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They flock to it in great numbers, preferring the just and beneficent administration of the white man to the uncertainties of native rule. So Kwong and his son made their way down the Yangtzse, floating down river on a stately junk with ragged matting sails.
One leg was gone, shot away above the knee, and he hobbled painfully down the gangplank and on to the tender, using his crutches very awkwardly. The great, brown, muddy Yangtzse! His own river! The ships of the world lay anchored in the harbour, the ships of all the world! The tender made its way upward against the rushing tide, and great, clumsy junks floated downstream.
The offscourings of the world and of society rolled into Shanghai with the inflow of each yellow tide of the Yangtzse, and somehow, he resented that deposit. He resented it, because from that deposit he must pick out his friends.
The sight of the yellow, muddy Yangtzse moved him strangely. It was his river. It belonged, somehow, to him. He stood, a lonely figure, on the deck, clad in ill-fitting, civilian clothes, not nearly so jaunty as those he used to wear before he went away. His clothes fell away from him strangely, for illness had wasted him, and his collar stood out stiffly from his scrawny neck.
Rogers drops out of the tale at this point, and as the ship slips out of sight down the lower reaches of the Yangtzse, so does he disappear from this story. It is to the boy that we must now turn our attention, the half-caste boy who had received such a heritage of decency and honour from one side of his house.
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