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Updated: September 22, 2025
The Navigator's order would have taken the ship well clear, but the helmsman, perplexed by having two diametrically opposite commands hurled at his head simultaneously, and not knowing which to obey, did nothing. There came a howl from the gunboat's forecastle and a frantic, blasphemous yelling from a party of Chinamen clustered on the junk's high poop. "Full speed astern!" roared Potvin.
Then, suddenly, there occurred a frightful explosion, the Kinshiu Maru was hove up on a mountain of foaming water which belched forth fire and smoke, the air became suddenly full of flying splinters and wreckage, a heavy fragment of which smote me full upon the forehead and knocked me back into the junk's hold, and as my senses left me I was dimly conscious of a wailing cry, pealing out across the water, of "Sayonara!"
There were several officers on her bridge, and she was close enough to enable me to see that they were all scrutinising the junk through their glasses; I therefore waved to them, and was waved to in reply. A few minutes later the boat, in charge of a lieutenant, dashed smartly alongside and the officer scrambled nimbly up the junk's low side.
These he followed straight to the water and into it, but in three feet of water he could no longer see them. On the other hand, as the tide was still falling, he could easily make out the impression made by the junk's bow, and could have likewise made out the impression of any other boat if it had landed at that particular spot.
I started up, listened for a moment to assure myself that the sound was not an illusion, and, satisfied that it was real, scrambled up on the junk's deck, to be greeted with the sight of several ships of war close at hand.
Those two shots must have wrought terrible havoc among the junk's crew, for not only did they not attempt to return our fire, but they allowed their vessel to run broad off before the wind, squaring away their foresail the better to do so; and presently the junk in our wake abandoned the chase and bore up to join her consort.
A couple of seconds later the two six-pounders barked out together, and the two hundred bullets peppered the junk's bulwarks most handsomely, many of them penetrating the planking, as I could both see and hear; for the next instant a dreadful, ear-splitting yell arose from the deck of the craft, telling a tale of very severe punishment.
And while I stood there on the junk's short fore deck, watching the scene with fascinated eyes, that awful, unequal duel went on between the Japanese rifles and the Rossia's machine-guns; the soldiers frenziedly yelling "Banzai Nippon!" between each volley, while the Russian gunners plied their pieces in grim silence.
I was unarmed, but the Chinese have learned to be fastidiously careful of American hip pockets, and it was upon this that I depended to keep him and his savage crew at a distance. I ordered him to drop the anchor at the junk's bow, to which he replied, "No sabbe." The crew responded in like fashion, and though I made my meaning plain by signs, they refused to understand.
But there, sure enough, were the tops of the junk's masts dead astern, for the course of the river proved to be just there almost exactly like that piece of twisted flat wire which ladies fasten on the backs of their dresses, and call an eye; the great stream forming first a small circle, and then going right away to form the large loop of the eye, while the junks were lying at the far side of the loop, so that to reach them where they lay, right across an open plain about two miles in width, we had to sail for some distance right away, apparently leaving them right behind.
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