After strolling some distance, the three travellers discovered the ruins
of an old brick building. They entered it, and found that there were no
signs of its being used by any one.
'The first thing to do is to have something to eat,' said Charlie.
He took from his pocket some of the food which the missionaries had
given them. Fred and Ping Wang followed his example, but in the middle
of their meal Charlie startled them by declaring that their plan for
getting him a pigtail was not worth carrying out.
'What is the good of my having a pigtail?' he asked. 'I haven't a
skull-cap, and it can't be sewn to my "beehive."'
'I will lend you my skull-cap,' Ping Wang said.
'Thank you,' Charlie said. 'But how are we going to sew the pigtail to
the cap?'
'I have a pin,' Fred replied. 'We must use that for a needle; and as for
thread we must pull some out of our clothing. That can easily be
managed.'
As he was speaking, he rummaged about the inside of his coat, and
succeeded at last in pulling out about a yard of blue cotton. Then they
sat down on portions of the ruin which had fallen in, and prepared to
wait until it was dark enough to carry out their unpleasant but
necessary task.
Three holes in the wall commanded a view of the surrounding country, and
they were satisfied that there was no one near them at present. For
nearly an hour they chatted quietly. But, when Charlie peeped out again,
he started back with a little cry of surprise.
'Hallo!' he said, 'here comes the old woman who stole my pigtail.'
Fred and Ping Wang sprang to their feet, and saw the cart in which they
had ridden coming slowly along the road.
'I say, I should like to recover my pigtail,' said Charlie. 'Let us run
out and take it from her.'
'No, no,' Ping Wang protested. 'While we were struggling to get hold of
it some one would be sure to see us. There's a man coming along now.'
The occupants of the cart began to speak to the man some moments before
he met them. After a time the woman produced Charlie's pigtail, and
handed it to the man to look at. For a few moments he examined it
carefully, and apparently he came to the conclusion that he had as much
right to it as the woman, for suddenly he rushed off with it. The
cart-owner shouted to him to come back; his wife shuffled out of the
cart and hobbled a yard or two after the thief, but soon realised that
she would not be able to catch him. The Pages and Ping Wang thoroughly
enjoyed the scene.
'The old lady does not appear to be in a hurry to go,' Charlie remarked.
'Hallo! she's coming over to look at the heads.'
But when the woman had hobbled to the nearest pole, she contented
herself with looking up at its grim burden, and then began to hobble
back towards her cart. But, before she had gone five yards, she noticed
the ruin in which the Pages and Ping Wang were hiding. She stood still
and gazed at it.
'She is coming over here to see what this place is!' said Charlie.
'She is,' Fred declared, and, as he spoke, the woman began to hobble in
their direction.
'What shall we do?' Charlie whispered.
'Stay here,' Ping Wang answered. 'We must lie down flat and then she may
overlook us.'
'Down we go,' Fred said; 'she's very near.'
About a minute later they heard the woman approach the hole in the wall,
through which they had been watching her. From a grunt of annoyance
which she uttered, they knew that she was not tall enough to see
through. They could hear her hobbling round to the next hole, and from
another grunt they guessed that she found it, like the other, above her
reach. She toddled round to the third hole, which was lower down. When
they heard her stop before it, they held their breath and lay
motionless, wondering whether she would see them. Their suspense was
soon at an end.
'Foreigners!' she shouted, wildly.
'Come on, Fred--come on, Ping Wang!' cried Charlie, jumping up; 'we must
bolt.'
The Chinese woman was so startled by his voice that she moved hurriedly
back, and, being unsteady on her tiny crippled feet, she toppled over
and fell, shouting to her husband to come and catch the foreigners.
'There is no one about,' Fred declared, when all three had scrambled out
of their hiding-place, 'so we will get a pigtail at once.'
Fred and Ping Wang without a moment's hesitation ran to the nearest
execution pole, and by tugging vigorously at it brought it to the
ground.
'Have you a knife?' Fred said to Ping Wang, who immediately produced
one, which, fortunately, was fairly sharp. Quickly, and as reverently as
possible, Fred performed the task which his brother's need had made
necessary, and placing the pigtail in his pocket he started off,
accompanied by Ping Wang, to rejoin Charlie, who had been having a busy
and exciting time. When Fred and Ping Wang ran to obtain a pigtail, he
dashed off towards the cart, and the cartman, seeing him coming, and
believing that he intended to rob him of his one hundred cash, left his
horse and vehicle and bolted across country. But Charlie, of course, had
no intention of acting the highway robber. He unharnessed the horse, and
turning him round started him off in the direction from which he had
come. But the horse knew that his stable was at Kwang-ngan, and had a
very natural objection to being sent in the reverse direction. After
trotting about twenty yards he turned round, and, breaking into a
gallop, approached Charlie, who stood in the middle of the track, with
arms extended, to stop his progress. But the cunning horse pretended
that he was going to pass on the right of Charlie, and, as soon as
Charlie jumped aside to stop him, changed his course suddenly and shot
by him on the left.
It was fortunate, however, that the horse did insist upon going towards
Kwang-ngan, for, when the Pages and Ping Wang followed in the same
direction, they saw two Chinamen coming towards them.
'Let us pretend that the horse has escaped from us,' Charlie suggested,
and they broke into a run. The horse hearing their footsteps, changed
his leisurely walk to a trot. The Chinamen made no attempt to stop him,
but stood aside to let him pass, and laughed and jeered at the pursuers.
'Well, I am glad that they did not stop the horse,' Charlie declared.
'But what are we going to do now? Chase that wretched horse all the way
to Kwang-ngan?'
'No,' Ping Wang replied. 'We must leave the horse. We must take that
track on the left, get round the town, and enter it by the gate on the
far side. To enter it by the one on this side would be very risky, as
the cartman and his wife will tell every one they meet that we are bound
for Kwang-ngan, and some of my more violent anti-foreign countrymen are
sure to start in pursuit of us.'
They left the main track and joined a little-used one which led round
the town. For half an hour they marched along in single file without
meeting or catching sight of any other human beings. Night came on, and
they were about a mile from the town, when they heard the shouts of an
advancing mob.
'We must hide: follow me!' Ping Wang exclaimed, and ran in the direction
of the town. The ground between the track and town wall was very uneven,
and abounded in little hollows which would have afforded ample
concealment, but Ping Wang did not halt until they had run fully half a
mile.
'Let's sit down here,' he said, panting.
They sat down in a hollow surrounded by shrubs, and listened to the
shouts of the men whom they had so nearly encountered.
'I imagine that they are the members of some society,' said Ping Wang.
'If they had discovered that Charlie and you were Europeans, they would
probably have killed us all.'
'The best thing we could do if we do meet them,' Charlie joined in, 'is
to pretend that we are deaf and dumb. We _are_ deaf and dumb as far as
Chinese is concerned. And, now, if you will give me that pigtail, I will
try to sew it to this skull-cap. I've never yet tried sewing with a pin,
and I fancy that it won't be an easy job.'
Charlie repeated that opinion several times during the next half-hour,
for, what with the difficulty of getting the head of the pin through the
cap, and the cotton constantly slipping off the pin, it was a most
irritating job. However, after working hard for a little more than half
an hour, he finished it.
'It doesn't look at all bad,' Fred declared.
Then they talked for some time of their journey, and of the treasure for
which they had travelled so far.
'There's somebody coming!' Fred exclaimed, stopping Ping Wang in the
middle of a sentence.
They listened. 'Let's get up and walk on,' Ping Wang said, quietly. 'I
fancy there are quite fifty men approaching. Probably they are some of
the men whom we heard an hour ago. There are more of them on the left,
and they're closing in on us. Remember that, if they do see us, you are
both not to say a word.'
(_Continued on page 346._)
[Illustration: "The horse shot by him."]
[Illustration: "The dog hailed his master as he passed."]
CRUISERS IN THE CLOUDS.
X.--PARACHUTES.
Venturesome people are always on the look-out for fresh excitements. To
them it is not enough to go up in the car of a balloon in the ordinary
way. They must do something that no one else had ever done. So a M.
Margat ascended sitting astride a wooden horse, and Madame Blanchard
attached fireworks to _her_ balloon, and discharged them in mid-air. At
Paris, on July 6th, 1819, she meant to make a finer display than usual,
and succeeded in letting off fountains of fire from a wooden platform
beneath the car. But, not content with this, she hoped to surprise and
delight the people of Paris still further by letting off a fresh display
from the car itself. Unfortunately she overlooked the fact that a small
stream of gas was pouring from the lower end of her balloon, owing to
the envelope having been too fully charged, and the moment she struck
the match this stream caught fire. A tongue of flame ran up the outside
of the bag, and, her efforts to put it out proving in vain, she pulled
the valve-rope to descend. The gas rushed out at the top, but caught
fire in turn, and the falling car, coming in contact with the roof of a
house, threw Madame Blanchard to the ground with fatal result.
Accidents in the air have been countless, a large number of them being
due to the use of the parachute. But this invention has frequently been
employed effectively. Though the idea of such a machine may be traced
back many hundreds of years in old drawings and old books, the inventor
of the first in which a descent was actually made, was Jacques Garnerin,
a pupil of the celebrated Professor Charles. The first to make use of it
was his little dog. M. Garnerin carried the parachute, tied underneath a
balloon, above a dense cloud. Here the little dog was carefully secured
in the car of the parachute, and the next moment disappeared swiftly
into the cloud. Garnerin pulled the valve-rope, and followed. But his
little dog was nowhere to be seen, on account of the mist. His master
was about to let out more gas, thinking that he was behindhand in this
race to the earth, when a loud and joyous barking fell on his ear. It
came from overhead, but Garnerin could see nothing until, when the cloud
was left behind, the parachute emerged into the sunshine a few yards
away. The dog, with senses quicker than his own, had been conscious of
his master's presence, and hailed him as he passed. But the balloon
continued rapidly on its downward course, and, answering the barks with
consoling words, the aeronaut hurried to the earth. A moment or two
later he welcomed his strange little traveller from the clouds. The dog,
happily, suffered nothing, and even seemed to enjoy the experiment,
which might have proved both cruel and fatal.
Garnerin's dog was the pioneer of many human travellers in the same
machine. The master himself was the next to perform the feat, and,
watched by a large crowd, on October 22nd, 1797, he cut his parachute
loose from his balloon at a height of three thousand feet. A cry of
horror broke from the watchers as the parachute was seen to descend with
awful swiftness. But it flew open the next moment, and though M.
Garnerin was swung dangerously from side to side, he reached the ground
in safety. This swaying was due to the fact that he had not made a hole
in the top of his 'umbrella,' to allow the air to rush through.
Imprisoned in the dome, its only outlet was over the sides, and this
caused the apparatus to swing. M. Garnerin took advantage of the lesson,
and made the opening before his next flight.
This parachute was built like a huge umbrella, the cords supporting the
car coming from the outside ends of the 'ribs.' Being closed, when
detached from the balloon it, of course, descended at a great speed till
the rush of air became strong enough to force it open. It was used
without mishap in many descents, and is still the pattern for
parachutes.
Among many who sought to improve upon M. Garnerin's machine was an
Englishman, named Cocking. In 1836 he built a parachute with the sides
turned up instead of down, like an umbrella blown inside out, thinking
that it would give greater steadiness in the descent. Thus far he was
correct, but, being too sure of success, he allowed himself, without
first making experiments, to be cut loose from a balloon three thousand
feet up, and was instantly killed, the parachute being too weak in
construction. Sixteen years later another inventor made a parachute like
Garnerin's, but provided with large wings. Standing in an iron frame he
worked these wings with both arms, with the intention of directing the
parachute in its fall, thus, to a certain extent, turning it into a
flying machine. But when he was descending near Tottenham, on June 27th,
1854, an unfortunate accident resulted in the inventor's death.
Such were some of the misuses of the parachute; but, though with care it
may be employed with safety, it is not popular with aeronauts, who have
pointed out that the balloon itself may, in emergencies, be turned into
a parachute. When the gas has nearly all escaped the passage of air will
drive the silk up into the netting, and so check the speed of descent.
Mr. Coxwell more than once came safely to earth in this way. Only a
short time ago, on July 24th, 1904, an incident bearing on this point
occurred in France. A captive balloon, when some hundred feet from the
ground, was torn from its anchorage by a sudden gust of wind. The nine
passengers in the car were horrified to find themselves a few moments
later sailing above the clouds. At ten thousand feet the pressure of gas
had become so great that the silk envelope was ruptured, and the
terrified travellers realised that they were falling rapidly. They then
left the car, and climbed into the network. Fortunately, as the balloon
collapsed more and more, it took the form of a parachute, and eventually
landed two miles from the starting-point, with its passengers more
terrified than hurt.
AFLOAT ON THE DOGGER BANK.
A Story of Adventure on the North Sea and in China.
(_Continued from page 343._)