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They reminded me of sheep huddling together to escape wolves. "From the time when the company first started operations at Tung-sha we realized that this bandit was working against us for the reason, of course, that he knew we would lessen his power.
I don't know how long I had remained in the cave and I can't tell you how I managed to make my way out of that wilderness of hills and dry river beds, but Providence must have guided me, for I finally stumbled down into the village of Tung-sha and found Hartley, the surgeon, and three or four of the Europeans still there. "I was delirious again for a time and didn't know what went on around me.
Rain or shine, every day was a perfect day, and we sailed on and on in that little old steamer out across the Pacific until we came at last to Asia. For several months we were in Shanghai at the headquarters of the company, then they sent me up into the province of Honan to a little place called Tung-sha on a tributary of the Yangtse in a country that was pretty wild.
Our little colony was hard hit and when that second summer was over the youngster I told you about didn't have any mother she was sleeping the long sleep out there at the foot of the Tung-sha hills." The mining engineer's voice had grown thick it was as if another person were speaking. "I should have told you more at the start about Red Knife," he said.
But I guess I out-distanced them, for after a time I was running alone up the dry bed of a stream where the Hai-Yu Gap cut the hills. I meant to get the boy and bring him back, but I suppose I might as well have tried to follow a black tracker into a tropic jungle as to follow the trail of Red Knife through those Tung-sha hills. "I don't know how far I went.
Teeny-bits, Neil Durant and Ted Norris sat without moving; their eyes were on the red and yellow fireplace flames, but what they saw was a bit of the old Chinese Empire, in-land on a tributary of the Yangtse and a bungalow at Tung-sha.
The mining engineer was silent so long that finally they looked up and, seeing the expression on his face, looked quickly down again as those turn away their faces who look by mistake too deeply into the intimate thoughts of another. "Bad water and Red Knife wrecked Tung-sha," said Wolcott Norris abruptly. "The water was contaminated somehow typhoid got into it.
Meanwhile they had given up hope of ever seeing me alive again, and when the colony decided that it was unsafe for the women to stay at Tung-sha any longer they sent the boy down to Shanghai with an American missionary by the name of Singleton, who was going back to the United States. She had become deaf during her service in China and was returning to the States for treatment.
"I remember that Ho Sen, my Chinese servant boy, used to say when the baby howled 'Nice stlong lung; he'll glow nice, big man! And by Jingo! How that little chap did grow! Those were days crowded with happiness and before we knew it we'd been in Tung-sha more than a year. The mine was beginning to require additional machinery and everything looked good for the future.
There the mining engineer, who knew how to talk to an Oriental, very quickly discovered that the proprietor of the establishment was a native of the Honan Province; that Shanghai and the Yangtse and Tung-sha were places not unknown to them, and then suddenly he put the question toward which he had been leading the conversation. When Chuan Kai had left China was Red Knife, the robber, alive?
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