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Updated: June 26, 2025
He paused, struck a match, and in an empty glass, shielding the flame against the breeze of the punkah, lighted a cigarette. "Since we have appointed our dictator," he began amiably, "we may repose " From the landing, without, a coolie bawled impudently for the master of the house. "Wutzler!" said Heywood, jumping up. "I mean his messenger." He was gone a noticeable time, but came back smiling.
A little Chinese imp in white, who acted as marker, turned on the new-comers a face of preternatural cunning. "Mr. Wutzler," said Heywood. The weazened reader rose in a nervous flutter, underwent his introduction to Rudolph with as much bashful agony as a school-girl, mumbled a few words in German, and instantly took refuge in his tattered Graphic.
"I will go see." And he flitted off through the smoke. Smuggled among the oil-jars, Rudolph lay panting. Shapes of men ran past, another empty jar rolled down beside him, and a stray bullet sang overhead like a vibrating wire. Soon afterward, Wutzler came crawling through the huddled pottery. "Lie still," he whispered. "Your friends are hemmed in. You cannot get through."
"See!" he cried, pointing to a new flare in the distance. The whole region was now aglow like a furnace, and filled with smoke, with prolonged yells, and a continuity of explosions that ripped the night air like tearing silk. "Her house is burning now." "You left in time." Wutzler shuffled before him, with the trot of a lean and exhausted laborer. "I was with the men you fought, when you ran.
How long the apparition stayed, the three men could not tell; for even after it vanished, and the torch fell hissing in the river, they stood below the wall, dumb and sick, knowing only that they had seen the head of Wutzler. Heywood was the first to make a sound a broken, hypnotic sound, without emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words torn from him by ventriloquy.
Followed by three coolies who popped out of the grass with game-bags, the young stranger descended, hopped nimbly from tussock to gunwale, and perched there to wash his boots in the river. "Might have known you weren't old Gilly," he said over his shoulder. "Wutzler said the Fa-Hien lay off signaling for sampan before breakfast. Going to stay long?"
Outside, a smoky lantern on the ground revealed the lower levels. In the wide sector of light stood Wutzler, shrinking and apologetic, like a man caught in a fault, his wrinkled face eloquent of fear, his gesture eloquent of excuse. Round him, as round a conjurer, scores of little shadowy things moved in a huddling dance, fitfully hopping like sparrows over spilt grain.
The watcher, whether he had seen them or not, was in no hurry; for with chin propped among the weeds, he held a pose at once alert and peaceful, mischievous and leisurely, as though he were master of that hollow, and might lie all night drowsing or waking, as the humor prompted. Wutzler pressed his face against the earth, and shivered in the stifling heat.
The rice-brandy was hot and potent; for of a sudden Rudolph found himself afoot and awake. A dizzy warmth cleared his spirit. He understood perfectly. This man, for some strange reason, was Wutzler, a coolie and yet a brother from the fatherland. He and his nauseous alien brandy had restored the future. There was more to do. "Come on." The forsaken lover was first man up the bank.
A confused thunder of gongs, the clash of cymbals smothered in the distance, maintained a throbbing uproar, pierced now and then by savage yells, prolonged and melancholy. As the two wanderers listened, "Where's the comfort," said Heywood, gloomily, "of knowing somebody's worse off? No, I wasn't thinking of Wutzler, then. Talk of germs! why, over there, it's goblins they're scaring away.
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