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Updated: May 31, 2025
They were so stiff that all movement was painful. He thanked the Panthay again and again, and patted his bare, smooth shoulder, and the native grinned and bowed before him. Then the wood-cutter pointed to the ground, and Jack nodded. He saw that the man wished him to drop from the howdah and leave the elephant. Jack was perfectly willing.
The elder Panthay leapt to his feet and shot down the cave with the glide of a panther. Jack sprang from his rock and followed. The English lad had known at once that the cry meant danger, so deep an anxiety had lain in the low troubled note. As he crept up to the boulder behind which the two Panthays crouched, he saw that the peril which threatened him a short time ago still hung over his head.
In Yunnan there occurred, about the year 1846, the first simmerings of disaffection among the Mohammedans, which many years later developed into the Panthay Rebellion, but on that occasion the vigor of the viceroy nipped the danger in the bud.
For a moment the Panthay, a short, strong, powerful man, looked upon Jack and his bonds with great surprise. Then he thrust forward the head of his axe, which he had carried with him all the time, and laid the keen edge against the cords which bound Jack to the howdah. In a trice Jack was free. He flung his arms up thankfully, but dropped them again with a groan.
He turned his head and saw the two Panthays fleeing to the uttermost part of the cave. They trembled before these terrible enemies. At this moment the Panthay tracker climbed into the cave. He spoke for a few moments to Saya Chone, pointing to the tunnel where Jack stood, but where in the darkness no one could see him.
In the meanwhile Jack and his companions hurried forward, quite unconscious that they had been spied upon. The elder Panthay led the way through the jungle, and within a mile they came to the edge of a steep descent. Down this they climbed with much difficulty, swinging themselves by creepers and holding on to the boles of saplings until they gained the foot of a deep ravine.
The rift in the rock forty feet above, which lighted the cave, was obscured and darkened. In a moment he saw that the gap was filled with a human body, and that a Panthay was peering down upon them. "What's this game?" thought Jack. "They've climbed up to that hole, but unless I obligingly stand under it, and let them drop a stone on my head, I don't see what they get by it."
The younger native had remained nearer the entrance, and, placing himself behind another big fallen boulder, was keeping watch through the mouth of the cave. The Panthay who had accompanied Jack now entered upon a series of gestures so clear and striking that Jack understood them as if he spoke.
Now he saw a second man, and the two dark figures, both naked save for a waist-cloth, crept slowly towards him under cover of the bushes. They were a couple of Panthay wood-cutters, felling teak trees on the edge of the ravine. At present the ravine was dry, but in the rainy season an ample flood of water roared along the hollow, a flood which would carry the teak logs down to the big river below.
But they stripped me of every weapon, even to my knife." At this instant there flashed across his mind the thought of the dah carried by the younger Panthay. He turned and found the man at his shoulder. Jack seized the thong by which the man bore the weapon, and lifted it over the Panthay's head. The native made no resistance, but gave up the sword at once.
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