  "Pretty fair," Captain Kneebone said. "But that ain't the end." This grudging praise--in which, moreover, Heywood tamely acquiesced--was his only comment. On Rudolph it had singular effects: at first filling him with resentment, and almost making him suspect the little captain of jealousy; then amusing him, as chance words of no weight; but in the unreal days that followed, recurring to convince him with all the force of prompt and subtle fore-knowledge. It helped him to learn the cold, salutary lesson, that one exploit does not make a victory. The springing of their countermine, he found, was no deliverance. It had two plain results, and no more: the crest of the high field, without, had changed its contour next morning as though a monster had bitten it; and when the day had burnt itself out in sullen darkness, there burst on all sides an attack of prolonged and furious exasperation. The fusillade now came not only from the landward sides, but from a long flotilla of boats in the river; and although these vanished at dawn, the fire never slackened, either from above the field, or from a distant wall, newly spotted with loopholes, beyond the ashes of the go-down. On the night following, the boats crept closer, and suddenly both gates resounded with the blows of battering-rams. These and later assaults were beaten off. By daylight, the nunnery walls were pitted as with small-pox; yet the little company remained untouched, except for Teppich, whose shaven head was trimmed still closer and redder by a bullet, and for Gilbert Forrester, who showed--with the grave smile of a man when fates are playful--two shots through his loose jacket. He was the only man to smile; for the others, parched by days and sweltered by nights of battle, questioned each other with hollow eyes and sleepy voices. One at a time, in patches of hot shade, they lay tumbled for a moment of oblivion, their backs studded thickly with obstinate flies like the driven heads of nails. As thickly, in the dust, empty Mauser cartridges lay glistening. "And I bought food," mourned the captain, chafing the untidy stubble on his cheeks, and staring gloomily down at the worthless brass. "I bought chow, when all Saigong was full o' cartridges!" The sight of the spent ammunition at their feet gave them more trouble than the swarming flies, or the heat, or the noises tearing and splitting the heat. Even Heywood went about with a hang-dog air, speaking few words, and those more and more surly. Once he laughed, when at broad noonday a line of queer heads popped up from the earthwork on the knoll, and stuck there, tilted at odd angles, as though peering quizzically. Both his laugh, however, and his one stare of scrutiny were filled with a savage contempt,--contempt not only for the stratagem, but for himself, the situation, all things. "Dummies--lay figures, to draw our fire. What a childish trick! Maskee!" he added, wearily "we couldn't waste a shot at 'em now even if they were real." His grimy hearers nodded mechanically. They knew, without being told, that they should fire no more until at close quarters in some final rush. "Only a few more rounds apiece," he continued. "Our friends outside must have run nearly as short, according to the coolie we took prisoner in the tunnel. But they'll get more supplies, he says, in a day or two. What's worse, his Generalissimo Fang expects big reinforcement, any day, from up country. He told me that a moment ago." "Perhaps he's lying," said Captain Kneebone, drowsily. "Wish he were," snapped Heywood. "No such luck. Too stupid." "That case," grumbled the captain, "we'd better signal your Hakka boat, and clear out." Again their hollow eyes questioned each other in discouragement. It was plain that he had spoken their general thought; but they were all too hot and sleepy to debate even a point of safety. Thus, in stupor or doubt, they watched another afternoon burn low by invisible degrees, like a great fire dying. Another breathless evening settled over all--at first with a dusty, copper light, widespread, as though sky and land were seen through smoked glass; another dusk, of deep, sad blue; and when this had given place to night, another mysterious lull. Midnight drew on, and no further change had come. Prowlers, made bold by the long silence in the nunnery, came and went under the very walls of the compound. In the court, beside a candle, Ah Pat the compradore sat with a bundle of halberds and a whetstone, sharpening edge after edge, placidly, against the time when there should be no more cartridges. Heywood and Rudolph stood near the water gate, and argued with Gilbert Forrester, who would not quit his post for either of them. "But I'm not sleepy," he repeated, with perverse, irritating serenity. "I'm not, I assure you. And that river full of their boats?--Go away." While they reasoned and wrangled, something scraped the edge of the wall. They could barely detect a small, stealthy movement above them, as if a man, climbing, had lifted his head over the top. Suddenly, beside it, flared a surprising torch, rags burning greasily at the end of a long bamboo. The smoky, dripping flame showed no man there, but only another long bamboo, impaling what might be another ball of rags. The two poles swayed, inclined toward each other; for one incredible instant the ball, beside its glowing fellow, shone pale and took on human features. Black shadows filled the eye-sockets, and gave to the face an uncertain, cavernous look, as though it saw and pondered. How long the apparition stayed, the three men could not tell; for even after it vanished, and the torch fell hissing in the river, they stood below the wall, dumb and sick, knowing only that they had seen the head of Wutzler. Heywood was the first to make a sound--a broken, hypnotic sound, without emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words torn from him by ventriloquy. "We must get the women--out of here." Afterward, when he was no longer with them, his two friends recalled that he never spoke again that night, but came and went in a kind of silent rage, ordering coolies by dumb-show, and carrying armful after armful of supplies to the water gate. He would neither pause nor answer. The word passed, or a listless, tacit understanding, that every one must hold himself ready to go aboard so soon after daylight as the hostile boats should leave the river. "If," said Gilly to Rudolph, while they stood thinking under the stars, "if his boat is still there, now that he--after what we saw." At dawn they could see the ragged flotilla of sampans stealing up-river on the early flood; but of the masts that huddled in vapors by the farther bank, they had no certainty until sunrise, when the green rag and the rice-measure appeared still dangling above the Hakka boat. Even then it was not certain--as Captain Kneebone sourly pointed out--that her sailors would keep their agreement. And when he had piled, on the river-steps, the dry wood for their signal fire, a new difficulty rose. One of the wounded converts was up, and hobbling with a stick; but the other would never be ferried down any stream known to man. He lay dying, and the padre could not leave him. All the others waited, ready and anxious; but no one grumbled because death, never punctual, now kept them waiting. The flutter of birds, among the orange trees, gradually ceased; the sun came slanting over the eastern wall; the gray floor of the compound turned white and blurred through the dancing heat. A torrid westerly breeze came fitfully, rose, died away, rose again, and made Captain Kneebone curse. "A fair wind lost," he muttered. "Next we'll lose the ebb, too, be 'anged." Noon passed, and mid-afternoon, before the padre came out from the courtyard, covering his white head with his ungainly helmet. "We may go now," he said gravely, "in a few minutes." No more were needed, for the loose clods in the old shaft of their counter-mine were quickly handled, and the necessary words soon uttered. Captain Kneebone had slipped out through the water gate, beforehand, and lighted the fire on the steps. But not one of the burial party turned his head, to watch the success or failure of their signal, so long as the padre's resonant bass continued. When it ceased, however, they returned quickly through the little grove. The captain opened the great gate, and looked out eagerly, craning to see through the smoke that poured into his face. "The wasters!" he cried bitterly. "She's gone." The Hakka boat had, indeed, vanished from her moorings. On the bronze current, nothing moved but three fishing-boats drifting down, with the smoke, toward the marsh and the bend of the river, and a small 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 gaps in which rose all the stinks of the sweating hold. The boatmen climbed the high slant of the bow, planted their stout bamboos against their shoulders, and came slowly down, head first, like straining acrobats. As slowly, the boat began to glide past the stairs. Thus far, though the fire lay scattered in the mud, the smoke drifted still before them and obscured their silent, headlong transaction. Now, thinning as they dropped below the corner of the wall, it left them naked to their enemies on the knoll. At the same instant, from the marsh ahead, the sentinel in the round hat sprang up again, like an instantaneous mushroom. He shouted, and waved to his fellows inland. They had no time, however, to leave the high ground; for the whole chance of the adventure took a sudden and amazing turn. Heywood sprang out of his stupor, and stood pointing. "Look there!" he snarled. "Those--oh!" He ended with a groan. The face of his friend, by torchlight above the wall, had struck him dumb. Now that he spoke, his companions saw, exposed in the field to the view of the nunnery, a white body lying on a framework as on a bier. Near the foot stood a rough sort of windlass. Above, on the crest of the field, where a band of men had begun to scramble at the sentinel's halloo, there sat on a white pony the bright-robed figure of the tall fanatic, Fang the Sword-Pen. He went leaping from sight over the crest"He did it!" Heywood's hands opened and shut rapidly, like things out of control. "Oh, Wutz, how did they--Saint Somebody--the martyrdom--Poussin's picture in the Vatican.--I can't stand this, you chaps!" He snatched blindly at his gun, caught instead one of the compradore's halberds, and without pause or warning, jumped out into the shallow water. He ran splashing toward the bank, turned, and seemed to waver, staring with wild eyes at the strange Tudor weapon in his hand. Then shaking it savagely,-- "This will do!" he cried. "Good-by, everybody. Good-by!" He wheeled again, staggered to his feet on dry ground, and ran swiftly along the eastern wall, up the rising field, straight toward his mark. Of the men on the knoll, a few fired and missed, the others, neutrals to their will, stood fixed in wonder. Four or five, as the runner neared, sprang out to intercept, but flew apart like ninepins. The watchers in the boat saw the halberd flash high in the late afternoon sun, the frightened pony swerve, and his rider go down with the one sweep of that Homeric blow. The last they saw of Heywood, he went leaping from sight over the crest, that swarmed with figures racing and stumbling after. The unheeded sentinel in the marsh fled, losing his great hat, as the boat drifted round the point into midstream. |
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