"Welly good," was John's reply; "thirletty dollars a month, and learn the
plan of salvation."
The Correspondent laughed.
"Well, you good Englishman, John? You like British flag? You fight?"
And John, blinking jaundicely, replied: "John allee samee Linglishman-
muchee fightee blimeby--nigger no eatee China boy;" and he chuckled.
A day and a night we lingered in the little Bay of Vivi, and then we left
it behind; each of us, however, watching till we could see the house on
the hillside and the flag no longer, and one at least wondering if that
secret passage into the hills from the palm-thatched home would ever be
used as the white dwellers fled for their lives.
We had promised that, if we came near Pentecost again on our cruise, we
would spend another idle day in the pretty bay. Two months passed and
then we kept our word. As we rounded the lofty headland the
Correspondent said: "Say, I'm hankering after that baby!" But the
Captain at the moment hoarsely cried: "God's love! but where are the
house and the flag?"
There was no house and there was no flag above the Bay of Vivi.
Ten minutes afterwards we stood beside the flag-staff, and at our feet
lay a moaning, mangled figure. It was the Chinaman, and over his gashed
misery were drawn the folds of the flag that had flown on the staff.
What horror we feared for those who were not to be seen needs no telling
here.
As for the Chinaman, it was as he said; the cannibals would not "eatee
Chinee boy." They were fastidious. They had left him, disdaining even
to take his head for a trophy.
Hours after, on board the Merrie Monarch, we learned in fragments the sad
story. It was John Chinaman that covered the retreat of the wife and
child into the hills when the husband had fallen.
The last words that the dying Chinkie said were these: "Blitish flag
wellee good thing keepee China boy walm; plentee good thing China boy
sleepee in all a-time."
So it was. With rude rites and reverent hands, we lowered him to the
deep from the decks of the Merrie Monarch, and round him was that flag
under which he had fought for English woman and English child so
valorously.
"And he went like a warrior into his rest
With the Union Jack around him."
That was the paraphrasing epitaph the Correspondent wrote for him in the
pretty Bay of Vivi, and when he read it, we all drank in silence to the
memory of "a Chinkie."
We found the mother and the child on the other side of the island ere a
week had passed, and bore them away in safety. They speak to-day of a
member of a despised race, as one who showed
"The constant service of the antique world."