meaning. "The Jasmine
+Flower," first; then, "My Love is Gathering Dolichos"; and then she
+sang the long Ballad of the Rice,--of the husband and wife planting side
+by side, the springing of the green blades, the harvest by millions upon
+millions of sheaves, the wealth of the State, more fragrant to ancestors
+than offerings of spice:--
+
+
+"...O Labor and Love and hallowed Land!
+Think you these things are but still to come?
+Think you they are but near at hand,
+Only now and here?--Behold.
+They were the same in years of old!"
+
+
+In her plaintive interlude, the slant-eyed servants watched her, nodding
+and muttering under the camphor trees.
+
+"And here's a song of exile," she said. "I render it very
+badly."--Rudolph had never seen her face like this, bending intently
+above the lute. It was as though in the music she found and disclosed
+herself, without guile.
+
+
+"...Blue was the sky,
+And blue the rice-pool water lay
+Holding the sky;
+Blue was the robe she wore that day.
+Alas, my sorrow! Why
+Must life bear all away,
+Away, away,
+Ah, my beloved, why?"
+
+
+A murmur of praise went round the group, as she put aside the
+instrument.
+
+"The sun's getting low," she said lightly, "and I _must_ see that view
+from the top." Chantel was rising, but sat down again with a scowl, as
+she turned to Rudolph. "You've never seen it, Mr. Hackh? Do come help
+me up."
+
+Inside, with echoing steps, they mounted in a squalid well, obscurely
+lighted from the upper windows, toward which decaying stairs rose in a
+dangerous spiral, without guard-rail. A misstep being no trifle, Rudolph
+offered his hand for the mere safety; but she took it with a curious
+little laugh. They climbed cautiously. Once, at a halt, she stood very
+close, with eyes shining large in the dusk. Her slight body trembled,
+her head shook with stifled merriment, like a girl overcome by mischief.
+
+"What a queer little world!" she whispered. "You and I here!--I never
+dreamed you could be funny. It made me so proud of you, down there!"
+
+He muttered something vague; and--the stairs ending in ruin at the
+fourth story--handed her carefully through the window to a small outer
+balustrade. As they stood together at the rail, he knew not whether to
+be angry, suspicious, or glad.
+
+"I love this prospect," she began quietly. "That's why I wanted you to
+come."
+
+Beyond the camphors, a wide, strange landscape glowed in the full,
+low-streaming light. The ocean lay a sapphire band in the east; in the
+west, on a long ridge, undulated the gray battlements of a city, the
+antique walls, warmed and glorified, breasting the flood of sunset. All
+between lay vernal fields and hillocks, maidenhair sprays of bamboo, and
+a wandering pattern of pink foot-paths. Slowly along one of these, a
+bright-gowned merchant rode a white pony, his bells tinkling in the
+stillness of sea and land. Everywhere, like other bells more tiny and
+shrill, sounded the trilling of frogs.
+
+As the two on the pagoda stood listening,--
+
+"It was before Rome," she declared thoughtfully. "Before Egypt, and has
+never changed. You and I are just--" She broke off, humming:--
+
+
+"Only here and now? Behold
+They were the same in years of old!"
+
+
+Her mood colored the scene: the aged continuity of life oppressed him.
+Yet he chose rather to watch the straggling battlements, far off, than
+to meet her eyes or see her hair gleaming in the sun. Through many
+troubled days he had forgotten her, despised her, bound his heart in
+triple brass against a future in her hateful neighborhood; and now,
+beside her at this time-worn rail, he was in danger of being happy. It
+was inglorious. He tried to frown.
+
+"You poor boy." Suddenly, with an impulse that must have been generous,
+she rested her hand on his arm. "I was sorry. I thought of you
+so often."
+
+At these close quarters, her tremulous voice and searching upward glance
+meant that she alone understood all his troubles. He started, turned for
+some rush of overwhelming speech, when a head popped through the window
+behind them.
+
+"Boot and saddle, Mrs. Forrester," announced Heywood. His lean young
+face was very droll and knowing. "We're leaving, bottom-side."
+
+"Thank you so much, Maurice," she answered, perhaps dryly. "You're a
+dear, to climb all those dreadful stairs."
+
+"Oh!" said Heywood, with his gray eyes fastened on Rudolph, "no
+trouble."
+
+All three went down the dark well together.
+
+When the company were mounted, and trooping downhill through the camphor
+shadow, Heywood's pony came sidling against Rudolph's, till legging
+chafed legging.
+
+"You blossomed, old boy," he whispered. "Quite the star, after your
+comedy turn." He reined aside, grinning. "What price sympathy on
+a pagoda?"
+
+For that moment, Rudolph could have struck down the one sure friend he
+had in China.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+IPHIGENIA
+
+"Don't chop off a hen's head with a battle-axe." Heywood, still with a
+malicious, friendly quirk at the corners of his mouth, held in his
+fretful pony. Rudolph stood bending a whip viciously. They two had
+fetched a compass about the town, and now in the twilight were parting
+before the nunnery gate. "A tiff's the last thing I'd want with you. The
+lady, in confidence, is not worth--"
+
+"I do not wish," declared Rudolph, trembling,--"I do not wish you to say
+those things, so!"
+
+"Right!" laughed the other, and his pony wheeled at the word. "I'll give
+you one month--no: you're such a good, thorough little chap, it will
+take longer--two months, to change your mind. Only"--he looked down at
+Rudolph with a comic, elderly air--"let me observe, our yellow people
+have that rather neat proverb. A hen's head, dear chap,--not with a
+battle-axe! No. Hot weather's coming, too. No sorrows of Werther, now,
+over such"--He laughed again. "Don't scowl, I'll be good. I won't say
+it. You'll supply the word, in two months!"
+
+He let the pony have his way, and was off in a clatter. Lonely, fuming
+with resentment, Rudolph stared after him. What could he know, this
+airy, unfeeling meddler, so free with his advice and innuendo? Let him
+go, then, let him canter away. He had seen quickly, guessed with a
+diabolic shrewdness, yet would remain on the surface, always, of a
+mystery so violent and so profound. The young man stalked into his
+vacant nunnery in a rage, a dismal pomp of emotion: reason telling him
+that a friend had spoken sense, imagination clothing him in the sceptred
+pall of tragedy.
+
+Yet one of these unwelcome words had stuck: he was Werther, it was
+true--a man who came too late. Another word was soon fulfilled; for the
+hot weather came, sudden, tropical, ferocious. Without gradation, the
+vernal days and languid noons were gone in a twinkling. The change came
+like another act of a play. One morning--though the dawn stirred cool
+and fragrant as all dawns before--the "boy" laid out Rudolph's white
+tunic, slipped in the shining buttons, smeared pipe-clay on his heaviest
+helmet; and Rudolph, looking from his window, saw that on the river, by
+the same instinct, boatmen were stretching up their bamboo awnings.
+Breakfast was hardly ended, before river, and convex field, and huddling
+red tiles of the town, lay under a blurred, quivering distortion. The
+day flamed. At night, against a glow of fiery umber, the western hills
+broke sharp and thin as sheet-iron, while below them rose in flooding
+mirage a bright strip of magical water.
+
+Thus, in these days, he rode for his exercise while the sun still lay
+behind the ocean; and thus her lively, pointed face and wide blue eyes,
+wondering or downcast or merry, were mingled in his thoughts with the
+first rousing of the world, the beat of hoofs in cool silences, the wide
+lights of creation over an aged, weary, alien empire. Their ponies
+whinnying like old friends, they met, by chance or appointment, before
+the power of sleep had lifted from eyes still new and strange against
+the morning. Sometimes Chantel the handsome rode glowering beside them,
+sometimes Gilly, erect and solid in the saddle, laid upon their talk all
+the weight of his honest, tired commonplaces.
+
+But one morning she cantered up alone, laughing at her escape. His pony
+bolted, and they raced along together as comrades happily join forces in
+a headlong dream. Quivering bamboo swept behind them; the river, on
+their other hand, met and passed in hurrying panorama. They had no time
+for words, but only laughter. Words, indeed, had never yet advanced them
+beyond that moment on the pagoda. And now, when their ponies fell into
+a shambling trot, came the first impulse of speech.
+
+"How lucky!" she cried. "How lucky we came this way! Now I can really
+test you!"
+
+He turned. Her glowing face was now averted, her gesture was not for
+him, but for the scene. He studied that, to understand her.
+
+The river, up which they had fled, now rested broad and quiet as a
+shallow lake, burnished faintly, brooded over by a floating, increasing
+light, not yet compounded into day. Tussocks, innumerable clods and
+crumbs of vivid green, speckled all the nearer water. On some of these
+storks meditated,--sage, pondering heads and urbane bodies perched high
+on the frailest penciling of legs. In the whole expanse, no movement
+came but when a distant bird, leaving his philosophic pose, plunged
+downward after a fish. Beyond them rose a shapeless mound or isle, like
+some half-organic monster grounded in his native ooze.
+
+"There!" said the woman, pointing. "Are you all excuses, like the
+others? Or do you dare?"
+
+"I am not afraid of anything--now," retorted Rudolph, and with truth,
+after the dash of their twilight encounter. "Dare what?"
+
+"Go see what's on that island," she answered. "I dared them all. Twice
+I've seen natives land there and hurry away. Mr. Nesbit was too lazy to
+try; Dr. Chantel wearing his best clothes. Maurice Heywood refused to
+mire his horse for a whim. Whim? It's a mystery! Come, now. Do
+you dare?"
+
+In a rare flush of pride, Rudolph wheeled his stubborn mount and bullied
+him down the bank. A poor horseman, he would have outstripped Curtius to
+the gulf. But no sooner had his dancing pony consented to make the first
+rebellious, sidelong plunge, than he had small joy of his boast.
+Fore-legs sank floundering, were hoisted with a terrified wrench of the
+shoulders, in the same moment that hind-legs went down as by suction.
+The pony squirmed, heaved, wrestled in a frenzy, and churning the red
+water about his master's thighs, went deeper and fared worse. With a
+clangor of wings, the storks rose, a streaming rout against the sky,
+trailed their tilted legs, filed away in straggling flight, like figures
+interlacing on a panel. At the height of his distress, Rudolph caught a
+whirling glimpse of the woman above him, safe on firm earth, easy in her
+saddle, and laughing. Quicksand, then, was a joke,--but he could not
+pause for this added bewilderment.
+
+The pony, using a skill born of agony, had found somewhere a solid verge
+and scrambled up, knee-deep, well out from the bank. With a splash,
+Rudolph stood beside him among the tufts of salad green. As he patted
+the trembling flanks, he heard a cry from the shore.
+
+"Oh, well done!" she mocked them. "Well done!"
+
+A gust of wholesome anger refreshed him. She might laugh, but now he
+would see this folly through. He tore off his coat, flung it across the
+saddle, waded out alone through the tussocks, and shooting forward full
+length in the turbid water, swam resolutely for the island.
+
+Sky and water brightened while he swam; and as he rose, wrapped in the
+leaden weight of dripping clothes, the sun, before and above him,
+touched wonderfully the quaggy bank and parched grasses. He lurched
+ashore, his feet caked with enormous clods as of melting chocolate. A
+filthy scramble left him smeared and disheveled on the summit. He had
+come for nothing. The mound lay vacant, a tangled patch, a fragment of
+wilderness.
+
+Yet as he stood panting, there rose a puny, miserable sound. What
+presence could lurk there? The distress, it might be, of some small
+animal--a rabbit dying in a forgotten trap. Faint as illusion, a wail, a
+thin-spun thread of sorrow, broke into lonely whimpering, and ceased. He
+moved forward, doubtfully, and of a sudden, in the scrubby level of the
+isle, stumbled on the rim of a shallow circular depression.
+
+At first, he could not believe the discovery; but next instant--as at
+the temple pond, though now without need of placard or interpreter--he
+understood. This bowl, a tiny crater among the weeds, showed like some
+paltry valley of Ezekiel, a charnel place of Herod's innocents, the
+battlefield of some babes' crusade. A chill struck him, not from the
+water or the early mists. In stupor, he viewed that savage fact.
+
+Through the stillness of death sounded again the note of living
+discontent. He was aware also of some stir, even before he spied, under
+a withered clump, the saffron body of an infant girl, feebly squirming.
+By a loathsome irony, there lay beside her an earthen bowl of rice, as
+an earnest or symbol of regret.
+
+Blind pity urged him into the atrocious hollow. Seeing no further than
+the present rescue, he caught up the small unclean sufferer, who moaned
+the louder as he carried her down the bank, and waded out through the
+sludge. To hold the squalling mouth above water, and swim, was no simple
+feat; yet at last he came floundering among the tussocks, wrapped the
+naked body in his jacket, and with infinite pains tugged his terrified
+pony along a tortuous bar to the land.
+
+Once in the river-path, he stood gloomily, and let Mrs. Forrester canter
+up to join him. Indeed, he had almost forgotten her.
+
+"Splendid!" she laughed. "What a figure of fun! But what can you have
+brought back? Oh, please! I can't wait!"
+
+He turned on her a muddy, haggard face, without enthusiasm, and gently
+unfolded the coat. The man and the woman looked down together, in
+silence, at the child. He had some foolish hope that she would take it,
+that his part was ended. Like an outlandish doll, with face contorted
+and thick-lidded eyes shut tightly against the sunshine, the outcast
+whimpered, too near the point of death for even the rebellion of
+arms and legs.
+
+The woman in the saddle gave a short, incredulous cry. Her face, all gay
+curiosity, had darkened in a shock of disgust.
+
+"What in the world!" she scolded. "Oh! Such a nasty little--Why
+did--What do you propose doing with it?"
+
+Rudolph shook his head, like a man caught in some stupid blunder.
+
+"I never thought of that," he explained heavily. "She has no--no
+friends."
+
+"Cover it," his companion ordered. "Cover it up. I can't bear to see
+it."
+
+With a sombre, disappointed air, he obeyed; then looked up, as if in her
+face he read strange matter.
+
+"I can't bear," she added quickly, "to see any kind of suffering. Why
+did--It's all my fault for sending you! We were having such a good ride
+together, and now I've spoiled it all, with this.--Poor little filthy
+object!" She turned her hands outward, with a helpless, dainty gesture.
+"But what can we do? These things happen every day."
+
+Rudolph was studying the ground again. His thoughts, then, had wronged
+her. Drenched and downhearted, holding this strange burden in his
+jacket, he felt that he had foolishly meddled in things inevitable,
+beyond repair. She was right. Yet some vague, insurgent instinct, which
+would not down, told him that there had been a disappointment. Still,
+what had he expected? No woman could help; no woman.
+
+Then suddenly he mounted, bundle and all, and turned his willing pony
+homeward.
+
+"Come," he said; and for the first time, unwittingly, had taken charge.
+
+"What is it?" she called. "You foolish boy! What's your plan?"
+
+"We shall see," he answered. Without waiting, he beckoned her to follow.
+She came. They rode stirrup to stirrup, silent as in their escape at
+dawn, and as close bodily, but in spirit traveling distant parallels. He
+gave no thought to that, riding toward his experiment. Near the town, at
+last, he reined aside to a cluster of buildings,--white walls and rosy
+tiles under a great willow.
+
+"You may save your steps," she declared, with sudden petulance. "The
+hospital's more out of funds than ever, and more crowded. They'll not
+thank you."
+
+Rudolph nodded back at her, with a queer smile, half reckless and half
+confident.
+
+"Then," he replied, dismounting, "I will replenish my nunnery."
+
+Squatting coolies sprang up and raced to hold his pony. Others, in the
+shade of the wall, cackled when they saw a Son of the Red-Haired so
+beplastered and sopping. A few pointed at his bundle, with grunts of
+sudden interest; and a leper, bearing the visage as of a stone lion
+defaced by time, cried something harshly. At his words, the whole band
+of idlers began to chatter.
+
+Rudolph turned to aid his companion. She sat watching them sharply. An
+uneasy light troubled the innocent blue eyes, which had not even a
+glance for him.
+
+"No, I shan't get down," she said angrily. "It's just what might
+be--Your little brat will bring no good to any of us."
+
+He flung away defiantly, strode through the gate, and calling aloud,
+traversed an empty compound, already heated by the new-risen sun. A
+cooler fringe of veranda, or shallow cloister, lined a second court. Two
+figures met him,--the dark-eyed Miss Drake, all in white, and behind
+her a shuffling, grinning native woman, who carried a basin, in which
+permanganate of potash swam gleaming like diluted blood.
+
+"Good-morning." With one droll look of amusement, the girl had
+understood, and regained that grave yet happy, friendly composure which
+had the virtue, he discovered, of being easily forgotten, to be met each
+time like something new. "What have you there for us?"
+
+Again he unfolded the jacket.
+
+"A child."
+
+The naked mite lay very still, the breath weakly fluttered. A somewhat
+nauseous gift, the girl raised her arms and received it gently, without
+haste,--the saffron body appearing yet more squalid against the
+Palladian whiteness of her tunic, plain and cool as drapery in marble.
+
+"It may live," she said. "We'll do what we can." And followed by the
+black-trousered woman, she moved quickly away to offer battle with
+death. A plain, usual fact, it seemed, involving no more surprise than
+repugnance. Her face had hardly altered; and yet Rudolph, for the first
+time in many days, had caught the fleeting brightness of compassion.
+Mere light of the eyes, a half-imagined glory, incongruous in the sharp
+smell of antiseptics, it left him wondering in the cloister. He knew now
+what had been missing by the river. "I was naked, and"--how ran the
+lines? He turned to go, recalling in a whirl snatches of truth he had
+never known since boyhood, never seen away from home.
+
+Across a court the padre hailed him,--a tall, ungainly patriarch under
+an enormous mushroom helmet of solar pith,--and walking along beside,
+listened shrewdly to his narrative. They paused at the outer gate. The
+padre, nodding, frowning slightly, stood at ease, all angles and loose
+joints, as if relaxed by the growing heat.
+
+Suddenly he stood erect as a grenadier.
+
+"That lie again!" he cried. "Listen!"
+
+The leper, without, harangued from his place apart, in a raucous voice
+filled with the solitary pride of intellect.
+
+"Well, men shall revile you," growled Dr. Earle. "He says we steal
+children, to puncture their eyes for magic medicine!"
+
+Then, heaving his wide shoulders,--
+
+"Oh, well!" he said wearily, "thanks, anyhow. Come see us, when we're
+not so busy? Good!--Look out these fellows don't fly at you."
+
+Tired and befouled, Rudolph passed through into the torrid glare. The
+leper cut short his snarling oration. But without looking at him, the
+young man took the bridle from the coolie. There had been a test. He had
+seen a child, and two women. And yet it was with a pang he found that
+Mrs. Forrester had not waited.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+THE HOT NIGHT
+
+Rudolph paced his long chamber like a wolf,--a wolf in summer, with too
+thick a coat. In sweat of body and heat of mind, he crossed from window
+to window, unable to halt.
+
+A faintly sour smell of parched things, oppressing the night without
+breath or motion, was like an interminable presence, irritating,
+poisonous. The punkah, too, flapped incessant, and only made the lamp
+gutter. Broad leaves outside shone in mockery of snow; and like snow the
+stifled river lay in the moonlight, where the wet muzzles of buffaloes
+glistened, floating like knots on sunken logs, or the snouts of
+crocodiles. Birds fluttered, sleepless and wretched. Coolies, flung
+asleep on the burnt grass, might have been corpses, but for the sound of
+their troubled breathing.
+
+"If I could believe," he groaned, sitting with hands thrust through his
+hair. "If I believe in her--But I came too late."
+
+The lamp was an added torment. He sprang up from it, wiped the drops off
+his forehead, and paced again. He came too late. All alone. The collar
+of his tunic strangled him. He stuffed his fingers underneath, and
+wrenched; then as he came and went, catching sight in a mirror, was
+shocked to see that, in Biblical fashion, he had rent his garments.
+
+"This is bad," he thought, staring. "It is the heat. I must not stay
+alone."
+
+He shouted, clapped his hands for a servant, and at last, snatching a
+coat from his unruffled boy, hurried away through stillness and
+moonlight to the detested club. On the stairs a song greeted him,--a
+fragment with more breath than melody, in a raw bass:--
+
+
+"Jolly boating weather,
+And a hay harvest breeze!"
+
+
+"Shut up!" snarled another voice. "Good God, man!"
+
+The loft was like a cave heated by subterranean fires. Two long punkahs
+flapped languidly in the darkness, with a whine of pulleys. Under a
+swinging lamp, in a pool of light and heat, four men sat playing cards,
+their tousled heads, bare arms, and cinglets torn open across the chest,
+giving them the air of desperadoes.
+
+"Jolly boating weather," wheezed the fat Sturgeon. He stood apart in
+shadow, swaying on his feet. "What would you give," he propounded
+thickly, "for a hay harvest breeze?"
+
+He climbed, or rolled, upon the billiard-table, turned head toward
+punkah, and suddenly lay still,--a gross white figure, collapsed and
+sprawling.
+
+"How much does he think a man can stand?" snapped Nesbit, his lean
+Cockney face pulled in savage lines. "Beast of a song! He'll die
+to-night, drinking."
+
+"Die yourself," mumbled the singer, "'m goin' sleep. More 'n you can
+do."
+
+A groan from the players, and the vicious flip of a card, acknowledged
+the hit. Rudolph joined them, ungreeting and ungreeted. The game went on
+grimly, with now and then the tinkle of ice, or the popping of soda
+bottles. Sharp cords and flaccid folds in Wutzler's neck, Chantel's
+brown cheeks, the point of Heywood's resolute chin, shone wet and
+polished in the lamplight. All four men scowled pugnaciously, even the
+pale Nesbit, who was winning. Bad temper filled the air, as palpable as
+the heat and stink of the burning oil.
+
+Only Heywood maintained a febrile gayety, interrupting the game
+perversely, stirring old Wutzler to incoherent speech.
+
+"What's that about Rome?" he asked. "You were saying?"
+
+"Rome is safed!" cried the outcast, with sudden enthusiasm. "In your
+paper _Tit-bit_, I read. How dey climb der walls op, yes, but Rome is
+safed by a flook of geeze. Gracious me, der History iss great sopjeck!
+I lern moch.--But iss Rome yet a fortify town?"
+
+Chantel rapped out a Parisian oath.
+
+"Do we play cards," he cried sourly, "or listen to the chatter of
+senility?"
+
+Heywood held to the previous question.
+
+"No, Wutz, that town's no longer fortified," he answered slowly. "Geese
+live there, still, as in--many other places."
+
+Dr. Chantel examined his finger-tips as though for some defect; then,
+snatching up the cards, shuffled and dealt with intense precision. The
+game went on as before.
+
+"I read alzo," stammered Wutzler, like a timid scholar encouraged to
+lecture, "I read zo how your Englishman, Rawf Ralli, he spreadt der fine
+clock for your Queen, and lern your Queen smoking, no?" He mopped his
+lean throat with the back of his hand. "In Bengal are dere Rallis. Dey
+handle jute."
+
+"Yes?" Heywood smiled a weary indulgence. Next instant he whirled on
+Rudolph in fury.--"Is this a game, or Idiot's Joy?"
+
+"I'm playing my best," explained Rudolph, sulkily.
+
+"Then your best is the worst I ever saw! Better learn, before sitting
+in!"
+
+Chantel laughed, without merriment; Rudolph flung down his cards,
+stalked to the window, and stood looking out, in lonely, impotent rage.
+A long time passed, marked by alarming snores from the billiard-table.
+The half-naked watchers played on, in ferocious silence. The night wore
+along without relief.
+
+Hours might have lapsed, when Dr. Chantel broke out as though the talk
+had but paused a moment.
+
+"So it goes!" he sneered. "Fools will always sit in, when they do not
+know. They rush into the water, also, and play the hero!"
+
+Again his laughter was brief but malignant. Heywood had left his cards,
+risen, and crossing the room, stood looking over Rudolph's shoulder into
+the snowy moonlight. On the shoulder his hand rested, as by accident.
+
+"It's the heat, old chap," he said wearily. "Don't mind what we say
+to-night."
+
+Rudolph made no sign, except to move from under his hand, so that, with
+their quarrel between them, the two men stared out across the blanched
+roofs and drooping trees, where long black shadows at last crept
+toward the dawn.
+
+"These heroes!" continued the mocker. "What is danger? Pouf--nothing!
+They make it for the rest of us, so easily! Do you know," his voice rose
+and quickened, "do you know, the other end of town is in an uproar? We
+murder children, it appears, for medicine!"
+
+Rudolph started, turned, but now sat quiet under Heywood's grasp.
+Chantel, in the lamplight, watched the punkahs with a hateful smile.
+
+"The Gascons are not all dead," he murmured. "They plunge us all into a
+turmoil, for the sake of a woman." He made a sudden startling gesture,
+like a man who has lost control. "For the sake," he cried angrily, "of a
+person we all know! Oh! we all know her! She is nothing more--"
+
+There was a light scuffle at the window.
+
+"Dr. Chantel," began Heywood, with a sharp and dangerous courtesy, "we
+are all unlike ourselves to-night. I am hardly the person to remind you,
+but this club is hardly the place--"
+
+"Oh, la la!" The other snapped his fingers, and reverting to his native
+tongue, finished his sentence wildly.
+
+"You cad!" Heywood advanced in long strides deliberately, as if
+gathering momentum for a collision. Before his blow could fall, he was
+sent spinning. Rudolph, his cheeks on fire, darted past and dealt, full
+force, a clumsy backhand sweep of the arm. Light and quick as a leopard,
+Chantel was on foot, erect, and even while his chair crashed on the
+floor, had whipped out a handkerchief.
+
+"You are right, Mr. Heywood," he said, stanching his lips, in icy
+composure. His eyes held an odd gleam of satisfaction. "You are right.
+We are not like ourselves, at present. I will better ask Mr. Sturgeon to
+see your friend to-morrow morning. This morning, rather."
+
+Not without dignity, he turned, stepped quickly to the stairs, saluted
+gravely, and went down.
+
+"No, no!" panted Nesbit, wrestling with Rudolph. "Easy on, now! Let you
+go? No fear!"
+
+Heywood wrenched the captive loose, but only to shake him violently, and
+thrust him into a chair.
+
+"Be quiet, you little ass!" he scolded. "I've a great mind, myself, to
+run after the bounder and kick him. But that sort of thing--you did
+enough. Who'd have thought? You young spitfire! Chantel took you on,
+exactly as he wanted."
+
+The fat sleeper continued to snore. Wutzler came slinking back from his
+refuge in the shadows.
+
+"It iss zo badt!" he whined, gulping nervously. "It iss zo badt!"
+
+"Right you are," said Heywood. With arms folded, he eyed them sternly.
+"It's bad. We might have known. If only I'd reached him first! By Jove,
+you must let me fight that beast. Duels? The idiot, nobody fights duels
+any more. I've always--His cuffs are always dirty, too, on the inside!"
+
+Rudolph leaned back, like a man refreshed and comforted, but his laugh
+was unsteady, and too boisterous.
+
+"It is well," he bragged. "Pistol-bullets--they fly on the wings of
+chance! No?--All is well."
+
+"Pistols? My dear young gentleman," scoffed his friend, "there's not a
+pair of matched pistols in the settlement. And if there were, Chantel
+has the choice. He'll take swords."
+
+He paused, in a silence that grew somewhat menacing. From a slit in the
+wall the wheel of the punkah-thong whined insistently,--rise and fall,
+rise and fall of peevish complaint, distressing as a brain-fever bird.
+
+"Swords, of course," continued Heywood. "If only out of vanity.
+Fencing,--oh, I hate the man, and the art's by-gone, if you like, but
+he's a beautiful swordsman! Wonderful!"
+
+Rudolph still lay back, but now with a singular calm.
+
+"It's just as well," he declared quietly.
+
+Heywood loosed a great breath, a sigh of vast relief.
+
+"My word!" he cried, grinning. "So you're there, too, eh? You young
+Sly-boots! If you're another expert--Bravo! We'll beat him at his own
+game! Hoist with his own what-d'-ye-call-it! I'd give anything"--He
+thumped the table, and pitched the cards broadcast, like an explosion of
+confetti, in a little carnival of glee. "You old Sly-boots!--But are you
+sure? He's quick as lightning."
+
+"I am not afraid," replied Rudolph, modestly. He trained his young
+moustache upward with steady fingers, and sat very quiet, thinking long
+thoughts. A quaint smile played about his eyes.
+
+"Good for you!" said Heywood. "Now let him come, as the Lord Mayor said
+of the hare. What sport! With an even chance--And what a load off
+one's mind!"
+
+He moved away to the window, as though searching for air. Instead of
+moonlight, without, there swam the blue mist of dawn.
+
+"Not a word must ever reach old Gilly," he mused. "Do you hear, Nesbit?"
+
+"If you think," retorted the clerk, stiffly, "I don't know the proper
+course of be'aviour! Not likely!"
+
+The tall silhouette in the window made no reply, but stood grumbling
+privately: "A club! Yes, where we drink out of jam-pots--dead cushions,
+dead balls--no veranda--fellow that soils the inside of his cuffs first!
+We're a pack of beach-combers."
+
+He propped his elbows on the long sill, and leaned out, venting
+fragments of disgust. Then of a sudden he turned, and beckoned eagerly.
+"Come here, you chaps. Look-see."
+
+The others joined him. Gray vapors from river and paddy-field, lingering
+like steam in a slow breeze, paled and dispersed in the growing light,
+as the new day, worse than the old, came sullenly without breath or
+respite. A few twilight shapes were pattering through the narrow
+street--a squad of Yamên runners haling a prisoner.
+
+"The Sword-Pen remains active," said Heywood, thoughtfully. "That dingy
+little procession, do you know, it's quite theatrical? The Cross and the
+Dragon. Eh? Another act's coming."
+
+Even Rudolph could spare a misgiving from his own difficulty while he
+watched the prisoner. It was Chok Chung, the plump Christian merchant,
+slowly trudging toward the darkest of human courts, to answer for the
+death of the cormorant-fisher. The squad passed by. Rudolph saw again
+the lighted shop, the tumbled figure retching on the floor; and with
+these came a memory of that cold and scornful face, thinking so cruelly
+among the unthinking rabble. The Sword-Pen had written something in
+the dark.
+
+"I go find out"; and Wutzler was away, as keen as a village gossip.
+
+"Trouble's comin'," Nesbit asserted glibly. "There's politics afloat.
+But I don't care." He stretched his arms, with a weary howl. "That's the
+first yawn I've done to-night. Trouble keeps, worse luck. I'm off--seek
+my downy."
+
+Alone with the grunting sleeper, the two friends sat for a long time and
+watched the flooding daylight.
+
+"What," began Rudolph, suddenly, and his voice trembled, "what is your
+true opinion? You are so kind, and I was just a fool. That other day, I
+would not listen. You laughed. Now tell me, so--as you were to die next.
+You were joking? Can I truly be proud of--of her?"
+
+He leaned forward, white and eager, waiting for the truth like a dicer
+for the final throw.
+
+"Of yourself, dear old chap. Not of the lady. She's the fool, not you.
+Poor old Gilly Forrester slaves here to send her junketing in Japan,
+Kashmir, Ceylon, Home. What Chantel said--well, between the two of us,
+I'm afraid he's right. It's a pity."
+
+Heywood paused, frowning.
+
+"A pity, too, this quarrel. So precious few of us, and trouble ahead.
+The natives lashing themselves into a state of mind, or being lashed.
+The least spark--Rough work ahead, and here we are at swords' points."
+
+"And the joke is," Rudolph added quietly, "I do not know a sword's point
+from a handle."
+
+Heywood turned, glowered, and twice failed to speak.
+
+"Rudie--old boy," he stammered, "that man--Preposterous! Why, it's plain
+murder!"
+
+Rudolph stared straight ahead, without hope, without illusions, facing
+the haggard light of morning. A few weeks ago he might have wept; but
+now his laugh, short and humorous, was worthy of his companion.
+
+"I do not care, more," he answered. "Luck, so called I it, when I
+escaped the militar' service. Ho ho! Luck, to pass into the _Ersatz!_--I
+do not care, now. I cannot believe, even cannot I fight.
+Worthless--dreamer! My deserts. It's a good way out."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+PASSAGE AT ARMS
+
+"Boy."
+
+"Sai."
+
+"S'pose Mr. Forrester bym-by come, you talkee he, master no got, you
+chin-chin he come-back."
+
+"Can do."
+
+The long-coated boy scuffed away, across the chunam floor, and
+disappeared in the darkness. Heywood submitted his head once more to the
+nimble hands of his groom, who, with horse-clippers and a pair of
+enormous iron shears, was trimming the stubborn chestnut locks still
+closer. The afternoon glow, reflected from the burnt grass and white
+walls of the compound, struck upward in the vault-spaces of the ground
+floor, and lighted oddly the keen-eyed yellow mafoo and his serious
+young master.
+
+Nesbit, pert as a jockey, sat on the table swinging his feet furiously.
+
+"Sturgeon would take it all right, of course," he said, with airy
+wisdom. "Quite the gentleman, he is. Netch'rally. No fault of his."
+
+"Not the least," Heywood assented gloomily. "Did everything he could.
+If I were commissioned to tell 'em outright--'The youngster can't
+fence'--why, we might save the day. But our man won't even listen to
+that. Fight's the word. Chantel will see, on the spot, directly they
+face. But will that stop him? No fear: he's worked up to the pitch of
+killing. He'll lunge first, and be surprised afterward.--So regrettable!
+Such remorse!--Oh, I know _him!_"
+
+The Cockney fidgeted for a time. His face--the face of a street-bred
+urchin--slowly worked into lines of abnormal cunning.
+
+"I say! I was thinking," he ventured at last. "Two swords, that's all?
+Just so. Now--my boy used to be learn-pidgin at Chantel's. Knows that
+'ouse inside out--loafs there now, the beggar, with Chantel's cook. Why
+not send him over--prowling, ye know--fingers the bric-a-brac, bloomin'
+ass, and breaks a sword-blade. Perfectly netch'ral. 'Can secure, all
+plopah,' Accident, ye know. All off with their little duel. What?"
+
+Heywood chuckled, and bowed his head to the horse-clippers.
+
+"Last week," he replied. "Not to-day. This afternoon's rather late for
+accidents. You make me feel like Pompey on his galley: 'This thou
+shouldst have done, and not have spoken on't,'--Besides, those swords
+belonged to Chantel's father. He began as a gentleman.--But you're a
+good sort, Nesbit, to take the affair this fashion."
+
+Lost in smoke, the clerk grumbled that the gory affair was unmentionable
+nonsense.
+
+"Quite," said Heywood. "We've tried reasoning. No go. As you say, an
+accident. That's all can save the youngster now. Impossible, of course."
+He sighed. Then suddenly the gray eyes lighted, became both shrewd and
+distant; a malicious little smile stole about the corners of his mouth.
+"Have-got! The credit's yours, Nesbit. Accident: can do. And this
+one--by Jove, it won't leave either of 'em a leg to stand on!--Here,
+mafoo, makee finish!"
+
+He sprang up, clapped a helmet on the shorn head, and stalked out into
+the sunlight.
+
+"Come on," he called. "It's nearly time. We must pick up our young
+Hotspur."
+
+The clerk followed, through the glowing compound and the road. In the
+shade of the nunnery gate they found Rudolph, who, raising his rattan,
+saluted them with a pale and stoic gravity.
+
+"Are we ready?" he asked; and turning, took a slow, cool survey of the
+nunnery, as though looking his last--from the ditch at their feet to the
+red tiles, patched with bronze mould, that capped the walls and the
+roof. "I never left any place with less regret. Come, let's go."
+
+The three men had covered some ground before Rudolph broke the silence.
+
+"You'll find a few little things up there in my strong-box, Maurice.
+Some are marked for you, and the rest--will you send them Home, please?"
+He hesitated. "I hope neither of you will misunderstand me. I'm horribly
+afraid, but not--but only because this fellow will make me look absurd.
+If I knew the first motion!" He broke out angrily. "I cannot bear to
+have him laugh, also! I cannot bear!"
+
+Heywood clapped him on the shoulder, and gave a queer cough.
+
+"If that's all, never you fear! I'll teach you your guard. 'Once in a
+while we can finish in style.' Eh?--Rudie, you blooming German, I--I
+think we must have been brothers! We'll pull it off yet."
+
+Heywood spoke with a strange alacrity, and tried again to cough. This
+time, however, there was no mistake--he was laughing.
+
+Rudolph shot at him one glance of startled unbelief, and then, tossing
+his head, marched on without a word. Pride and loneliness overwhelmed
+him. The two at his side were no companions--not even presences. He
+went alone, conscious only of the long flood of sunset, and the black
+interlacing pattern of bamboos. The one friendly spirit had deserted,
+laughing; yet even this last and worst of earthly puzzles did not
+matter. It was true, what he had read; this, which they called death,
+was a lonely thing.
+
+On a broken stone bench, Sturgeon, sober and dejected, with puffy
+circles under his eyes, sat waiting. A long parcel, wrapped in green
+baize, lay across his knees. He nodded gloomily, without rising. At his
+feet wandered a path, rankly matted with burnt weeds, and bordered with
+green bottle-ends, the "dimples" choked with discs of mud. The place was
+a deserted garden, where the ruins of a European house--burnt by natives
+in some obscure madness, years ago--sprawled in desolation among wild
+shrubs. A little way down the path stood Teppich and Chantel, each with
+his back turned and his hands clasped, like a pair of sulky Napoleons,
+one fat, one slender. The wooden pretense of their attitude set Rudolph,
+for an instant, to laughing silently and bitterly. This final
+scene,--what justice, that it should be a mean waste, the wreck of silly
+pleasure-grounds, long forgotten, and now used only by grotesque
+play-actors. He must die, in both action and setting, without dignity.
+It was some comfort, he became aware, to find that the place was fairly
+private. Except for the breach by which they had entered, the blotched
+and spotted compound walls stood ruinous yet high, shutting out all but
+a rising slant of sunlight, and from some outpost line of shops, near
+by, the rattle of an abacus and the broken singsong of argument, now
+harsh, now drowsy.
+
+Heywood had been speaking earnestly to Sturgeon:--
+
+"A little practice--try the balance of the swords. No more than fair."
+
+"Fair? Most certainly," croaked that battered convivialist. "Chantel
+can't object."
+
+He rose, and waddled down the path. Rudolph saw Chantel turn, frowning,
+then nod and smile. The nod was courteous, the smile full of satire. The
+fat ambassador returned.
+
+"Right-oh," he puffed, tugging from the baize cover a shining pair of
+bell-hilted swords. "Here, try 'em out." His puffy eyes turned furtively
+toward Rudolph. "May be bad form, Hackh, but--we all wish you luck, I
+fancy." Then, in a burst of candor, "Wish that unspeakable ass felt as
+seedy as I do--heat-stroke--drop dead--that sort of thing."
+
+Still grumbling treason, this strange second rejoined his principal.
+
+"Jackets off," commanded Heywood; and in their cinglets, each with sword
+under arm, the two friends took shelter behind a ragged clump of
+plantains. The yellow leaves, half dead with drought and blight, hung
+ponderous as torn strips of sheet metal in the lifeless air.
+
+Behind this tattered screen, Rudolph studied, for a moment, the lethal
+object in his hand. It was very graceful,--the tapering, three-cornered
+blade, with shallow grooves in which blood was soon to run, the silver
+hilt where his enemy's father had set, in florid letters, the name of
+"H.B. St. A. Chantel," and a date. How long ago, he thought, the steel
+was forged for this day.
+
+"It is Fate." He looked up sadly. "Come, show me how to begin; so that I
+can stand up to him."
+
+"Here, then." Slowly, easily, his long limbs transformed with a sudden
+youthful grace, Heywood moved through the seven positions of On
+Guard. "Try it."
+
+Rudolph learned only that his own clumsy imitation was hopeless.
+
+"Once more.--He can't see us."
+
+Again and again, more and more rapidly, they performed the motions of
+this odd rehearsal. Suddenly Heywood stepped back, and lowering his
+point, looked into his pupil's face, long and earnestly.
+
+"For the last time," he said: "won't you let me tell him? This is
+extremely silly."
+
+Rudolph hung his head, like a stubborn child.
+
+"Do you still think," he answered coldly, "that I would beg off?"
+
+With a hopeless gesture of impatience, Heywood stepped forward briskly.
+"Very well, then. Once more." And as their blades clashed softly
+together, a quick light danced in his eyes. "Here's how our friend will
+stick you!" His point cut a swift little circle, and sped home. By a
+wild instinct, the novice beat it awkwardly aside. His friend laughed,
+poised again, disengaged again, but in mid-career of this heartless
+play, stumbled and came pitching forward. Rudolph darted back, swept his
+arm blindly, and cried out; for with the full impetus of the mishap, a
+shock had run from wrist to elbow. He dropped his sword, and in
+stupefaction watched the red blood coursing down his forearm, and his
+third finger twitching convulsively, beyond control.
+
+"Dear fellow!" cried his opponent, scrambling upright. "So sorry! I say,
+that's a bad one." With a stick and a handkerchief, he twisted on a
+tourniquet, muttering condolence: "Pain much? Lost my balance, you know.
+That better?--What a clumsy accident!" Then, dodging out from the
+plantain screen, and beckoning,--"All you chaps! Come over here!"
+
+Nesbit came running, but at sight of the bloody victim, pulled up short.
+"What ho!" he whispered, first with a stare, then a grin of mysterious
+joy. Sturgeon gave a sympathetic whistle, and stolidly unwound bandages.
+At first the two Napoleons remained aloof, but at last, yielding to
+indignant shouts, haughtily approached. The little group stood at fault.
+
+Heywood wiped his sword-blade very carefully on a plantain leaf; then
+stood erect, to address them with a kind of cool severity.
+
+"I regret this more than anybody," he declared, pausing, and picking his
+words. "We were at practice, and my friend had the misfortune to be run
+through the arm."
+
+Chantel flung out his hands, in a motion at once furious and impudent.
+
+"Zut! What a farce!--Will you tell me, please, since your friend has
+disabled himself"--
+
+Heywood wheeled upon him, scornfully.
+
+"You have no right to such an expression," he stated, with a coldness
+which conveyed more rage than the other man's heat. "This was entirely
+my fault. It's I who have spoiled your--arrangement, and therefore I am
+quite ready to take up my friend's quarrel."
+
+"I have no quarrel with you," replied Chantel, contemptuously. "You saw
+last night how he--"
+
+"He was quicker than I, that's all. By every circumstance, I'm the
+natural proxy. Besides"--the young man appealed to the company,
+smiling--"besides, what a pity to postpone matters, and spoil the
+occasion, when Doctor Chantel has gone to the trouble of a clean shirt."
+
+The doctor recoiled, flung up a trembling arm, and as quickly dropped
+it. His handsome face burned darker, then faded with a mortal pallor,
+and for one rigid moment, took on such a strange beauty as though it
+were about to be translated into bronze. His brown fingers twitched,
+became all nerves and sinews and white knuckles. Then, stepping
+backward, he withdrew from the circle.
+
+"Very well," he said lightly. "Since we are all so--irregular. I will
+take the substitute."
+
+Rudolph gave a choking cry, and would have come forward; but Sturgeon
+clung to the wounded arm, and bound on his bandage.
+
+"Hold still, there!" he scolded, as though addressing a horse; then
+growled in Heywood's ear, "Why did _you_ go lose your temper?"
+
+"Didn't. We can't let him walk over us, though." The young man held the
+sword across his throat, and whispered, "Only angry up to here!"
+
+And indeed, through the anxious preliminary silence, he stood waiting as
+cool and ready as a young centurion.
+
+His adversary, turning back the sleeves of the unfortunate white linen,
+picked up the other sword, and practiced his fingering on the silver
+hilt, while the blade answered as delicately as the bow to a violinist.
+At last he came forward, with thin lips and hard, thoughtful eyes, like
+a man bent upon dispatch. Both men saluted formally, and sprang
+on guard.
+
+From the first twitter of the blades, even Rudolph knew the outcome.
+Heywood, his face white and anxious in the failing light, fought at full
+stretch, at the last wrench of skill. Chantel, for the moment, was
+fencing; and though his attacks came ceaseless and quick as flame, he
+was plainly prolonging them, discarding them, repeating, varying,
+whether for black-hearted merriment, or the vanity of perfect form, or
+love of his art. Graceful, safe, easy, as though performing the grand
+salute, he teased and frolicked, his bright blade puzzling the sight,
+scattering like quicksilver in the endless whirl and clash.
+
+Teppich was gaping foolishly, Sturgeon shaking his head, the Cockney,
+with narrow body drawn together, watching, shivering, squatting on toes
+and finger-tips, like a runner about to spring from a mark. Rudolph,
+dizzy with pain and suspense, nursed his forearm mechanically. The
+hurried, silver ring of the hilts dismayed him, the dust from the garden
+path choked him like an acrid smoke.
+
+Suddenly Chantel, dropping low like a deflected arrow, swooped in with
+fingers touching the ground. On "three feet," he had delivered the blow
+so long withheld.
+
+The watchers shouted. Nesbit sprang up, released. But Heywood, by some
+desperate sleight, had parried the certainty, and even tried a riposte.
+Still afoot and fighting, he complained testily above the sword-play:--
+
+"Don't shout like that! Fair field, you chaps!"
+
+Above the sword-play, too, came gradually a murmur of voices. Through
+the dust, beyond the lunging figures, Rudolph was distantly aware of
+crowded bodies, of yellow faces grinning or agape, in the breach of the
+compound wall. Men of the neighboring hamlet had gathered, to watch the
+foreign monsters play at this new, fantastic game. Shaven heads bobbed,
+saffron arms pointed, voices, sharp and guttural, argued scornfully.
+
+The hilts rang, the blades grated faster. But now it was plain that
+Heywood could do no more, by luck or inspiration. Fretted by his clumsy
+yet strong and close defense, Chantel was forcing on the end. He gave a
+panting laugh. Instantly, all saw the weaker blade fly wide, the
+stronger swerve, to dart in victorious,--and then saw Doctor Chantel
+staggering backward, struck full in the face by something round and
+heavy. The brown missile skipped along the garden path.
+
+Another struck a bottle-end, and burst into milk-white fragments, like a
+bomb. A third, rebounding from Teppich's girdle, left him bent and
+gasping. Strange yells broke out, as from a tribe of apes. The air was
+thick with hurtling globes. Cocoanuts rained upon the company,
+tempestuously, as though an invisible palm were shaken by a hurricane.
+Among them flew sticks, jagged lumps of sun-dried clay, thick scales
+of plaster.
+
+"Aow!" cried Nesbit, "the bloomin' coolies!" First to recover, he
+skipped about, fielding and hurling back cocoanuts.
+
+A small but raging phalanx crowded the gap in the wall, throwing
+continually, howling, and exhorting one another to rush in.
+
+"A riot!" cried Heywood, and started, sword in hand. "Come on, stop
+'em!"
+
+But it was Nesbit who, wrenching a pair of loose bottles from the path,
+brandishing them aloft like clubs, and shouting the unseemly
+battle-cries of a street-fighter, led the white men into this deadly
+breach. At the first shock, the rioters broke and scattered, fled round
+corners of the wall, crashed through bamboos, went leaping across
+paddy-fields toward the river. The tumult--except for lonely howls in
+the distance--ended as quickly as it had risen. The little band of
+Europeans returned from the pursuit, drenched with sweat, panting, like
+a squad of triumphant football players; but no one smiled.
+
+"That explains it," grumbled Heywood. He pointed along the path to
+where, far off, a tall, stooping figure paced slowly toward the town,
+his long robe a moving strip of color, faint in the twilight. "The
+Sword-Pen dropped some remarks in passing."
+
+The others nodded moodily, too breathless for reply. Nesbit's forehead
+bore an ugly cut, Rudolph's bandage was red and sopping. Chantel, more
+rueful than either, stared down at a bleeding hand, which held two
+shards of steel. He had fallen, and snapped his sword in the rubble of
+old masonry.
+
+"No more blades," he said, like a child with a broken toy; "there are no
+more blades this side of Saigon."
+
+"Then we must postpone." Heywood mopped his dripping and fiery cheeks.
+He tossed a piece of silver to one who wailed in the ditch,--a forlorn
+stranger from Hai-nan, lamenting the broken shells and empty baskets of
+his small venture.--"Contribution, you chaps. A bad day for imported
+cocoanuts. Wish I carried some money: this chit system is
+damnable.--Meanwhile, doctor, won't you forget anything I was rude
+enough to say? And come join me in a peg at the club? The heat is
+excessive."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+THREE PORTALS
+
+Not till after dinner, that evening, did Rudolph rouse from his stupor.
+With the clerk, he lay wearily in the upper chamber of Heywood's house.
+The host, with both his long legs out at window, sat watching the smoky
+lights along the river, and now and then cursing the heat.
+
+"After all," he broke silence, "those cocoanuts came time enough."
+
+"Didn't they just?" said Nesbit, jauntily; and fingering the plaster
+cross on his wounded forehead, drawled: "You might think I'd done a bit
+o' dueling myself, by the looks.--But I had _some_ part. Now, that
+accident trick. Rather neat, what? But for me, you might never have
+thought o' that--"
+
+"Idiot!" snapped Heywood, and pulling in his legs, rose and stamped
+across the room.
+
+A glass of ice and tansan smashed on the floor. Rudolph was on foot,
+clutching his bandaged arm as though the hurt were new.
+
+"You!" he stammered. "You did that!" He stood gaping, thunderstruck.
+
+Felt soles scuffed in the darkness, and through the door, his yellow
+face wearing a placid and lofty grin, entered Ah Pat, the compradore.
+
+"One coolie-man hab-got chit."
+
+He handed a note to his master, who snatched it as though glad of the
+interruption, bent under the lamp, and scowled.
+
+The writing was in a crabbed, antique German character:--
+
+"Please to see bearer, in bad clothes but urgent. We are all in danger.
+_Um Gottes willen_--" It straggled off, illegible. The signature, "Otto
+Wutzler," ran frantically into a blot.
+
+"Can do," said Heywood. "You talkee he, come topside."
+
+The messenger must have been waiting, however, at the stairhead; for no
+sooner had the compradore withdrawn, than a singular little coolie
+shuffled into the room. Lean and shriveled as an opium-smoker, he wore
+loose clothes of dirty blue,--one trousers-leg rolled up. The brown
+face, thin and comically small, wore a mask of inky shadow under a
+wicker bowl hat. His eyes were cast down in a strange fashion, unlike
+the bold, inquisitive peering of his countrymen,--the more strange, in
+that he spoke harshly and abruptly, like a racer catching breath.
+
+"I bring news." His dialect was the vilest and surliest form of the
+colloquial "Clear Speech."--"One pair of ears, enough."
+
+"You can speak and act more civilly," retorted Heywood, "or taste the
+bamboo."
+
+The man did not answer, or look up, or remove his varnished hat. Still
+downcast and hang-dog, he sidled along the verge of the shadow, snatched
+from the table the paper and a pencil, and choosing the darkest part of
+the wall, began to write. The lamp stood between him and the company:
+Heywood alone saw--and with a shock of amazement--that he did not print
+vertically as with a brush, but scrawled horizontally. He tossed back
+the paper, and dodged once more into the gloom.
+
+The postscript ran in the same shaky hand:--
+
+"Send way the others both."
+
+"What!" cried the young master of the house; and then over his shoulder,
+"Excuse us a moment--me, I should say."
+
+He led the dwarfish coolie across the landing, to the deserted
+dinner-table. The creature darted past him, blew out one candle, and
+thrust the other behind a bottle, so that he stood in a wedge of shadow.
+
+"Eng-lish speak I ver' badt," he whispered; and then with something
+between gasp and chuckle, "but der _pak-wa_ goot, no? When der live
+dependt, zo can mann--" He caught his breath, and trembled in a
+strong seizure.
+
+"Good?" whispered Heywood, staring. "Why, man, it's wonderful! You
+_are_ a coolie"--Wutzler's conical wicker-hat ducked as from a blow. "I
+beg your pardon. I mean, you're--"
+
+The shrunken figure pulled itself together.
+
+"You are right," he whispered, in the vernacular. "To-night I am a
+coolie--all but the eyes. Therefore this hat."
+
+Heywood stepped back to the door, and popped his head out. The dim hall
+was empty.
+
+"Go on," he said, returning. "What is your news?"
+
+"Riots. They are coming. We are all marked for massacre. All day I ran
+about the town, finding out. The trial of Chok Chung, your--_our_
+Christian merchant--I saw him 'cross the hall.' They kept asking, 'Do
+you follow the foreign dogs and goats?' But he would only answer, 'I
+follow the Lord Jesus.' So then they beat out his teeth with a heavy
+shoe, and cast him into prison. Now they wait, to see if his padre will
+interfere with the law. It is a trap. The suit is certainly brought by
+Fang the scholar, whom they call the Sword-Pen."
+
+"That much," said Heywood, "I could have told you."
+
+Wutzler glanced behind him fearfully, as though the flickering shadows
+might hear.
+
+"But there is more. Since dark I ran everywhere, watching, listening to
+gossip. I painted my skin with mangrove-bark water. You know this
+sign?" He patted his right leg, where the roll of trousers bound his
+thigh. "It is for protection in the streets. It says, 'I am a
+Heaven-and-Earth man.'"
+
+"The Triad!" Heywood whistled. "You?"
+
+The other faltered, and hung his head.
+
+"Yes," he whispered at last. "My--my wife's cousin, he is a Grass
+Sandal. He taught her the verses at home, for safety.--We mean no harm,
+now, we of the Triad. But there is another secret band, having many of
+our signs. It is said they ape our ritual. Fang the scholar heads their
+lodge. They are the White Lotus."
+
+"White Lotus?" Heywood snapped his fingers. "Nonsense. Extinct, this
+hundred years."
+
+"Extinct? They meet to-night," said the outcast, in sudden grief and
+passion. "They drink blood--plan blood. Extinct? Are _you_ married to
+these people? Does the knowledge come so cheap, or at a price? All these
+years--darkness--sunken--alone"--He trembled violently, but regained his
+voice. "O my friend! This very night they swear in recruits, and set the
+day. I know their lodge-room. For any sake, believe me! I know!"
+
+"Right," said Heywood, curtly. "I believe you. But why come here? Why
+not stay, and learn more?"
+
+Wutzler's head dropped on his breast again. The varnished hat gleamed
+softly in the darkness.
+
+"I--I dare not stay," he sobbed.
+
+"Oh, exactly!" Heywood flung out an impatient arm. "The date, man! The
+day they set. You came away without it!--We sit tight, then, and wait in
+ignorance."
+
+The droll, withered face, suddenly raised, shone with great tears that
+streaked the mangrove stain.
+
+"My head sits loosely already, with what I have done to-night. I found a
+listening place--next door: a long roof. You can hear and see them--But
+I could not stay. Yes, I am a coward."
+
+"There, there!" Heywood patted his shoulder. "I didn't mean--Here, have
+a drink."
+
+The man drained the tumbler at a gulp; stood without a word, sniffing
+miserably; then of a sudden, as though the draught had worked, looked up
+bold and shrewd.
+
+"Do you?" he whispered. "Do _you_ dare go to the place I show you, and
+hide? You would learn."
+
+Heywood started visibly, paused, then laughed.
+
+"Excellent," he said. "_Tu quoque_ is good argument. Can you smuggle
+me?--Then come on." He stepped lightly across the landing, and called
+out, "You chaps make yourselves at home, will you? Business, you know.
+What a bore! I'll not be back till late." And as he followed the
+slinking form downstairs, he grumbled, "If at all, perhaps."
+
+The moon still lurked behind the ocean, making an aqueous pallor above
+the crouching roofs. The two men hurried along a "goat" path, skirted
+the town wall, and stole through a dark gate into a darker maze of
+lonely streets. Drawing nearer to a faint clash of cymbals in some
+joss-house, they halted before a blind wall.
+
+"In the first room," whispered the guide, "a circle is drawn on the
+floor. Put your right foot there, and say, 'We are all in-the-circle
+men,' If they ask, remember: you go to pluck the White Lotus. These men
+hate it, they are Triad brothers, they will let you pass. You come from
+the East, where the Fusang cocks spit orient pearls; you studied in the
+Red Flower Pavilion; your eyes are bloodshot because"--He lectured
+earnestly, repeating desperate nonsense, over and over. "No: not so. Say
+it exactly, after me."
+
+They held a hurried catechism in the dark.
+
+"There," sighed Wutzler, at last, "that is as much as we can hope. Do
+not forget. They will pass you through hidden ways.--But you are very
+rash. It is not too late to go home."
+
+Receiving no answer, he sighed more heavily, and gave a complicated
+knock. Bars clattered within, and a strip of dim light widened. "Who
+comes?" said a harsh but guarded voice, with a strong Hakka brogue.
+
+"A brother," answered the outcast, "to pluck the White Lotus. Aid,
+brothers.--Go in, I can help no further. If you are caught, slide down,
+and run westward to the gate which is called the Meeting of
+the Dragons."
+
+Heywood nodded, and slipped in. Beside a leaf-point flame of peanut-oil,
+a broad, squat giant sat stiff and still against the opposite wall, and
+stared with cruel, unblinking eyes. If the stranger were the first white
+man to enter, this motionless grim janitor gave no sign. On the earthen
+floor lay a small circle of white lime. Heywood placed his right foot
+inside it.
+
+"We are all in-the-circle men."
+
+"Pass," said the guard.
+
+Out from shadow glided a tall native with a halberd, who opened a door
+in the far corner.
+
+In the second room, dim as the first, burned the same smoky orange light
+on the same table. But here a twisted cripple, his nose long and
+pendulous with elephantiasis, presided over three cups of tea set in a
+row. Heywood lifted the central cup, and drank.
+
+"Will you bite the clouds?" asked the second guard, in a soft and husky
+bass. As he spoke, the great nose trembled slightly.
+
+"No, I will bite ginger," replied the white man.
+
+"Why is your face so green?"
+
+"It is a melon-face--a green face with a red heart."
+
+"Pass," said the cripple, gently. He pulled a cord--the nose quaking
+with this exertion--and opened the third door.
+
+Again the chamber was dim. A venerable man in gleaming silks--a
+grandfather, by his drooping rat-tail moustaches--sat fanning himself.
+In the breath of his black fan, the lamplight tossed queer shadows
+leaping, and danced on the table of polished camagon. Except for this
+unrest, the aged face might have been carved from yellow soapstone. But
+his slant eyes were the sharpest yet.
+
+"You have come far," he said, with sinister and warning courtesy.
+
+Too far, thought Heywood, in a sinking heart; but answered:--
+
+"From the East, where the Fusang cocks spit orient pearls."
+
+"And where did you study?" The black fan stopped fluttering.
+
+"In the Red Flower Pavilion."
+
+"What book did you read?"
+
+"The book," said Heywood, holding his wits by his will, "the book was
+Ten Thousand Thousand Pages."
+
+"And the theme?"
+
+"The waters of the deluge crosswise flow." "And what"--the aged voice
+rose briskly--"what saw you on the waters?"
+
+"The Eight Abbots, floating," answered Heywood, negligently.--"But," ran
+his thought, "he'll pump me dry."
+
+"Why," continued the examiner, "do you look so happy?"
+
+"Because Heaven has sent the Unicorn."
+
+The black fan began fluttering once more. It seemed a hopeful sign; but
+the keen old eyes were far from satisfied.
+
+"Why have you such a sensual face?"
+
+"I was born under a peach tree."
+
+"Pass," said the old man, regretfully. And Heywood, glancing back from
+the mouth of a dark corridor, saw him, beside the table of camagon,
+wagging his head like a judge doubtful of his judgment.
+
+The narrow passage, hot, fetid, and blacker than the wholesome night
+without, crooked about sharp corners, that bruised the wanderer's hands
+and arms. Suddenly he fell down a short flight of slimy steps, landing
+in noisome mud at the bottom of some crypt. A trap, a suffocating well,
+he thought; and rose filthy, choked with bitterness and disgust. Only
+the taunting justice of Wutzler's argument, the retort _ad hominem_, had
+sent him headlong into this dangerous folly. He had scolded a coward
+with hasty words, and been forced to follow where they led. To this
+loathsome hole. Behind him, a door closed, a bar scraped softly into
+place. Before him, as he groped in rage and self-reproach, rose a vault
+of solid plaster, narrow as a chimney.
+
+But presently, glancing upward, he saw a small cluster of stars
+blinking, voluptuous, immeasurably overhead. Their pittance of light, as
+his eyesight cleared, showed a ladder rising flat against the wall. He
+reached up, grasped the bamboo rungs, hoisted with an acrobatic wrench,
+and began to climb cautiously.
+
+Above, faint and muffled, sounded a murmur of voices.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+WHITE LOTUS
+
+He was swarming up, quiet as a thief, when his fingers clawed the bare
+plaster. The ladder hung from the square end of a protruding beam, above
+which there were no more rungs. He hung in doubt.
+
+Then, to his great relief, something blacker than the starlight gathered
+into form over his head,--a slanting bulk, which gradually took on a
+familiar meaning. He chuckled, reached for it, and fingering the rough
+edge to avoid loose tiles, hauled himself up to a foothold on the beam,
+and so, flinging out his arms and hooking one knee, scrambled over and
+lay on a ribbed and mossy surface, under the friendly stars. The outcast
+and his strange brethren had played fair: this was the long roof, and
+close ahead rose the wall of some higher building, an upright blackness
+from which escaped two bits of light,--a right angle of hairbreadth
+lines, and below this a brighter patch, small and ragged. Here, louder,
+but confused with a gentle scuffing of feet, sounded the voices of the
+rival lodge.
+
+Toward these he crawled, stopping at every creak of the tiles. Once a
+broken roll snapped off, and slid rattling down the roof. He sat up,
+every muscle ready for the sudden leap and shove that would send him
+sliding after it into the lower darkness. It fell but a short distance,
+into something soft. Gradually he relaxed, but lay very still. Nothing
+followed; no one had heard.
+
+He tried again, crawled forward his own length, and brought up snug and
+safe in the angle where roof met wall. The voices and shuffling feet
+were dangerously close. He sat up, caught a shaft of light full in his
+face, and peered in through the ragged chink. Two legs in bright,
+wrinkled hose, and a pair of black shoes with thick white soles, blocked
+the view. For a long time they shifted, uneasy and tantalizing. He could
+hear only a hubbub of talk,--random phrases without meaning. The legs
+moved away, and left a clear space.
+
+But at the same instant, a grating noise startled him, directly
+overhead, out of doors. The thin right angle of light spread instantly
+into a brilliant square. With a bang, a wooden shutter slid open.
+Heywood lay back swiftly, just as a long, fat bamboo pipe, two sleeves,
+and the head of a man in a red silk cap were thrust out into the
+night air.
+
+"_Ai-yah!"_ sighed the man, and puffed at his bamboo. "It is hot."
+
+Heywood tried to blot himself against the wall. The lounger, propped on
+elbows, finished his smoke, spat upon the tiles, and remained, a pensive
+silhouette.
+
+"_Ai-yah!"_ he sighed again; then knocking out the bamboo, drew in his
+head. Not until the shutter slammed, did Heywood shake the burning
+sparks from his wrist.
+
+In the same movement, however, he raised head and shoulders to spy
+through the chink. This time the bright-hosed legs were gone. He saw
+clear down a brilliant lane of robes and banners, multicolored, and
+shining with embroidery and tinsel,--a lane between two ranks of crowded
+men, who, splendid with green and blue and yellow robes of ceremony,
+faced each other in a strong lamplight, that glistened on their oily
+cheeks. The chatter had ceased. Under the crowded rows of shaven
+foreheads, their eyes blinked, deep-set and expectant. At the far end of
+the loft, through two circular arches or giant hoops of rattan, Heywood
+at last descried a third arch, of swords; beyond this, a tall incense
+jar smouldering gray wisps of smoke, beside a transverse table twinkling
+with candles like an altar; and over these, a black image with a pale,
+carved face, seated bolt upright before a lofty, intricate, gilded
+shrine of the Patriot War-God.
+
+A tall man in dove-gray silk with a high scarlet turban moved athwart
+the altar, chanting as he solemnly lifted one by one a row of symbols: a
+round wooden measure, heaped with something white, like rice, in which
+stuck a gay cluster of paper flags; a brown, polished abacus; a mace
+carved with a dragon, another carved with a phoenix; a rainbow robe,
+gleaming with the plumage of Siamese kingfishers. All these, and more,
+he displayed aloft and replaced among the candles.
+
+When his chant ended, a brisk little man in yellow stepped forward into
+the lane.
+
+"O Fragrant Ones," he shrilled, "I bring ten thousand recruits, to join
+our army and swear brotherhood. Attend, O Master of Incense."
+
+Behind him, a squad of some dozen barefoot wretches, in coolie clothes,
+with queues un-plaited, crawled on all fours through the first arch.
+They crouched abject, while the tall Master of Incense in the dove-gray
+silk sternly examined their sponsor.
+
+In the outer darkness, Heywood craned and listened till neck and
+shoulders ached. He could make nothing of the florid verbiage.
+
+With endless ritual, the crawling novices reached the arch of swords.
+They knelt, each holding above his head a lighted bundle of
+incense-sticks,--red sparks that quivered like angry fireflies. Above
+them the tall Master of Incense thundered:--
+
+"O Spirits of the Hills and Brooks, the Land, the swollen seeds of the
+ground, and all the Veins of Earth; O Thou, young Bearer of the Axe that
+cleared the Hills; O Imperial Heaven, and ye, Five Dragons of the Five
+Regions, with all the Holy Influences who pass and instantly re-pass
+through unutterable space:--draw near, record our oath, accept the
+draught of blood."
+
+He raised at arm's length a heavy baton, which, with a flowing movement,
+unrolled to the floor a bright yellow scroll thickly inscribed. From
+this he read, slowly, an interminable catalogue of oaths. Heywood could
+catch only the scolding sing-song of the responses:--
+
+"If any brother shall break this, let him die beneath ten thousand
+knives."
+
+"--Who violates this, shall be hurled down into the great sky."
+
+"--Let thunder from the Five Regions annihilate him."
+
+Silence followed, broken suddenly by the frenzied squawking of a fowl,
+as suddenly cut short. Near the chink, Heywood heard a quick struggling
+and beating. Next instant he lay flattened against the wall.
+
+The shutter grated open, a flood of light poured out.
+
+Within reach, in that radiance, a pair of sinewy yellow hands gripped
+the neck of a white cock. The wretched bird squawked once more, feebly,
+flapped its wings, and clawed the air, just as a second pair of arms
+reached out and sliced with a knife. The cock's head flew off upon the
+tiles. Hot blood spattered on Heywood's cheek. Half blinded, but not
+daring to move, he saw the knife withdrawn, and a huge goblet held out
+to catch the flow. Then arms, goblet, and convulsive wings jerked out of
+sight, and the shutter slid home.
+
+"Twice they've not seen me," thought Heywood. It was darker, here, than
+he had hoped. He rose more boldly to the peep-hole.
+
+Under the arch of swords, the new recruits, now standing upright,
+stretched one by one their wrists over the goblet. The Incense Master
+pricked each yellow arm, to mingle human blood with the blood of the
+white cock; then, from a brazen vessel, filled the goblet to the brim.
+It passed from hand to hand, like a loving-cup. Each novice raised it,
+chanted some formula, and drank. Then all dispersed. There fell
+a silence.
+
+Suddenly, in the pale face of the black image seated before the shrine,
+the eyes turned, scanning the company with a cold contempt. The lips
+moved. The voice, level and ironic, was that of Fang, the Sword-Pen:--
+
+"O Fragrant Ones, when shall the foreign monsters perish like this
+cock?"
+
+A man in black, with a red wand, bowed and answered harshly:--
+
+"The time, Great Elder Brother, draws at hand."
+
+"How shall we know the hour?"
+
+"The hour," replied the Red Wand, "shall be when the Black Dog barks."
+
+"And the day?"
+
+Heywood pressed his ear against the chink, and listened, his five senses
+fused into one.
+
+No answer came, but presently a rapid, steady clicking, strangely
+familiar and commonplace. He peered in again. The Red Wand stood by the
+abacus, rattling the brown beads with flying fingers, like a shroff.
+Plainly, it was no real calculation, but a ceremony before the answer.
+The listener clapped his ear to the crevice. Would that answer, he
+wondered, be a month, a week, to-morrow?
+
+The shutter banged, the light streamed, down went Heywood against the
+plaster. Thick dregs from the goblet splashed on the tiles. A head, the
+flattened profile of the brisk man in yellow, leaned far out from the
+little port-hole. Grunting, he shook the inverted cup, let it dangle
+from his hands, stared up aimlessly at the stars, and then--to Heywood's
+consternation--dropped his head to meditate, looking straight down.
+
+"He sees me," thought Heywood, and held himself ready, trembling. But
+the fellow made no sign, the broad squat features no change. The pose
+was that of vague, comfortable thought. Yet his vision seemed to rest,
+true as a plumb-line, on the hiding-place. Was he in doubt?--he could
+reach down lazily, and feel.
+
+Worst of all, the greenish pallor in the eastern sky had imperceptibly
+turned brighter; and now the ribbed edge of a roof, across the way,
+began to glow like incandescent silver. The moon was crawling up.
+
+The head and the dangling goblet were slowly pulled in, just before the
+moonlight, soft and sullen through the brown haze of the heat, stole
+down the wall and spread upon the tiles. The shutter remained open. But
+Heywood drew a free breath: those eyes had been staring into vacancy.
+
+"Now, then," he thought, and sat up to the cranny; for the rattle of the
+abacus had stopped.
+
+"The counting is complete," announced the Red Wand slowly, "the hours
+are numbered. The day--"
+
+Movement, shadow, or nameless instinct, made the listener glance upward
+swiftly. He caught the gleam of yellow silk, the poise and downward jab,
+and with a great heave of muscles went shooting down the slippery
+channel of the cock's blood. A spearhead grazed his scalp, and smashed
+a tile behind him. As he rolled over the edge, the spear itself whizzed
+by him into the dark.
+
+"The chap saw," he thought, in mid-air; "beastly clever--all the time--"
+
+He landed on the spear-shaft, in a pile of dry rubbish, snatched up the
+weapon, and ran, dimly conscious of a quiet scurrying behind and above
+him, of silent men tumbling after, and doors flung violently open.
+
+He raced blindly, but whipped about the next corner, leaving the moon at
+his back. Westward, somebody had told him, to the gate where
+dragons met.
+
+There had been no uproar; but running his hardest down the empty
+corridors of the streets, he felt that the pack was gaining. Ahead
+loomed something gray, a wall, the end of a blind alley. Scale it, or
+make a stand at the foot,--he debated, racing. Before the decision came,
+a man popped out of the darkness. Heywood shifted his grip, drew back
+the spear, but found the stranger bounding lightly alongside, and
+muttering,--
+
+"To the west-south, quick! A brother waits. I fool those who follow--"
+
+Obeying, Heywood dove to the left into the black slit of an alley, while
+the other fugitive pattered straight on into the seeming trap, with a
+yelp of encouragement to the band who swept after. The alley was too
+dark for speed. Heywood ran on, fell, rose and ran, fell again, losing
+his spear. A pair of trembling hands eagerly helped him to his feet.
+
+"My cozin's boy, he ron quick," said Wutzler. "Dose fellows, dey not
+catch him! Kom."
+
+They threaded the gloom swiftly. Wutzler, ready and certain of his
+ground, led the tortuous way through narrow and greasy galleries, along
+the side of a wall, and at last through an unlighted gate, free of
+the town.
+
+In the moonlight he stared at his companion, cackled, clapped his
+thighs, and bent double in unholy convulsions.
+
+"My gracious me!" He laughed immoderately. "Oh, I wait zo fearful, you
+kom zo fonny!" For a while he clung, shaking, to the young man's arm.
+"My friendt, zo fonny you look! My gootness me!" At last he regained
+himself, stood quiet, and added very pointedly, "What did _yow_ lern?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Heywood, angrily. "Nothing. Fragrant Ones! Not a bad
+name. Phew!--Oh, I say, what did they mean? What Black Dog is to bark?"
+
+"Black Dog? Black Dog iss cannon." The man became, once more, as keen as
+a gossip. "What cannon? When dey shoot him off?"
+
+"Can't tell," said his friend. "That's to be their signal."
+
+"I do not know," The conical hat wagged sagely. "I go find out." He
+pointed across the moonlit spaces. "Ofer dere iss your house. You can no
+more. _Schlafen Sie wohl_."
+
+The two men wrung each other's hands.
+
+"Shan't forget this, Wutz."
+
+"Oh, for me--all you haf done--" The outcast turned away, shaking his
+head sadly.
+
+Never did Heywood's fat water-jar glisten more welcome than when he
+gained the vaulted bath-room. He ripped off his blood-stained clothes,
+scrubbed the sacrificial clots from his hair, and splashed the cool
+water luxuriously over his exhausted body. When at last he had thrown a
+kimono about him, and wearily climbed the stairs, he was surprised to
+see Rudolph, in the white-washed room ahead, pacing the floor and
+ardently twisting his little moustache. As Heywood entered, he wheeled,
+stared long and solemnly.
+
+"I must wait to tell you." He stalked forward, and with his sound left
+hand grasped Heywood's right. "This afternoon, you--"
+
+"My dear boy, it's too hot. No speeches."
+
+But Rudolph's emotion would not be hindered.
+
+"This afternoon," he persisted, with tragic voice and eyes, "this
+afternoon I nearly was killed."
+
+"So was I.--Which seems to meet that." And Heywood pulled free.
+
+"Oh," cried Rudolph, fervently. "I know! I feel--If you knew what I--My
+life--"
+
+The weary stoic in the blue kimono eyed him very coldly, then plucked
+him by the sleeve.--"Come here, for a bit."
+
+Both men leaned from the window into the hot, airless night. A Chinese
+rebeck wailed, monotonous and nasal. Heywood pointed at the moon, which
+now hung clearly above the copper haze.
+
+"What do you see there?" he asked dryly.
+
+"The moon," replied his friend, wondering.
+
+"Good.--You know, I was afraid you might just see Rudie Hackh."
+
+The rebeck wailed a long complaint before he added:--
+
+"If I didn't like you fairly well--The point is--Good old Cynthia! That
+bally orb may not see one of us to-morrow night, next week, next
+quarter. 'Through this same Garden, and for us in vain.' Every man Jack.
+Let me explain. It will make you better company."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+THE WAR BOARD
+
+"Rigmarole?" drawled Heywood, and abstained from glancing at Chantel.
+"Dare say. However, Gilly, their rigmarole _may_ mean business. On that
+supposition, I made my notes urgent to you chaps."
+
+"Quite right," said Mr. Forrester, tugging his gray moustache, and
+studying the floor. "Obviously. Rigmarole or not, your plan is
+thoroughly sound: stock one house, and if the pinch comes, fortify."
+
+Chantel drummed on Heywood's long table, and smiled quaintly, with eyes
+which roved out at window, and from mast to bare mast of the few small
+junks that lay moored against the distant bank. He bore himself, to-day,
+like a lazy cock of the walk. The rest of the council, Nesbit, Teppich,
+Sturgeon, Kempner, and the great snow-headed padre, surrounded the table
+with heat-worn, thoughtful faces. When they looked up, their eyes went
+straight to Heywood at the head; so that, though deferring to his
+elders, the youngest man plainly presided.
+
+Chantel turned suddenly, merrily, his teeth flashing in a laugh.
+
+"If we are then afraid, let us all take a jonc down the river," he
+scoffed, "or the next vessel for Hongkong!"
+
+Gilly's tired, honest eyes saw only the plain statement.
+
+"Impossible." He shook his bullet head. "We can't run away from a rumor,
+you know. Can we, now? The women, perhaps. But we should lose face no
+end--horribly."
+
+"Let's come to facts," urged Heywood. "Arms, for example. What have we?
+To my knowledge, one pair of good rifles, mine and Sturgeon's.
+Ammunition--uncertain, but limited. Two revolvers: my Webley.450, and
+that little thing of Nesbit's, which is not man-stopping. Shot-guns?
+Every one but you, padre: fit only for spring snipe, anyway, or bamboo
+partridge. Hackh has just taken over, from this house, the only real
+weapons in the settlement--one dozen old Mausers, Argentine, calibre.765.
+My predecessor left 'em, and three cases of cartridges. I've kept
+the guns oiled, and will warrant the lot sound.--Now, who'll lend me
+spare coolies, and stuff for sand-bags?"
+
+"Over where?" puffed Sturgeon. "Where's he taking your Mausers?"
+
+"Nunnery, of course."
+
+"Oh, I say!" Mr. Forrester looked up, with an injured air. "As the
+senior here, except Dr. Earle, I naturally thought the choice would be
+my house."
+
+"Right!" cried two or three voices from the foot of the table. "It
+should be--Farthest off--"
+
+All talked at once, except Chantel, who eyed them leniently, and smiled
+as at so many absurd children. Kempner--a pale, dogged man, with a
+pompous white moustache which pouted and bristled while he spoke--rose
+and delivered a pointless oration. "Ignoring race and creed," he droned,
+"we must stand together--"
+
+Heywood balanced a pencil, twirled it, and at last took to drawing. On
+the polished wood he scratched, with great pains, the effigy of a pig,
+whose snout blared forth a gale of quarter-notes.
+
+"Whistle away!" he muttered; then resumed, as if no one had interrupted:
+"Very good of you, Gilly. But with your permission, I see five
+points.--Here's a rough sketch, made some time ago."
+
+He tossed on the table a sheet of paper. Forrester spread it, frowning,
+while the others leaned across or craned over his chair.
+
+"All out of whack, you see," explained the draughtsman; "but here are my
+points, Gilly. One: your house lies quite inland, with four sides to
+defend: the river and marsh give Rudie's but two and a fraction. Boats?
+Not hardly: we'd soon stop that, as you'll see, if they dare.
+Anyhow,--point two,--your house is all hillocks behind, and shops
+roundabout: here's just one low ridge, and the rest clear field. Third:
+the Portuguese built a well of sorts in the courtyard; water's deadly, I
+dare say, but your place has no well whatever. And as to four,
+suppose--in a sudden alarm, say, those cut off by land could run another
+half-chance to reach the place by river.--By the way, the nunnery has a
+bell to ring."
+
+Gilbert Forrester shoved the map along to his neighbor, and cleared his
+throat.
+
+"Gentlemen," he declared slowly, "you once did me the honor to say that
+in--in a certain event, you would consider me as acting head. Frankly, I
+confess, my plans were quite--ah!--vague. I wish to--briefly, to resign,
+in favor of this young--ah--bachelor."
+
+"Don't go rotting me," complained Heywood, and his sallow cheeks turned
+ruddy. "I merely bring up these points. And five is this: your
+compound's very cramped, where the nunnery could shelter the goodly
+blooming fellowship of native converts."
+
+Chantel laughed heartily, and stretched his legs at ease under the
+table.
+
+[Illustration: Portuguese Nunnery:--Sketch Map.]
+
+"What strategy!" he chuckled, preening his moustache. "Your mythical
+siege--it will be brief! For me, I vote no to that: no rice-Christians
+filling their bellies--eating us into a surrender!" He made a pantomime
+of chop-sticks. "A compound full, eating, eating!"
+
+One or two nodded, approving the retort. Heywood, slightly lifting his
+chin, stared at the speaker coldly, down the length of their
+council-board. The red in his cheeks burned darker.
+
+"Our everlasting shame, then," he replied quietly. "It will be
+everlasting, if we leave these poor devils in the lurch, after cutting
+them loose from their people. Excuse me, padre, but it's no time to
+mince our words. We made them strangers in their own land. Desert 'em?
+Damned if we do!"
+
+No one made reply. The padre, who had looked up, looked down quickly,
+musing, and smoothed his white hair with big fingers that
+somewhat trembled.
+
+"Besides," continued the speaker, in a tone of apology, "we'll need 'em
+to man the works. Meantime, you chaps must lend coolies, eh? Look here."
+With rising spirits, he traced an eager finger along the map. "I must
+run a good strong bamboo scaffold along the inside wall, with plenty of
+sand-bags ready for loopholing--specially atop the servants' quarters
+and pony-shed, and in that northeast angle, where we'll throw up a
+mound or platform.--What do you say? Suggestions, please!"
+
+Chantel, humming a tune, reached for his helmet, and rose. He paused,
+struck a match, and in an empty glass, shielding the flame against the
+breeze of the punkah, lighted a cigarette.
+
+"Since we have appointed our dictator," he began amiably, "we may
+repose--"
+
+From the landing, without, a coolie bawled impudently for the master of
+the house.
+
+"Wutzler!" said Heywood, jumping up. "I mean--his messenger."
+
+He was gone a noticeable time, but came back smiling.
+
+"Good news, Gilly." He held aloft a scrap of Chinese paper, scrawled on
+with pencil. "We need expect nothing these ten days. They wait for more
+ammunition--'more shoots,' the text has it. The Hak Kaú--their Black
+Dog--is a bronze cannon, nine feet long, cast at Rotterdam in 1607. He
+writes, 'I saw it in shed last night, but is gone to-day. O.W.'
+Gentlemen, for a timid man, our friend does not scamp his reports.
+Thorough, rather? Little O.W. is O.K."
+
+Chantel, still humming, had moved toward the door. All at once he
+halted, and stared from the landward window. Cymbals clashed
+somewhere below.
+
+"What's this?" he cried sharply. The noise drew nearer, more brazen,
+and with it a clatter of hoofs. "Here come swordsmen!"
+
+"To play with you, I suppose. Your fame has spread." Heywood spoke with
+a slow, mischievous drawl; but he crossed the room quickly. "What's up?"
+
+Below, by the open gate, a gay grotesque rider reined in a piebald pony,
+and leaning down, handed to the house-boy a ribbon of scarlet paper.
+Behind him, to the clash of cymbals, a file of men in motley robes
+swaggered into position, wheeled, and formed the ragged front of a
+Falstaff regiment. Overcome by the scarlet ribbon, the long-coated "boy"
+bowed, just as through the gate, like a top-heavy boat swept under an
+arch, came heaving an unwieldy screened chair, borne by four broad men:
+not naked and glistening coolies, but "Tail-less Horses" in proud
+livery. Before they could lower their shafts, Heywood ran clattering
+down the stairs.
+
+Slowly, cautiously, like a little fat old woman, there clambered out
+from the broadcloth box a rotund man, in flowing silks, and a conical,
+tasseled hat of fine straw. He waddled down the compound path, shading
+with his fan a shrewd, bland face, thoughtful, yet smooth as a babe's.
+
+The watchers in the upper room saw Heywood greet him with extreme
+ceremony, and heard the murmur of "Pray you, I pray you," as with
+endless bows and deprecations the two men passed from sight, within the
+house. A long time dragged by. The visitor did not join the company, but
+from another room, now and then, sounded his clear-pitched voice, full
+of odd and courteous modulations. When at last the conference ended, and
+their unmated footsteps crossed the landing, a few sentences echoed from
+the stairway.
+
+"That is all," declared the voice, pleasantly. "The Chow Ceremonial
+says, 'That man is unwise who knowingly throws away precious things.'
+And in the Analects we read, 'There is merit in dispatch.'"
+
+Heywood's reply was lost, except the words, "stupid people."
+
+"In every nation," agreed the placid voice. "It is true. What says the
+Viceroy of Hupeh: 'They see a charge of bird-shot, and think they are
+tasting broiled owl.'--Walk slowly!"
+
+"A safe walk, Your Excellency."
+
+The cymbals struck up, the cavalcade, headed by ragamuffin lictors with
+whips, went swaying past the gate. Heywood, when he returned,
+was grinning.
+
+"Wonderful old chap!" he exclaimed. "Hates this station, I fancy, much
+as we hate it."
+
+"Anything to concern us?" asked Gilly.
+
+"Intimated he could beat me at chess," laughed the young man, "and will
+bet me a jar of peach wine to a box of Manila cigars!"
+
+Chantel, from a derisive dumb-show near the window, had turned to waddle
+solemnly down the room. At sight of Heywood's face he stopped guiltily.
+
+"Chantel!" All the laughter was gone from the voice and the hard gray
+eyes. "Yesterday we humored you tin-soldier fashion, but to-day let's
+put away childish things.--I like that magistrate, plainly, a damned
+deal better than I like you. When you or I show one half his ability,
+we're free to mock him--in my house."
+
+For the first time within the memory of any man present, the mimic
+wilted.
+
+"I--I did not know," he stammered, "that old man was your friend." Very
+quiet, and a little flushed, he took his seat among the others.
+
+"I like him no end." Still more quiet, Heywood appealed to the company.
+"Part for his hard luck--stuck down, a three-year term, in this
+neglected hole. Enemies in power, higher up. Fang, the Sword-Pen, in
+great favor up there.--What? Oh, said nothing directly, of course.
+Friendly call, and all that. But his indirections speak straight enough.
+We understood each other. The dregs of the town are all stirred
+up--bottomside topside--danger point. He, in case--you know--can't give
+us any help. No means, no recourse. His chief's fairly itching to
+cashier him.--Spoke highly of your hospital work, padre, but said, 'Even
+good deeds may be misconstrued.'--In short, gentlemen, without saying a
+word, he tells us honestly in plain terms, 'Sorry, but look out for
+yourselves.'"
+
+A beggar rattled his bowl of cash in the road, below; from up the river
+sounded wailing cries.
+
+"Did he mention," said the big padre, presently, "the case against my
+man, Chok Chung?"
+
+Heywood's eyes became evasive, his words reluctant.
+
+"The magistrate dodged that--that unpleasant subject. The case was
+forced on him. Some understrapper tried it. Let's be fair."
+
+Dr. Earle's great elbows left the board. Without rising, he seemed to
+grow in bulk and stature, and send his vision past the company, into
+those things which are not, to confound the things which are.
+
+"For myself, it does not matter. 'He buries His workmen, but carries on
+His work.'" The man spoke in a heavy, broken voice, as though it were
+his body that suffered. "But it comes hard to hear, from a young man, so
+good a friend, after many years"--The deep-set eyes returned, and with a
+sudden lustre, made a sharp survey from face to face. "If I have made my
+flock a remnant--aliens--rejected--tell me, what shall I do? Tell me. I
+have shut eyes and conscience, and never meddled, never!--not even when
+money was levied for the village idols. And here's a man beaten, cast
+into prison--"
+
+He shoved both fists out on the table, and bowed his white head.
+
+"My safety is nothing. But yours--and his.--To keep one, I desert the
+other. Either way." The padre groaned. "What must I choose?"
+
+"We're all quite helpless," said Heywood, gently. "Quite. It's a long
+way to the nearest gunboat."
+
+"Tell me," repeated the other, stubbornly.
+
+At the same moment it happened that the cries came louder along the
+river-bank, and that some one bounded up the stairs.
+
+The runner was Rudolph. All morning he had gone about his errands very
+calmly, playing the man of action, in a new philosophy learned
+overnight. But now he forgot to imitate his teacher, and darted in, so
+headlong that all the dogs came with him, bouncing and barking.
+
+"Look," he called, stumbling toward the farther window, while Flounce
+the terrier and a wonk puppy ran nipping at his heels. "Come, look at
+them! Out on the river!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+THE SPARE MAN
+
+Beyond the scant greenery of Heywood's garden--a ropy little banyan, a
+low rank of glossy whampee leaves, and the dusty sage-green tops of
+stunted olives--glared the river. Wide, savage sunlight lay so hot upon
+it, that to aching eyes the water shone solid, like a broad road of
+yellow clay. Only close at hand and by an effort of vision, appeared the
+tiny, quiet lines of the irresistible flood pouring toward the sea;
+there whipped into the pool of banyan shade black snippets and tails of
+reflection, darting ceaselessly after each other like a shoal of
+frightened minnows. But elsewhere the river lay golden, solid, and
+painfully bright. Things afloat, in the slumberous procession of all
+Eastern rivers, swam downward imperceptibly, now blurred, now outlined
+in corrosive sharpness.
+
+The white men stood crowding along the spacious window. The dogs barked
+outrageously; but at last above their din floated, as before, the high
+wailing cries. A heaping cairn of round-bellied, rosy-pink earthen jars
+came steering past, poled by a naked statue of new copper, who balanced
+precariously on the edge of his hidden raft. No sound came from him; nor
+from the funeral barge which floated next, where still figures in white
+robes guarded the vermilion drapery of a bier, decked with vivid green
+boughs. All these were silent.
+
+"No, above!" cried Rudolph, pointing.
+
+After the mourners' barge, at some distance, came hurrying a boat
+crowded with shining yellow bodies and dull blue jackets. Long bamboo
+poles plied bumping along her gunwale, sticking into the air all about
+her, many and loose and incoordinate, like the ribs of an unfinished
+basket. From the bow spurted a white puff of smoke. The dull report of a
+musket lagged across the water.
+
+The bullet skipped like a schoolboy's pebble, ripping out little rags of
+white along that surface of liquid clay.
+
+The line of fire thus revealed, revealed the mark. Untouched, a black
+head bobbed vigorously in the water, some few yards before the boat. The
+saffron crew, poling faster, yelled and cackled at so clean a miss,
+while a coolie in the bow reloaded his matchlock.
+
+The fugitive head labored like that of a man not used to swimming, and
+desperately spent. It now gave a quick twist, and showed a distorted
+face, almost of the same color with the water.
+
+The mouth gaped black in a sputtering cry, then closed choking,
+squirted out water, and gaped once more, to wail clearly:--
+
+"I am Jesus Christ!"
+
+In the broad, bare daylight of the river, this lonely and sudden
+blasphemy came as though a person in a dream might declare himself to a
+waking audience of skeptics. The cry, sharp with forlorn hope, rang like
+an appeal.
+
+"Why--look," stammered Heywood. "He sees us--heading here. Look,
+it's--Quick! let me out!"
+
+Just as he turned to elbow through his companions, and just as the cry
+sounded again, the matchlock blazed from the bow. No bullet skipped. The
+swimmer, who had reached the shallows, suddenly rose with an incredible
+heave, like a leaping salmon, flung one bent arm up and back in the
+gesture of the Laocoön, and pitched forward with a turbid splash. The
+quivering darkness under the banyan blotted everything: death had
+dispersed the black minnows there, in oozy wriggles of shadow; but next
+moment the fish-tail stripes chased in a more lively shoal. The gleaming
+potter, below his rosy cairn, stared. The mourners forgot their grief.
+
+Heywood, after his impulse of rescue, stood very quiet.
+
+"You saw," he repeated dully. "You all saw."
+
+The clutching figure, bolt upright in the soaked remnant of prison
+rags, had in that leap and fall shown himself for Chok Chung, the
+Christian. He had sunk in mystery, to become at one forever with the
+drunken cormorant-fisher.
+
+Obscene delight raged in the crowded boat, with yells and laughter, and
+flourish of bamboo poles.
+
+"Come away from the window," said Heywood; and then to the white-haired
+doctor: "Your question's answered, padre. Strange, to come so quick." He
+jerked his thumb back toward the river. "And that's only first blood."
+
+The others had broken into wrangling.
+
+"Escaped? Nonsense--Cat--and--mouse game, I tell you; those devils let
+him go merely to--We'll never know--Of course! Plain as your nose--To
+stand by, and never lift a hand! Oh, it's--Rot! Look here,
+why--Acquitted, then set on him--But we'll _never_ know!--Fang watching
+on the spot. Trust him!"
+
+A calm "boy," in sky-blue gown, stood beside them, ready to speak. The
+dispute paused, while they turned for his message. It was a
+disappointing trifle: Mrs. Forrester waited below for her husband, to
+walk home.
+
+"Can't leave now," snapped Gilly. "I'll be along, tell her--"
+
+"Had she better go alone?" suggested Heywood.
+
+"No; right you are." The other swept a fretful eye about the company.
+"But this business begins to look urgent.--Here, somebody we can spare.
+You go, Hackh, there's a good chap."
+
+Chantel dropped the helmet he had caught up. Bowing stiffly, Rudolph
+marched across the room and down the stairs. His face, pale at the late
+spectacle, had grown red and sulky, "Can spare me, can you?--I'm the
+one." He descended, muttering.
+
+Viewing himself thus, morosely, as rejected of men, he reached the
+compound gate to fare no better with the woman. She stood waiting in the
+shadow of the wall; and as he drew unwillingly near, the sight of
+her--to his shame and quick dismay--made his heart leap in welcome. She
+wore the coolest and severest white, but at her throat the same small
+furbelow, every line of which he had known aboard ship, in the days of
+his first exile and of his recent youth. It was now as though that youth
+came flooding back to greet her.
+
+"Good-morning." He forgot everything, except that for a few priceless
+moments they would be walking side by side.
+
+She faced him with a start, never so young and beautiful as now--her
+blue eyes wide, scornful, and blazing, her cheeks red and lips
+trembling, like a child ready to cry.
+
+"I did not want _you_" she said curtly.
+
+"Nor did they." Pride forged the retort for him, at a blow. He explained
+in the barest of terms, while she eyed him steadily, with every sign of
+rising temper.
+
+"I can spare you, too," she whipped out; then turned to walk away,
+holding her helmet erect, in the poise of a young goddess, pert
+but warlike.
+
+This double injustice left Rudolph chafing. In two strides, however, he
+had overtaken her.
+
+"I am under orders," he stated grimly.
+
+Her pace gradually slackened in the growing heat; but she went forward
+with her eyes fixed on the littered, sunken flags of their path. This
+rankling silence seemed to him more unaccountable and deadly than all
+former mischances, and left him far more alone. From the sultry tops of
+bamboos, drooping like plants in an oven, an amorous multitude of
+cicadas maintained the buzzing torment of steel on emery wheels, as
+though the universal heat had chafed and fretted itself into a dry,
+feverish utterance. Once Mrs. Forrester looked about, quick and angry,
+like one ready to choke that endless voice. But for the rest, the two
+strange companions moved steadily onward.
+
+In an alley of checkered light a buffalo with a wicker nose-ring, and
+heavy, sagging horns that seemed to jerk his head back in agony, heaved
+toward them, ridden by a naked yellow infant in a nest-like saddle of
+green fodder. Scenting with fright the disgusting presence of white
+aliens, the sleep-walking monster shied, opened his eyes, and lowered
+his blue muzzle as if to charge. There was a pause, full of menace.
+
+"Don't run!" said Rudolph, and catching the woman roughly about the
+shoulders, thrust her behind him. She clutched him tightly by the
+wounded arm.
+
+The buffalo stared irresolute, with evil eyes. The naked boy in the
+green nest brushed a swarm of flies from his handful of sticky
+sweetmeats, looked up, pounded the clumsy shoulders, and shrilled a
+command. Staring doubtfully, and trembling, the buffalo swayed past, the
+wrinkled armor of his gray hide plastered with dry mud as with yellow
+ochre. To the slow click of hoofs, the surly monster, guided by a little
+child, went swinging down the pastoral shade,--ancient yet living shapes
+from a picture immemorial in art and poetry.
+
+"Please," begged Rudolph, trying with his left hand to loosen her grip.
+"Please, that hurts."
+
+For a second they stood close, their fingers interlacing. With a touch
+of contempt, he found that she still trembled, and drew short breath.
+Her eyes slowly gathered his meaning.
+
+"Oh, that!" She tore her hand loose, as though burned. "That! It _was_
+all true, then. I forgot."
+
+She caught aside her skirts angrily, and started forward in all her
+former disdain. But this, after their brief alliance, was not to be
+tolerated.
+
+"What was all true?" he insisted. "You shall not treat me so. If anybody
+has a right--"
+
+After several paces, she flashed about at him in a whirl of words:--
+
+"All alike, every one of you! And I was fool enough to think you were
+different!" The conflict in her eyes showed real, beyond suspicion. "He
+told me all about it. Last evening. And you dare talk of rights, and
+come following me here--"
+
+"Lucky I did," retorted Rudolph, with sudden spirit; and holding out his
+wounded arm, indignantly: "That scratch, if you know how it came--"
+
+"I know, perfectly." She stared as at some crowning impudence. "He was
+chicken-hearted. You came off cheaply.--I know all you said. But the one
+thing I'll never understand, is where you found the courage, after he
+struck you, at the club. You'll always have _that_ to admire!"
+
+"After he struck"--A light broke in on Rudolph, somehow. "Chantel? Oh,
+that liar!"
+
+He wheeled and started to go back.
+
+"Wait, stop!" she called, in a strangely altered voice, which brought
+him up short. "They're all with him now. You can't--What did you mean?"
+
+He explained, sulkily at first, but ending in a kind of generous rage.
+"So I couldn't even stand up to him. And except for Maurice Heywood--Oh,
+you need not frown; he's the best friend I ever had."
+
+Mrs. Forrester had walked on, with the same cloudy aspect, the same
+light, impatient step. He felt the greater surprise when, suddenly
+turning, she raised toward him her odd, enticing, pointed face, and the
+friendly mischief of her eyes.
+
+"The best?" she echoed, in the same half-whisper as when she had
+flattered him, that afternoon in the dusky well of the pagoda stairway.
+"The very best friend? Don't you think you have a better?"
+
+Rudolph stared.
+
+"Oh, you funny, funny boy!" she cried, with a bewildering laugh, of
+delight and pride. "I hate people all prim and circumspect, and
+you--You'd have flown back there straight at him, before my--before all
+the others. That's why I like you so!--But you must leave that horrid,
+lying fellow to me."
+
+All unaware, she had led him along the blinding white wall of the
+Forrester compound, and halted in the hot shadow that lay under the
+tiled gateway. As though timidly, her hand stole up and rested on
+his forearm.
+
+"So sorry." The confined space, narrow and covered, gave to her voice a
+plaintive ring. "That's twice you protected me, and I hurt you.--You
+_are_ different. This doesn't happen between people, often. When you
+did--that, for me, yesterday, didn't it seem different and rather
+splendid, and--like a book?"
+
+"It seemed nonsense," replied Rudolph, sturdily. "The heat. We were
+fools."
+
+She laughed again, and at close range watched him from under consciously
+drooping lashes that almost veiled a liquid brilliancy. Everywhere the
+cicadas kept the heat vibrating with their strident buzz. It recalled
+some other widespread mist of treble music, long ago. The trilling of
+frogs, that had been, before.
+
+"You dear, brave boy," she said slowly. "You're so honest, too. I'm not
+ungrateful. Do you know what I'd like--Oh, there's the _amah!"_
+
+She drew back, with an impatient gesture.
+
+"That stupid, fat Mrs. Earle's waiting for me.--I hate to leave you."
+The stealthy brightness of her admiration changed to a slow, inscrutable
+appeal. "Don't forget. Haven't you--a better friend?" And with an
+instant, bold, and tantalizing grimace, she had vanished within.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To his homeward march, her cicadas shrilled the music of fifes. He, the
+despised, the man to spare, now cocked up his helmet like fortune's
+minion, dizzy with new honors. Nobody had ever praised him to his face.
+And now she, she of all the world, had spoken words which he feared and
+longed to believe, and which even said still less than her searching and
+mysterious look.
+
+On the top of his exultation, he reached the nunnery, and entered his
+big, bare living-room, to find Heywood stretched in a wicker chair.
+
+"Hallo, Rudie! I've asked myself to tiffin," drawled the lounger, from a
+little tempest of blue smoke, tossed by the punkah. "How's the fair
+Bertha?--Mausers all right? And by the way, did you make that inventory
+of provisions?"
+
+Rudolph faced him with a sudden conviction of guilt, of treachery to a
+leader.
+
+"Yes," he stammered; "I--I'll get it for you."
+
+He passed into his bedroom, caught up the written list from a table, and
+for a moment stood as if dreaming. Before him the Mausers, polished and
+orderly, shone in their new rack against the lime-coated wall. Though
+appearing to scan them, Rudolph saw nothing but his inward confusion.
+"After all this man did for me," he mused. What had loosed the bond,
+swept away all the effects?
+
+A sound near the window made him turn. An imp in white and red livery,
+Pêng, the little billiard-marker from the club, stood hurling things
+violently into the outer glare.
+
+"What thing you do?" called Rudolph, sharply.
+
+Some small but heavy object clattered on the floor. The urchin stooped,
+snatched it up, and flung it hurtling clean over the garden to the
+river. He turned, grinning amiably. "Goo-moh? ning-seh. How too you
+too," he chanted. "I am welly? glat to-see you." A boat-coolie, he
+explained, had called this house bad names. He, Pêng, threw stones.
+Bad man.
+
+"Out of here, you rascal!" Rudolph flicked a riding-whip at the
+scampering legs, as the small defender of his honor bolted for
+the stairs.
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+Heywood appeared promptly at the door.
+
+From the road, below, a gleeful voice piped:--
+
+"Goat-men! Baby-killers!"
+
+In the noon blaze, Pêng skipped derisively, jeered at them, performed a
+brief but indecorous pantomime, and then, kicking up his heels with joy,
+scurried for his life.
+
+"Chucked his billet," said Heywood, without surprise. "Little devil, I
+always thought--What's missing?"
+
+Rudolph scanned his meagre belongings, rummaged his dressing-table,
+opened a wardrobe.
+
+"Nothing," he answered. "A boat-coolie--"
+
+But Heywood had darted to the rack of Mausers, knelt, and sprung up,
+raging.
+
+"Side-bolts! Man," he cried, in a voice that made Rudolph jump,--"man,
+why didn't you stop him? The side-bolts, all but two.--Young heathen,
+he's crippled us: one pair of rifles left."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+OFF DUTY
+
+The last of the sunlight streamed level through a gap in the western
+ridges. It melted, with sinuous, tender shadows, the dry contour of
+field and knoll, and poured over all the parching land a liquid,
+undulating grace. Like the shadow of clouds on ripe corn, the red tiles
+of the village roofs patched the countryside. From the distant sea had
+come a breath of air, cool enough to be felt with gratitude, yet so
+faint as neither to disturb the dry pulsation of myriad insect-voices,
+nor to blur the square mirrors of distant rice-fields, still tropically
+blue or icy with reflected clouds.
+
+Miss Drake paused on the knoll, and looked about her.
+
+"This remains the same, doesn't it, for all our troubles?" she said;
+then to herself, slowly, "'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.'"
+
+Heywood made no pretense of following her look.
+
+"'Dear Nun,'" he blurted; "no, how does it go again?--'dear child, that
+walkest with me here--'"
+
+The girl started down the slope, with the impatience of one whose mood
+is frustrated. The climate had robbed her cheeks of much color, but not,
+it seemed, of all.
+
+"Your fault," said Heywood, impenitent. "Merely to show you. I could
+quote, once."
+
+"Aged Man!" She laughed, as though glad of this turn. "I like you better
+in prose. Go on, please, where we left off. What did you do then?"
+
+Heywood's smile, half earnest, half mischievous, obediently faded.
+
+"Oh, that! Why, then, of course, I discharged Rudolph's gatekeeper, put
+a trusty of my own in his place, sent out to hire a diver, and turned
+all hands to hunting. 'Obviously,' as Gilly would say.--We picked up two
+side-bolts in the garden, by the wall, one in the mud outside, and three
+the diver got in shallow water. Total recovered, six; plus two Pêng had
+no time for, eight. We can ill spare four guns, though; and the affair
+shows they keep a beastly close watch."
+
+"Yes," said Miss Drake, absently; then drew a slow breath. "Pêng was the
+most promising pupil we had."
+
+"He was," stated her companion, "a little, unmitigated, skipping,
+orange-tawny goblin!"
+
+She made no reply. As they footed slowly along the winding path,
+Flounce, the fox-terrier, who had scouted among strange clumps of
+bamboo, now rejoined them briskly, cantering with her fore-legs
+delicately stiff and joyful. Miss Drake stooped to pat her, saying:--
+
+"Poor little dog. Little Foreign Dog!" She rose with a sigh, to add
+incongruously, "Oh, the things we dream beforehand, and then the things
+that happen!"
+
+"I don't know." Heywood looked at her keenly. "Sometimes they're the
+same."
+
+The jealous terrier scored her dusty paws down his white drill, from
+knee to ankle, before he added:--
+
+"You know how the Queen of Heaven won her divinity."
+
+"Another," said the girl, "of your heathen stories?"
+
+"Rather a pretty one," he retorted. "It happened in a seaport, a good
+many hundred miles up the coast. A poor girl lived there, with her
+mother, in a hut. One night a great gale blew, so that everybody was
+anxious. Three junks were out somewhere at sea, in that storm. The girl
+lay there in the dark. Her sweetheart on board, it would be in a Western
+story; but these were only her friends, and kin, and townsmen, that were
+at stake. So she lay there in the hut, you see, and couldn't rest. And
+then it seemed to her, in the dark, that she was swimming out through
+the storm, out and out, and not in the least afraid. She had become
+larger, and more powerful, somehow, than the rain, or the dark, or the
+whole ocean; for when she came upon the junks tossing there, she took
+one in each hand, the third in her mouth, and began to swim for home.
+Just retrieved 'em, you know. But then across the storm she heard her
+mother calling in the dark, and had to open her mouth to answer. So she
+lost that junk."
+
+"Well, then her spirit was back in the hut. But next day the two junks
+came in; the third one, never. And for that dream, she was made, after
+her death, the great and merciful Queen of Heaven."
+
+As Heywood ended, they were entering a pastoral village, near the town,
+but hidden low under great trees, ancient and widely gnarled.
+
+"You told that," said Miss Drake, "as though it had really happened."
+
+"If you believe, these things have reality; if not, they have none." His
+gesture, as he repeated the native maxim, committed him to neither side.
+
+Miss Drake looked back toward the hills.
+
+"Her dream was play, compared to--some."
+
+"That," he answered, "is abominably true."
+
+The curt, significant tone made her glance at him quickly. In her dark
+eyes there was no impatience, but only trouble.
+
+"We do better," she said, "when we are both busy."
+
+He nodded, as though reluctantly agreeing, not so much to the words as
+to the silence which followed.
+
+The evening peace, which lay on the fields and hills, had flooded even
+the village streets. Without pause, without haste, the endless labor of
+the day went on as quiet as a summer cloud. Meeting or overtaking,
+coolies passed in single file, their bare feet slapping the enormous
+flags of antique, sunken granite, their twin baskets bobbing and
+creaking to the rhythm of their wincing trot. The yellow muscles rippled
+strongly over straining ribs, as with serious faces, and slant eyes
+intent on their path, they chanted in pairs the ageless refrain, the
+call and answer which make burdens lighter:--
+
+
+"O heh!--O ha?
+ O ho ho!
+ O heh!--O ha?
+ O ho ho!"
+
+
+From hidden places sounded the whir of a jade-cutter's wheel, a
+cobbler's rattle, or the clanging music of a forge. Yet everywhere the
+slow movements, the faded, tranquil colors,--dull blue garments, dusky
+red tiles, deep bronze-green foliage overhanging a vista of subdued
+white and gray,--consorted with the spindling shadows and low-streaming
+vesper light. Keepers of humble shops lounged in the open air with their
+gossips, smoking bright pipes of the Yunnan white copper, nodding and
+blinking gravely. Above them, no less courteous and placid, little
+doorway shrines besought the Earth-God to lead the Giver of Wealth
+within. Sometimes, where a narrow lane gaped opposite a door, small
+stone lions sat grinning upon pillars, to scare away the Secret Arrow of
+misfortune. But these rarely: the village seemed a happy place, favored
+of the Influences. In the grateful coolness men came and went, buying,
+joking, offering neighborly advice to chance-met people.
+
+A plump woman, who carried two tiny silver fish in an immense flat
+basket, grinned at Miss Drake, and pointed roguishly.
+
+"See the two boats going by!" she called. "Her feet are bigger than my
+Golden Lilies!" And laughing, she wriggled her own dusty toes, strong,
+free, and perfect in modeling.
+
+An old, withered barber looked up from shaving a blue forehead, under a
+tree.
+
+"Their women," he growled, "are shameless, and walk everywhere!"
+
+But a stern man, bearing a palm-leaf fan and a lark in a cage, frowned
+him down.
+
+"She brought my son safe out of the Three Sicknesses," he declared.
+"Mind your trade, Catcher of Lively Ones!" Then bending over the cage,
+with solicitude, he began gently to fan the lark. As Heywood and the
+girl paused beside him, he glanced up, and smiled gravely. "I give my
+pet his airing," he said; and then, quickly but quietly, "When you reach
+the town, do not pass through the West Quarter. It is full of
+evil-minded persons. Their placards are posted."
+
+A shrill trio of naked boys came racing and squabbling, to offer
+grasshoppers for sale.
+
+"We have seen no placards," replied Heywood.
+
+"You will to-morrow," said the owner of the lark, calmly; and squatting,
+became engrossed in poking a grasshopper between the brown, varnished
+splints of the cage. "Maker of Music, here is your evening rice."
+
+The two companions passed on, with Flounce timidly at heel.
+
+"You see," Heywood broke out. "Warnings everywhere. Now please, won't
+you listen to my advice? No telling when the next ship _will_ call, but
+when it does--"
+
+"I can't run away." She spoke as one clinging to a former answer. "I
+must stand by my dream, such as it used to be--and even such as it is."
+
+He eyed her sadly, shook his head, and said no more. For a moment they
+halted, where the path broadened on a market-place, part shade, part
+luminous with golden dust. A squad of lank boys, kicking miraculously
+with flat upturned soles, kept a wicker ball shining in the air, as true
+and lively as a plaything on a fountain-jet. Beyond, their tiny juniors,
+girls and boys knee-high, and fat tumbling babies in rainbow finery, all
+hand-locked and singing, turned their circle inside out and back again,
+in the dizzy graces of the "Water Wheel." Other boys, and girls still
+trousered and queued like boys, played at hopscotch, in and out among
+shoes that lay across the road. All traffic, even the steady trotting
+coolies, fetched a lenient compass roundabout.
+
+"Lucky Hand, Lucky Hand! Allow me to pass," begged a coffin-maker's man,
+bent under a plank. "These Long-Life boards are heavy."
+
+"Ho, Lame Chicken!" called another, blocked by the hop-scotch. He was a
+brown grass-cutter, who grinned, and fondled a smoky cloth that
+buzzed--some tribe of wild bees, captured far afield. "Ho, Lame Chicken!
+Do not bump me. They will sting."
+
+He came through safely; for at the same moment the musical "Cling-clank"
+of a sweetmeat-seller's bell turned the game into a race. The way was
+clear, also, for a tiny, aged collector of paper, flying the gay flag of
+an "Exalted Literary Society," and plodding, between two great baskets,
+on his pious rounds. "Revere and spare," he piped, at intervals,--
+"revere and spare the Written Word!"
+
+All the bright picture lingered with the two alien wayfarers, long after
+they had passed and the sun had withdrawn from their path. In the hoary
+peace of twilight,--
+
+"What can _we_ do here?" the girl cried abruptly. "There--I never meant
+to say it. But it runs in my head all the time. I work and work, to keep
+it down. What can we do here?"
+
+Heywood watched her face, set straight before them, and now more clearly
+cut in the failing light. Were there only pride in those fine and
+resolute lines, it might have been a face from some splendid coin, or
+medal of victory.
+
+"You work too hard," he said. "Think, instead, of all the good--"
+
+But at that she seemed to wince.
+
+"The good? As if there weren't dark streets and crooked children at
+home! Oh, the pride and ignorance that sent me here!" She spoke quietly,
+with a kind of wonder. "Just blind, ignorant feelings, I took them
+for--for something too great and mysterious. It's all very strange to
+look back on, and try to put into words. I remember painted glass, and
+solemn music--and thinking--then!--that I knew this lovely and terrible
+world--and its Maker and Master." She looked down the dusky lanes,
+where glowworm lanterns began to bob and wink. "Oh, this land! where you
+see the days running into years!"
+
+"The Dragon's a wise old beast," he ventured. "He teaches--something."
+
+She assented gravely:--
+
+"And in those days I thought it was a dark continent--of lost souls."
+
+"There are no dark continents," declared Heywood suddenly, in a broken
+voice. "The heart of one man--can hold more darkness--You would never
+see into it--"
+
+"Don't!" she cried sharply. "What did we promise?"
+
+They stood close in the dusk, and a tremor, a wave, passed through them
+both.
+
+"I forgot--I couldn't help"--he stammered; then, as they stumbled
+forward, he regained his former tone, keen and ready. "Mustn't get to
+fussing about our work, must we?--Curious thing: speaking of dreams, you
+know. The other night I thought you were somewhere out on board a junk,
+and Flounce with you. I swam like anything, miles and miles, but
+couldn't get out to you. Worked like steam, and no headway. Flounce knew
+I was coming, but you didn't. Deuced odd, how real it seemed."
+
+She laughed, as though they had walked past some danger.
+
+"And speaking of dragons," she rejoined. "They _do_ help. The man in
+the story, that dipped in dragon's blood, was made invulnerable."
+
+"Oh?" He stood plainly at a loss. "Oh, I see. German, wasn't he?--Pity
+they didn't pop Rudie Hackh in!"
+
+Her swift upward glance might have been admiration, if she had not
+said:--
+
+"Your mind works very slowly."
+
+"Oh?" Again he paused, as though somewhat hurt; then answered
+cheerfully: "Dare say. Always did. Thought at first you meant the
+rattan-juice kind, from Sumatra."
+
+The gate of the town yawned black. From the streets glimmered a few
+lanterns, like candles in a long cave. But shunning these unfriendly
+corridors, he led her roundabout, now along the walls, now through the
+dim ways of an outlying hamlet. A prolonged shriek of growing fright and
+anguish came slowly toward them--the cry of a wheelbarrow carrying the
+great carcass of a pig, waxy white and waxy red, like an image from a
+chamber of horrors. In the blue twilight, fast deepening, the most
+familiar things became grotesque. A woman's voice telling stories behind
+shadow pictures, and the capricious play of the black puppets on her
+lighted screen, had the effect of incantation. Before the booth of a
+dentist, the long strings of black teeth swayed in the lantern-glow,
+rattling, like horrid necklaces of cannibals. And from a squat
+den--where on a translucent placard in the dull window flickered the
+words "Foreign Earth," and the guttering door-lantern hinted "As You
+Like It"--there came a sweet, insidious, potent smell that seemed more
+poisonous than mere opium.
+
+"Let's go faster," said the girl. "Somehow, the dark makes me uneasy
+to-night."
+
+Skirting the town, they struck at last the open road beyond, and saw
+against a fading sky the low black bulk of the nunnery, pierced with
+orange squares. Past its landward wall, lanterns moved slowly, clustered
+here and there by twos and threes, and dispersed. Cackling argument came
+from the ditch, wherever the lantern-bearers halted; and on the face of
+the wall, among elbowing shadows, shone dim strips of scarlet. Both
+pillars of the gate were plastered with them.
+
+"Placards," said Heywood. "Things are ripening fast." Lighting match
+from match, he studied the long red scrolls, crowded with neat rows of
+symbols. He read them off slowly.
+
+'The Garden of the Three Exquisites.'--Pshaw! that's a theatre notice:
+enterprising manager.--Ah, more like it. Long preamble, regular
+trimetrical platitudes--here we are:--
+
+"'These Red-Bristled Ghosts teach their dupes to break the ancestral
+tablets, and to worship the picture of a naked infant, which points one
+finger toward heaven, another toward earth.--To each man entering the
+False Religion, a pill is given which confuses and darkens the
+mind.--Why they dig out babies' eyes: from one hundred pounds of Chinese
+lead can be extracted seven pounds of silver, and the remaining
+ninety-three pounds can be sold at the original cost. This silver can be
+extracted only by the elixir of black eyes. The green eyes of barbarians
+are of no use.'--Really, what follows is too--er--obscure. But here's
+the close: 'Tao-tais of the villages, assemble your population.
+Patriots, join! Let us hurl back these wizard-beasts beyond the oceans,
+to take their place among the strange things of creation!'"
+
+"And the big characters," she added, "the big characters you tried to
+hide, are 'Kill' and 'Burn'?"
+
+Gray eyes and dark eyes met steadily, while the last match, reddening
+the blood in his fingers, slowly burned out.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+KAÚ FAI
+
+At the top of the nunnery stairs, Rudolph met them with awkward
+ceremony, and with that smiling air of encouragement which a nurse might
+use in trying cheerfully to deceive a sick man. Heywood laughed, without
+mercy, at this pious fraud.
+
+"Hallo, you Red-Bristled Ghost!" he cried. "We came early--straight from
+our walk. Are the rest coming? And did my cook arrive to help yours?"
+
+Their host, carried by assault, at once became less mournful.
+
+"The cook is here," he replied, "by the kitchen-sounds. They disagree, I
+think. I have asked everybody. We should have a full dinner-table."
+
+"Good," said his friend; and then whispering, as they followed Miss
+Drake to the living-room, "I say, don't act as though you expected the
+ghost of Banquo."
+
+In the bare, white loft, by candle-light, Sturgeon sat midway in some
+long and wheezy tale, to which the padre and his wife listened with true
+forbearance. Greetings over, the stodgy annalist continued. The story
+was forgotten as soon as ended; talk languished; and even by the quaking
+light of the candles, it was plain that the silence was no mere waiting
+solemnity before meat, but a period of tension.
+
+The relief came oddly. Up from the road sounded a hubbub of voices, the
+tramp of feet, and loud halloos.
+
+"By Jove!" cried Sturgeon, like a man who fears the worst; and for all
+his bulk, he was first at the window.
+
+A straggling file of lanterns, borne by some small army, came jogging
+and crowding to a halt under the walls. Yellow faces gleamed faintly,
+bare heads bobbed, and men set down burdens, grunting. Among the
+vanguard an angry voice scolded in a strange tongue. "_Burra suar!_" it
+raged; then hailed imperiously, "_Ko hai?_"
+
+Where the lanterns clustered brightest, an active little figure in white
+waved a helmet, crying,--
+
+"On deck! Where the devil does Maurice Heywood live?"
+
+"I'm up here," called that young man.
+
+For reply, the stranger began to skip among his cohorts, jerking out his
+white legs like a dancing marionette. Then, with a sudden drop-kick, he
+sent the helmet flickering high into the darkness over the wall.
+
+"Here we come!" he shouted, in hilarious warning. The squabbling
+retinue surged after him through the gate, and one by one the lanterns
+disappeared under the covered way.
+
+"It's the captain!" laughed Heywood, in amazement. "Kneebone--ashore! He
+can't be sober!"
+
+All stared; for Captain Kneebone, after one historically brief and
+outspoken visit, had never in all these years set foot in the port. The
+two young men hurried to the stairs.
+
+Chinamen and lanterns crowded the courtyard, stuffed the passage, and
+still came straggling in at the gate. By the noise and clatter, it might
+have been a caravan, or a band of half-naked robbers bringing plunder.
+Everywhere, on the stone flags, coolies were dumping down bundles,
+boxes, jute-bags crammed with heavy objects. Among them, still brawling
+in bad Hindustani, the little captain gave his orders. At sight of
+Heywood, however, he began once more to caper, with extravagant
+grimaces. By his smooth, ruddy face, and tunic of purest white, he
+seemed a runaway parson gone farther wrong than ever.
+
+"I've come to stay a month!" he cried; and dancing up, caught Heywood's
+hands and whirled him about. "I was fair bursting to see ye, my boy! And
+here we are, at last!"
+
+Though his cheeks were flushed, and eyes alarmingly bright, he was
+beyond question sober. Over his head, Heywood and Rudolph exchanged an
+anxious glance.
+
+"Good! but this is Hackh's house--the nunnery," said the one; and the
+other added, "You're just in time for dinner."
+
+The captain found these facts to be excruciating. He clapped Rudolph on
+the arm, and crowed:--
+
+"Nunnery? We'll make it a bloomin' chummery!--Dinner be 'anged! A
+banquet. What's more, I've brought the chow"--he swept the huddled boxes
+with a prodigal gesture,--"lashin's o' food and drink! That's what it
+is: a banquet!"
+
+He turned again to his sweating followers, and flung the head coolie a
+handful of silver, crying, "_Sub-log kiswasti!_ Divide, and be off with
+ye! _Jao_, ye beggars! Not a pice more. Finish! I'll not spend it all on
+_you_!" Then, pouncing on the nearest crate, he burst it open with a
+ferocious kick. "Stores? The choicest to be 'ad in all Saigong! Look
+here"--He held up a tin and scanned the label triumphantly: "Chow de
+Bruxelles, what? Never saw chow spelt with an 'x' before, did ye?
+French, my boy. Bad spellers, but good cooks, are the French."
+
+Heywood lost his worried frown. Something had happened,--evidently at
+Calcutta, for the captain always picked up his vernacular where he
+dropped his latest cargo; but at all events these vagaries were not the
+effect of heat or loneliness.
+
+"What's up, Captain?" he laughed.
+
+But now that the coolies had gone, Captain Kneebone's heels were busy,
+staving open boxes right and left. A bottle rolled out, and smashed in a
+hissing froth of champagne.
+
+"Plenty more," he cried, rejoicing. "That shows ye how much _I_ care!
+Oho!" Suddenly he turned from this destruction, and facing Heywood,
+began mysteriously to exult over him. "Old fool and his earnings, eh?
+Fixed ideas, eh? 'No good,' says you. 'That cock won't fight,' says you.
+'Let it alone.'--Ho-ho! What price fixed ideas now?"
+
+The eyes of his young friend widened in unbelief.
+
+"No," he cried, with a start: "you haven't?"
+
+The captain seized both hands again, and took on--for his height--a
+Roman stateliness.
+
+"I have." He nodded solemnly. "Bar sells, I have. No more, now.
+We'll--be-George, we'll announce it, at the banquet! Announce, that's
+the word. First time in _my_ life: announce!"
+
+Heywood suddenly collapsed on a sack, and laughed himself into abject
+silence.
+
+"Awfully glad, old chap," he at last contrived to say, and again
+choked. The captain looked down at the shaking body with a singular,
+benign, and fatherly smile.
+
+"A funny world, ain't it?" he declared sagely. "I've known this boy a
+long time," he explained to Rudolph. "This matter's--We'll let you in,
+presently. Lend me some coolies here, while we turn your dinner into my
+banquet. Eh? You don't care? Once in a bloomin' lifetime."
+
+With a seafaring bellow, he helped Rudolph to hail the servants'
+quarters. A pair of cooks, a pair of Number Twos, and all the
+"learn-pidgin" youngsters of two households came shuffling into the
+court; and arriving guests found all hands broaching cargo, in a loud
+confusion of orders and miscomprehension.
+
+The captain's dinner was the more brilliant. Throughout the long, white
+room, in the slow breeze of the punkah, scores of candles burned soft
+and tremulous, as though the old days had returned when the brown
+sisters lighted their refectory; but never had their table seen such
+profusion of viands, or of talk and laughter. The Saigon stores--after
+daily fare--seemed of a strange and Corinthian luxury. The captain's
+wine proved excellent. And his ruddy little face, beaming at the head of
+the table, wore an extravagant, infectious grin. His quick blue eyes
+danced with the light of some ineffable joke. He seemed a conjurer,
+creating banquets for sheer mischief in the wilderness.
+
+"There's a soup!" he had proclaimed. "Patent, mind ye! Stick a knife
+into the tin, and she 'eats 'erself!"
+
+Among all the revelers, one face alone showed melancholy. Chantel, at
+the foot of the table, sat unregarded by all save Rudolph, who now and
+then caught from him a look filled with gloom and suspicion. It was
+beside Rudolph that Mrs. Forrester laughed and chattered, calling all
+eyes toward her, and yet finding private intervals in which to dart a
+sidelong shaft at her neighbor. Rudolph's ears shone coral pink; for now
+again he was aboard ship, hiding a secret at once dizzy, dangerous, and
+entrancing. Across the talk, the wine, the many lights, came the triumph
+of seeing that other hostile face, glowering in defeat. Never before had
+Chantel, and all the others, dwindled so far into such nonentity, or her
+presence vibrated so near.
+
+Soon he became aware that Captain Kneebone had risen, with a face
+glowing red above the candles. Even Sturgeon forgot the flood of
+bounties, and looked expectantly toward their source. The captain
+cleared his throat, faltered, then turning sheepish all at once,
+hung his head.
+
+"Be 'anged, I can't make a speech, after all," he grumbled; and
+wheeling suddenly on Heywood, with a peevish air of having been
+defrauded: "Aboard ship I could sit and think up no end o' flowery talk,
+and now it's all gone!"
+
+He stared at his plate miserably. It was Miss Drake who came to his
+rescue.
+
+"Tell us the secret," she begged. "How do you manage all these nice
+things?"
+
+The captain's eyes surveyed the motley collection down the length of the
+bright table, then returned to her, gratefully:--
+
+"This ain't anything. Only a little--bloomin'--"
+
+"Impromptu," suggested Heywood.
+
+"That's the word!" Captain Kneebone eyed them both with uncommon favor.
+"That's it, ye know. I just 'opped about Saigong like a--jackdaw,
+picking up these impromptus. But I came here all the way to break the
+news proper, by word o' mouth."
+
+He faced the company, and gathering himself for the effort,--
+
+"I'm rich," he declared. "I'm da--I'm remarkable rich."
+
+Pausing for the effect, he warmed to his oratory.
+
+"It ain't for me to boast. Sailormen as a rule are bad hands to save
+money. But I've won first prize in the Derby Sweepstake Lott'ry, and the
+money's safe to my credit at the H.K. and S. in Calcutta, and I'm
+retired and going Home! More money than the old Kut Sing earned since
+her launching--so much I was frightened, first, and lost my sleep! And
+me without chick nor child, as the saying is--to go Home and live
+luxurious ever after!"
+
+"Ow!" cried Nesbit, "lucky beggar!"--"Sincerely glad," said Mr.
+Forrester. And a volley of compliments went round the board. The captain
+plainly took heart, and flushing still redder at so much praise and good
+will, stood now at ease, chuckling.
+
+"Most men," he began, when there came a lull, "most men makes a will
+after they're dead. That's a shore way o' doing things! Now _I_ want to
+see the effects, living. So be 'anged, here goes, right and proper. To
+Miss Drake, for her hospital and kiddies, two thousand rupees."
+
+In the laughter and friendly uproar, the girl sat dazed.
+
+"What shall I say?" she whispered, wavering between amusement and
+distress. "I can't accept it--"
+
+"Nonsense!" grumbled Heywood, with an angry glance. "Don't spoil the
+happiest evening of an old man's life."
+
+"You're right," she answered quickly; and when the plaudits ended, she
+thanked the captain in a very simple, pretty speech, which made him
+duck and grin,--a proud little benefactor.
+
+"That ain't all," he cried gayly; then leveled a threatening finger,
+like a pistol, at her neighbor. "Who poked fun at me, first and last?
+Who always came out aboard to tell me what an old ass I was? Fixed
+ideas, eh? No go?--Look you here. What did I come so many hundred miles
+for? To say what I always said: half-shares." The light-blue eyes, keen
+with sea-cunning and the lonely sight of many far horizons, suffered an
+indescribable change. "My boy, the half's yours. There's two rich men
+here to-night. I've come to take you Home."
+
+It was Heywood's turn to be struck dumb. He grew very pale.
+
+"Oh, I say," he stammered at last, "it's not fair--"
+
+"Don't spoil the happiest evening--" whispered the girl beside him.
+
+He eyed her ruefully, groaned, then springing up, went swiftly to the
+head of the table and wrung the captain's brown paw, without a word
+to say.
+
+"Can do, can do," said Captain Kneebone, curtly. "I was afraid ye might
+not want to come."
+
+Then followed a whirlwind; and Teppich rose with his moustache
+bristling, and the ready Nesbit jerked him down again in the opening
+sentence; and everybody laughed at Heywood, who sat there so white,
+with such large eyes; and the dinner going by on the wings of night, the
+melancholy "boy" circled the table, all too soon, with a new silver
+casket full of noble cigars from Paiacombo, Manila, and Dindigul.
+
+As the three ladies passed the foot of the table, Rudolph saw Mrs.
+Forrester make an angry signal. And presently, like a prisoner going to
+his judge, Chantel slipped out of the room. He was not missed; for
+already the streaming candle-flames stood wreathed in blue layers, nor
+was it long before the captain, mounting his chair, held a full
+glass aloft.
+
+"Here," he cried in triumph, "here's to every nail in the hoof--"
+
+The glass crashed into splinters and froth. A flying stone struck the
+boom of the punkah, and thumped on the table. Through the open windows,
+from the road, came a wild chorus of yells, caught up and echoed by many
+voices in the distance.
+
+"Shutters!" called Heywood. "Quick!"
+
+As they slammed them home, more stones drummed on the boards and
+clattered against the wall. Conches brayed somewhere, followed by an
+unaccountable, sputtering fusillade as of tiny muskets, and then by a
+formidable silence. While the banqueters listened in the smoky room,
+there came a sullen, heavy sound, like a single stroke on a large and
+very slack bass-drum.
+
+"_Kaú fai!_" shrilled the voices below; and then in a fainter gabble, as
+though hurrying off toward the sound,--"_kaú fai!_"
+
+"The Black Dog," said Heywood, quietly. "He has barked. Earlier than we
+figured, Gilly. Lucky the scaffolding's up. Gentlemen, we all know our
+posts. Guns are in the first bedroom. Quietly, now. Rudie, go call
+Chantel. Don't frighten the women. If they ask about that noise, tell
+'em anything--Dragon Boat Festival beginning. Anything.--We can easily
+hold this place, while the captain gets 'em out to his ship."
+
+The captain wheeled, with an injured air.
+
+"What ship?" he inquired testily. "Told ye, plain, I was retired. Came
+the last bit in a stinking native boat, and _she's_ cleared by now.
+Think I carry ships in my pocket?"
+
+Outside, the swollen discord of shouts, thunder of gongs, and hoarse
+calling of the conches came slowly nearer, extending through
+the darkness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE GUNWALE
+
+Rudolph's mission began quietly, with a glimpse which he afterward
+recalled as incredibly peaceful. Two of the women, at least, showed no
+fear. In the living-room sat Mrs. Earle, her chin cramped on her high
+bosom, while she mournfully studied his colored picture-book of the
+Rhine. Miss Drake, who leaned in one of the river windows, answered him,
+saying rather coldly that Chantel and Mrs. Forrester had gone down to
+the garden.
+
+In the court, however, he ran across Ah Pat, loitering beside a lantern.
+The compradore grinned, and in a tone of great unconcern called out that
+the pair were not in the garden. "Walkee so." He pointed down the
+passage to the main gate, and hooked his thumb toward the right, to
+indicate their course. "Makee finish, makee die now," he added calmly;
+"too muchee, no can."
+
+Rudolph experienced his first shock of terror, like an icy blow on the
+scalp. They had gone outside before the alarm; she, Bertha, was swept
+away in that tumult which came raging through the darkness.--He stood
+transfixed, but only for an instant, rather by the stroke of
+helplessness than by fear; and then, blindly, without plan or foresight,
+darted down the covered way. The tiny flame of a pith wick, floating in
+a saucer of oil, showed Heywood's gatekeeper sitting at his post, like a
+gnome in the gallery of a mine. Rudolph tore away the bar, heard the
+heavy gate slam shut, and found himself running down the starlit road.
+
+Not all starlight, however; a dim red glow began to flicker on the
+shapes which rushed behind him in his flight. Wheeling once, he saw two
+broad flames leaping high in wild and splendid rivalry,--one from
+Heywood's house, one from the club. He caught also a whirling impression
+of many heads and arms, far off, tiny, black, and crowded in rushing
+disorder; of pale torches in the road; and of a hissing, snarling shout,
+a single word, like "_Sha, sha_!" repeated incessantly in a high key.
+The flame at the club shot up threefold, with a crash; and a glorious
+criss-cross multitude of sparks flew hissing through the treetops, like
+fiery tadpoles through a net.
+
+He turned and ran on, dazzled; fell over some one who lay groaning; rose
+on hands and knees, groped in the dust, and suddenly fingered thin,
+rough cloth, warm and sopping. In a nausea of relief, he felt that this
+was a native,--some unknown dying man, who coughed like a drunkard.
+
+Rudolph sprang up and raced again, following by habit the path which he
+and she had traversed at noon. Once, with a heavy collision, he stopped
+short violently in the midst of crowded men, who shouted, clung to him,
+wrestling, and struck out with something sharp that ripped his tunic. He
+kicked, shook them off, hammered his fists right and left, and ran free,
+with a strange conviction that to-night he was invincible. Stranger
+still, as the bamboo leaves now and then brushed his bare forehead, he
+missed the sharp music of her cicadas.
+
+The looming of a wall checked him. Here stood her house; she had the
+briefest possible start of him, and he had run headlong the whole way;
+by all the certainty of instinct, he knew that he had chosen the right
+path: why, then, had he not overtaken her? If she met that band which he
+had just broken through--He wavered in the darkness, and was turning
+wildly to race back, when a sudden light sprang up before him in her
+window. He plunged forward, in at the gate, across a plot of turf,
+stumbled through the Goddess of Mercy bamboo that hedged the door, and
+went falling up the dark stairs, crying aloud,--for the first time in
+his life,--"Bertha! Bertha!"
+
+Empty rooms rang with the name, but no one answered. At last, however,
+reaching the upper level, he saw by lamplight, through the open door,
+two figures struggling. Just before he entered, she tore herself free
+and went unsteadily across the room. Chantel, white and abject, turned
+as in panic.
+
+"Oh!" Plainly he had not expected to see another face as white as his
+own. Breathless and trembling, he spoke in a strangely little voice; but
+his staring eyes lighted with a sudden and desperate resolution. "Help
+me with her," he begged. "She won't listen. The woman's out of
+her wits."
+
+He caught Rudolph by the arm; and standing for a moment like close
+friends, the two panting rivals watched her in stupefaction. She
+ransacked a great cedar chest, a table, shelves, boxes, and strewed the
+contents on the floor,--silk scarfs, shining Benares brass, Chinese
+silver, vivid sarongs from the Preanger regency, Kyoto cloisonné, a wild
+heap of plunder from the bazaars of all the nations where Gilly's meagre
+earnings had been squandered. A Cingalese box dropped and burst open,
+scattering bright stones, false or precious, broadcast. She trampled
+them in her blind and furious search.
+
+"Come," said Chantel, and snatched at her. "Leave those. Come to the
+boat. Every minute--"
+
+She pushed him aside like a thing without weight or meaning, stooped
+again among the gay rubbish, caught up a necklace, flung it down for
+the sake of a brooch, then dropped everything and turned with blank,
+dilated eyes, and the face of a child lost in a crowd.
+
+"Rudolph," she whimpered, "help me. What shall I do?"
+
+Without waiting for answer, she bent once more to sort and discard her
+pitiful treasures, to pause vaguely, consider, and wring her hands.
+Rudolph, in his turn, caught her by the arm, but fared no better.
+
+"We must humor her," whispered Chantel, and, kneeling like a peddler
+among the bazaar-stuffs, spread on the floor a Java sarong, blue and
+brown, painted with men and buffaloes. On this he began to heap things
+pell-mell.
+
+The woman surrendered, and all at once flung her arms about Rudolph,
+hiding her face, and clinging to him as if with the last of
+her strength.
+
+"Come, he'll bring them," she sobbed. "Let's go--to the boat. He must
+find his own way. Take me." Hurry and fright choked her. "Take me--leave
+him, if he won't come--I scolded him--then the noises came, and
+we ran--"
+
+"What boat?" said Rudolph.
+
+Chantel did not look up.
+
+"I have one ready and stocked," he mumbled, tugging with his teeth at
+the knot in the sarong corners. "You can come. We'll drop down the
+river, and try it along the coast. Only chance. Come on."
+
+He rose, and started for the door, slinging the bright-colored bundle
+over his shoulder. "Come on," he snarled. Against the gay pattern, his
+handsome pirate face shone brown and evil in the lamplight. "Damn you,
+I've waited long enough for your whims. Stay there and be killed, then."
+
+He ran to the stairs, and down. The woman's arms began to drag loosely,
+as if she were slipping to the floor; then suddenly, with a cry, she
+turned and bolted. Run as he might, Rudolph did not overtake her till
+she had caught Chantel at the gate. All three, silent, sped across
+fields toward the river, through the startling shadows and dim orange
+glow from distant flames.
+
+The rough ground sloped, at last, and sent them stumbling down into mud.
+Behind them the bank ran black and ragged against the glow; before them,
+still more black, lay the river, placid, mysterious, and safe. Through
+the mud they labored heavily toward a little, smoky light--a lantern
+gleaming faintly on a polished gunwale, the shoulders of a man, and the
+thin, slant line that was his pole.
+
+"Lowdah?" called Chantel; and the shoulders moved, the line shifted, as
+the boatman answered. Chantel pitched the bundle over the lantern, and
+leapt on board. Rudolph came slowly, carrying in his arms the woman,
+who lay quiet and limp, clasping him in a kind of drowsy oblivion. He
+felt the flutter of her lips, while she whispered in his ear strange,
+breathless entreaties, a broken murmur of endearments, unheard-of, which
+tempted him more than the wide, alluring darkness of the river.
+
+He lowered her slowly; and leaning against the gunwale, she still clung
+to his hands.
+
+"Aboard! Quickly!" snapped their leader, from the dusk behind the
+lantern.
+
+Obeying by impulse, Rudolph moved nearer the gunwale. The slippery edge,
+polished by bare feet through many years, seemed the one bit of reality
+in this dream, except the warmth of her hands.
+
+"To the nunnery?" he asked, trying dully to rouse from a fascination.
+
+"No, no," she wailed. "Down--away--safe."
+
+"No, back to them," he answered stupidly. "They are all there. Your--he
+is there. We can't leave--"
+
+"You fool!" Chantel swore in one tongue, and in another cried to the
+boatman--"Shove off, if they won't come!" He seized the woman roughly
+and pulled her on board; but she reached out and caught Rudolph's
+hand again.
+
+"Come, hurry," she whispered, tugging at him. "Come, dear boy. I won't
+leave you. Quickly. You saw it burning. They're all dead. It's no use.
+We must live. We must live, darling."
+
+She was right, somehow; there was no power to confute her. He must come
+with her, or run back, useless, into the ring of swords and flames. She
+and life were in the boat; ashore, a friend cut off beyond reach, an
+impossible duty, and death. His eyes, dull and fixed in the smoky
+lantern-light, rested for an age on the knotted sarong. It meant
+nothing; then in a flash, as though for him all light of the eyes had
+concentrated in a single vision, it meant everything. The colored
+cloth--rudely painted in the hut of some forgotten mountaineer--held
+all her treasure and her heart, the things of this world. She must go
+with those. It was fitting. She was beautiful--in all her fear and
+disorder, still more beautiful. She went with life, departing into a
+dream. This glossy gunwale, polished by bare feet, was after all the
+sole reality, a shining line between life and death.
+
+"Then I must die," he groaned, and wrenched his hands away from that
+perilous boundary.
+
+He vaguely heard her cry out, vaguely saw Chantel rise above the lantern
+and slash down at him with the lowdah's pole. The bamboo struck him,
+heavy but glancing, on the head. He staggered, lost his footing, and
+fell into the mud, where, as though his choice had already overtaken
+him, he lay without thought or emotion, watching the dim light float off
+into the darkness.
+
+By and by it was gone. From somewhere in another direction came a sharp,
+continual, crackling fusillade, like the snapping of dry bamboo-joints
+in a fire. The unstirring night grew heavier with the smell of burnt
+gunpowder. But Rudolph, sitting in the mud, felt only that his eyes were
+dry and leaden in their sockets, that there was a drumming in his ears,
+and that if heat and weariness thus made an end of him, he need no
+longer watch the oppressive multitude of stars, or hear the monotony of
+flowing water.
+
+Something stirred in the dry grass above him. Without turning, he heard
+a man scramble down the bank; without looking up, he felt some one pause
+and stoop close. When at last, in profound apathy, he raised his eyes,
+he saw against the starlight the hat, head, and shoulders of a coolie.
+
+Quite natural, he thought, that the fellow should be muttering in
+German. It was only the halting, rusty fashion of the speech that
+finally fretted him into listening. The words did not concern him.
+
+"Are you dead, then?" grumbled the coolie. "Did she kill you?"
+
+Rudolph dismissed him with a vague but angry motion.
+
+Some time afterward the same voice came louder. The coolie was still
+there.
+
+"You cannot sit here all night," he said. "By daylight they will catch
+you. Come. Perhaps I can take you to your friends. Come."
+
+Rudolph felt sharp knuckles working at his lips, and before he could
+rebel, found his mouth full of sweet fiery liquid. He choked, swallowed,
+and presently heard the empty bottle splash in the river.
+
+"_Stösst an_!" said the rescuer, and chuckled something in dispraise of
+women. "Is that not better?"
+
+The rice-brandy was hot and potent; for of a sudden Rudolph found
+himself afoot and awake. A dizzy warmth cleared his spirit. He
+understood perfectly. This man, for some strange reason, was Wutzler, a
+coolie and yet a brother from the fatherland. He and his nauseous alien
+brandy had restored the future. There was more to do.
+
+"Come on." The forsaken lover was first man up the bank. "See!" he
+cried, pointing to a new flare in the distance. The whole region was now
+aglow like a furnace, and filled with smoke, with prolonged yells, and a
+continuity of explosions that ripped the night air like tearing silk.
+"Her house is burning now."
+
+"You left in time." Wutzler shuffled before him, with the trot of a
+lean and exhausted laborer. "I was with the men you fought, when you
+ran. I followed to the house, and then here, to the river. I was glad
+you did not jump on board." He glanced back, timidly, for approbation.
+"I am a great coward, Herr Heywood told me so,--but I also stay
+and help."
+
+He steered craftily among the longest and blackest shadows, now jogging
+in a path, now threading the boundary of a rice-field, or waiting behind
+trees; and all the time, though devious and artful as a deer-stalker,
+crept toward the centre of the noise and the leaping flames. When the
+quaking shadows grew thin and spare, and the lighted clearings
+dangerously wide, he swerved to the right through a rolling bank of
+smoke. They coughed as they ran.
+
+Once Rudolph paused, with the heat of the fire on his cheeks.
+
+"The nunnery is burning," he said hopelessly.
+
+His guide halted, peered shrewdly, and listened.
+
+"No, they are still shooting," he answered, and limped onward, skirting
+the uproar.
+
+At last, when by pale stars above the smoke and flame and sparks,
+Rudolph judged that they were somewhere north of the nunnery, they came
+stumbling down into a hollow encumbered with round, swollen obstacles.
+Like a patch of enormous melons, oil-jars lay scattered.
+
+"Hide here, and wait," commanded Wutzler. "I will go see." And he
+flitted off through the smoke.
+
+Smuggled among the oil-jars, Rudolph lay panting. Shapes of men ran
+past, another empty jar rolled down beside him, and a stray bullet sang
+overhead like a vibrating wire. Soon afterward, Wutzler came crawling
+through the huddled pottery.
+
+"Lie still," he whispered. "Your friends are hemmed in. You cannot get
+through."
+
+The smell of rancid oil choked them, yet they could breathe without
+coughing, and could rest their smarting eyes. In the midst of tumult and
+combustion, the hollow lay dark as a pool. Along its rim bristled a
+scrubby fringe of weeds, black against a rosy cloud.
+
+After a time, something still blacker parted the weeds. In silhouette, a
+man's head, his hand grasping a staff or the muzzle of a gun, remained
+there as still as though, crawling to the verge, he lay petrified in the
+act of spying.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+LAMP OF HEAVEN
+
+The white men peered from among the oil-jars, like two of the Forty
+Thieves. They could detect no movement, friendly or hostile: the black
+head lodged there without stirring. The watcher, whether he had seen
+them or not, was in no hurry; for with chin propped among the weeds, he
+held a pose at once alert and peaceful, mischievous and leisurely, as
+though he were master of that hollow, and might lie all night drowsing
+or waking, as the humor prompted.
+
+Wutzler pressed his face against the earth, and shivered in the stifling
+heat. The uncertainty grew, with Rudolph, into an acute distress. His
+legs ached and twitched, the bones of his neck were stretched as if to
+break, and a corner of broken clay bored sharply between his ribs. He
+felt no fear, however: only a great impatience to have the spy
+begin,--rise, beckon, call to his fellows, fire his gun, hit or miss.
+
+This longing, or a flash of anger, or the rice-brandy working so nimbly
+in his wits, gave him both impulse and plan.
+
+"Don't move," he whispered; "wait here." And wriggling backward, inch
+by inch, feet foremost among the crowded bellies of the jars, he gained
+the further darkness. So far as sight would carry, the head stirred no
+more than if it had been a cannon-ball planted there on the verge,
+against the rosy cloud. From crawling, Rudolph rose to hands and knees,
+and silently in the dust began to creep on a long circuit. Once, through
+a rift in smoke, he saw a band of yellow musketeers, who crouched behind
+some ragged earthwork or broken wall, loading and firing without pause
+or care, chattering like outraged monkeys, and all too busy to spare a
+glance behind. Their heads bobbed up and down in queer scarlet turbans
+or scarfs, like the flannel nightcaps of so many diabolic invalids.
+
+Passing them unseen, he crept back toward his hollow. In spite of smoke,
+he had gauged and held his circle nicely, for straight ahead lay the
+man's legs. Taken thus in the rear, he still lay prone, staring down the
+slope, inactive; yet legs, body, and the bent arm that clutched a musket
+beside him in the grass, were stiff with some curious excitement. He
+seemed ready to spring up and fire.
+
+No time to lose, thought Rudolph; and rising, measured his distance with
+a painful, giddy exactness. He would have counted to himself before
+leaping, but his throat was too dry. He flinched a little, then shot
+through the air, and landed heavily, one knee on each side, pinning the
+fellow down as he grappled underneath for the throat. Almost in the same
+movement he had bounded on foot again, holding both hands above his
+head, as high as he could withdraw them. The body among the weeds lay
+cold, revoltingly indifferent to stratagem or violence, in the same
+tense attitude, which had nothing to do with life.
+
+Rudolph dropped his hands, and stood confounded by his own brutal
+discourtesy. Wutzler, crawling out from the jars, scrambled joyfully
+up the bank.
+
+"You have killed him?" quavered the dry little voice. "You are very
+brave!"
+
+"No, no," cried Rudolph, earnestly. "He was, already."
+
+By the scarlet headgear, and a white symbol on the back of his jacket,
+the man at their feet was one of the musketeers. He had left the
+firing-line, crawled away in the dark, and found a quiet spot to die in.
+
+"So! This is good luck!" Wutzler doffed his coolie hat, slid out of his
+jacket, tossed both down among the oil-jars, and stooping over the dead
+man, began to untwist the scarlet turban. In the dim light his lean arms
+and frail body, coated with black hair, gave him the look of a puny ape
+robbing a sleeper. He wriggled into the dead man's jacket, wound the
+blood-red cloth about his own temples, and caught up musket, ramrod,
+powder-horn, and bag of bullets.--"Now I am all safe," he chuckled. "Now
+I can go anywhere, to-night."
+
+He shouldered arms and stood grinning as though all their troubles were
+ended.
+
+"So! I am rebel soldier. We try again; come.--Not too close behind me;
+and if I speak, run back."
+
+In this order they began once more to scout through the smoke. No one
+met them, though distant shapes rushed athwart the gloom, yelping to
+each other, and near by, legs of runners moved under a rolling cloud of
+smoke as if their bodies were embedded and swept along in the
+wrack:--all confused, hurried, and meaningless, like the uproar of
+gongs, horns, conches, whistling bullets, crackers, and squibs that
+sputtering, string upon string, flower upon rising flower of misty red
+gold explosion, ripped all other noise to tatters.
+
+Where and how he followed, Rudolph never could have told; but once, as
+they ran slinking through the heaviest smoke and, as it seemed, the
+heart of the turmoil, he recognized the yawning rim of a clay-pit, not a
+stone's throw from his own gate. It was amazing to feel that safety lay
+so close; still more amazing to catch a glimpse of many coolies digging
+in the pit by torchlight, peacefully, as though they had heard of no
+disturbance that evening. Hardly had the picture flashed past, than he
+wondered whether he had seen or imagined it, whose men they were, and
+why, even at any time, they should swarm so busy, thick as ants, merely
+to dig clay.
+
+He had worry enough, however, to keep in view the white cross-barred
+hieroglyphic on his guide's jacket. Suddenly it vanished, and next
+instant the muzzle of the gun jolted against his ribs.
+
+"Run, quick," panted Wutzler, pushing him aside. "To the left, into the
+go-down. Here they are!--To your left!" And with the words, he bounded
+off to the right, firing his gun to confuse the chase.
+
+Rudolph obeyed, and, running at top speed, dimly understood that he had
+doubled round a squad of grunting runners, whose bare feet pattered
+close by him in the smoke. Before him gaped a black square, through
+which he darted, to pitch head first over some fat, padded bulk. As he
+rose, the rasping of rough jute against his cheek told him that he had
+fallen among bales; and a familiar, musty smell, that the bales were his
+own, in his own go-down, across a narrow lane from the nunnery. With
+high hopes, he stumbled farther into the darkness. Once, among the
+bales, he trod on a man's hand, which was silently pulled away. With no
+time to think of that, he crawled and climbed over the disordered heaps,
+groping toward the other door. He had nearly reached it, when torchlight
+flared behind him, rushing in, and savage cries, both shrill and
+guttural, rang through the stuffy warehouse. He had barely time, in the
+reeling shadows, to fall on the earthen floor, and crawl under a thin
+curtain of reeds to a new refuge.
+
+Into this--a cubby-hole where the compradore kept his tally-slips,
+umbrella, odds and ends--the torchlight shone faintly through the reeds.
+Lying flat behind a roll of matting, Rudolph could see, as through the
+gauze twilight of a stage scene, the tossing lights and the skipping men
+who shouted back and forth, jabbing their spears or pikes down among the
+bales, to probe the darkness. Their search was wild but thorough. Before
+it, in swift retreat, some one crawled past the compradore's room,
+brushing the splint partition like a snake. This, as Rudolph guessed,
+might be the man whose hand he had stepped on.
+
+The stitches in the curtain became beads of light. A shadowy arm heaved
+up, fell with a dry, ripping sound and a vertical flash. A sword had cut
+the reeds from top to bottom.
+
+Through the rent a smoking flame plunged after the sword, and after
+both, a bony yellow face that gleamed with sweat. Rudolph, half wrapped
+in his matting, could see the hard, glassy eyes shine cruelly in their
+narrow slits; but before they lowered to meet his own, a jubilant yell
+resounded in the go-down, and with a grunt, the yellow face, the
+flambeau, and the sword were snatched away.
+
+He lay safe, but at the price of another man's peril. They had caught
+the crawling fugitive, and now came dragging him back to the lights.
+Through the tattered curtain Rudolph saw him flung on the ground like an
+empty sack, while his captors crowded about in a broken ring, cackling,
+and prodding him with their pikes. Some jeered, some snarled, others
+called him by name, with laughing epithets that rang more friendly, or
+at least more jocular; but all bent toward him eagerly, and flung down
+question after question, like a little band of kobolds holding an
+inquisition. At some sharper cry than the rest, the fellow rose to his
+knees and faced them boldly. A haggard Christian, he was being fairly
+given his last chance to recant.
+
+"Open your mouth! Open your mouth!" they cried, in rage or entreaty.
+
+The kneeling captive shook his head, and made some reply, very distinct
+and simple.
+
+"Open your mouth!" They struck at him with the torches. The same sword
+that had slashed the curtain now pricked his naked chest. Rudolph,
+clenching his fists in a helpless longing to rush out and scatter all
+these men-at-arms, had a strange sense of being transported into the
+past, to watch with ghostly impotence a mediaeval tragedy.
+
+The kneeling man repeated his unknown declaration. His round, honest,
+oily face was anything but heroic, and wore no legendary, transfiguring
+light. He seemed rather stupid than calm; yet as he mechanically wound
+his queue into place once more above the shaven forehead, his fingers
+moved surely and deftly. Not once did they slip or tremble.
+
+"Open your mouth!" snarled the pikemen and the torch-bearers, with the
+fierce gestures of men who have wasted time and patience.
+
+"The Lamp of Heaven!" bawled the swordsman, beside himself. "Give him
+the Lamp of Heaven!"
+
+To the others, this phrase acted as a spark to powder.
+
+"Good! good!" they shrilled, nodding furiously. "The Lamp of Heaven!"
+And several men began to rummage and overhaul the chaos of the go-down.
+Rudolph had given orders, that afternoon, to remove all necessary stores
+to the nunnery. But from somewhere in the darkness, one rioter brought a
+sack of flour, while another flung down a tin case of petroleum. The
+sword had no sooner cut the sack across and punctured the tin, than a
+fat villain in a loin cloth, squatting on the earthen floor, kneaded
+flour and oil into a grimy batch of dough.
+
+"Will you speak out and live," cried the swordsman, "or will you die?"
+
+For a second the Christian did not stir. Then, as though the option were
+not in his power,--
+
+"Die," he answered.
+
+The fat baker sprang up, and clapped on the obstinate head a shapeless
+gray turban of dough. Half a dozen torches jostled for the honor of
+lighting it. The Christian, crowned with sooty flames, gave a single
+cry, clear above all the others. He was calling--as even Rudolph
+knew--on the strange god across the sea, Saviour of the Children of the
+West, not to forget his nameless and lonely servant.
+
+Rudolph groaned aloud, rose, and had parted the curtain to run out and
+fall upon them all, when suddenly, close at hand and sharp in the
+general din, there burst a quick volley of rifleshots. Splinters flew
+from the attap walls. A torch-bearer and the man with the sword spun
+half round, collided, and fell, the one across the other, like drunken
+wrestlers. The survivors flung down their torches and ran, leaping and
+diving over bales. On the ground, the smouldering Lamp of Heaven showed
+that its wearer, rescued by a lucky bullet, lay still in a posture of
+humility. Strange humility, it seemed, for one so suddenly given the
+complete and profound wisdom that confirms all faith, foreign or
+domestic, new or old.
+
+With a sense of all this, but no clear sense of action, Rudolph found
+the side-door, opened it, closed it, and started across the lane. He
+knew only that he should reach the mafoo's little gate by the pony-shed,
+and step out of these dark ages into the friendly present; so that when
+something from the wall blazed point-blank, and he fell flat on the
+ground, he lay in utter defeat, bitterly surprised and offended. His own
+friends: they might miss him once, but not twice. Let it come quickly.
+
+Instead, from the darkness above came the most welcome sound he had ever
+known,--a keen, high voice, scolding.
+
+"What the devil are you firing at?" It was Heywood, somewhere on the
+roof of the pony-shed. He put the question sharply, yet sounded cool and
+cheerful. "A shadow? Rot! You waste another cartridge so, and I'll take
+your gun away. Remember that!"
+
+Nesbit's voice clipped out some pert objection.
+
+"Potted the beggar, any'ow--see for yourself--go-down 's afire."
+
+"Saves us the trouble of burning it." The other voice moved away, with
+a parting rebuke. "No more of that, sniping and squandering. Wait till
+they rush you."
+
+Rudolph lifted his head from the dust.
+
+"Maurice!" he called feebly. "Maurice, let me in!"
+
+"Hallo!" answered his captain on the wall, blithely. "Steady on, we'll
+get you."
+
+Of all hardships, this brief delay was least bearable. Then a bight of
+rope fell across Rudolph's back. He seized it, hauled taut, and planting
+his feet against the wall, went up like a fish, to land gasping on a row
+of sand-bags.
+
+"Ho, you wandering German!" His invisible friend clapped him on the
+shoulder. "By Jove, I'm glad. No time to burble now, though. Off with
+you. Compradore has a gun for you, in the court. Collect a drink as you
+go by. Report to Kneebone at the northeast corner. Danger point there:
+we need a good man, so hurry. Devilish glad. Cut along."
+
+Rudolph, scrambling down from the pony-shed, ran across the compound
+with his head in a whirl. Yet through all the scudding darkness and
+confusion, one fact had pierced as bright as a star. On this night of
+alarms, he had turned the great corner in his life. Like the pale
+stranger with his crown of fire, he could finish the course.
+
+He caught his rifle from the compradore's hand, but needed no draught
+from any earthly cup. Brushing through the orange trees, he made for the
+northeast angle, free of all longing perplexities, purged of all vile
+admiration, and fit to join his friends in clean and wholesome danger.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+SIEGE
+
+He never believed that they could hold the northeast corner for a
+minute, so loud and unceasing was the uproar. Bullets spattered sharply
+along the wall and sang overhead, mixed now and then with an
+indescribable whistling and jingling. The angle was like the prow of a
+ship cutting forward into a gale. Yet Rudolph climbed, rejoicing, up the
+short bamboo ladder, to the platform which his coolies had built in such
+haste, so long ago, that afternoon.
+
+His high spirits went before a fall. As he stood up, in the full glow
+from the burning go-down, somebody tackled him about the knees and threw
+him head first on the sand-bags.
+
+"How many times must I give me orders?" barked the little sea-captain.
+"Under cover, under cover, and stay under cover, or I'll send ye below,
+ye gallivanting--Oh! it's you, is it? Well, there's your port-hole." A
+stubby finger pointed in the obscurity. "There! and don't ye fire till
+I say so!"
+
+Thus made welcome, Rudolph crawled toward a chink among the bags, ran
+the muzzle of his gun into place, and lay ready for whatever might come
+out of the quaking lights and darknesses beyond.
+
+Nothing came, however, except a swollen continuity of sound, a rolling
+cloud of noises, thick and sullen as the smell of burnt gunpowder. It
+was strange, thought Rudolph, how nothing happened from moment to
+moment. No yellow bodies came charging out of the hubbub. He himself lay
+there unhurt; his fellows joked, grumbled, shifted their legs on the
+platform. At times the heavier, duller sound, which had been the signal
+for the whole disorder,--one ponderous beat, as on a huge and very slack
+bass-drum,--told that the Black Dog from Rotterdam was not far off. Yet
+even then there followed no shock of round-shot battering at masonry,
+but only an access of the stormy whistling and jingling.
+
+"Copper cash," declared the voice of Heywood, in a lull. By the sound,
+he was standing on the rungs of the ladder, with his head at the level
+of the platform; also by the sound, he was enjoying himself
+inordinately. "What a jolly good piece of luck! Scrap metal and copper
+cash. Firing money at us--like you, Captain. Just what we thought, too.
+Some unruly gang among them wouldn't wait, and forced matters. Tonight
+was premature. The beggars have plenty of powder, and little else.
+So far."
+
+Rudolph listened in wonder. Here, in the thick of the fight, was a
+light-hearted, busy commander, drawing conclusions and extracting news
+from chaos.
+
+"Look out for arrows," continued the speaker, as he crawled to a
+loophole between Rudolph's and the captain's. "They're shooting arrows
+up over. Killed one convert and wounded two, there by the water gate.
+They can't get the elevation for you chaps here, though." And again he
+added, cheerfully, "So far, at least."
+
+The little band behind the loopholes lay watching through the smoke,
+listening through the noise. The Black Dog barked again, and sent a
+shower of money clinking along the wall.
+
+"How do you like it, Rudie?" chuckled his friend.
+
+"It is terrible," answered Rudolph, honestly.
+
+"Terrible racket, yes. Fireworks, to frighten us. Wait till their
+ammunition comes; then you'll see fun. Fireworks, all this." Heywood
+turned to his other companion. "I say, Kneebone, what's your idea?
+Sniping all night, will it be?--or shall we get a fair chance at 'em?"
+
+The captain, a small, white, recumbent spectre, lifted his head and
+appeared to sniff the smoke judicially.
+
+"They get a chance at us, more like!" he grumbled. "My opinion, the
+blighters have shot and burnt themselves into a state o' mind; bloomin'
+delusion o' grandeur, that's what. Wildest of 'em will rush us to-night,
+once--maybe twice. We stave 'em off, say: that case, they'll settle down
+to starve us, right and proper."
+
+"Siege," assented Heywood.
+
+"Siege, like you read about." The captain lay flat again. "Wish a man
+could smoke up here."
+
+Heywood laughed, and turned his head:--
+
+"How much do you know about sieges, old chap?"
+
+"Nothing," Rudolph confessed.
+
+"Nor I, worse luck. Outside of school--_testudine facia,_ that sort of
+thing. However," he went on cheerfully, "we shall before long"--He broke
+off with a start. "Rudie! By Jove, I forgot! Did you find them? Where's
+Bertha Forrester?"
+
+"Gone," said Rudolph, and struggling to explain, found his late
+adventure shrunk into the compass of a few words, far too small and bare
+to suggest the magnitude of his decision. "They went," he began, "in
+a boat--"
+
+He was saved the trouble; for suddenly Captain Kneebone cried in a voice
+of keen satisfaction, "Here they come! I told ye!"--and fired his rifle.
+
+Through a patch of firelight, down the gentle slope of the field, swept
+a ragged cohort of men, some bare-headed, some in their scarlet
+nightcaps, as though they had escaped from bed, and all yelling. One of
+the foremost, who met the captain's bullet, was carried stumbling his
+own length before he sank underfoot; as the Mausers flashed from between
+the sand-bags, another and another man fell to his knees or toppled
+sidelong, tripping his fellows into a little knot or windrow of kicking
+arms and legs; but the main wave poured on, all the faster. Among and
+above them, like wreckage in that surf, tossed the shapes of
+scaling-ladders and notched bamboos. Two naked men, swinging between
+them a long cylinder or log, flashed through the bonfire space and on
+into the dark below the wall.
+
+"Pung-dongs!" bawled the captain. "Look out for the pung-dong!"
+
+His friends were too busy firing into the crowded gloom below. Rudolph,
+fumbling at side-bolt and pulling trigger, felt the end of a ladder bump
+his forehead, saw turban and mediaeval halberd heave above him, and
+without time to think of firing, dashed the muzzle of his gun at the
+climber's face. The shock was solid, the halberd rang on the platform,
+but the man vanished like a shade.
+
+"Very neat," growled Heywood, who in the same instant, with a great
+shove, managed to fling down the ladder. "Perfectly silly attack. We'll
+hold 'em."
+
+While he spoke, however, something hurtled over their heads and thumped
+the platform. The queer log, or cylinder, lay there with a red coal
+sputtering at one end, a burning fuse. Heywood snatched at it and
+missed. Some one else caught up the long bulk, and springing to his
+feet, swung it aloft. Firelight showed the bristling moustache of
+Kempner, his long, thin arms poising a great bamboo case bound with
+rings of leather or metal. He threw it out with his utmost force,
+staggered as though to follow it; then, leaping back, straightened his
+tall body with a jerk, flung out one arm in a gesture of surprise, no
+sooner rigid than drooping; and even while he seemed inflated for
+another of his speeches, turned half-round and dove into the garden and
+the night. By the ending of it, he had redeemed a somewhat rancid life.
+
+Before, the angle was alive with swarming heads. As he fell, it was
+empty, and the assault finished; for below, the bamboo tube burst with a
+sound that shook the wall; liquid flame, the Greek fire of stink-pot
+chemicals, squirted in jets that revealed a crowd torn asunder, saffron
+faces contorted in shouting, and men who leapt away with clothes afire
+and powder-horns bursting at their sides. Dim figures scampered off, up
+the rising ground.
+
+"That's over," panted Heywood. "Thundering good lesson,--Here, count
+noses. Rudie? Right-oh. Sturgeon, Teppich, Padre, Captain? Good! but
+look sharp, while I go inspect." He whispered to Rudolph. "Come down,
+won't you, and help me with--you know."
+
+At the foot of the ladder, they met a man in white, with a white face in
+what might be the dawn, or the pallor of the late-risen moon.
+
+"Is Hackh there?" He hailed them in a dry voice, and cleared his throat,
+"Where is she? Where's my wife?"
+
+It was here, accordingly, while Heywood stooped over a tumbled object on
+the ground, that Rudolph told her husband what Bertha Forrester had
+chosen. The words came harder than before, but at last he got rid of
+them. His questioner stood very still. It was like telling the news of
+an absent ghost to another present.
+
+"This town was never a place," said Gilly, with all his former
+steadiness,--"never a place to bring a woman. And--and of her age."
+
+All three men listened to the conflict of gongs and crackers, and to the
+shouting, now muffled and distant behind the knoll. All three, as it
+seemed to Rudolph, had consented to ignore something vile.
+
+"That's all I wanted to know," said the older man, slowly. "I must get
+back to my post. You didn't say, but--She made no attempt to come here?
+Well, that's--that's lucky. I'll go back."
+
+For some time again they stood as though listening, till Heywood
+spoke:--
+
+"Holding your own, are you, by the water gate?"
+
+"Oh, yes," replied Forrester, rousing slightly. "All quiet there. No
+more arrows. Converts behaving splendidly. Two or three have begged
+for guns."
+
+"Give 'em this." Heywood skipped up the ladder, to return with a rifle.
+"And this belt--Kempner's. Poor chap, he'll never ask you to return
+them.--Anything else?"
+
+"No," answered Gilly, taking the dead man's weapon, and moving off into
+the darkness. "No, except "--He halted. "Except if we come to a pinch,
+and need a man for some tight place, then give me first chance. Won't
+you? I could do better, now, than--than you younger men. Oh, and Hackh;
+your efforts to-night--Well, few men would have dared, and I feel
+immensely grateful."
+
+He disappeared among the orange trees, leaving Rudolph to think about
+such gratitude.
+
+"Now, then," called Heywood, and stooped to the white bundle at their
+feet. "Don't stand looking. Can't be helped. Trust old Gilly to take it
+like a man. Come bear a hand."
+
+And between them the two friends carried to the nunnery a tiresome
+theorist, who had acted once, and now, himself tired and limp, would
+offend no more by speaking.
+
+When the dawn filled the compound with a deep blue twilight, and this in
+turn grew pale, the night-long menace of noise gradually faded also,
+like an orgy of evil spirits dispersing before cockcrow. To ears long
+deafened, the wide stillness had the effect of another sound, never
+heard before. Even when disturbed by the flutter of birds darting from
+top to dense green top of the orange trees, the air seemed hushed by
+some unholy constraint. Through the cool morning vapors, hot smoke from
+smouldering wreckage mounted thin and straight, toward where the pale
+disk of the moon dissolved in light. The convex field stood bare, except
+for a few overthrown scarecrows in naked yellow or dusty blue, and for a
+jagged strip of earthwork torn from the crest, over which the Black Dog
+thrust his round muzzle. In a truce of empty silence, the defenders
+slept by turns among the sand-bags.
+
+The day came, and dragged by without incident. The sun blazed in the
+compound, swinging overhead, and slanting down through the afternoon. At
+the water gate, Rudolph, Heywood, and the padre, with a few forlorn
+Christians,--driven in like sheep, at the last moment,--were building
+a rough screen against the arrows that had flown in darkness, and that
+now lay scattered along the path. One of these a workman suddenly caught
+at, and with a grunt, held up before the padre.
+
+The head was blunt. About the shaft, wound tightly with silk thread, ran
+a thin roll of Chinese paper.
+
+Dr. Earle nodded, took the arrow, and slitting with a pocket-knife,
+freed and flattened out a painted scroll of complex characters. His keen
+old eyes ran down the columns. His face, always cloudy now, grew darker
+with perplexity.
+
+"A message," he declared slowly. "I think a serious message." He sat
+down on a pile of sacks, and spread the paper on his knee. "But the
+characters are so elaborate--I can't make head or tail."
+
+He beckoned Heywood, and together they scowled at the intricate and
+meaningless symbols.
+
+"All alike," complained the younger man. "Maddening." Then his face
+lighted. "No, see here--lower left hand."
+
+The last stroke of the brush, down in the corner, formed a loose "O. W."
+
+"From Wutzler. Must mean something."
+
+For all that, the painted lines remained a stubborn puzzle.
+
+"Something, yes. But what?" The padre pulled out a cigar, and smoking
+at top speed, spaced off each character with his thumb. "They are all
+alike, and yet"--He clutched his white hair with big knuckles, and
+tugged; replaced his mushroom helmet; held the paper at a new focus.
+"Ah!" he said doubtfully; and at last, "Yes." For some time he read to
+himself, nodding. "A Triad cipher."
+
+"Well?" resumed Heywood, patiently.
+
+The reader pointed with his cigar.
+
+"Take only the left half of that word, and what have you?"
+
+"'Lightning,'" read Heywood.
+
+"The right half?"
+
+"'Boat.'"
+
+"Take," the padre ordered, "this one; left half?"
+
+"'Lightning,'" repeated his pupil. "The right half--might be
+'rice-scoop,' But that's nonsense."
+
+"No," said the padre. "You have the secret. It's good Triad writing.
+Subtract this twisted character 'Lightning' from each, and we've made
+the crooked straight. The writer was afraid of being caught. Here's the
+sense of his message, I take it." And he read off, slowly:--
+
+"A Hakka boat on opposite shore; a green flag and a rice-scoop hoisted
+at her mast; light a fire on the water-gate steps, and she will come
+quickly, day or night.--O.W."
+
+Heywood took the news coldly. He shook his head, and stood thinking.
+
+"That won't help," he said curtly. "Never in the world."
+
+With the aid of a convert, he unbarred the ponderous gate, and ventured
+out on the highest slab of the landing-steps. Across the river, to be
+sure, there lay--between a local junk and a stray _papico_ from the
+north--the high-nosed Hakka boat, her deck roofed with tawny
+basket-work, and at her masthead a wooden rice-measure dangling below a
+green rag. Aft, by the great steering-paddle, perched a man, motionless,
+yet seeming to watch. Heywood turned, however, and pointed downstream to
+where, at the bend of the river, a little spit of mud ran out from the
+marsh. On the spit, from among tussocks, a man in a round hat sprang up
+like a thin black toadstool. He waved an arm, and gave a shrill cry,
+summoning help from further inland. Other hats presently came bobbing
+toward him, low down among the marsh. Puffs of white spurted out from
+the mud. And as Heywood dodged back through the gate, and Nesbit's rifle
+answered from his little fort on the pony-shed, the distant crack of the
+muskets joined with a spattering of ooze and a chipping of stone on the
+river-stairs.
+
+"Covered, you see," said Heywood, replacing the bar. "Last resort,
+perhaps, that way. Still, we may as well keep a bundle of firewood
+ready here."
+
+The shots from the marsh, though trivial and scattering, were like a
+signal; for all about the nunnery, from a ring of hiding-places, the
+noise of last night broke out afresh. The sun lowered through a brown,
+burnt haze, the night sped up from the ocean, covering the sky with
+sudden darkness, in which stars appeared, many and cool, above the
+torrid earth and the insensate turmoil. So, without change but from
+pause to outbreak, outbreak to pause, nights and days went by in
+the siege.
+
+Nothing happened. One morning, indeed, the fragments of another blunt
+arrow came to light, broken underfoot and trampled into the dust. The
+paper scroll, in tatters, held only a few marks legible through dirt and
+heel-prints: "Listen--work fast--many bags--watch closely." And still
+nothing happened to explain the warning.
+
+That night Heywood even made a sortie, and stealing from the main gate
+with four coolies, removed to the river certain relics that lay close
+under the wall, and would soon become intolerable. He had returned
+safely, with an ancient musket, a bag of bullets, a petroleum squirt,
+and a small bundle of pole-axes, and was making his tour of the
+defenses, when he stumbled over Rudolph, who knelt on the ground under
+what in old days had been the chapel, and near what now was
+Kempner's grave.
+
+He was not kneeling in devotion, for he took Heywood by the arm, and
+made him stoop.
+
+"I was coming," he said, "to find you. The first night, I saw coolies
+working in the clay-pit. Bend, a moment over. Put now the ear close."
+
+Heywood laid his cheek in the dust.
+
+"They're keeping such a racket outside," he muttered; and then, half to
+himself: "It certainly is. Rudie, it's--it's as if poor Kempner
+were--waking up." He listened again. "You're right. They are digging."
+
+The two friends sat up, and eyed each other in the starlight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+BROTHER MOLES
+
+This new danger, working below in the solid earth, had thrown Rudolph
+into a state of sullen resignation. What was the use now, he thought
+indignantly, of all their watching and fighting? The ground, at any
+moment, might heave, break, and spring up underfoot. He waited for his
+friend to speak out, and put the same thought roundly into words.
+Instead, to his surprise, he heard something quite contrary.
+
+"Now we know!" said Heywood, in lively satisfaction. "Now we know what
+the beasts have up their sleeve. That's a comfort. Rather!"
+
+He sat thinking, a white figure in the starlight, cross-legged like a
+Buddha.
+
+"That's why they've all been lying doggo," he continued. "And then their
+bad marksmanship, with all this sniping--they don't care, you see,
+whether they pot us or not. They'd rather make one clean sweep, and
+'blow us at the moon.' Eh? Cheer up, Rudie: so long as they're digging,
+they're not blowing. Are they?"
+
+While he spoke, the din outside the walls wavered and sank, at last
+giving place to a shrill, tiny interlude of insect voices. In this
+diluted silence came now and then a tinkle of glass from the dark
+hospital room where Miss Drake was groping among her vials.
+Heywood listened.
+
+"If it weren't for that," he said quietly, "I shouldn't much care.
+Except for the women, this would really be great larks." Then, as a
+shadow flitted past the orange grove, he roused himself to hail: "Ah
+Pat! Go catchee four piecee coolie-man!"
+
+"Can do." The shadow passed, and after a time returned with four other
+shadows. They stood waiting, till Heywood raised his head from the dust.
+
+"Those noises have stopped, down there," he said to Rudolph; and rising,
+gave his orders briefly. The coolies were to dig, strike into the
+sappers' tunnel, and report at once: "Chop-chop.--Meantime, Rudie, let's
+take a holiday. We can smoke in the courtyard."
+
+A solitary candle burned in the far corner of the inclosure, and cast
+faint streamers of reflection along the wet flags, which, sluiced with
+water from the well, exhaled a slight but grateful coolness. Heywood
+stooped above the quivering flame, lighted a cigar, and sinking loosely
+into a chair, blew the smoke upward in slow content.
+
+"Luxury!" he yawned. "Nothing to do, nothing to fret about, till the
+compradore reports. Wonderful--too good to be true."
+
+For a long time, lying side by side, they might have been asleep.
+Through the dim light on the white walls dipped and swerved the drunken
+shadow of a bat, who now whirled as a flake of blackness across the
+stars, now swooped and set the humbler flame reeling. The flutter of his
+leathern wings, and the plash of water in the dark, where a coolie still
+drenched the flags, marked the sleepy, soothing measures in a nocturne,
+broken at strangely regular intervals by a shot, and the crack of a
+bullet somewhere above in the deserted chambers.
+
+"Queer," mused Heywood, drowsily studying his watch. "The beggar puts
+one shot every five minutes through the same window.--I wonder what he's
+thinking about? Lying out there, firing at the Red-Bristled Ghosts. Odd!
+Wonder what they're all"--He put back his cigar, mumbling. "Handful of
+poor blackguards, all upset in their minds, and sweating round. And all
+the rest tranquil as ever, eh?--the whole country jogging on the same
+old way, or asleep and dreaming dreams, perhaps, same kind of dreams
+they had in Marco Polo's day."
+
+The end of his cigar burned red again; and again, except for that, he
+might have been asleep. Rudolph made no answer, but lay thinking. This
+brief moment of rest in the cool, dim courtyard--merely to lie there
+and wait--seemed precious above all other gain or knowledge. Some quiet
+influence, a subtle and profound conviction, slowly was at work in him.
+It was patience, wonder, steady confidence,--all three, and more. He had
+felt it but this once, obscurely; might die without knowing it in
+clearer fashion; and yet could never lose it, or forget, or come to any
+later harm. With it the stars, above the dim vagaries of the bat, were
+brightly interwoven. For the present he had only to lie ready, and wait,
+a single comrade in a happy army.
+
+Through a dark little door came Miss Drake, all in white, and moving
+quietly, like a symbolic figure of evening, or the genius of the place.
+Her hair shone duskily as she bent beside the candle, and with steady
+fingers tilted a vial, from which amber drops fell slowly into a glass.
+With dark eyes watching closely, she had the air of a young, beneficent
+Medea, intent on some white magic.
+
+"Aren't you coming," called Heywood, "to sit with us awhile?"
+
+"Can't, thanks," she replied, without looking up. "I'm too busy."
+
+"That's no excuse. Rest a little."
+
+She moved away, carrying her medicines, but paused in the door, smiled
+back at him as from a crypt, and said:--
+
+"Have _you_ been hurt?"
+
+"Only my feelings."
+
+"I've no time," she laughed, "for lazy able-bodied persons." And she was
+gone in the darkness, to sit by her wounded men.
+
+With her went the interval of peace; for past the well-curb came another
+figure, scuffing slowly toward the light. The compradore, his robes lost
+in their background, appeared as an oily face and a hand beckoning with
+downward sweep. The two friends rose, and followed him down the
+courtyard. In passing out, they discovered the padre's wife lying
+exhausted in a low chair, of which she filled half the length and all
+the width. Heywood paused beside her with some friendly question, to
+which Rudolph caught the answer.
+
+"Oh, quite composed." Her voice sounded fretful, her fan stirred weakly.
+"Yes, wonderfully composed. I feel quite ready to suffer for the faith."
+
+"Dear Mrs. Earle," said the young man, gently, "there ought to be no
+need. Nobody shall suffer, if we can prevent. I think we can."
+
+Under the orange trees, he laid an unsteady hand on Rudolph's arm, and
+halting, shook with quiet merriment.
+
+"Poor dear lady!" he whispered, and went forward chuckling.
+
+Loose earth underfoot warned them not to stumble over the new-raised
+mound beside the pit, which yawned slightly blacker than the night.
+Kempner's grave had not been quieter. The compradore stood whispering:
+they had found the tunnel empty, because, he thought, the sappers were
+gone out to eat their chow.
+
+"We'll see, anyway," said Heywood, stripping off his coat. He climbed
+over the mound, grasped the edges, and promptly disappeared. In the long
+moment which followed, the earth might have closed on him. Once, as
+Rudolph bent listening over the shaft, there seemed to come a faint
+momentary gleam; but no sound, and no further sign, until the head and
+shoulders burrowed up again.
+
+"Big enough hole down there," he reported, swinging clear, and sitting
+with his feet in the shaft. "Regular cave. Three sacks of powder stowed
+already, so we're none too soon.--One sack was leaky. I struck a match,
+and nearly blew myself to Casabianca." He paused, as if reflecting. "It
+gives us a plan, though. Rudie: are you game for something rather
+foolhardy? Be frank, now; for if you wouldn't really enjoy it, I'll give
+old Gilly Forrester his chance."
+
+"No!" said Rudolph, stung as by some perfidy. "You make me--ashamed!
+This is all ours, this part, so!"
+
+"Can do," laughed the other. "Get off your jacket. Give me half a
+moment start, so that you won't jump on my head." And he went wriggling
+down into the pit.
+
+An unwholesome smell of wet earth, a damp, subterranean coolness,
+enveloped Rudolph as he slid down a flue of greasy clay, and stooping,
+crawled into the horizontal bore of the tunnel. Large enough, perhaps,
+for two or three men to pass on all fours, it ran level, roughly cut,
+through earth wet with seepage from the river, but packed into a smooth
+floor by many hands and bare knees. It widened suddenly before him. In
+the small chamber of the mine, choked with the smell of stale betel, he
+bumped Heywood's elbow.
+
+"Some Fragrant Ones have been working here, I should say." The speaker
+patted the ground with quick palms, groping. "Phew! They've worked like
+steam. This explains old Wutz, and his broken arrow. I say, Rudie, feel
+about. I saw a coil of fuse lying somewhere.--At least, I thought it
+was. Ah, never mind: have-got!" He pulled something along the floor.
+"How's the old forearm I gave you? I forgot that. Equal to hauling a
+sack out? Good! Catch hold, here."
+
+Sweeping his hand in the darkness, he captured Rudolph's, and guided it
+to where a powder-bag lay.
+
+"Now, then, carry on," he commanded; and crawling into the tunnel,
+flung back fragments of explanation as he tugged at his own load. "Carry
+these out--far as we dare--touch 'em off, you see, and block the
+passage. Far out as possible, though. We can use this hole afterward,
+for listening in, if they try--"
+
+He cut the sentence short. Their tunnel had begun to slope gently
+downward, with niches gouged here and there for the passing of
+burden-bearers. Rudolph, toiling after, suddenly found his head
+entangled between his leader's boots.
+
+"Quiet," he heard him whisper. "Somebody coming."
+
+An instant later, the boots withdrew quickly. An odd little squeak of
+surprise followed, a strange gurgling, and a succession of rapid shocks,
+as though some one were pummeling the earthen walls.
+
+"Got the beggar," panted Heywood. "Only one of 'em. Roll clear, Rudie,
+and let us pass. Collar his legs, if you can, and shove."
+
+Squeezing past Rudolph in his niche, there struggled a convulsive bulk,
+like some monstrous worm, too large for the bore, yet writhing. Bare
+feet kicked him in violent rebellion, and a muscular knee jarred
+squarely under his chin. He caught a pair of naked legs, and hugged
+them dearly.
+
+"Not too hard," called Heywood, with a breathless laugh. "Poor
+devil--must think he ran foul of a genie."
+
+Indeed, their prisoner had already given up the conflict, and lay under
+them with limbs dissolved and quaking.
+
+"Pass him along," chuckled his captor. "Make him go ahead of us."
+
+Prodded into action, the man stirred limply, and crawled past them
+toward the mine, while Heywood, at his heels, growled orders in the
+vernacular with a voice of dismal ferocity. In this order they gained
+the shaft, and wriggled up like ferrets into the night air. Rudolph,
+standing as in a well, heard a volley of questions and a few timid
+answers, before the returning legs of his comrade warned him to dodge
+back into the tunnel.
+
+Again the two men crept forward on their expedition; and this time the
+leader talked without lowering his voice.
+
+"That chap," he declared, "was fairly chattering with fright. Coolie, it
+seems, who came back to find his betel-box. The rest are all outside
+eating their rice. We have a clear track."
+
+They stumbled on their powder-sacks, caught hold, and dragged them, at
+first easily down the incline, then over a short level, then arduously
+up a rising grade, till the work grew heavy and hot, and breath came
+hard in the stifled burrow.
+
+"Far enough," said Heywood, puffing. "Pile yours here."
+
+Rudolph, however, was not only drenched with sweat, but fired by a new
+spirit, a spirit of daring. He would try, down here in the bowels of the
+earth, to emulate his friend.
+
+"But let us reconnoitre," he objected. "It will bring us to the clay-pit
+where I saw them digging. Let us go out to the end, and look."
+
+"Well said, old mole!" Heywood snapped his fingers with delight. "I
+never thought of that." By his tone, he was proud of the amendment.
+"Come on, by all means. I say, I didn't really--I didn't _want_ poor old
+Gilly down here, you know."
+
+They crawled on, with more speed but no less caution, up the strait
+little gallery, which now rose between smooth, soft walls of clay.
+Suddenly, as the incline once more became a level, they saw a glimmering
+square of dusky red, like the fluttering of a weak flame through scarlet
+cloth. This, while they shuffled toward it, grew higher and broader,
+until they lay prone in the very door of the hill,--a large, square-cut
+portal, deeply overhung by the edge of the clay-pit, and flanked with
+what seemed a bulkhead of sand-bags piled in orderly tiers. Between
+shadowy mounds of loose earth flickered the light of a fire, small and
+distant, round which wavered the inky silhouettes of men, and beyond
+which dimly shone a yellow face or two, a yellow fist clutched full of
+boiled rice like a snowball. Beyond these, in turn, gleamed other little
+fires, where other coolies were squatting at their supper.
+
+"Rudie, look!" Heywood's voice trembled with joyful excitement. "Look,
+these bags; not sand-bags at all! It's powder, old chap, powder! Their
+whole supply. Wait a bit--oh, by Jove, wait a bit!"
+
+He scurried back into the hill like a great rat, returned as quickly and
+swiftly, and with eager hands began to uncoil something on the clay
+threshold.
+
+"Do you know enough to time a fuse?" he whispered. "Neither do I.
+Powder's bad, anyhow. We must guess at it. Here, quick, lend me a
+knife." He slashed open one of the lower sacks in the bulkhead by the
+door, stuffed in some kind of twisted cord, and, edging away, sat for an
+instant with his knife-blade gleaming in the ruddy twilight. "How long,
+Rudie, how long?" He smothered a groan. "Too long, or too short, spoils
+everything. Oh, well--here goes."
+
+The blade moved.
+
+"Now lie across," he ordered, "and shield the tandstickor." With a
+sudden fuff, the match blazed up to show his gray eyes bright and
+dancing, his face glossy with sweat; below, on the golden clay, the
+twisted, lumpy tail of the fuse, like the end of a dusty vine. Darkness
+followed, quick and blinding. A rosy, fitful coal sputtered, darting out
+short capillary lines and needles of fire.
+
+"Cut sticks--go like the devil! If it blows up, and caves the earth on
+us--" Heywood ran on hands and knees, as if that were his natural way of
+going. Rudolph scrambled after, now urged by an ecstasy of apprehension,
+now clogged as by the weight of all the hill above them. If it should
+fall now, he thought, or now; and thus measuring as he crawled, found
+the tunnel endless.
+
+When at last, however, they gained the bottom of the shaft, and were
+hoisted out among their coolies on the shelving mound, the evening
+stillness lay above and about them, undisturbed. The fuse could never
+have lasted all these minutes. Their whole enterprise was but labor
+lost. They listened, breathing short. No sound came.
+
+"Gone out," said Heywood, gloomily. "Or else they saw it."
+
+He climbed the bamboo scaffold, and stood looking over the wall. Rudolph
+perched beside him,--by the same anxious, futile instinct of curiosity,
+for they could see nothing but the night and the burning stars.
+
+"Gone out. Underground again, Rudie, and try our first plan." Heywood
+turned to leap down. "The Sword-Pen looks to set off his mine
+to-morrow morning."
+
+He clutched the wall in time to save himself, as the bamboo frame leapt
+underfoot. Outside, the crest of the slope ran black against a single
+burst of flame. The detonation came like the blow of a mallet on
+the ribs.
+
+"Let him look! Let him look!" Heywood jumped to the ground, and in a
+pelting shower of clods, exulted:--
+
+
+"He looked again, and saw it was
+The middle of next week!"
+
+
+"Come on, brother mole. Spread the news!"
+
+He ran off, laughing, in the wide hush of astonishment.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+THE HAKKA BOAT
+
+"Pretty fair," Captain Kneebone said. "But that ain't the end."
+
+This grudging praise--in which, moreover, Heywood tamely acquiesced--was
+his only comment. On Rudolph it had singular effects: at first filling
+him with resentment, and almost making him suspect the little captain of
+jealousy; then amusing him, as chance words of no weight; but in the
+unreal days that followed, recurring to convince him with all the force
+of prompt and subtle fore-knowledge. It helped him to learn the cold,
+salutary lesson, that one exploit does not make a victory.
+
+The springing of their countermine, he found, was no deliverance. It had
+two plain results, and no more: the crest of the high field, without,
+had changed its contour next morning as though a monster had bitten it;
+and when the day had burnt itself out in sullen darkness, there burst on
+all sides an attack of prolonged and furious exasperation. The fusillade
+now came not only from the landward sides, but from a long flotilla of
+boats in the river; and although these vanished at dawn, the fire never
+slackened, either from above the field, or from a distant wall, newly
+spotted with loopholes, beyond the ashes of the go-down. On the night
+following, the boats crept closer, and suddenly both gates resounded
+with the blows of battering-rams. These and later assaults were beaten
+off. By daylight, the nunnery walls were pitted as with small-pox; yet
+the little company remained untouched, except for Teppich, whose shaven
+head was trimmed still closer and redder by a bullet, and for Gilbert
+Forrester, who showed--with the grave smile of a man when fates are
+playful--two shots through his loose jacket.
+
+He was the only man to smile; for the others, parched by days and
+sweltered by nights of battle, questioned each other with hollow eyes
+and sleepy voices. One at a time, in patches of hot shade, they lay
+tumbled for a moment of oblivion, their backs studded thickly with
+obstinate flies like the driven heads of nails. As thickly, in the dust,
+empty Mauser cartridges lay glistening.
+
+"And I bought food," mourned the captain, chafing the untidy stubble on
+his cheeks, and staring gloomily down at the worthless brass. "I bought
+chow, when all Saigong was full o' cartridges!"
+
+The sight of the spent ammunition at their feet gave them more trouble
+than the swarming flies, or the heat, or the noises tearing and
+splitting the heat. Even Heywood went about with a hang-dog air,
+speaking few words, and those more and more surly. Once he laughed, when
+at broad noonday a line of queer heads popped up from the earthwork on
+the knoll, and stuck there, tilted at odd angles, as though peering
+quizzically. Both his laugh, however, and his one stare of scrutiny were
+filled with a savage contempt,--contempt not only for the stratagem, but
+for himself, the situation, all things.
+
+"Dummies--lay figures, to draw our fire. What a childish trick! Maskee!"
+he added, wearily "we couldn't waste a shot at 'em now even if they
+were real."
+
+His grimy hearers nodded mechanically. They knew, without being told,
+that they should fire no more until at close quarters in some
+final rush.
+
+"Only a few more rounds apiece," he continued. "Our friends outside must
+have run nearly as short, according to the coolie we took prisoner in
+the tunnel. But they'll get more supplies, he says, in a day or two.
+What's worse, his Generalissimo Fang expects big reinforcement, any day,
+from up country. He told me that a moment ago."
+
+"Perhaps he's lying," said Captain Kneebone, drowsily.
+
+"Wish he were," snapped Heywood. "No such luck. Too stupid."
+
+"That case," grumbled the captain, "we'd better signal your Hakka boat,
+and clear out."
+
+Again their hollow eyes questioned each other in discouragement. It was
+plain that he had spoken their general thought; but they were all too
+hot and sleepy to debate even a point of safety. Thus, in stupor or
+doubt, they watched another afternoon burn low by invisible degrees,
+like a great fire dying. Another breathless evening settled over all--at
+first with a dusty, copper light, widespread, as though sky and land
+were seen through smoked glass; another dusk, of deep, sad blue; and
+when this had given place to night, another mysterious lull.
+
+Midnight drew on, and no further change had come. Prowlers, made bold by
+the long silence in the nunnery, came and went under the very walls of
+the compound. In the court, beside a candle, Ah Pat the compradore sat
+with a bundle of halberds and a whetstone, sharpening edge after edge,
+placidly, against the time when there should be no more cartridges.
+Heywood and Rudolph stood near the water gate, and argued with Gilbert
+Forrester, who would not quit his post for either of them.
+
+"But I'm not sleepy," he repeated, with perverse, irritating serenity.
+"I'm not, I assure you. And that river full of their boats?--Go away."
+
+While they reasoned and wrangled, something scraped the edge of the
+wall. They could barely detect a small, stealthy movement above them, as
+if a man, climbing, had lifted his head over the top. Suddenly, beside
+it, flared a surprising torch, rags burning greasily at the end of a
+long bamboo. The smoky, dripping flame showed no man there, but only
+another long bamboo, impaling what might be another ball of rags. The
+two poles swayed, inclined toward each other; for one incredible instant
+the ball, beside its glowing fellow, shone pale and took on human
+features. Black shadows filled the eye-sockets, and gave to the face an
+uncertain, cavernous look, as though it saw and pondered.
+
+How long the apparition stayed, the three men could not tell; for even
+after it vanished, and the torch fell hissing in the river, they stood
+below the wall, dumb and sick, knowing only that they had seen the head
+of Wutzler.
+
+Heywood was the first to make a sound--a broken, hypnotic sound, without
+emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words
+torn from him by ventriloquy.
+
+"We must get the women--out of here."
+
+Afterward, when he was no longer with them, his two friends recalled
+that he never spoke again that night, but came and went in a kind of
+silent rage, ordering coolies by dumb-show, and carrying armful after
+armful of supplies to the water gate. He would neither pause nor answer.
+
+The word passed, or a listless, tacit understanding, that every one must
+hold himself ready to go aboard so soon after daylight as the hostile
+boats should leave the river. "If," said Gilly to Rudolph, while they
+stood thinking under the stars, "if his boat is still there, now that
+he--after what we saw."
+
+At dawn they could see the ragged flotilla of sampans stealing up-river
+on the early flood; but of the masts that huddled in vapors by the
+farther bank, they had no certainty until sunrise, when the green rag
+and the rice-measure appeared still dangling above the Hakka boat.
+
+Even then it was not certain--as Captain Kneebone sourly pointed
+out--that her sailors would keep their agreement. And when he had piled,
+on the river-steps, the dry wood for their signal fire, a new difficulty
+rose. One of the wounded converts was up, and hobbling with a stick; but
+the other would never be ferried down any stream known to man. He lay
+dying, and the padre could not leave him.
+
+All the others waited, ready and anxious; but no one grumbled because
+death, never punctual, now kept them waiting. The flutter of birds,
+among the orange trees, gradually ceased; the sun came slanting over
+the eastern wall; the gray floor of the compound turned white and
+blurred through the dancing heat. A torrid westerly breeze came
+fitfully, rose, died away, rose again, and made Captain Kneebone curse.
+
+"A fair wind lost," he muttered. "Next we'll lose the ebb, too, be
+'anged."
+
+Noon passed, and mid-afternoon, before the padre came out from the
+courtyard, covering his white head with his ungainly helmet.
+
+"We may go now," he said gravely, "in a few minutes."
+
+No more were needed, for the loose clods in the old shaft of their
+counter-mine were quickly handled, and the necessary words soon uttered.
+Captain Kneebone had slipped out through the water gate, beforehand, and
+lighted the fire on the steps. But not one of the burial party turned
+his head, to watch the success or failure of their signal, so long as
+the padre's resonant bass continued.
+
+When it ceased, however, they returned quickly through the little grove.
+The captain opened the great gate, and looked out eagerly, craning to
+see through the smoke that poured into his face.
+
+"The wasters!" he cried bitterly. "She's gone."
+
+The Hakka boat had, indeed, vanished from her moorings. On the bronze
+current, nothing moved but three fishing-boats drifting down, with the
+smoke, toward the marsh and the bend of the river, and a small junk that
+toiled up against wind and tide, a cluster of naked sailors tugging and
+shoving at her heavy sweep, which chafed its rigging of dry rope, and
+gave out a high, complaining note like the cry of a sea-gull.
+
+"She's gone," repeated Captain Kneebone. "No boat for us."
+
+But the compradore, dragging his bundle of sharp halberds, poked an
+inquisitive head out past the captain's, and peered on all sides through
+the smoke, with comical thoroughness. He dodged back, grinning and
+ducking amiably.
+
+"Moh bettah look-see," he chuckled; "dat coolie come-back, he too muchee
+waitee, b'long one piecee foolo-man."
+
+He was wrong. Whoever handled the Hakka boat was no fool, but by working
+upstream on the opposite shore, crossing above, and dropping down with
+the ebb, had craftily brought her along the shallow, so close beneath
+the river-wall, that not till now did even the little captain spy her.
+The high prow, the mast, now bare, and her round midships roof, bright
+golden-thatched with leaves of the edible bamboo, came moving quiet as
+some enchanted boat in a calm. The fugitives by the gate still thought
+themselves abandoned, when her beak, six feet in air, stole past them,
+and her lean boatmen, prodding the river-bed with their poles, stopped
+her as easily as a gondola. The yellow steersman grinned, straining at
+the pivot of his gigantic paddle.
+
+"Good boy, lowdah!" called Kneebone. "Remember _you_ in my will, too!"
+And the grinning lowdah nodded, as though he understood.
+
+They had now only to pitch their supplies through the smoke, down on the
+loose boards of her deck. Then--Rudolph and the captain kicking the
+bonfire off the stairs--the whole company hurried down and safely over
+her gunwale: first the two women, then the few huddling converts, the
+white men next, the compradore still hugging his pole-axes, and last of
+all, Heywood, still in strange apathy, with haggard face and downcast
+eyes. He stumbled aboard as though drunk, his rifle askew under one arm,
+and in the crook of the other, Flounce, the fox-terrier, dangling,
+nervous and wide awake.
+
+He looked to neither right nor left, met nobody's eye. The rest of the
+company crowded into the house amidships, and flung themselves down
+wearily in the grateful dusk, where vivid paintings and mysteries of
+rude carving writhed on the fir bulkheads. But Heywood, with his dog and
+the captain and Rudolph, sat in the hot sun, staring down at the
+ramshackle deck, through the gaps in which rose all the stinks of the
+sweating hold.
+
+The boatmen climbed the high slant of the bow, planted their stout
+bamboos against their shoulders, and came slowly down, head first, like
+straining acrobats. As slowly, the boat began to glide past the stairs.
+
+Thus far, though the fire lay scattered in the mud, the smoke drifted
+still before them and obscured their silent, headlong transaction. Now,
+thinning as they dropped below the corner of the wall, it left them
+naked to their enemies on the knoll. At the same instant, from the marsh
+ahead, the sentinel in the round hat sprang up again, like an
+instantaneous mushroom. He shouted, and waved to his fellows inland.
+
+They had no time, however, to leave the high ground; for the whole
+chance of the adventure took a sudden and amazing turn.
+
+Heywood sprang out of his stupor, and stood pointing.
+
+"Look there!" he snarled. "Those--oh!"
+
+He ended with a groan. The face of his friend, by torchlight above the
+wall, had struck him dumb. Now that he spoke, his companions saw,
+exposed in the field to the view of the nunnery, a white body lying on a
+framework as on a bier. Near the foot stood a rough sort of windlass.
+Above, on the crest of the field, where a band of men had begun to
+scramble at the sentinel's halloo, there sat on a white pony the
+bright-robed figure of the tall fanatic, Fang the Sword-Pen.
+
+"He did it!" Heywood's hands opened and shut rapidly, like things out of
+control. "Oh, Wutz, how did they--Saint Somebody--the martyrdom--
+Poussin's picture in the Vatican.--I can't stand this, you chaps!"
+
+He snatched blindly at his gun, caught instead one of the compradore's
+halberds, and without pause or warning, jumped out into the shallow
+water. He ran splashing toward the bank, turned, and seemed to waver,
+staring with wild eyes at the strange Tudor weapon in his hand. Then
+shaking it savagely,--
+
+"This will do!" he cried. "Good-by, everybody. Good-by!"
+
+He wheeled again, staggered to his feet on dry ground, and ran swiftly
+along the eastern wall, up the rising field, straight toward his mark.
+
+Of the men on the knoll, a few fired and missed, the others, neutrals to
+their will, stood fixed in wonder. Four or five, as the runner neared,
+sprang out to intercept, but flew apart like ninepins. The watchers in
+the boat saw the halberd flash high in the late afternoon sun, the
+frightened pony swerve, and his rider go down with the one sweep of that
+Homeric blow.
+
+The last they saw of Heywood, he went leaping from sight over the
+crest, that swarmed with figures racing and stumbling after.
+
+The unheeded sentinel in the marsh fled, losing his great hat, as the
+boat drifted round the point into midstream.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+THE DRAGON'S SHADOW
+
+The lowdah would have set his dirty sails without delay, for the fair
+wind was already drooping; but at the first motion he found himself
+deposed, and a usurper in command, at the big steering-paddle. Captain
+Kneebone, his cheeks white and suddenly old beneath the untidy stubble
+of his beard, had taken charge. In momentary danger of being cut off
+downstream, or overtaken from above, he kept the boat waiting along the
+oozy shore. Puckering his eyes, he watched now the land, and now the
+river, silent, furtive, and keenly perplexed, his head on a swivel, as
+though he steered by some nightmare chart, or expected some instant and
+transforming sight.
+
+Not until the sun touched the western hills, and long shadows from the
+bank stole out and turned the stream from bright copper to vague
+iron-gray, did he give over his watch. He left the tiller, with a
+hopeless fling of the arm.
+
+"Do as ye please," he growled, and cast himself down on deck by the
+thatched house. "Go on.--I'll never see _him_ again.--The heat, and
+all--By the head, he was--Go on. That's all. Finish."
+
+He sat looking straight before him, with dull eyes that never moved;
+nor did he stir at the dry rustle and scrape of the matting sail, slowly
+hoisted above him. The quaggy banks, now darkening, slid more rapidly
+astern; while the steersman and his mates in the high bow invoked the
+wind with alternate chant, plaintive, mysterious, and half musical:--
+
+
+"Ay-ly-chy-ly
+Ah-ha-aah!"
+
+
+To the listeners, huddled in silence, the familiar cry became a long,
+monotonous accompaniment to sad thoughts. Through the rhythm, presently,
+broke a sound of small-arms,--a few shots, quick but softened by
+distance, from far inland. The stillness of evening followed.
+
+The captain stirred, listened, dropped his head, and sat like stone. To
+Rudolph, near him, the brief disturbance called up another evening--his
+first on this same river, when from the grassy brink, above, he had
+first heard of his friend. Now, at the same place, and by the same
+light, they had heard the last. It was intolerable: he turned his back
+on the captain. Inside, in the gloom of the painted cabin, the padre's
+wife began suddenly to cry. After a time, the deep voice of her husband,
+speaking very low, and to her alone, became dimly audible:--
+
+"'All this is come upon us; yet have we not--Our heart is not turned
+back, neither have our steps declined--Though thou hast sore broken us
+in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.'"
+
+The little captain groaned, and rolled aside from the doorway.
+
+"All very fine," he muttered, his head wrapped in his arms. "But that's
+no good to me. I can't stand it."
+
+Whether she heard him, or by chance, Miss Drake came quietly from
+within, and found a place between him and the gunwale. He did not rouse;
+she neither glanced nor spoke, but leaned against the ribs of
+smooth-worn fir, as though calmly waiting.
+
+When at last he looked up, to see her face and posture, he gave an angry
+start.
+
+"And I thought," he blurted, "be 'anged if sometimes I didn't think you
+liked him!"
+
+Her dark eyes met the captain's with a great and steadfast clearness.
+
+"No," she whispered; "it was more than that."
+
+The captain sat bolt upright, but no longer in condemnation. For a long
+time he watched her, marveling; and when finally he spoke, his sharp,
+domineering voice was lowered, almost gentle.
+
+"Always talked too much," he said. "Don't mind me, my dear. I never
+meant--Don't ye mind a rough old beggar, that don't know that hasn't one
+thing more between him and the grave. Not a thing--but money. And that,
+now--I wish't was at the bottom o' this bloomin' river!"
+
+They said no more, but rested side by side, like old friends joined
+closer by new grief. Flounce, the terrier, snuffing disconsolately about
+the deck, and scratching the boards in her zeal to explore the shallow
+hold, at last grew weary, and came to snuggle down between the two
+silent companions. Not till then did the girl turn aside her face, as
+though studying the shore, which now melted in a soft, half-liquid band
+as black as coal-tar, above the luminous indigo of the river.
+
+Suddenly Rudolph got upon his feet, and craning outboard from gunwale
+and thatched eaves, looked steadily forward into the dusk. A chatter of
+angry voices came stealing up, in the pauses of the wind. He watched and
+listened, then quickly drew in his head.
+
+"Sit quiet," he said. "A boat full of men. I do not like their looks."
+
+Two or three of the voices hailed together, raucously. The steersman,
+leaning on the loom of his paddle, made neither stir nor answer. They
+hailed again, this time close aboard, and as it seemed, in rage.
+Glancing contemptuously to starboard, the lowdah made some negligent
+reply, about a cargo of human hair. His indifference appeared so real,
+that for a moment Rudolph suspected him: perhaps he had been bought
+over, and this meeting arranged. The thought, however, was unjust. The
+voices began to drop astern, and to come in louder confusion with
+the breeze.
+
+But at this point Flounce, the terrier, spoiled all by whipping up
+beside the lowdah, and furiously barking. Hers was no pariah's yelp: she
+barked with spirit, in the King's English.
+
+For answer, there came a shout, a sharp report, and a bullet that ripped
+through the matting sail. The steersman ducked, but clung bravely to his
+paddle. Men tumbled out from the cabin, rifles in hand, to join Rudolph
+and the captain.
+
+Astern, dangerously near, they saw the hostile craft, small, but listed
+heavily with crowding ruffians, packed so close that their great wicker
+hats hung along the gunwale to save room, and shone dim in the obscurity
+like golden shields of vikings. A squat, burly fellow, shouting, jammed
+the yulow hard to bring her about.
+
+"Save your fire," called Captain Kneebone. "No shots to waste. Sit
+tight."
+
+As he spoke, however, an active form bounced up beside the squat man at
+the sweep,--a plump, muscular little barefoot woman in blue. She tore
+the fellow's hands away, and took command, keeping the boat's nose
+pointed up-river, and squalling ferocious orders to all on board.
+
+"The Pretty Lily!" cried Rudolph. This small, nimble, capable creature
+could be no one but Mrs. Wu, their friend and gossip of that morning,
+long ago....
+
+The squat man gave an angry shout, and turned on her to wrest away the
+handle. He failed, at once and for all. With great violence, yet with a
+neat economy of motion, the Pretty Lily took one hand from her tiller,
+long enough to topple him overboard with a sounding splash.
+
+Her passengers, at so prompt and visual a joke, burst into shrill,
+cackling laughter. Yet more shrill, before their mood could alter, the
+Pretty Lily scourged them with the tongue of a humorous woman. She held
+her course, moreover; the two boats drifted so quickly apart that when
+she turned, to fling a comic farewell after the white men, they could no
+more than descry her face, alert and comely, and the whiteness of her
+teeth. Her laughing cry still rang, the overthrown leader still
+floundered in the water, when the picture blurred and vanished. Down the
+wind came her words, high, voluble, quelling all further mutiny aboard
+that craft of hers.
+
+"We owe this to you." The tall padre eyed Rudolph with sudden interest,
+and laid his big hand on the young man's shoulder. "Did you catch what
+she said? You made a good friend there."
+
+"No," answered Rudolph, and shook his head, sadly. "We owe that to--some
+one else."
+
+Later, while they drifted down to meet the sea and the night, he told
+the story, to which all listened with profound attention, wondering at
+the turns of fortune, and at this last service, rendered by a friend
+they should see no more.
+
+They murmured awhile, by twos and threes huddled in corners; then lay
+silent, exhausted in body and spirit. The river melted with the shore
+into a common blackness, faintly hovered over by the hot, brown, sullen
+evening. Unchallenged, the Hakka boat flitted past the lights of a
+war-junk, so close that the curved lantern-ribs flickered thin and sharp
+against a smoky gleam, and tawny faces wavered, thick of lip and stolid
+of eye, round the supper fire. A greasy, bitter smell of cooking floated
+after. Then no change or break in the darkness, except a dim lantern or
+two creeping low in a sampan, with a fragment of talk from unseen
+passers; until, as the stars multiplied overhead, the night of the land
+rolled heavily astern and away from another, wider night, the stink of
+the marshes failed, and by a blind sense of greater buoyancy and
+sea-room, the voyagers knew that they had gained the roadstead. Ahead,
+far off and lustrous, a new field of stars hung scarce higher than
+their gunwale, above the rim of the world.
+
+The lowdah showed no light; and presently none was needed, for--as the
+shallows gave place to deeps--the ocean boiled with the hoary,
+green-gold magic of phosphorus, that heaved alongside in soft explosions
+of witch-fire, and sent uncertain smoky tremors playing through the
+darkness on deck. Rudolph, watching this tropic miracle, could make out
+the white figure of the captain, asleep near by, under the faint
+semicircle of the deck-house; and across from him, Miss Drake, still
+sitting upright, as though waiting, with Flounce at her side. Landward,
+against the last sage-green vapor of daylight, ran the dim range of the
+hills, in long undulations broken by sharper crests, like the finny back
+of leviathan basking.
+
+Over there, thought Rudolph, beyond that black shape as beyond its
+guarding dragon, lay the whole mysterious and peaceful empire, with
+uncounted lives going on, ending, beginning, as though he, and his sore
+loss, and his heart vacant of all but grief, belonged to some
+unheard-of, alien process, to Nature's most unworthy trifling. This
+boatload of men and women--so huge a part of his own experience--was
+like the tiniest barnacle chafed from the side of that dark,
+serene monster.
+
+Rudolph stared long at the hills, and as they faded, hung his head.
+From that dragon he had learned much; yet now all learning was but loss.
+
+Of a sudden the girl spoke, in a clear yet guarded voice, too low to
+reach the sleepers.
+
+"What are you thinking of?" she said. "Come tell me. It will be good for
+both of us."
+
+Rudolph crossed silently, and stood leaning on the gunwale beside her.
+
+"I thought only," he answered, "how much the hills looked so--as a
+dragon."
+
+"How strange." The trembling phosphorus half-revealed her face, pale and
+still. "I was thinking of that, in a way. It reminded me of what he
+said, once--when we were walking together."
+
+To their great relief, they found themselves talking of Heywood, sadly,
+but freely, and as it were in a sudden calm. Their friendship seemed,
+for the moment, a thing as long established as the dragon hills. Years
+afterward, Rudolph recalled her words, plainer than the fiery wonder
+that spread and burst round their little vessel, or the long play of
+heat-lightning which now, from time to time, wavered instantly along the
+eastern sea-line.
+
+"You are right," she declared once. "To go on with life, even when we
+are alone--You will go on, I know. Bravely." And again she said: "Yes,
+such men as he are--a sort of Happy Warrior." And later, in her slow and
+level voice: "You learned something, you say. Isn't that--what I
+call--being invulnerable? When a man's greater than anything that
+happens to him--"
+
+So they talked, their speech bare and simple, but the pauses and longer
+silences filled with deep understanding, solemnized by the time and the
+place, as though their two lonely spirits caught wisdom from the night,
+scope from the silent ocean, light from the flickering East.
+
+The flashes, meanwhile, came faster and prolonged their glory, running
+behind a thin, dead screen of scalloped clouds, piercing the tropic sky
+with summer blue, and ripping out the lost horizon like a long black
+fibre from pulp. The two friends watched in silence, when Rudolph rose,
+and moved cautiously aft.
+
+"Good-night," he whispered. "You must sleep now."
+
+That was not, however, the reason. So long as the boiling witch-fire
+turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever
+the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the
+lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire
+gauze,--then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt
+out astern, and vanished. He stood by the lowdah, watching anxiously.
+
+Time and again the ocean flickered into view, like the floor of a
+measureless cavern; and still he could not tell. But at last the lowdah
+also turned his head, and murmured. Their boat creaked monotonously,
+drifting to leeward in a riot of golden mist; yet now another creaking
+disturbed the night, in a different cadence. Another boat followed them,
+rowing fast and gaining. In a brighter flash, her black sail fluttered,
+unmistakable.
+
+Rudolph reached for his gun, but waited silently. He would not call out.
+Some chance fisherman, it might be, or any small craft holding the same
+course along the coast. Still, he did not like the hurry of the sweeps,
+which presently groaned louder and threw up nebulous fire. The
+stranger's bow became an arrowhead of running gold.
+
+And here was Flounce, ready to misbehave once more. Before he could
+catch her, the small white body of the terrier whipped by him, and past
+the steersman. This time, however, as though cowed, she began to
+whimper, and then maintained a long, trembling whine.
+
+Beside Rudolph, the compradore's head bobbed up.
+
+"Allo same she mastah come." And in his native tongue, Ah Pat grumbled
+something about ghosts.
+
+A harsh voice hailed, from the boat astern; the lowdah answered; and so
+rapidly slid the deceptive glimmer of her bow, that before Rudolph knew
+whether to wake his friends, or could recover, next, from the shock and
+ecstasy of unbelief, a tall white figure jumped or swarmed over
+the side.
+
+"By Jove, my dream!" sounded the voice of Heywood, gravely. With fingers
+that dripped gold, he tried to pat the bounding terrier. She flew up at
+him, and tumbled back, in the liveliest danger of falling overboard.
+"Old girl,--my dream!"
+
+The figure rose.
+
+"Hallo, Rudie." In a daze, Rudolph gripped the wet and shining hands,
+and heard the same quiet voice: "Rest all asleep, I suppose? Don't wake
+'em. To-morrow will do.--Have you any money on you? Toss that
+fisherman--whatever you think I'm worth. He really rowed like steam,
+you know."
+
+Rudolph flung his purse into the other boat. When he turned, this man
+restored from the sea had disappeared. But he had only stolen forward,
+dog in arms, to sit beside Miss Drake. So quietly had all happened, that
+none of the sleepers, not even the captain, was aware. Rudolph drew near
+the two murmuring voices.
+
+"--Couldn't help it, honestly," said Heywood. "Can't describe, or
+explain. Just something--went black inside my head, you know." He
+paused. "No: don't recall seeing a thing, really, until I pitched away
+the--what happened to be in my hands. A blank, all that. Losing your
+head, I suppose they call it. Most extraordinary."
+
+The girl's question recalled him from his puzzle.
+
+"Do? Oh!" He disposed of the subject easily. "I ran, that's all.--Oh,
+yes, but I ran faster.--Not half so many as you'd suppose. Most of 'em
+were away, burning your hospital. Saw the smoke, as I ran. All gone but
+a handful. Hence those stuffed hats, Rudie, in the trench.--Only three
+of the lot could run. I merely scuttled into the next bamboo, and kept
+on scuttling. No: they weren't half loaded. Oh, yes, arrow in the
+shoulder--scratch. Of course, when it came dark, I stopped running, and
+made for the nearest fisherman. That's all."
+
+"But," protested Rudolph, wondering, "we heard shots."
+
+"Yes, I had my Webley in my belt. Fortunately. I _told_ you: three of
+them could run." The speaker patted the terrier in his lap. "My dream,
+eh, little dog? You _were_ the only one to know."
+
+"No," said the girl: "I knew--all the time, that--"
+
+Whatever she meant, Rudolph could only guess; but it was true, he
+thought, that she had never once spoken as though the present meeting
+were not possible, here or somewhere. Recalling this, he suddenly but
+quietly stepped away aft, to sit beside the steersman, and smile in
+the darkness.
+
+The two voices flowed on. He did not listen, but watched the phosphorus
+welling soft and turbulent in the wake, and far off, in glimpses of the
+tropic light, the great Dragon weltering on the face of the waters. The
+shape glimmered forth, died away, like a prodigy. How ran the verse?
+
+
+"Ich lieg' und besitze.
+Lass mich schlafen."
+
+
+"And yet," thought the young man, "I have one pearl from his hoard."
+That girl was right: like Siegfried tempered in the grisly flood, the
+raw boy was turning into a man, seasoned and invulnerable.
+
+Heywood was calling to him:--
+
+"You must go Home with us. Do you hear? I've made a wonderful plan--with
+the captain's fortune! Dear old Kneebone."
+
+A small white heap across the deck began to rise.
+
+"How often," complained a voice blurred with sleep, "how often must I
+tell ye--wake me, unless the ship--chart's all--Good God!"
+
+At the captain's cry, those who lay in darkness under the thatched roof
+began to mutter, to rise, and grope out into the trembling light, with
+sleepy cries of joy.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dragon's blood, by Henry Milner Rideout
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