Dragons Blood | Page 5

unknown rank
substances burning. He stared like a visionary at the streaming

multitude of alien shapes.
The coolie swerved, stopped, tilted his shafts to the ground. Rudolph
entered a sombre, mouldy office, where the darkness rang with tiny
silver bells. Pig-tailed men in skull-caps, their faces calm as polished
ivory, were counting dollars endlessly over flying finger-tips. One of
these men paused long enough to give him a sealed dispatch,--the
message to which the ocean-bed, the Midgard ooze, had thrilled
beneath his tardy keel.
"Zimmerman recalled," the interpretation ran; "take his station; proceed
at once."
He knew the port only as forlorn and insignificant. It did not matter.
One consolation remained: he would never see her again.
CHAPTER II
THE PIED PIPER
A gray smudge trailing northward showed where the Fa-Hien--Scottish
Oriental, sixteen hundred tons--was disappearing from the pale expanse
of ocean. The sampan drifted landward imperceptibly, seeming, with
nut-brown sail unstirred, to remain where the impatient steamer had
met it, dropped a solitary passenger overside, and cast him loose upon
the breadth of the antipodes. Rare and far, the sails of junks patched the
horizon with umber polygons. Rudolph, sitting among his boxes in the
sampan, viewed by turns this desolate void astern and the more
desolate sweep of coast ahead. His matting sail divided the shining
bronze outpour of an invisible river, divided a low brown shore beyond,
and above these, the strips of some higher desert country that shone
like snowdrifts, or like sifted ashes from which the hills rose black and
charred. Their savage, winter-blasted look, in the clear light of an
almost vernal morning, made the land seem fabulous. Yet here in
reality, thought Rudolph, as he floated toward that hoary
kingdom,--here at last, facing a lonely sea, reared the lifeless,
inhospitable shore, the sullen margin of China.

The slow creaking of the spliced oar, swung in its lashing by a
half-naked yellow man, his incomprehensible chatter with some fellow
boatman hidden in the bows, were sounds lost in a drowsy silence,
rhythms lost in a wide inertia. Time itself seemed stationary. Rudolph
nodded, slept, and waking, found the afternoon sped, the hills gone, and
his clumsy, time-worn craft stealing close under a muddy bank topped
with brown weeds and grass. They had left behind the silted roadstead,
and now, gliding on a gentle flood, entered the river-mouth. Here and
there, against the saffron tide, or under banks quaggy as melting
chocolate, stooped a naked fisherman, who--swarthy as his background
but for a loin-band of yellow flesh--shone wet and glistening while he
stirred a dip-net through the liquid mud. Faint in the distance harsh
cries sounded now and then, and the soft popping of small-arms,--tiny
revolts in the reign of a stillness aged and formidable. Crumbling walls
and squat ruins, black and green-patched with mould--old towers of
defense against pirates--guarded from either bank the turns of the river.
In one reach, a "war-junk," her sails furled, lay at anchor, the red and
white eyes staring fish-like from her black prow: a silly monster, the
painted tompions of her wooden cannon aiming drunkenly askew, her
crew's wash fluttering peacefully in a line of blue dungaree.
Beyond the next turn, a fowling-piece cracked sharply, close at hand;
something splashed, and the ruffled body of a snipe bobbed in the
bronze flood alongside.
"Hang it!" complained a voice, loudly. "The beggar was too--Hallo! Oh,
I say, Gilly! Gilly, ahoy! Pick us up, there's a good chap! The bird first,
will you, and then me."
A tall young man in brown holland and a battered terai stood above on
the grassy brink.
"Oh, beg pardon," he continued. "Took you for old Gilly, you know."
He snapped the empty shells from his gun, and blew into the breech,
before adding, "Would you mind, then? That is, if you're bound up for
Stink-Chau. It's a beastly long tramp, and I've been shooting all
afternoon."

Followed by three coolies who popped out of the grass with game-bags,
the young stranger descended, hopped nimbly from tussock to gunwale,
and perched there to wash his boots in the river.
"Might have known you weren't old Gilly," he said over his shoulder.
"Wutzler said the Fa-Hien lay off signaling for sampan before breakfast.
Going to stay long?"
"I am agent," answered Rudolph, with a touch of pride, "for Fliegelman
and Sons."
"Oh?" drawled the hunter, lazily. He swung his legs inboard, faced
about, and studied Rudolph with embarrassing frankness. He was a
long-limbed young Englishman, whose cynical gray eyes, and thin face
tinged rather sallow and Oriental, bespoke a reckless good humor. "Life
sentence, eh? Then your name's--what is it again?--Hackh, isn't it?
Heywood's mine. So you take Zimmerman's place. He's off already,
and good riddance. He was a bounder!--Charming spot you've come to!
I daresay if your