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Updated: May 28, 2025
"Lowdah?" called Chantel; and the shoulders moved, the line shifted, as the boatman answered. Chantel pitched the bundle over the lantern, and leapt on board. Rudolph came slowly, carrying in his arms the woman, who lay quiet and limp, clasping him in a kind of drowsy oblivion.
The yellow steersman grinned, straining at the pivot of his gigantic paddle. "Good boy, lowdah!" called Kneebone. "Remember you in my will, too!" And the grinning lowdah nodded, as though he understood. They had now only to pitch their supplies through the smoke, down on the loose boards of her deck.
Just as the lowdah was casting off our host asked if he might put a few bottles of beer into my game-bag as it was a warm and thirsty morning; so, to make room, and thinking that the snipe had not yet fully arrived, in which case the spare cartridges would not be required, they were replaced on board.
As attendant in an opium den near the quay, he had come in contact with many low and desperate characters, amongst whom was the lowdah of a certain junk which plied for hire between the Poyang lake and the provinces of the West. Gradually an intimacy sprang up between these two, until at length the diabolical plot was hatched of murdering Chin and levanting with his goods.
The steersman, leaning on the loom of his paddle, made neither stir nor answer. They hailed again, this time close aboard, and as it seemed, in rage. Glancing contemptuously to starboard, the lowdah made some negligent reply, about a cargo of human hair. His indifference appeared so real, that for a moment Rudolph suspected him: perhaps he had been bought over, and this meeting arranged.
The unheeded sentinel in the marsh fled, losing his great hat, as the boat drifted round the point into midstream. The lowdah would have set his dirty sails without delay, for the fair wind was already drooping; but at the first motion he found himself deposed, and a usurper in command, at the big steering-paddle.
And in his native tongue, Ah Pat grumbled something about ghosts. A harsh voice hailed, from the boat astern; the lowdah answered; and so rapidly slid the deceptive glimmer of her bow, that before Rudolph knew whether to wake his friends, or could recover, next, from the shock and ecstasy of unbelief, a tall white figure jumped or swarmed over the side.
Questioned as to what they were doing, the lowdah replied, "Fishing," and my astonishment was not diminished when they returned on board with the bucket half-filled with fine perch, varying from perhaps eight ounces to a pound in weight. Until then I was unaware that perch existed in Chinese waters, nor have I since seen any.
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