ms, pressing the girl to his heart.

"My Kinko--my dear Kinko!" she replies, while her tears mingle with his.

"Monsieur Bombarnac!" says the poor fellow, appealing for my
intervention.

"Kinko," I reply, "take it coolly, and depend on me. You are alive, and
we thought you were dead."

"But I am not much better off!" he murmurs.

Mistake! Anything is better than being dead--even when one is menaced
by prison, be it a Chinese prison. And that is what happens, in spite
of the girl's supplications and my entreaties. And Kinko is dragged off
by the police, amid the laughter and howls of the crowd.

But I will not abandon him! No, if I move heaven and earth, I will not
abandon him.

CHAPTER XXVII.

If ever the expression, "sinking in sight of port," could be used in
its precise meaning, it evidently can in this case. And I must beg you
to excuse me. But although a ship may sink by the side of the jetty, we
must not conclude that she is lost. That Kinko's liberty is in danger,
providing the intervention of myself and fellow passengers is of no
avail, agreed. But he is alive, and that is the essential point.

But we must not waste an hour, for if the police is not perfect in
China, it is at least prompt and expeditious. Soon caught, soon
hanged--and it will not do for them to hang Kinko, even metaphorically.

I offer my arm to Mademoiselle Zinca, and I lead her to my carriage,
and we return rapidly towards the _Hotel of the Ten Thousand Dreams_.

There I find Major Noltitz and the Caternas, and by a lucky chance
young Pan-Chao, without Dr. Tio-King. Pan-Chao would like nothing
better than to be our interpreter before the Chinese authorities.

And then, before the weeping Zinca, I told my companions all about
Kinko, how he had traveled, how I had made his acquaintance on the
journey. I told them that if he had defrauded the Transasiatic Company
it was thanks to this fraud that he was able to get on to the train at
Uzun Ada. And if he had not been in the train we should all have been
engulfed in the abyss of the Tjon valley.

And I enlarged on the facts which I alone knew. I had surprised
Faruskiar at the very moment he was about to accomplish his crime, but
it was Kinko who, at the peril of his life, with coolness and courage
superhuman, had thrown on the coals, hung on to the lever of the safety
valves, and stopped the train by blowing up the engine.

What an explosion there was of exclamatory ohs and a