"ONE PIECEE CAN DO!"
We could not talk together, for the very good reason that our mouths
were gagged, nor could we see each other now, poor consolation as that
would have been; although possibly a friendly wink from Ned might have
cheered me up a bit under the circumstances, the idea preying on my mind
that it was owing to my fault in persuading him to enter into the
treacherous ambuscade that we had been thus entrapped.
But whatever Anstruther's reflections might have been I had no means of
knowing, as our bearers trotted onwards with his bamboo palanquin
abreast of mine, both of our craft making good headway; the artful,
yellow-hatted old scoundrel who had so successfully planned our capture
bringing up the rear of the procession and grunting away at a fine rate
behind.
He was mounted on a diminutive pony, which he straddled in a clumsy
fashion, his legs almost touching the ground; while a parasol he held
aloft in one hand nearly poked my eyes out when he came up every now and
then alongside my cage, to see that I was there all right and had not
wriggled out of my bonds since his last inspection.
If I could not speak, like the monkeys in the Zoological Gardens, I
thought the more; all sorts of curious fancies continually coming into
my head as we were thus borne along.
For one thing, I was not in the least frightened about my fate; for, as
the old chap had not killed us at the first start off, it occurred to me
that he had merely taken us prisoners with the view of getting a heavy
ransom for us by-and-by, being led to the belief that we might be
important personages on account of his seeing us followed after we
landed from the gunboat, by the cutter's crew.
Our stalwart bluejackets appeared to his little, rat eyes, no doubt,
like the retinue of a mandarin with a peacock's feather in his tail at
the least; and this impression had, probably, been confirmed by the fact
of our being such young fellows, which was a proof of what "big" men we
would be when grown-up! Thinking this, I was in no ways alarmed. On
the contrary, I chuckled greatly when I recollected what a widely
different value the captain or first lieutenant would attach to a couple
of harum-scarum midshipmen to the estimation in which this wily old
kidnapper evidently held us; glorying in the great sell awaiting him
when he came in his bland innocence to exchange our poor carcases for
hard cash!
This anticipation so pleased me, that I began to interest myself in the
scenes through which we passed to our as yet unknown destination.
The one great drawback to my enjoyment of this amusement was that there
was precious little to look at, the country being fiat and dreary in the
extreme, and consisting apparently of an endless plain, dotted here and
there with heaps of earth, like mud-pies magnified, with the black Peiho
serpentining through it in its snake-like curves.