THE DRAGON'S SHADOW

The lowdah would have set his dirty sails without delay, for the fair wind was already drooping; but at the first motion he found himself deposed, and a usurper in command, at the big steering-paddle. Captain Kneebone, his cheeks white and suddenly old beneath the untidy stubble of his beard, had taken charge. In momentary danger of being cut off downstream, or overtaken from above, he kept the boat waiting along the oozy shore. Puckering his eyes, he watched now the land, and now the river, silent, furtive, and keenly perplexed, his head on a swivel, as though he steered by some nightmare chart, or expected some instant and transforming sight.

Not until the sun touched the western hills, and long shadows from the bank stole out and turned the stream from bright copper to vague iron-gray, did he give over his watch. He left the tiller, with a hopeless fling of the arm.

"Do as ye please," he growled, and cast himself down on deck by the thatched house. "Go on.--I'll never see him again.--The heat, and all--By the head, he was--Go on. That's all. Finish."

He sat looking straight before him, with dull eyes that never moved; nor did he stir at the dry rustle and scrape of the matting sail, slowly hoisted above him. The quaggy banks, now darkening, slid more rapidly astern; while the steersman and his mates in the high bow invoked the wind with alternate chant, plaintive, mysterious, and half musical:--

"Ay-ly-chy-ly
Ah-ha-aah!"

To the listeners, huddled in silence, the familiar cry became a long, monotonous accompaniment to sad thoughts. Through the rhythm, presently, broke a sound of small-arms,--a few shots, quick but softened by distance, from far inland. The stillness of evening followed.

The captain stirred, listened, dropped his head, and sat like stone. To Rudolph, near him, the brief disturbance called up another evening--his first on this same river, when from the grassy brink, above, he had first heard of his friend. Now, at the same place, and by the same light, they had heard the last. It was intolerable: he turned his back on the captain. Inside, in the gloom of the painted cabin, the padre's wife began suddenly to cry. After a time, the deep voice of her husband, speaking very low, and to her alone, became dimly audible:--

"'All this is come upon us; yet have we not--Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined--Though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.'"

The little captain groaned, and rolled aside from the doorway.

"All very fine," he muttered, his head wrapped in his arms. "But that's no good to me. I can't stand it."

Whether she heard him, or by chance, Miss Drake came quietly from within, and found a place between him and the gunwale. He did not rouse; she neither glanced nor spoke, but leaned against the ribs of smooth-worn fir, as though calmly waiting.

When at last he looked up, to see her face and posture, he gave an angry start.

"And I thought," he blurted, "be 'anged if sometimes I didn't think you liked him!"

Her dark eyes met the captain's with a great and steadfast clearness.

"No," she whispered; "it was more than that."

The captain sat bolt upright, but no longer in condemnation. For a long time he watched her, marveling; and when finally he spoke, his sharp, domineering voice was lowered, almost gentle.

"Always talked too much," he said. "Don't mind me, my dear. I never meant--Don't ye mind a rough old beggar, that don't know that hasn't one thing more between him and the grave. Not a thing--but money. And that, now--I wish't was at the bottom o' this bloomin' river!"

They said no more, but rested side by side, like old friends joined closer by new grief. Flounce, the terrier, snuffing disconsolately about the deck, and scratching the boards in her zeal to explore the shallow hold, at last grew weary, and came to snuggle down between the two silent companions. Not till then did the girl turn aside her face, as though studying the shore, which now melted in a soft, half-liquid band as black as coal-tar, above the luminous indigo of the river.

Suddenly Rudolph got upon his feet, and craning outboard from gunwale and thatched eaves, looked steadily forward into the dusk. A chatter of angry voices came stealing up, in the pauses of the wind. He watched and listened, then quickly drew in his head.

"Sit quiet," he said. "A boat full of men. I do not like their looks."

Two or three of the voices hailed together, raucously. The steersman, leaning on the loom of his paddle, made neither stir nor answer. They hailed again, this time close aboard, and as it seemed, in rage. Glancing contemptuously to starboard, the lowdah made some negligent reply, about a cargo of human hair. His indifference appeared so real, that for a moment Rudolph suspected him: perhaps he had been bought over, and this meeting arranged. The thought, however, was unjust. The voices began to drop astern, and to come in louder confusion with the breeze.

But at this point Flounce, the terrier, spoiled all by whipping up beside the lowdah, and furiously barking. Hers was no pariah's yelp: she barked with spirit, in the King's English.

For answer, there came a shout, a sharp report, and a bullet that ripped through the matting sail. The steersman ducked, but clung bravely to his paddle. Men tumbled out from the cabin, rifles in hand, to join Rudolph and the captain.

Astern, dangerously near, they saw the hostile craft, small, but listed heavily with crowding ruffians, packed so close that their great wicker hats hung along the gunwale to save room, and shone dim in the obscurity like golden shields of vikings. A squat, burly fellow, shouting, jammed the yulow hard to bring her about.

"Save your fire," called Captain Kneebone. "No shots to waste. Sit tight."

As he spoke, however, an active form bounced up beside the squat man at the sweep,--a plump, muscular little barefoot woman in blue. She tore the fellow's hands away, and took command, keeping the boat's nose pointed up-river, and squalling ferocious orders to all on board.

"The Pretty Lily!" cried Rudolph. This small, nimble, capable creature could be no one but Mrs. Wu, their friend and gossip of that morning, long ago....

The squat man gave an angry shout, and turned on her to wrest away the handle. He failed, at once and for all. With great violence, yet with a neat economy of motion, the Pretty Lily took one hand from her tiller, long enough to topple him overboard with a sounding splash.

Her passengers, at so prompt and visual a joke, burst into shrill, cackling laughter. Yet more shrill, before their mood could alter, the Pretty Lily scourged them with the tongue of a humorous woman. She held her course, moreover; the two boats drifted so quickly apart that when she turned, to fling a comic farewell after the white men, they could no more than descry her face, alert and comely, and the whiteness of her teeth. Her laughing cry still rang, the overthrown leader still floundered in the water, when the picture blurred and vanished. Down the wind came her words, high, voluble, quelling all further mutiny aboard that craft of hers.

"We owe this to you." The tall padre eyed Rudolph with sudden interest, and laid his big hand on the young man's shoulder. "Did you catch what she said? You made a good friend there."

"No," answered Rudolph, and shook his head, sadly. "We owe that to--some one else."

Later, while they drifted down to meet the sea and the night, he told the story, to which all listened with profound attention, wondering at the turns of fortune, and at this last service, rendered by a friend they should see no more.

They murmured awhile, by twos and threes huddled in corners; then lay silent, exhausted in body and spirit. The river melted with the shore into a common blackness, faintly hovered over by the hot, brown, sullen evening. Unchallenged, the Hakka boat flitted past the lights of a war-junk, so close that the curved lantern-ribs flickered thin and sharp against a smoky gleam, and tawny faces wavered, thick of lip and stolid of eye, round the supper fire. A greasy, bitter smell of cooking floated after. Then no change or break in the darkness, except a dim lantern or two creeping low in a sampan, with a fragment of talk from unseen passers; until, as the stars multiplied overhead, the night of the land rolled heavily astern and away from another, wider night, the stink of the marshes failed, and by a blind sense of greater buoyancy and sea-room, the voyagers knew that they had gained the roadstead. Ahead, far off and lustrous, a new field of stars hung scarce higher than their gunwale, above the rim of the world.

The lowdah showed no light; and presently none was needed, for--as the shallows gave place to deeps--the ocean boiled with the hoary, green-gold magic of phosphorus, that heaved alongside in soft explosions of witch-fire, and sent uncertain smoky tremors playing through the darkness on deck. Rudolph, watching this tropic miracle, could make out the white figure of the captain, asleep near by, under the faint semicircle of the deck-house; and across from him, Miss Drake, still sitting upright, as though waiting, with Flounce at her side. Landward, against the last sage-green vapor of daylight, ran the dim range of the hills, in long undulations broken by sharper crests, like the finny back of leviathan basking.

Over there, thought Rudolph, beyond that black shape as beyond its guarding dragon, lay the whole mysterious and peaceful empire, with uncounted lives going on, ending, beginning, as though he, and his sore loss, and his heart vacant of all but grief, belonged to some unheard-of, alien process, to Nature's most unworthy trifling. This boatload of men and women--so huge a part of his own experience--was like the tiniest barnacle chafed from the side of that dark, serene monster.

Rudolph stared long at the hills, and as they faded, hung his head. From that dragon he had learned much; yet now all learning was but loss.

Of a sudden the girl spoke, in a clear yet guarded voice, too low to reach the sleepers.

"What are you thinking of?" she said. "Come tell me. It will be good for both of us."

Rudolph crossed silently, and stood leaning on the gunwale beside her.

"I thought only," he answered, "how much the hills looked so--as a dragon."

"How strange." The trembling phosphorus half-revealed her face, pale and still. "I was thinking of that, in a way. It reminded me of what he said, once--when we were walking together."

To their great relief, they found themselves talking of Heywood, sadly, but freely, and as it were in a sudden calm. Their friendship seemed, for the moment, a thing as long established as the dragon hills. Years afterward, Rudolph recalled her words, plainer than the fiery wonder that spread and burst round their little vessel, or the long play of heat-lightning which now, from time to time, wavered instantly along the eastern sea-line.

"You are right," she declared once. "To go on with life, even when we are alone--You will go on, I know. Bravely." And again she said: "Yes, such men as he are--a sort of Happy Warrior." And later, in her slow and level voice: "You learned something, you say. Isn't that--what I call--being invulnerable? When a man's greater than anything that happens to him--"

So they talked, their speech bare and simple, but the pauses and longer silences filled with deep understanding, solemnized by the time and the place, as though their two lonely spirits caught wisdom from the night, scope from the silent ocean, light from the flickering East.

The flashes, meanwhile, came faster and prolonged their glory, running behind a thin, dead screen of scalloped clouds, piercing the tropic sky with summer blue, and ripping out the lost horizon like a long black fibre from pulp. The two friends watched in silence, when Rudolph rose, and moved cautiously aft.

"Good-night," he whispered. "You must sleep now."

That was not, however, the reason. So long as the boiling witch-fire turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire gauze,--then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt out astern, and vanished. He stood by the lowdah, watching anxiously.

Time and again the ocean flickered into view, like the floor of a measureless cavern; and still he could not tell. But at last the lowdah also turned his head, and murmured. Their boat creaked monotonously, drifting to leeward in a riot of golden mist; yet now another creaking disturbed the night, in a different cadence. Another boat followed them, rowing fast and gaining. In a brighter flash, her black sail fluttered, unmistakable.

Rudolph reached for his gun, but waited silently. He would not call out. Some chance fisherman, it might be, or any small craft holding the same course along the coast. Still, he did not like the hurry of the sweeps, which presently groaned louder and threw up nebulous fire. The stranger's bow became an arrowhead of running gold.

And here was Flounce, ready to misbehave once more. Before he could catch her, the small white body of the terrier whipped by him, and past the steersman. This time, however, as though cowed, she began to whimper, and then maintained a long, trembling whine.

Beside Rudolph, the compradore's head bobbed up.

"Allo same she mastah come." And in his native tongue, Ah Pat grumbled something about ghosts.

A harsh voice hailed, from the boat astern; the lowdah answered; and so rapidly slid the deceptive glimmer of her bow, that before Rudolph knew whether to wake his friends, or could recover, next, from the shock and ecstasy of unbelief, a tall white figure jumped or swarmed over the side.

"By Jove, my dream!" sounded the voice of Heywood, gravely. With fingers that dripped gold, he tried to pat the bounding terrier. She flew up at him, and tumbled back, in the liveliest danger of falling overboard. "Old girl,--my dream!"

The figure rose.

"Hallo, Rudie." In a daze, Rudolph gripped the wet and shining hands, and heard the same quiet voice: "Rest all asleep, I suppose? Don't wake 'em. To-morrow will do.--Have you any money on you? Toss that fisherman--whatever you think I'm worth. He really rowed like steam, you know."

Rudolph flung his purse into the other boat. When he turned, this man restored from the sea had disappeared. But he had only stolen forward, dog in arms, to sit beside Miss Drake. So quietly had all happened, that none of the sleepers, not even the captain, was aware. Rudolph drew near the two murmuring voices.

"--Couldn't help it, honestly," said Heywood. "Can't describe, or explain. Just something--went black inside my head, you know." He paused. "No: don't recall seeing a thing, really, until I pitched away the--what happened to be in my hands. A blank, all that. Losing your head, I suppose they call it. Most extraordinary."

The girl's question recalled him from his puzzle.

"Do? Oh!" He disposed of the subject easily. "I ran, that's all.--Oh, yes, but I ran faster.--Not half so many as you'd suppose. Most of 'em were away, burning your hospital. Saw the smoke, as I ran. All gone but a handful. Hence those stuffed hats, Rudie, in the trench.--Only three of the lot could run. I merely scuttled into the next bamboo, and kept on scuttling. No: they weren't half loaded. Oh, yes, arrow in the shoulder--scratch. Of course, when it came dark, I stopped running, and made for the nearest fisherman. That's all."

"But," protested Rudolph, wondering, "we heard shots."

"Yes, I had my Webley in my belt. Fortunately. I told you: three of them could run." The speaker patted the terrier in his lap. "My dream, eh, little dog? You were the only one to know."

"No," said the girl: "I knew--all the time, that--"

Whatever she meant, Rudolph could only guess; but it was true, he thought, that she had never once spoken as though the present meeting were not possible, here or somewhere. Recalling this, he suddenly but quietly stepped away aft, to sit beside the steersman, and smile in the darkness.

The two voices flowed on. He did not listen, but watched the phosphorus welling soft and turbulent in the wake, and far off, in glimpses of the tropic light, the great Dragon weltering on the face of the waters. The shape glimmered forth, died away, like a prodigy. How ran the verse?

"Ich lieg' und besitze.
Lass mich schlafen."

"And yet," thought the young man, "I have one pearl from his hoard." That girl was right: like Siegfried tempered in the grisly flood, the raw boy was turning into a man, seasoned and invulnerable.

Heywood was calling to him:--

"You must go Home with us. Do you hear? I've made a wonderful plan--with the captain's fortune! Dear old Kneebone."

A small white heap across the deck began to rise.

"How often," complained a voice blurred with sleep, "how often must I tell ye--wake me, unless the ship--chart's all--Good God!"

At the captain's cry, those who lay in darkness under the thatched roof began to mutter, to rise, and grope out into the trembling light, with sleepy cries of joy.