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Careful now when you haul up Hoang has got his eye on you, and so have the rest of them. What do you call it, anyhow? Why are you so particular about it? Is it worth anything?" "I don't know perhaps. We'll have a look at it, anyway." Moran hauled the stuff aboard, and Wilbur followed. "Whew!" he exclaimed with half-closed eyes.
Seven hundred miles of rice- and millet-fields and vegetable gardens unbroken by wall or hedge; nothing to cast a shadow on the dead level except an occasional walled town or temple grove! And the horrible land was all alive with swarming, toiling, ant-hill humanity. It was a nightmare. On the second day we reached the Hoang Ho, China's sorrow and the engineer's despair.
"Kwo Kam, chosen representative of the sacred line of Tang," began the Being, when he and Hoang had exchanged signs and greetings of equality in an obscure tongue, "the grafted peach-tree on the Crystal Wall is stricken and the fruit is ripe and rotten to the touch.
Out of it was bulging some kind of dull white matter marbled with gray. It was a hard lump of irregular shape and about as big as a hogshead. Moran glanced over to the junk, some forty feet distant. The beach-combers were hoisting the lug-sail. Hoang was at the steering oar. "Get that stuff aboard," she commanded quietly. "That!" exclaimed Wilbur, pointing to the lump.
In an instant Moran knew very well what he had come for. "God!" she exclaimed under her breath, springing to her feet. "Why didn't we think of this!" Hoang slipped his knife from the sleeve of his blouse. For an instant the old imperiousness, the old savage pride and anger, leaped again in Moran's breast then died away forever.
At length, on the afternoon of the third day, the captain of the junk, whose name was Hoang, presented himself upon the quarter-deck. He was naked to the waist, and his bare brown torso was gleaming with oil and sweat. His queue was coiled like a snake around his neck, his hatchet thrust into his belt. "Well?" said Moran, coming up.
Like all Chinamen, Hoang was true to his promises, and he had already set apart three and a half barrels of spermaceti, ten barrels of oil, and some twenty pounds of bone as the schooner's share in the transaction. There was no discussion over the matter. He called their attention to the discharge of his obligations, and hurried away to summon his men aboard and get the junk under way again.
Thebes and Memphis, Rameses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutely upon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were moulded of Euphrates mud; the greatness of Nineveh reposed on the silt of the Tigris. Upper India is the Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud; China is the Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang; Burmah is the paddy field of the Irrawaddy delta.
They were examining this armament and Moran was suggesting a plan of attack, when Hoang, the leader of the beach-combers, and one other Chinaman appeared some little distance below them on the beach. The moon was low and there was no great light, but the two beach-combers caught the flash of the points of the spades. They halted and glanced narrowly and suspiciously at the group.
"You deserted once before without even saying good-by; and my hand in the fire, you'll come back this time dotty with opium. Get away with you. We'll have men aboard here in a few days." "Can go?" inquired Jim suavely. "I said so. Report our arrival to your Six Companies." Hoang rowed Jim and the coolies ashore, and then returned to the schooner with the dory and streamed her astern.
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