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This steamer, he found, lay over at the former port for thirteen hours, so he shifted again to an outbound boat headed for Woosung. It was not until he was on the tender, making the hour-long run from Woosung up the Whangpoo to Shanghai itself, that he seemed to emerge from his half-cataleptic indifference to his environment. He began to realize that he was at last in the Orient.
This, of course, had been the modus operandi in the happy days before 1914, when white men began the slaughter of white men. Nowadays Ling Foo was off to the Astor House the moment he had news of a ship dropping anchor off the bar twelve miles down the Whangpoo River. The hour no longer mattered; the point was to beat his competitors to the market and often there was no market.
It was the tide, and a bamboo pole for pushing, rather than any assistance derived from the ragged sails, which eventually landed them in the safe harbour of Whangpoo Creek, and stranded them on the mud flats below Garden Bridge. Being illiterate people, father and son, unskilled labour was all that presented itself, so they became rickshaw coolies, as so many country people do.
The lady would be in her room at this hour. The devil beads would not be casting a spell on us." "Devil beads, eh?" Ling Foo shrugged and ran his hands into his sleeves. Somewhere along the banks of the Whangpoo or the Yang-tse would be the body of an unknown, but Ling Foo's lips were locked quite as securely as the dead man's. Devil beads they were.
Outside the bar where the Whangpoo empties into the Yang-tse lay the thousand-ton yacht Wanderer II, out of New York. She was a sea whippet, and prior to the war her bowsprit had nosed into all the famed harbours of the seven seas. For nearly three years she had been in the auxiliary fleet of the United States Navy.
When the yacht goes out of commission you store the loot, and tremble when you hear a fire alarm. All right. Dinner at seven. I'll go and liberate your son and the lady." "Cunningham, I will kill you out of hand the very first chance." "Old dear, I'll add a fact for your comfort. There will be guns on board, but half an hour gone all the ammunition was dumped into the Whangpoo.
At Hongkong the sailing is on a bright, blue sea, whether in the magnificent harbour or amongst the numerous lovely islands, while at Shanghai it is on the muddy waters of the Whangpoo, which, except for the fact that it is the harbour of this thriving settlement, where scores of vessels of all sizes and nationalities ride at anchor or are berthed alongside wharves, is a small and uninteresting river flowing into the estuary of the Yangtse.
She sprang out of bed, a trill of happiness in her throat. The shops! Oh, the beautiful, beautiful shops! "China, China, China!" she sang. She threw up the shade and squinted for a moment. The sun in the heavens and the reflection on the Whangpoo were blinding. The sampans made her think of ants, darting, scuttling, wheeling. "Oh, the beautiful shops!"
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