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As this labor would detain me in the unpleasant neighborhood, I determined to secrete my own boat from the public gaze. To accomplish this, while favored by the darkness of night, I ran it into a side canal, where the watchman of the New Lake End Protection Levee lived in a floating house. The duck-boat was drawn out of the water on to a low bank of the levee, and was then covered with reeds.
Consequently, Chinese cities are left without efficient lighting, draining, or scavengering; and it is astonishing how good the health of the people living under these conditions can be. There is no organized police force; but cities are divided into wards, and at certain points barriers are drawn across the streets at night, with perhaps one watchman to each.
He stepped upon a little dock and started walking its length. After a time he came near the end of it without having encountered a watchman, and sat down on a box in a dark, secluded corner. There, his back braced against the building and the building shielding him from the cold wind that came up from the distant sea, Sidney Prale sat and tried to think it out.
A dozen men were between Dick and the watchman; but almost under his hand, at the edge of the bar, stood a whisky bottle. He dove for it, brought it up, and threw. The watchman, struck fairly on the side of the head, dropped off backward, and fell to the floor behind the bar, and his pistol exploded harmlessly upward. Instantly there came a change.
I wished I could talk like that. When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off, I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with the boat the night watchman. He snubbed my advances at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him.
It passed under the gate that Wamba built and up the tree-girt incline to the city. The streets were deserted, and no window showed a light. A watchman in his shelter, at the corner by the synagogue, peered at them over the folds of his cloak, and noting the clank of scabbard against spur, paid no further heed to a traveller who took the road with such outward signs of authority.
The steam engine was running day and night, and the watchman had orders to go the rounds of the place every hour during the night; but the Apaches were so skillful and secretive in their movements that not the least intimation of their presence on the place was observed, not even by the watchdogs, which generally have a keen scent for Indians.
"You have been well known, my old and revered friend, a true and tried follower of the Cross; one who, as Saint Jerome hath it, 'per infamiam et bonam famam grassari ad immortalitatem, which may be freely rendered, 'who rusheth on to immortal life, through bad report and good report. You have been one of those to whom the tender and fearful souls cry during the midnight solitude 'Watchman, what of the night?
Roon and Paul were not ordinary robbers. They were, no doubt, honest men. He would have said that they were thieves bent on burglarising Green Fancy were it not for the disclosures of Miss Thackeray and the very convincing proof that they were not shot by the same man. Detected on the grounds about Green Fancy by a watchman, they would have had an encounter with him there and then.
"The watchman has saved his majesty the trouble," answered I, looking back and seeing one of our friends in the clutch of the pursuers. "On, on!" was Dartmore's only reply.
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