he rest of them were so frightened that at
first I couldn't get them to tell me anything, but finally I made out
that Red Knife's men had carried the baby away in a basket and that Ho
Sen had gone with them, voluntarily or as a prisoner I did not know.

"I can't tell you just how crazy I was. I remember that I grabbed up a
handful of shells for my revolver and ran up toward the Hai-Yu Gap where
the natives said Red Knife and his gang had disappeared. I remember also
that Hartley, the surgeon, and a Frenchman ran after me and tried to
pull me back, and when I wouldn't come with them that they ran along
beside me. But I guess I out-distanced them, for after a time I was
running alone up the dry bed of a stream where the Hai-Yu Gap cut the
hills. I meant to get the boy and bring him back, but I suppose I might
as well have tried to follow a black tracker into a tropic jungle as to
follow the trail of Red Knife through those Tung-sha hills.

"I don't know how far I went. When night came I was lost--scrambling in
the dark over bare rocks, slipping into gulleys and fighting my way out
again. I suppose I made a terrific clatter and that Red Knife's men
heard me coming when I was a long way off. At any rate they got me when
I was off my guard--the yellow men pounced on me from behind the rocks
and, though I think I did for one or two of them with my gun, they
knocked me over the head. When I came to I was in the dusky interior of
a stone house, bound and utterly helpless."

Wolcott Norris got up abruptly from his chair and, walking over to the
window, looked out into the twilight at the snow-covered Pocassett
landscape. When he came back to the fireplace he said to the three
listeners who had followed them with their eyes but had not stirred:

"Maybe you've read of the devilish ingenuity of some of these Chinese
brigands--there are wild stories and some are true and some are not, but
the torture that Red Knife put me to in that stone house up beyond the
Hai-Yu Gap was worse than death--or so it seemed to me.

"He was a short, broad-shouldered wretch with a thin, hairy mustache
that curled round the corners of his mouth. That mouth of his and his
black, slant eyes were the most vivid expressions of cruelty that I have
ever seen. When I first saw him I thought of Genghis Khan, that ancient
conqueror who is said to have slaughtered five million persons while he
ruled over China. Red Knife brought in Ho Sen and my little boy and