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Updated: June 3, 2025
"Beasts!" muttered Moran. "They are up to the game there's no surprising them now. Talk to him, Charlie; see what he wants." Moran, Wilbur, and Charlie came part of the way toward Hoang and his fellow, and paused some fifteen feet distant, and a long colloquy ensued.
In that whirl of swift action Wilbur could reconstruct but two brief pictures: the Chinaman, Hoang's companion, flying like one possessed along the shore; Hoang himself flung headlong into the arms of the "Bertha's" coolies, and Moran, her eyes blazing, her thick braids flying, brandishing her fist as she shouted at the top of her deep voice, "We've got you, anyhow!"
They had taken Hoang prisoner, whether by treachery or not, Wilbur did not exactly know; and, even if unfair means had been used, he could not repress a feeling of delight and satisfaction as he told himself that in the very beginning of the fight that was to follow he and his mates had gained the first advantage.
She was blind to all danger, animated only by a sense of injustice and imposition. Hoang uttered a sentence in Cantonese. One of the coolies jumped forward, and Moran's fist met him in the face and brought him to his knees. Then came the rush Wilbur had foreseen. He had just time to catch a sight of Moran at grapples with Hoang when a little hatchet glinted over his head.
Then the pictures began to thicken fast: the derelict bark "Lady Letty" rolling to her scuppers, abandoned and lonely; the "boy" in the wheel-box; Kitchell wrenching open the desk in the captain's stateroom; Captain Sternersen buried at sea, his false teeth upside down; the black fury of the squall, and Moran at the wheel; Moran lying at full length on the deck, getting the altitude of a star; Magdalena Bay; the shark-fishing; the mysterious lifting and shuddering of the schooner; the beach-combers' junk, with its staring red eyes; Hoang, naked to the waist, gleaming with sweat and whale-oil; the ambergris; the race to beach the sinking schooner; the never-to-be-forgotten night when he and Moran had camped together on the beach; Hoang taken prisoner, and the hideous filing of his teeth; the beach-combers, silent and watchful behind their sand breastworks; the Chinaman he had killed twitching and hic-coughing at his feet; Moran turned Berserker, bursting down upon him through a haze of smoke; Charlie dying in the hammock aboard the schooner, ordering his funeral with its "four-piecee horse"; Coronado; the incongruous scene in the ballroom; and, last of all, Josie Herrick in white duck and kid shoes, giving her hand to Moran in her boots and belt, hatless as ever, her sleeves rolled up to above the elbows, her white, strong arm extended, her ruddy face, and pale, milk-blue eyes gravely observant, her heavy braids, yellow as ripening rye, hanging over her shoulder and breast.
The schooner righted slowly to an even keel. Meanwhile the junk had set its one lug-sail and its crew had run out the sweeps. Hoang took the steering sweep and worked the junk to a position right across the "Bertha's" bows, some fifty feet ahead. "They're watching us, right enough," said Wilbur. "Up your mains'l," ordered Moran. The pair set the fore and main sails with great difficulty.
With the full sweep of her arm, her fist clinched till the knuckles whitened, Moran struck him in the face. "Now will you talk?" she cried. Hoang wiped the blood from his face upon his shoulder and set his jaws. He did not answer. "You will talk before I'm done with you, my friend; don't get any wrong notions in your head about that," Moran continued, her teeth clinched.
The risks of the future, however, were too great to be run with impunity; therefore it was arranged, by means of money for this person was fast becoming acquainted with the ways of Peking that an emissary from one who sat in an easy-chair should call upon him for a conference, the narrative of which appeared in this form in the Peking Printed Leaves of Thrice-distilled Truth: The brilliant and amiable young picture-maker Kin Yen, in spite of the immediate and universal success of his accomplished efforts, is still quite rotund in intellect, nor is he, if we may use a form of speaking affected by our friends across the Hoang Hai, "suffering from swollen feet."
His queue had become unbound for half its length, and he plaited it anew, winking his eyes thoughtfully. "Well, what do you say?" said Moran. "I lose face," answered Hoang at length, calmly. "You lose face? What do you mean?" "I lose face," he insisted; then added: "I heap 'shamed. You fightee my China boy, you catchee me. My boy no mo' hab me fo' boss savvy? I go back, him no likee me.
He acted the part of interpreter between Wilbur and the hands; even turned to in the galley upon occasion; and of his own accord offered to give the vessel a coat of paint above the water-line. Moran turned back to her log, and Hoang went forward.
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