l 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 g