They had nearly reached the gunboat when those on the bank heard young Kane's voice raised in hot protest. There was a moment of argument; then a splash. The boy could be seen then swimming back to shore. And Dawley Kane, turning his back, went on to the gunboat, stepped aboard, and disappeared. Rocky clambered, dripping, up the bank; came straight to Duane, a staring, exhausted youth, very white.
“I can't do it.” he panted. “They've just told me—Kato and the pater—about this terrible trouble of the viceroy's and—and Miss Hui Fei's.... The pater said it was time I—got clear of any new entanglement. I quit him. Oh, I suppose you'll think me a—damn fool, but”—at this point he nearly broke into tears—“but I love that girl, Mr. Doane! If I can't be of some use to her—now, in this awful trouble—I don't want to live. Will you—help me? And let me help?”.... And, all blind confidence, he offered his hand to the big mate; who took it.
The gunboat hoisted anchor and swung about, heading down-stream. Passing her, upward bound, came a large junk, with the rig of a trader from Szechuen, her single huge rectangular sail, brown-umber 'n tint and closely ribbed with battens of bamboo, flat against the one mast that towered clumsily amidships. The eight long sweeps, in the low waist and forward, moved rhythmically in time with the syncopated, wailing chant of nearly a hundred oarsmen. The tai-kung crouched, bamboo pole in hand, just within the prow.
The hull was of cypress, stained from stem to stern with yellow orpiment and rubbed to a polish with oil. The high after-deck structure, all of fifty feet in length, terminating in a projecting gallery-twenty feet or higher above the water, was carved everywhere in intricately decorative designs; as were, also, the roof over the tillerman's stand on the deck house and the gallery railing (just within which stood a row of flowering plants in yellow and green pots). The many small windows along the sides were glazed with opalescent squares of ground oyster shells and glue; those across the stern (under the gallery) with stained glass.
To no one aboard the gunboat or among the still waiting groups on the bank did the thought occur that this craft might be engaged in other than peaceable business. Her like were not an uncommon sight along the always crowded river. The passing attention she drew was merely that aroused by a richly decorative object moving beautifully (with a remarkably detailed reflection) through the flat water, that itself glowed under the red and gold of the early morning sky like a great sheet of burnished old copper. It was not observed that three white faces peered warily out of the shadow, behind as many opened windows; nor could it easily be seen that the figure in blue, sitting, knees drawn up, on the deck house just behind the laopan who mercilessly urged on the sweat-shining oarsmen, was none other than the redoubtable Tom Sung.
CHAPTER VIII—ABOARD THE YELLOW JUNK
IN making their escape from the steamer, Tex Connor and the Manila Kid seized one of the small boats, manning, one at either end, the tackle-falls. Connor was quick, rough, profane. The Kid, breathless with excitement, hesitant, glancing back over the rail for a thinly girlish face that did not, then, appear, worked with ten thumbs at the ropes. Connor's end, the boat, fell first, a short way, nearly pitching him out. He cursed this futile man, his jackal, roundly; then clung to the tackle as the stern fell.... The Kid moaned with pain as the slipping hemp burned the skin off his fingers, but held it just short of disaster.
Hot red flames licked out overhead as the boat jerkily dropped. The women were screaming up there. A white man, the second mate, leaned over, swearing vigorously at them. They passed an open freight gangway, where bodies lay.
“Ready, now!” cried Connor. “Let go with me!”
“Wait a minute, can't you?” whined the Kid. He was peering into the dark interior of the steamer; grasping a moment more; wrapping a handkerchief about his left hand. “My God! Can't a fellow tie up his hand.”
A thin blue figure appeared, stepped lightly over into the boat and dropped on a middle thwart.
“Dixie!” cried the Kid in falsetto.
She wore a cap, and carried an oddly lady-like shopping bag.
“Where'd you come from?” growled Connor.
“I saw you start,” said the girl casually. “Come on—let's get away.”
Connor stared at her; then turned back to his work. The boat struck the water and drifted rapidly away down-stream. Connor, roaring angrily at the Kid, got out an oar.
“What are you doing?” asked Miss Carmichael very quietly.
“Going ashore?” said Connor.
“Oh, come, Tex!” said she. “Use your head.”
He looked sharply, inquiringly, doubtingly at her.
“You two better row straight down-stream as hard as you can,” she added. “You can bet Tom Sung and that gang aren't going to show themselves at Kiu Kiang. They've stopped somewhere below here.”
The Kid, who was nursing his hand, looked up; wrinkled his low forehead that was hatless, and then softly whistled. Connor made no remark, but continued studying the girl with his one eye. Finally, with an effort at reasserting his authority, he growled:
“Take an oar, Jim!”
“But my hands! My God, that rope took all the—”
“Do you expect me to do the rowing, Jim?” said Miss Carmichael.
The Kid yielded then. The girl settled herself comfortably in the stem, looking back at the fire. Soon they were out of the circle of light.
Suddenly Connor drew in his oar; stowed it away.
“Dixie,” he remarked. “You've made up your mind to go through with this business, eh?”
“Certainly,” she replied.
“You'll have to come across if you want my help. I won't go it blind.”
Miss Carmichael glanced back at the red glow in the sky, then out toward the slightly paling East.
“I'll tell you by sunrise,” she said. “The thing won't keep much longer than that, anyhow. It'll have to be fairly quick work.”
“All right,” said Connor. “That's an agreement. Now I'm going to take a nap. This current's taking us down fast enough. When you sight Tom's outfit, wake me up.” With which he curled up in the bow, and soon was snoring.
The Kid stowed his own oar, and crept to the girl's side.
“Careful!” she whispered. “If he should wake up....” She extricated herself from an encircling arm. “Jim—sit still now!—It's time you and I had an understanding. I need you, and I'm going to use you. I don't propose to have you all steamed up, either. You'll need all the nerve you've got. Perhaps more. I'm not at all sure that you're big enough for what you've got to do. That's the difficulty.”
“You promised, Dixie.” He was still absurdly breathless. “You said it was a trade—if I'd stick to you, you'd stick to me!”
“Certainly. But it's during the next eight or ten hours that you're going to find out what sticking to me, means. You can have me, all right, Jim, but you've got to earn me.”
“I guess I'll earn you, all right.”
“I wonder if you have the courage.”
“By God, for you, Dixie—”
Her hand fell lightly on his; and her voice, very small and calm, broke in with: “Supposing I told you to kill a man. Would you do it?”
She heard, felt, his breath stop. Then he whispered, with one swift glance at the sleeping Connor: “If I say yes, Dixie, will you kiss me? Right now?”
She pressed her lips slightly; then replied: “No. Not yet. And you needn't kill anybody until I tell you to.”
“Is it—is it”—his whisper was huskier—“is it—him, Dixie?” He was staring with less certainty now, at Connor.
“No”—said she slowly—“nobody in particular. But anything may happen to-night, Jim. And we can't falter. Not now.”
She let him press her hand during a brief moment; then made him resume his seat. And from behind lowered lids she watched him.
Once he came back, to ask hoarsely: “You said he was rough with you, Dix. Did he—did you and he—my God, if I thought that Tex had—”
She caught his shoulder and placed a hand over his mouth: held him thus while she said: “If he catches you back here, Jim, he'll kill you. No fear! Now you go back there and show me that you can play cards. You're sitting in the biggest game of your life. Jim Watson.”
He crept back; puzzled, something hurt. There was a sting in her voice. Could it be that the girlish Dixie was as cold-blooded as that? Treating him like a child! Hadn't she any feelings? The question came around and around in his muddy brain, confused with frantic uprushes of jealousy against the big man who slept and snored in the bow.... hadn't she any feelings?.... She was excitingly desirable.
Just as a conquest, now; something to brag about.
It was Dixie who sighted the soldiers, sitting in heated argument on the bank not a hundred yards below a big junk that lay moored to stakes in an eddy. She called sharply to Connor; they pulled straight in beside the other two boats.
Tom Sung came to the water's edge, a rifle (with set bayonet) in his hand. Connor stepped out, holding the boat. The Kid, with a furtive, glance at the big yellow fighter, and the abruptly silent shadowy group on the bank, cautiously got out an automatic pistol and held it beside him on the thwart.
Dixie said sharply, for Connor's ears: “Put up that gun, Jim!”
The Kid obeyed.
She spoke then to Connor direct.
“Tell your man we want that junk,” she said. “Get out these other boats and take it, quick. Then we'll start back up-stream.”
For a moment Connor was nonplussed. The girl's assumption of authority was complete. Even the slow-thinking Tom Sung felt her presence and turned abruptly from himself toward her.
But, though angered, Connor controlled himself. She meant, after all, business. Dixit wasn't a girl to make careless mistakes. She knew, none better, what any success, little or big, might be worth in risks run. So, speaking sharply, he gave his orders to Tom.
Quietly the twenty or more outlaw soldiers came down to the boats and pushed off. Rowing and paddling they crept up on the junk. A drowsy watchman peeped over at the rail, forward.
Then they were alongside. Catching at the mooring poles, the soldiers stepped out on the wide sponson that curved down, amidships, nearly to the water-line. Quickly, rifles slung on backs but revolvers at their girdles and knives in their teeth, they went up the ropes hand over hand, their bare feet dinging monkeylike to the smooth side.
There were cries aboard now, and a confusion of running feet. The first soldier to get a leg over the rail came tumbling back with a split skull, bounding off the sponson into the water and sinking as he drifted away.
Connor and the Kid caught together at the sponson. Connor stepped out; and calling on a belated soldier to give him a back, climbed laboriously, puffing but determined, up over the rail, pausing at the top only to call back for the Kid to follow.
But that worthy hesitated, crouching, clutching at the boat painter. “I've got to hold the boat here!” he shouted back; but Connor had disappeared.
There was much noise up there now—shouts, groans, appalling screeches, shots, and that insistent pattering of feet.
Dixie, watching critically the crouching figure on the sponson—for the Kid was shivering and making little sounds, obviously caught in the acute physical distress into which extreme sudden fear will at times plunge a man—called abruptly: “Jim—look up!”
A nearly naked Chinese was lowering himself in a deliberate gingerly manner down a moving rope nearly overhead.
“Kill him, Jim!” Dixie added.
Singling out her clear voice from the tumult, the yellow man looked fearfully down.
The Kid, at the same moment, looked up; then, fumbling in a curiously absent way for his pistol, glanced back at Dixie.
“I'll hold the boat,” said she. “Go on—kill him!” She sat quietly, one thin arm reached out to the nearest mooring pole, looking steadily up.
The Kid, nerving himself, suddenly burst into a storm of wild oaths and shot three times into the body above him. At the first shot the man slipped down a little way.
“Push him away!” Dixie cried sharply. “I don't want him falling into the boat!”
He was shooting again; and then with an effort diverted the falling body.
Dixie got up, and stood steadying herself in the gently rocking boat; and the Kid—quit; out of breath now, and muttering, as he fondled the hot pistol, “Well, I did it, didn't I? I did what you said!”—found in her eyes, shining through the dusk of early dawn, a bright white light that was, to him, disconcerting and yet profoundly thrilling. He shivered again as he felt the spell of her strange genius. What a woman, he was thinking again, but wildly, madly, now, to conquer.
And she was saying, “I guess your nerve's all right.”
Other shining yellow bodies were tumbling over the side and floating away.
“Help me up there, Jim!” she commanded. “Never mind tying the boat—let it go! It's only a giveaway. Quick—give me a hand!”
She was beside him on the sponson. He clasped her in his arms; but before he could kiss her she slapped him sharply. “Keep your head!” she commanded. “Put me up there!”
He lifted her high; until she could kneel, then stand, on his shoulder. She went over the rail as lightly as a boy. She found the soldiers in small groups cornering one or another of the crew, torturing and hacking at them with bayonets and knives, and during a brief moment looked on with a curious keen interest. The master, or laopan, crouched, whimpering, on the poop.... She saw Connor standing by the mast, just above the well, amidships and forward, where were huddled the survivors among the crew (their number surprisingly large); Connor was panting, revolver in hand, and scowling about him.
Dixie stepped to his side.
“You've got to save enough of this crew to work the boat up the river, Tex,” she remarked.
“I'm saving enough of 'em,” he replied gruffly. “We've only killed a dozen or so. There was more'n a hundred.”
The heavily evil-looking Tom Sung reluctantly detached himself from one of the groups and came over, wiping his bayonet casually on his sleeve. Mr. Connor roughly ordered to gather his men together and make ready to get under way. To the Kid, who came awkwardly over the rail just then, Connor gave merely a glance. Then to Dixie, he said:
“Come up here!”
He led the way up the steps with the carven hand rail to the poop; gave the laopan a careless kick; stepped around the steersman's covered pit and out astern on the high projecting gallery.
“Now,” he said, fixing his one eye on Her, “where's this place?”
She turned away to the pots of flowers that stood closely spaced just within the elaborate woodwork of the railing. There were chrysanthemums, white, yellow and deep Indian red; highly cultivated double dahlias; red lotus blossoms; and tuberoses that filled the fresh morning air with their heavy perfume. “Well?” Connor added explosively.
“I said I'd tell you by sunrise, Tex,” she said, coolly pleasant; and hummed, very softly, a music-hall tune, bending over a spreading lotus blossom with every appearance of ingenuous girlish interest. After a moment, she went on, “The thing now is to get this junk up the river as fast as it will go.”
“Where to?” He was controlling his voice, but his face, usually expressionless, was brutally clouded...."Push me just a little farther, Dix, and you'll go overboard. And there won't be any flowers at the funeral. By God, I'm not sure I wouldn't enjoy it. You got me into this business! Now if you—”
“Better control yourself, Tex,” said she; straightening up before him. “I may have got you in, but it's a real job now. You've got to go through. And you're going to need me. The place is a few miles this side of a town called Huang Chau, on the north hank.”
“Beyond Hankow?”
“No, below. It's only a matter of hours getting up there, if you'll just get this junk started.”
“How'll we know it when we get there?”
“All we've got to do is ask a native, anywhere along the bank, where Kang Yu lives—his old home.”
“Who's he?”
“The viceroy of Nanking. Why don't you use that eye of yours once in a while, Tex—look around you a little?”
Slowly his mind, so quick at the vicious games of his own race, picked up and related the facts. His face relaxed, as he thought, into the familiar wooden expression.
“You're sure the stones are there?” he asked, quietly now.
She nodded; hummed again; caressed the flowers.
“All right, Dix,” he said then, as he turned to go forward, “that sounds square enough. I guess I can handle it all right. And I'll see that you get your share all hunky dory.”
“What are you figuring my share to be?” she asked, glancing casually up from a lotus blossom.
“Oh,” he cried without hesitation, almost playfully, “you and I aren't going to have any trouble about that.”
He went then; and she lingered among the flowers.
From beyond the long deck house came shouts and wailing. The great sweeps were got overside. The mooring poles were hoisted out and lashed along the sponsons. The clumsy craft swung out into the river and moved slowly forward.
At the sound of a hasty light step Dixie looked up into the haggard gray face of the Kid.
“What was it?” he whispered, glancing fearfully behind him. “Wha'd he say to you?”
She dropped her eyes; turned away.
“Quick! Tell me, or by God, I'll—”
She threw up a frail white hand.
“Not now, Jim!”
“When?”
“He'll have to sleep. There's work ahead.”
“If you think I can sleep—”
“I can't either, Jim. It's dreadful. But I'm going to tell you everything. You have a right to know. Wait till we're past the steamer. We'd better get below now anyhow. We mustn't be seen. If we aren't, they'll never suspect this junk. Then make sure he's asleep and come up here. I'll be waiting.”
The Kid brought Dixie's breakfast of rice and eggs and tea to the gallery.
“The cook was only wounded a little,” he explained. “Tom's got him working now.”
Dixie was reclining on a Canton chair of green rushes over a bamboo frame, her head resting languidly near the tuberoses. Now and again she drew in deeply the rich odor. And beyond the fringe of flowers and the carven railing she could see the river. Junks moved slowly by, sliding down with the current—somber seagoing craft out of Tientsin and Cheefoo and Swatow and even Canton. By a village were clustered open sampans, and slipper-boats with their coverings of arched matting. The small craft of the fishermen with suspended nets or with roosting, crowding cormorants clustered here and there along the channel-way. Everywhere farmers and their coolies were at work in the fields. A family—father, mother, boys and girls—worked tirelessly with their feet a large irrigating wheel at the water's edge.
The Kid seated himself on the deck and mournfully looked on while she ate. Perversely she delayed her narrative, playing with time and life. In her oblique way she was happy, exercising her gift for gambling on a scale new in her experience. Indeed, for the thrill she now experienced, Dixie Carmichael would have paid almost any price. Life itself—the mere existing—-she held almost as cheaply as the Chinese. Deliberately, with nerves steady as steel instruments, she finished her simple breakfast and then put the bowls aside on the deck.
Lying back, averting her face, gazing off down the river, she began the narrative that she had framed within the hour. Her manner, calm at first, soon offered evidences of deeply suppressed emotion. Her voice exhibited the first unsteadiness the Kid had ever heard in it. She drew out an embroidered handkerchief from the pocket of her blouse and pressed it once or twice to her eyes, as, with an air of dogged determination, she talked on.
The narrative itself dealt with her girlhood near San Francisco, her chance meeting with Tex Connor, then a well-known character on the western coast of America, her girlish infatuation with him, and an elopement that she had supposed would end in marriage. Instead she found her life ruined. Connor had beaten her, degraded her, driven her into vice. She ran away from him; reached the China Coast; settled down with every intent to become what she termed, in his and her language, a square gambler.
“When I took up with you a little last year, Jim, it seemed to me that at last I'd found a man I could tie to. You never knew my real feelings. I'm not the kind that tells much or shows much. I guess perhaps my life's been too hard. But—oh, Jim!—well, you're, seeing the real girl now. I'm pretty well beaten down, Jim.... You're getting the truth from me at last. I've got to tell it—all of it—for your own sake. You're in worse trouble than you know, right now. The cards are stacked against you, Jim. Your life even”—her voice broke; but she got it under control—“I'm going to save you if I can.”
Moodily he watched her.
“If it was anybody but Tex! He's merciless. He's strong. He never forgets.... Listen, Jim! Tex came clear from London to find me. And he found out about—us—you and me. That I was growing fond of you. He never forgets and he never forgives. Oh. Jim, can't you see it! Can't you see that that's why he took you on—so he could watch you, keep you away from me? Can't you see what a game I've had to play? God, if you'd heard what he said to me back here this very morning—Oh, it's too awful! I can't tell you! He's so determined! He gets his way, Jim—Tex gets his way!.... Oh, what can I do!”
“No, wait—I've got to tell you the whole thing. You said he was planning to cross me. He'll do that, of course. I don't think I care much about that. But you, Jim—oh, you poor innocent boy! If you could only see! You'll never get your hands on one of the viceroy's jewels.”
She turned her face toward him. Her eyes now were swollen and wet with tears.
Jim, gray of face, held in his two hands a Chinese knife, balancing it. There were stains on the blade. He must have picked it up, she reflected, here on the junk. For it wouldn't be like him to carry such a weapon. It seemed to her then that he was holding his breath. She saw him moisten his blue lips with the tip of an ashen tongue. He was trying to speak. At least his lips parted again. She waited. When the voice did finally come, it was so hoarse that he had evident difficulty in making it intelligible.
“Tex may be strong—but if you think I'm afraid—”
“Oh, Jim.... no, I don't mean that! Not that! Oh, I don't know what I'm saying-! It's only when I think how happy you and I might be—think of it! really rich! able to go and live decently somewhere, like regular folks!”
Silently, with surprising stealthy swiftness, he got to his feet. His right hand, with the knife, busied itself in a side pocket of his coat.
“Say the word, Dixie”—his face was contorted with the muscular effort necessary to produce this small sound—“say the word, and I'll kill him.”
“Oh, no, Jim!” she covered her face with her thin hands, and sobbed, very low. “Oh God, what can we do? Isn't there some other way?”
“Say the word,” he whispered.
“Would it be”—she broke down again—“would it be—where a man's a devil, where he's threatened—wouldn't it be like defending ourselves?”
“Say the word!”
“Oh, Jim—-God forgive me!.... Yes!”
Her lips barely framed the word. But he read it. She watched him as he stepped around the huge coils of tracking rope on the roof of the steersman's pit; watched until he dropped softly down and disappeared.
Then, lying back, very still, she listened. But the oarsmen were chanting up forward, the laopan shouting; nearer, the steersman was singing an apparently endless falsetto narrative (as if there had never been bloodshed). The minutes slowly passed. She drew in the sweet exhalation of the tuberoses.... still no unusual sound. She herself exhibited no sign of excitement beyond the hint of a cryptic smile and the white light in her eyes.... Her shopping bag lay on her lap. Opening it, she looked at the bracelet watch, that nestled close to a small triangular bottle of green corrosive sublimate tablets.... The gentle wash of the current against the hull gave out a soothing sound. The slowly rising sun beat warmly down, and the polished deck radiated the heat. A sensation of drowsiness was stealing over her. For a short while she fought it off; but then, deciding that no anxiety on her part could be of value, she yielded, closed the bag on her lap, and drifted into slumber.
It was pleasantly warmer still. She felt her eyes about to open—slowly—on a presence. This languor was delicious. As an almost ascetic epicure in sensations she rested a moment longer in it, thinking dreamily of priceless gems heaped in her hollowed hands; of luxurious idleness in some exotic port—Singapore, or Penang (she had loved the tropical splendor of Penang), or in Burmah or India—Rangoon say, or even Lucknow, Lahore and Simla. They would know less about her there. And with the means to operate on a larger scale she should be able to add enormously to her wealth. She decided to dress and act differently; make a radical change in her methods.
Her lips parted. The presence before her—coatless, little cap pushed back off the low forehead—was Connor. He had pushed aside a flower pot to make a seat on the rail.
She closed her eyes again. He still wore the gray flannels and the white shoes with the rubber soles-It would be the shoes that had enabled him to approach without awakening her. He was smoking a cigar And the face was wooden again—save for his eye—He at stared oddly at her. And she thought his breathing somewhat short, just at first.
She opened her eyes again.
“I've had a good nap,” she said.
He smoked, and stared.
“Where's Jim?” she asked then; quite casually: raising herself on an elbow.
He made no reply; smoked on, still a thought breathless, fixing her with his eyes.
“He brought me some breakfast, just before I fell asleep.... What time is it?”
For what seemed a long space he did not even answer this; merely smoked and stared. She had never, sensitively keen as were her perceptions, felt so curious a hostility in Connor. She had hitherto supposed that she understood him, short as had been their actual acquaintance—-her narrative of a past with him in America, as related to Jim, was false—but the man before her now, sitting all but motionless on the railing, smoking with an odd rapid intensity, holding that cold eye on her, was wholly alien.
Finally he replied: “It's afternoon.”
“No!” She sat up. “Have we been going right along?”
“Right along.”
She stood erect; covered a yawn; then with her thin hands smoothed down the wrinkled blue skirt about her hips.
“I look like the devil,” she remarked. The thin hands went to her hair. “You haven't noticed any sort of a mirror in the cabin, have you, Tex?”
He did not reply.
Faintly through the still air came a faint sound—a boom—boom-bom.
“What's that?” she asked sharply.
“Fighting around Hankow.”
“We're not way up there?” She stepped to the side and looked out ahead. “There's a city!”
“Tom says it's Huang Chau.”
“Hello! We're there!”
He inclined his head.
“What are you going to do?”
“Tie up here.”
She heard now other and more confused sounds. The junk was slowing down; working in toward the yellow shallows.
“Now listen!” said he. She glanced at him, then away, apparently considering the quiet landscape; alien he was indeed, and hostile, his manner that of an inarticulate man struggling with a set speech.... “Listen! You're smart enough. But I want you to understand I don't trust you.''
“Don't you, Tex?”
“When I go ashore, you're to stay here—right here on this deck—where you are now.”
“What's the big idea, Tex?”
“There'll be men to see that you do stay here. I want you to get this straight.”
“Of course,” said she musingly, “you won't be able to rob me outright. You'll have to give me enough of a share to keep me quiet afterward.”
He said nothing.
“But what's to prevent the crew from getting away with the junk. I'm not very keen about being carried off that way.”
“You needn't worry. I'm taking the master along with me.”
He stood then; looked meaningly at her; then went forward. She noted that his two hip pockets bulged.
Slowly the long narrow craft was worked in toward the land. Trackers sculled ashore in sampans and made the great hawsers fast to stakes. Then the crew, with a deal of shouting and many casual blows, were assembled in the long well forward of the mast, where they huddled abjectly.
Keeping around the steersman's house, Dixie contrived to take in much of the scene. There was quarreling among the soldiers. Tom Sung towered over them, shouting rough orders. The two men that were told off (she judged to guard her and the junk) appeared to be objecting to their part in the affair. Obviously there would be small loot here.
Connor came back over the deck house; stood angrily over her. She sensed the mounting brutality in him. For that matter, his sort and their ways with women were familiar enough to her. She had learned to take brutal men for granted. But it had not occurred to her that Connor would strike her. However, he did. Knocked her to her knees; then to her face; even kicked her as she lay on the deck. He was suddenly loud, wild.
“None o' this peeking around!” he cried. “Keep your eyes where they belong!” And left her there.
After a little she was able to creep to the rail and peer out through the flowers. Frightened members of the crew were sculling the sampans back and forth, until at length the whole party, every man except the laopan armed, fully assembled, set off inland.
Beyond an unpleasant headache she felt no injury. She sat for a little while; then again looked forward. The two guards were on the deck house, talking excitedly together. While she watched they climbed down, shouted at the huddled crew, fired a careless shot or two into the mass of them that brought down at least one. At length two of the crew went over the side, followed by the soldiers. A moment later the sampan appeared moving toward the shore, the two soldiers loudly urging on the oarsmen.
Dixie, swiftly then, rearranging her disordered hair as she walked, went down into the cabin.
A corridor extended along one side from the laopans quarters under the steersman's house—sounds of stifled weeping came from there, apparently a woman or a girl—forward to the open space amidships. The rooms all gave on this corridor, the doorways hung with curtains of blue cotton cloth. Into one and another of these rooms she looked. There was bentwood furniture and bedding in each—-the latter tossed about. On the walls hung neat ideographic mottoes. The grillwork about the windows and over the doors was of a uniform and quaint design.
Connor had taken for himself the rear room. There she found, beneath the window a heap of matting and bedding. Thoughtfully, deliberately, she lifted it off, piece by piece, exposing first a foot and leg, then a bony hand, finally the entire figure of what had been Jim Watson, known, of recent years, along Soochow Road and Bubbling Well Road as the Manila Kid. His clothing was slashed and torn in many places. About his middle, and about his head, were wide pools of blood that during a number of hours, evidently, had been drying into the boards of the deck. The neck, she observed, on closer examination, had been cut through nearly to the vertebrae.
During a swift moment she considered the grew-some problem; then carefully replaced the matting and bedding.
She went forward then to the end of the corridor; paused to look in her shopping bag, open the triangular bottle and drop a few of the green pills into the pocket of her middy blouse, under her handkerchief; closed the bag and stepped out on the low midships deck.
The sampan had just returned to the junk. The two soldiers were walking; rapidly inland after Connor's party. She let herself quickly over the side; stepped into the sampan; waved toward the shore. Meekly the cowed oarsmen obeyed the pantomime order.
She stepped out on the bank, very slim, almost pretty; tossed a Chinese Mexican dollar into the boat, watched, with a faint, reflective smile, the two primitive creatures as they fought over it; then walked briskly, not without a trace of native elegance in her carriage, after the soldiers, lightly swinging her shopping bag.
CHAPTER IX—IN A GARDEN
THE road—narrow, worn to a deep-rutted little canyon—circled a brown hill, rose into a mud-gray village, where a few listless children played among the dogs, and a few apathetic beggars, and vendors of cakes, and wrinkled old women stared at the thin white girl who walked rapidly and alone; wound on below the surface of the cultivated fields; came, at length, to a wall of gray-brick crowned with tiles of bright yellow glaze and a ridge-piece of green, and at last to a gate house with a heavily ornamented roof of timbers and tiles. Other roofs appeared just beyond, and interlacing foliage that was tinged, here and there, with the red and yellow and bronze of autumn.
The great gates, of heavy plank studded with iron spikes, stood open, apparently unattended. Dixie Carmichael paused; pursed her lips. Her coolly searching eyes noted an incandescent light bulb set in the massive lintel. This, perhaps, would be the place. Almost absently, peering through into tiled courtyards, she took two of the green tablets from her pocket; then, holding them in her hand, stepped within, and stood listening. The rustling of the leaves, she heard, as they swayed in a pleasant breeze, and a softly musical tinkling sound; then a murmur that might be voices at a distance and in some confusion; and then, sharply, with an unearthly thrill, the silver scream of a girl.... Yes, this would be the place.
The buildings on either hand were silent. Doors stood open. Paper windows were torn here and there, and the woodwork broken in. But the flowers and the dwarf trees from Japan that stood in jars of Ming pottery were undisturbed.
She passed through an inner gate and around a screen of brick and found herself in a park. There was a waterfall in a rockery, and a stream, and a tiny lake. A path led over a series of little arching bridges of marble into the grove beyond; and through the trees there she caught glimpses of elaborate yellow roofs. On either hand stood pai-lows—decorative arches in the pretentious Chinese manner—and beyond each a roofed pavilion built over a bridge.... She considered these; after a moment sauntered under the pai-low at her right, mounted the steps and dropped on the ornamented seat behind a leafy vine. Here she was sheltered from view, yet her eyes commanded both the main gate and the way over the marble bridges to the buildings in the grove.
She looked about with a sense of quiet pleasure at the gilded fretwork beneath the curving eaves of the pavilion, the painted scrolls above them, and the smooth found columns of aged nanmu wood that was in color like dead oak leaves and that still exhaled a vague perfume. The tinkling sound set up again as another breeze wandered by; and looking up she saw four small bells of bronze suspended from the eaves.... She sat very still, listening, looking, thinking, drawing in with a deep inhalation the exquisite fragrance of the nanmu wood. It might be pleasant, one day, to lease or even buy a home like this. So ran her alert thoughts.
The murmuring from the buildings in the grove continued, now swelling a little, now subsiding. It was not, of itself, an alarming sound, except for an occasional muffled shot. Her quick imagination, however, pictured the scene—they would be running about, calling to one another, beating in doors, rummaging everywhere. The drunkenness would doubtless be already under way. There would be much casual but ingenious cruelty, an orgiastic indulgence in every uttermost thrill of sense. It would be interesting to see; she even considered, her nerves tightening slightly at the thought, strolling back there over the bridges; but held finally to her first impulse and continued waiting here.
A considerable time passed; half an hour or more. Then she glimpsed figures approaching slowly through the grove. They emerged on the farthest of the little marble bridges. One was Tex Connor; the second perhaps—certainly—Tom Sung. They carried armfuls of small boxes, at the sight of which Dixie's pulse again quickened slightly; for these would be the jewels. Tom appeared to be talking freely; as they crossed the middle bridge he broke into song; and he reeled jovially.... Connor walked firmly on ahead.
They stopped by the gate screen. Connor glanced cautiously about; then moved aside into a tiled area that was hidden from the gate and the path by quince bushes. He called to Tom who followed.
Miss Carmichael could look almost directly down at them through the leaves. She watched closely as they hurriedly opened the boxes and filled their pockets with the gems. Tom used a stone to break the golden settings of the larger diamonds, pearls and rubies.
A low-voiced argument followed. She heard Tom say, “I come back, all light. But I got have a girl!” And he lurched away.
Connor, looking angrily after him, reached back to his hip pocket; but reconsidered. He needed Tom, if only as interpreter; and Tom, singing unmusically as he reeled away over the marble bridges, knew it.
Connor waited, standing irresolute, listening, turning his eye toward the gate, then toward the trees behind him. The girl in the pavilion considered him. She had not before observed evidence of fear in the man. But then she had never before seen him in a situation that tested his brain and nerve as well as his animal courage. He was at heart a bully, of course: and she knew that bullies were cowards.... What small respect she had at moments felt for Tex left her now. She came down to despising him, as she despised nearly all other men of her acquaintance. Still peering through the leaves, she saw him move a little way toward the gate, then glance, with a start, toward the marble bridges, finally turning back to the remaining boxes.
He opened one of these—it was of yellow lacquer richly ornamented—and drew out what appeared to be a tangle of strings of pearls. He turned it over in his hands; spread it out; felt his pockets; finally unbuttoned his shirt and thrust it in there.
It was at this point that Dixie arose, replaced the green tablets in her pocket, smoothed her skirt, and went lightly down the steps. He did not hear her until she spoke.
“Do you think Tom'll come back, Tex?”
He whirled so clumsily that he nearly fell among the boxes and the broken and trampled bits of gold and silver; fixed his good eye on her, while the other, of glass, gazed vacantly over her shoulder.
She coolly studied him—the flushed face, bulging pockets, protruding shirt where he had stuffed in those astonishing ropes of pearls.
He said then, vaguely: “What are you doing here?”
“Thought I'd come along. Suppose he stays back there—drinks some more. You'd be sort of up against it, wouldn't you?”
“I'd be no worse off than you.” He was evasive, and more than a little sullen. She saw that he was foolishly trying to keep his broad person between her and the boxes.
“You couldn't handle the junk without Tom. Not very well.... Look here, Tex, it can't be very far to the concessions at Hankow. We could pick up a cart, or even walk it.”
“What good would that do?”
“There'll be steamers down to Shanghai.”
“And there'll be police to drag us off.”
“How can they? What can they pin on you?” Connor's eye wavered back toward the grove and the buildings. He was again breathing hard. “After all this..” he muttered. “That old viceroy'll be up here, you know. With his mob, too. And there's plenty of people here to tell....” He was trying now to hold an arm across his middle in a position that would conceal the treasure there.
Her glance followed the motion, and for a moment a faintly mocking smile hovered about her thin mouth. She said: “Saving those pearls for me, Tex?”
He stared at her, fixed her with that one small eye, but offered not a word. A moment later, however, nervously signaling her to be still he brushed by and peeped out around the quinces.
“What is it?” she asked quickly; then moved to his side.
Immediately beyond the farthest of the marble bridges stood a group of ten or twelve soldiers in drunkenly earnest argument. Above them towered the powerful shoulders and small round head of Tom Sung. In the one quick glance she caught an impression of rifles slung across sturdy backs, of bayonets that seemed, at that distance, oddly dark in color; an impression, too, of confused minds and a growing primitive instinct for violence. Tom and another swayed toward the bridge; others drew them back and pointed toward the buildings they had left. The argument waxed. Voices were shrilly emphatic.
“Looks bad,” said the girl at Connor's shoulder. “You've let 'em get out of hand, Tex.” Then, as she saw him nervously measuring with his eye the width of the open space between the quinces and the gate screen, she added, “Thinking of making a run for it, Tex?”
He slowly swung that eye on her now; and for no reason pushed her roughly away. “It's none of your business what I'm going to do,” he replied roughly.
But the voice was husky, and curiously light in quality. And the eye wavered away from her intent look. This creature fell far short of the Tex Connor of old. She spoke sharply.
“Come up into this summer-house, Tex!” she indicated it with an upward jerk of her head. “They won't see us there, at first. You didn't see me. You've got your pistols. You can give me one. We ought to be able to stand off a few Chinese drunks.”
She could see that he was fumbling about for courage, for a plan, in a mind that had broken down utterly. His growl of—“I'm not giving you any pistol!”—was the flimsiest of cover. And so she left him, choosing a moment when that loud argument beyond the bridges was at its height to run lightly up the steps and into the pavilion.
From this point she looked down on the thick-minded Connor as he struggled between cupidity, fear and the bluffing pride that was so deep a strain in the man. The one certain fact was that he couldn't purposelessly wait there, with Tom Sung leading these outlawed soldiers to a deed he feared to undertake alone.... They were coming over the bridges now, Tom in the lead, lurching along and brandishing his revolver, the others unslinging their rifles. The argument had ceased; they were ominously quiet.
Dixie got her tablets out again; then sat waiting, that faint mocking smile again touching the corners of her mouth. But the smile now meant an excitement bordering on the thrill she had lately envied the savage folk in the grove. Such a thrill had moved those coldeyed women who sat above the combat of gladiators in the Colosseum and with thumbs down awaited the death agony of a fallen warrior. It had been respectable then; now it was the perverse pleasure of a solitary social outcast. But to this girl who could be moved by no simple pleasure it came as a gratifying substitute for happiness. Her own danger but added a sharp edge to the exquisite sensation. It was the ultimate gamble, in a life in which only gambling mattered.
Connor was fumbling first at a hip pocket where a pistol bulged, then at a side pocket that bulged with precious stones. His eye darted this way and that his cheeks had changed in color to a pasty gray. The girl thought for a moment that he had actually gone out of his head.
His action, when it finally came, was grotesquely romantic. She thought, in a flash, of the adventure novels she had so often seen him reading. It was to her absurd; even madly comic. For with those bulging pockets and that gray face, a criminal run to earth by his cruder confederates, he fell back on dignity. He strode directly out into the path, with a sort of mock firmness, and, like a policeman on a busy corner, raised his hand.
Even at that he might have impressed the soldiers; for he was white, and had been their vital and vigorous leader, and they were yellow and low-bred and drunk. As it was, they actually stopped, just over the nearest bridge; gave the odd appearance of huddling uncertainly there. But Connor could not hold the pose. He broke; looked wildly about; started, puffing like a spent runner, up the steps of the pavilion where the girl, leaning slightly forward, drawing in her breath sharply through parted lips, looked through the leaves.
Several of the rifles cracked then; she heard bullets sing by. And Connor fell forward on the steps, clawed at them for a moment, and lay still in a slowly widening pool of thick blood. He had not so much as drawn a weapon. Tex Connor was gone.
They came on, laughing, with a good deal of rough banter, and gathered up the jewels. Tom and another mounted the steps to the body and went through the pockets of his trousers for the jewels that were there and the pistols. As there was no coat they did not look further. And then, merrily, they went back over the marble bridges to the buildings in the grove where were still, perhaps, liquor and women.
When the last of their shouts had died out, when laying her head against the fragrant wood she could hear again the musical tinkling of the bronze bells and the pleasant murmuring of the tiny waterfall and the sighing of the leaves, Dixie slipped down to the body, fastidiously avoiding the blood. It was heavy; she exerted all her wiry strength in rolling it partly over. Then, drawing out the curious net of pearls she let the body roll back.
Returning to her sheltered seat she spread on her lap the amazing garment; for a garment of some sort it appeared to be. There was even a row of golden clasps set with very large diamonds. At a rough estimate she decided that there were all of three thousand to four thousand perfect pearls in the numerous strings. Turning and twisting it about, she hit on the notion of drawing it about her shoulders and found that it settled there like a cape. It was, indeed, just that—a cape of pearls. She did not know that it was the only garment of its precise sort in the world, that it had passed from one royal person to another until, after the death of the Old Buddha in 1908 it fell into the hands of his excellency, Kang Yu.
She took it off; stood erect; pulled out her loosely hanging middy blouse; and twisting the strings into a rope fastened it about her waist, rearranging the blouse over it. The concealment was perfect.
She sat again, then, to think out the next step. Returning to the junk was cut of the question. It would be better to get somehow up to the concessions and trust to her wits to explain her presence there. For Tex had been shrewd enough about that. The concessions were a small bit of earth with but one or two possible hotels, full of white folk and fuller of gossip. She had had her little difficulties with the consuls as with the rough-riding American judge who took his itinerant court from port to port announcing firmly that he purposed ridding the East of such “American girls” as she. Dawley Kane would surely be there, and other survivors of the fire.... It all meant picking up a passage down the river at the earliest possible moment; and running grave chances at that. But her great strength lay in her impregnable self-confidence. She feared herself least of all.
Another problem was the getting to the concessions. It was not the best of times for a girl to walk the highway alone. To be sure, she had come safely through from the junk; but it had not been far, and she hadn't had to approach a native army. She decided to wait an hour or so, until the plunderers there in the grove should be fully drunk; then, if at the moment it seemed the thing, to slip out and make a try for it.
And then, a little later, evidently from the road outside the wall, came a new sort of confused sounds; music, of flageolets and strings, and falsetto voices, and with it a low-pitched babel of many tongues. Whoever these new folk might be, they appeared to be turning in at the open gate. The music stopped abruptly, in a low whine of discord, and the talk rose in pitch. Over the brick screen appeared banners moving jerkily about, dipping and rising, as if in the hands of agitated persons below; a black banner, bearing in its center the triple imperial emblems of the Sun, the other two yellow, one blazoning the familiar dragon, the other a phoenix.
A few banner men appeared peeping cautiously about the screen; Manchu soldiers of the old effete army, bearing short rifles. They came on, cautiously into the park, joined in a moment by others. An officer with a queue and an old-fashioned sword and a military cap in place of a turban followed and, forming them into a ragged column of fours, marched them over the marble bridges and into the grove, where they disappeared from view.
Then a gorgeously colored sedan chair came swaying in, carried by many bearers walking under stout bamboo cross-poles. Others, in the more elaborate dress of officials, walked beside and behind it. Then came more soldiers, who straggled informally about, some even dropping on the gravel to rest their evidently weary bodies.
The chair was opened in front and a tall fat man stepped rather pompously out, wearing a robe of rose and blue and the brightly embroidered insignia and button of a mandarin of the fourth rank. At once a servant stepped forward with a huge umbrella which he opened and held over the fat man. And then they waited, all of them, standing or lying about and talking in excited groups. Several of the officials hurried back around the screen as if to examine the deserted apartments just within the gate, and shortly returned with much to say in their musical singsong.... An officer espied the body of Connor lying on the steps of the pavilion, and came with others, excitedly, to the foot of the steps. The key of the confused talk rose at once. There was an excited conference of many ranks about the tall fat man under the umbrella.
Then came, from the grove, that same sound of muffled shots, followed by a breathless pause. More shots then, and increasing excitement here by the screen. A number of the soldiers who had crossed the bridges appeared, running. The man in the lead had lost turban and rifle; as he drew near blood could be seen on his face. And now, abruptly, the officials and the ragtag and bobtail by the screen—pole-bearers, lictors, runners, soldiers—lost their heads. Some ran this way and that, even into the bushes, only to reappear and follow their clearer-headed brethren out to the gate. The umbrella-bearer dropped his burden and vanished. The fugitives from the grove were among the panic-stricken group now, racing with them for the gate and the highway without; scurrying around the end of the screen like frightened rabbits; and in pursuit, cheering and yelling, came many of the soldiers from the junk.
They caught the tall fat mandarin, as he was waddling around the screen, wounded by a chance shot; leaped upon him, bringing him down screaming with fear; beat and kicked him; with their knives and bayonets performing subtle acts of torture which gave them evident pleasure and of which the coldly observant Dixie Carmichael lost no detail. When the fat body lay inert, not before, they took the sword of a fallen officer and cut off the head, hacking clumsily. The head they placed on a pole, marching noisily about with it; finally setting the pole upright beside the first of the little marble bridges. Then, at last, they wandered back into the grove and left the grisly object on the pole to dominate obscenely the garden they had profaned.
Dixie leaned against the smooth sweet surface of the nanmu wood and listened, again, to the pleasantly soft sounds of waterfall and moving leaves and little bronze bells. Her face was chalk white; her thin hands lay limp in her lap; she knew, with an abrupt sensation of sinking, that she was profoundly tired. But in her brain burned still a cold white flame of excitement. Life, her instinct as the veriest child had informed her, was anything, everything, but the simple copybook pattern expounded by the naive folk of America and England. Life, as she critically saw it, was a complex of primitive impulses tempered by greeds, dreams and amazing subtleties. It was blindly possessive, carelessly repellent, creative and destructive in a breath, at once warm and cold, kindly and savage, impersonally heedless of the helpless human creatures that drifted hither and yon before the winds of chance. Cunning, in the world she saw about her, won always further than virtue, and often further than force.
She could not take her eyes, during a long period, from the hideous object on the pole. Her over-stimulated thoughts were reaching quickly, sharply, far in every direction. The feeling came, grew into belief, that she was, mysteriously, out of her danger. She felt the ropes of pearls under her blouse with an ecstatic little catch of the breath; and (finally) letting her eyes drop to that other ugly object on the steps beneath her, slowly opened her bag, drew out the bracelet watch (that the Manila Kid had given her out of an absurd hope) and fastened it about her wrist. And her eyes were bright with triumph.