ady, and they were all on deck after
a night and a day down below. It made you feel queer to see so many
gaunt, wild faces together. The beggars stared about at the sky, at the
sea, at the ship, as though they had expected the whole thing to have
been blown to pieces. And no wonder! They had had a doing that would
have shaken the soul out of a white man. But then they say a Chinaman
has no soul. He has, though, something about him that is deuced tough.
There was a fellow (amongst others of the badly hurt) who had had his
eye all but knocked out. It stood out of his head the size of half a
hen's egg. This would have laid out a white man on his back for a month:
and yet there was that chap elbowing here and there in the crowd and
talking to the others as if nothing had been the matter. They made a
great hubbub amongst themselves, and whenever the old man showed his
bald head on the foreside of the bridge, they would all leave off jawing
and look at him from below.

"It seems that after he had done his thinking he made that Bun Hin's
fellow go down and explain to them the only way they could get their
money back. He told me afterwards that, all the coolies having worked in
the same place and for the same length of time, he reckoned he would be
doing the fair thing by them as near as possible if he shared all the
cash we had picked up equally among the lot. You couldn't tell one man's
dollars from another's, he said, and if you asked each man how much
money he brought on board he was afraid they would lie, and he would
find himself a long way short. I think he was right there. As to giving
up the money to any Chinese official he could scare up in Fu-chau, he
said he might just as well put the lot in his own pocket at once for all
the good it would be to them. I suppose they thought so, too.

"We finished the distribution before dark. It was rather a sight: the
sea running high, the ship a wreck to look at, these Chinamen staggering
up on the bridge one by one for their share, and the old man still
booted, and in his shirt-sleeves, busy paying out at the chartroom door,
perspiring like anything, and now and then coming down sharp on myself
or Father Rout about one thing or another not quite to his mind. He took
the share of those who were disabled himself to them on the No. 2 hatch.
There were three dollars left over, and these went to the three most
damaged coolies, one to each. We turned-to afterwards, and shovelled
out o