us; suppose that instead of bringing something here he took one of these
old castings away?'
"The hobo looked at me without changing his position.
"'How could he, Governor; he was pointin' this way with the load?'
"'By walking backward,' I said. For it had occurred to me that perhaps
the creature had manufactured this evidence for the occasion, and I
wished to test the theory."
Walker went on in his slow, even voice:
"The test produced more action than I expected. The hobo dived out
through the door. I followed to see him disappear. But he was not in
flight; he was squatting down over the foot prints. And a moment later
he rocked back on his haunches with a little exultant yelp.
"'Dope's wrong, Governor,' he said; 'he was sure comin' this way.' Then
he explained: 'If a man's walkin' forward in sand or mud or snow the toe
of his shoe flirts out a little of it, an' if he's walkin' backward his
heel flirts it out.'
"At this point I began to have some respect for the creature's ability.
He got up and came back into the shed. And there he stood, in his old
position, with his fingers over his mouth, looking round at the empty
shed, in which, as I have said, one could not have concealed a bird's
egg.
"I watched him without offering any suggestion, for my interest in the
thing had awakened and was curious to see what he would do. He stood
perfectly motionless for about a minute; and then suddenly he snapped
his fingers and the light came into his face.
"'I got it, Governor!' Then he came over to where I stood. 'Gimme a
quarter to get a bucket'
"I gave him the coin, for I was now profoundly puzzled, and he went out.
He was gone perhaps twenty minutes, and when he came in he had a bucket
of water. But he had evidently been thinking on the way, for he set the
bucket down carefully, wiped his hands on his canvas breeches, and began
to speak, with a little apologetic whimper in his voice.
"'Now look here, Governor,' he said, 'I'm a-goin' to talk turkey; do I
get the five thousand if I find this stuff?'
"'Surely,' I answered him.
"'An' there'll be no monkey'n', Governor; you'll take me down to a bank
yourself an' put the money in my hand?'
"'I promise you that,' I assured him.
"But he was not entirely quiet in his mind about it. He shifted uneasily
from one foot to the other, and his soft rubber nose worked.
"'Now, Governor,' he said, 'I'm leery about jokers--I gotta be. I don't
want any string to this money. If I get it I want to go and blow it in.
I don't want you to hand me the roll an' then start any reformin'
stunt--a-holdin' of it in trust an' a probation officer a-pussy-footin'
me, or any funny business. I want the wad an' a clear road to the bright
lights with no word passed along to pinch me. Do I git it?'
"'It's a trade!" I said.
"'O.K.,' he answered, and he took up the bucket. He began at the door
and poured the water carefully on the hard tramped earth. When the
bucket was empty he brought another and another. Finally about midway of
the floor space he stopped.
"'Here it is!' he said.
"I was following beside him, but I saw nothing to justify his words.
"Why do you think the plates are buried here?' I said.
"'Look at the air bubbles comin' up, Governor,' he answered."
Walker stopped, then he added:
"It's a thing which I did not know until that moment, but it's the
truth. If hard-packed earth is dug up and repacked air gets into it, and
if one pours water on the place air bubbles will come up."
He did not go on, and I flung the big query of his story at him.
"And you found the plates there?"
"Yes," he replied, "in the false bottom of an old steamer trunk."
"And the hobo got the money?"
"Certainly," he answered. "I put it into his hand, and let him go with
it, as I promised."
Again he was silent, and I turned toward him in astonishment.
"Then," I said, "why did you begin this story by saying the hobo faked
you? I don't see the fake; he found the plates and he was entitled to
the reward."
Walker put his hand into his pocket, took out a leather case, selected a
paper from among its contents and handed it to me. "I didn't see the
fake either," he said, "until I got this letter."
I unfolded the letter carefully. It was neatly written in a hand like
copper plate and dated from Buenos Aires:
_Dear Colonel Walker_: When I discovered that you were planting an agent
on every ship I had to abandon the plates and try for the reward. Thank
you for the five thousand; it covered expenses. Very sincerely yours,
D. MULEHAUS.
THE BLOOD OF THE DRAGON
BY THOMAS GRANT SPRINGER
From _Live Stories_
Kan Wong, the sampan boatman, sat in the bow of his tiny craft, looking
with dream-misted eyes upon the oily, yellow flood of the Yangtze River.
Far across on the opposite shore, blurred by the mist that the alchemy
of the setting sun transmuted from miasmic vapour to a veil of gold,
rose the purple-shadowed, stone-tumbled ruins of Hang Gow, ruins that
had been a proud, walled city in the days before the Tai-ping Rebellion.
Viewing its slowly dimming powers as they sank into the fading gold of
the mist that the coming night thickened and darkened as it wiped out
the light with a damp hand, Kan Wong dreamed over the stories that his
father's father--now revered dust somewhere off toward the hills that
dimly met the melting sky line--had told him of that ruined city,
wherein he, Kan Wong, had not Fate made men mad, would now be ruling a
lordly household, even wearing the peacock feather and embroidered
jacket that were his by right of the Dragon's blood, that blood now
hidden under the sun-browned skin of a river coolie. Kan Wong stuffed
fine-cut into his brass-bowled pipe and struck a spark from his tinder
box. Through his wide nostrils twin streamers of smoke writhed out,
twisting fantastically together and mixing slowly with the rising river
mist. His pipe became a wand of dreams summoning the genii of glorious
memory. The blood of the Dragon in his veins quickened from the lethargy
to which drudgery had cooled it, and raced hotly as he thought of the
battle past of his forefathers. Off Somewhere along the river's winding
length, where it crawled slowly to the sea, lay the great coast cities.
The lazy ripples, light-tipped, beckoned with luring fingers. There was
naught to stay him. His sampan was his home and movable, therefore the
morrow would see him turning its bow downstream to seek that strange
city where he had heard, dwelt many Foreign Devils who now and then
scattered wealth with a prodigal hand.
In that pale hour when the mist, not yet dissipated by the rising sun,
lay in a cold, silver veil upon the night-chilled water, he pushed out
from the shore and pointed the sampan's prow downstream. Days it took
him to reach salt water. He loitered for light cargoes at village edges,
or picked up the price of his daily rice at odd tasks ashore, but
always, were it day or night for travel, his tiny craft bore surely
seaward. Mile after slow mile dropped behind him, like the praying beads
of a lama's chain, but at last the river salted slightly, and his tiny
craft was lifted by the slow swell of the sea's hand reaching for
inland.
The river became more populous. The crowding sampans, houseboats, and
junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city
as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing
population failed to find ground space in its maggoty swarming. As the
stream widened until the farther bank disappeared in the artificial mist
of rising smoke and man-stirred dust, the Foreign Devils' fire junks
appeared, majestically steaming up and down--swift swans that scorned
the logy, lumbering native craft, the mat sails and toiling sweeps of
which made them appear motionless by comparison. A day or two of this
and then the coast, with Shanghai sprawling upon the bank, writhing with
life, odoriferous, noisy, perpetually awake.
Kan Wong slid into its waterfront turmoil, an infinitesimal human atom
added to it. His tiny craft fixed itself upon the outer edge of the
wriggling river life like a coral cell attaching itself to a slow
growing atoll. From there he worked his way inshore, crawling over the
craft that stretched out from the low banks as a water beetle might move
over the flotsam and jetsam caught in the back-water of a sluggish
stream. Once in the narrow, crowded streets of the city itself, he
roamed aimlessly, open-eyed to its wonders, dreamily observant. Out of
the native quarter and into the foreign section he moved, accustoming
himself to these masters of mystery whom he was about to serve, calling
sluggish memory to his aid as his cars strove to reconstruct The meaning
of the barbarous jargon.
Into the quarter where the Foreign Devils and the native population came
together to barter and to trade, he strayed one day. A Foreign Devil in
a strangely unattractive uniform was addressing a crowd of coolies in
their own tongue. Kan Wong attached himself to the outer edge of the
impassively curious throng, his ears alert, his features, as ever, an
imperturbable mask. The foreign officer, for such he seemed to be, was
making an offer to the assemblage for contract labour: one dollar a day,
with rice, fish, and tea rations, for work in a foreign land. Kan Wong
translated the money quickly into _yens_. The sum seemed incredible to
him. What service would he not perform for such payment? Why, within a
year, or two at the very most, with careful frugality, he might return
and buy himself a junk worthy of his Dragon dreams of the river. And
then ...
The officer talked on, persuading, holding out the glittering lure of
profit and adventure. Kan Wong listened eagerly. He had thought there
was a ban on contract labour, but perhaps this new Republican
Government, so friendly to the Foreign Devil, had removed it. Surely one
who wore the uniform of a soldier and an officer could not thus publicly
solicit coolies without the sanction of the mandarins, or escape their
notice.
Kan Wong studied the crowd. It contained a few Chinese soldiers, who
were obviously keeping order. He was satisfied, and edged his way closer
to the speaker. There, already, ranged to one side was a line of his own
kind, jabbering to a Celestial who put down their names on slips of rice
paper and accepted their marks, which they made with a bamboo brush,
that they bonded themselves to the adventure. Kan Wong gained the
signing table. Picking up the brush, he set his name, the name of one
of the Dragon's blood, to the contract, accepted a duplicate, and
stepped back into the waiting line.
His pay and his rations, he was told, would begin two days hence, when
he was to report to the fire junk now lying at the dock, awaiting the
human cargo of which he was a part. Kan Wong memorized the directions as
he turned away from his instructing countryman. Of the Foreign Devil he
took no further notice. Time enough for that when he passed into
service. The God of Luck had smiled upon his boldness, and, reflecting
upon it Kan Wong turned back to the river and the sampan that had so
long been his floating home. No sentimental memories, however, clung
about it for him. Its freight of dreams he had landed here in Shanghai,
marketing them for a realization. The sampan now was but the empty shell
of a water beetle, that had crawled upon the bank into the sun of
Fortune to spill forth a dragon fly to try newly found wings of
adventure.
He found a customer, and, with much haggling after the manner of his
kind, disposed of his boat, the last tie, if tie there was, that bound
him to his present life. Waterman he had always been, and now had come
to him the call of the Father of All Waters. The tang of the salt in his
nostrils conjured up dreams as magical as those invoked by the wand of
the poppy god. Wrapped in their rosy mantle, he walked the streets for
the next two days, and on the third he took his way to the dock where
lay the fire junk that was to bear him forth into the wonders of the
Foreign Devils' land. Larger she loomed than any he had ever seen,
larger, oh, much larger, than those which had steamed up the Yangtze in
swanlike majesty. But this huge bulk was grey--grey and squat and
powerful. Once aboard, he found it crowded with an army of chattering
coolies. They swarmed in the hold like maggots. Every inch of space was
given over to them, an army, it seemed to Kan Wong, in which he was all
but lost.
Day after day across the waste of water the ship took its eastern way.
Never had Kan Wong dreamed there was so much water in the world. The
broad, long river that had been his life's path seemed but a narrow
trickle on the earth's face compared with this stretch of sea that never
ended, though the days ran into weeks. The land coolies chafed and found
much sickness in the swell but Kan Wong, used ever to a moving deck,
round the way none too long, and smiled softly to himself as he counted
up the dollars they were paying him for the keenest pleasure he had ever
known.
At last land appeared. The ship swung into the dock, disclosing to the
questioning eyes of Kan Won and his kind a new strange land. In orderly
discipline they were marched off the vessel and on to the dock. But rest
was not theirs as yet, nor was this their final destination. From the
fire junk they boarded the flying iron horse of the Foreign Devils;
again they were on the move. Swiftly across the land they went, over
high mountains crowded with eternal snow, thence down upon brown,
rolling plains as wide as the flat stretches of the broad Yangtze
Valley; eastward, ever eastward, through a land sparsely peopled for all
its virgin fertility. Behind their flying progress the days
dropped--one, two, three, four, at last five; and then they entered a
more populous region. Kan Wong, his nose flattened against the glass
that held the moving picture as in a frame, wondered much at the magic
that unrolled to his never-sated eyes. Yet the journey's end was beyond
his questioning.
Once more they came to a seaport. Marching from the carriages, once more
they beheld the sea. But this time it was different--more turbulent,
harsher, more sombre with the hint of waiting storms. Was there, then,
more than one ocean, Kan Wong asked himself? He found that it was indeed
so when once more a fire junk received them. This one was greyer than
the first that they had known. Upon her decks were guns and at her side
were other junks, low, menacing, with a demon flurry of vicious speed,
and short, squat funnels that belched dense smoke clouds. Within the
town were many Foreign Devils, all dressed alike in strange drab
uniforms; on the docks and here and there at other places they bore
arms and other unmistakable equipment of fighting men, which even Kan
Wong could not but notice.
The grey ship moved into a cold grey fog. With it other ships as grey
and as crowded, ships that crawled with men, strange Foreign Devils who
clanked with weapons as they walked aboard. Again a waste of water,
through which the ship seemed to crawl with a caution that Kan Wong
felt, but did not understand. With it on either side, moved those other
junks--squat, menacing, standing low on the horizon, but as haunting as
dark ghosts. Where were they bound, this strangely mixed fleet? Often
Kan Wong pondered this, but gave it no tongue to his fellow-passengers,
holding a bit aloof from them by virtue of his caste.
Again they neared the shore, where other boats, low-built and bristling
with guns, flew swiftly out to meet them like fierce ocean birds of
prey. Now they skirted high, bleak cliffs, their feet hid in a lather of
white foam; then they rounded the cliffs and passed into a storm-struck
stretch of sea through which they rolled to a more level land, off which
they cast anchor. The long ocean journey was finished at last.
There was a frantic bustle at this port, increasing a hundredfold when
once they set foot upon the land. Men--men were everywhere; men in
various uniforms, men who spoke various tongues in a confusing babel,
yet they all seemed intent upon one purpose, the import of which Kan
Wong could but vaguely guess. All about them was endless movement, but
no confusion, and once ashore their work commenced immediately.
From the fleet of fire junks various cargoes were to be unloaded with
all speed, and at this the coolies toiled. Numberless crates, boxes, and
bags came ashore to be stowed away in long, low buildings, or loaded
into long lines of rough, boxlike carriages that then went scurrying off
behind countless snorting and puffing fire-horses to the east, always to
the east and north. Strange engines, which the Foreign Devils saw to it
that they handled most tenderly, were also much in evidence, and always,
at all hours the uniformed men with their bristling arms and clanking
equipment crowded into the carriages and were whisked off to the east,
always to the east and north. They went with much strange shouting and,
to Kan Wong's ears, discordant sounds that they mistook for music. Yet
now and then other strings of carriages came back from the east and
north, with other men--men broken, bloody, lacking limbs, groping in
blindness, their faces twisted with pain as they were loaded into the
waiting fire-junks to recross the rough sea.
Then came the turn of the coolies to be crowded into the boxlike
carriages and to be whisked off to the east. With them went
tools--picks, shovels, and the like--for further work, upon the nature
of which Kan Wong, unquestioning, speculated. It was a slow, broken
journey that they made. Every now and then they stopped that other
traffic might pass them, going either way; mostly the strange men in
uniforms, bristling with guns, hurrying always to the east and north.
At last they too turned north, and as they did so the country, which had
been smiling, low, filled with soft fields and pretty, nestling houses,
little towns and quiet, orderly cities, changed to bleak fields, cut and
seared as by a simoom's angry breath. Still there were little towns--or
what had been little towns, now tumbled ruins--fire-smitten, gutted,
their windows gaping like blind eyes in the face of a twisted cripple.
Off to the east hung angry clouds from which the thunder echoed
distantly; a thunder low, grumbling, continual, menacing, and through
the clouds at night were lightning flashes of an angry red. Toward this
storm it seemed that all the men were hurrying, and so too were the
coolies of whom Kan Wong was one. Often they chattered speculatively of
the storm beyond. What did it mean? Why did the men hurry toward instead
of away from it? Truly the ways of the Foreign Devils were strange!
As they drew nearer to the storm, the river dreams of Kan Wong returned.
This was indeed the land of the Dragon's wrath. The torn and harrowed
fields, the empty, broken towns, the distant, grumbling storm, and the
armed men, hurrying, always hurrying toward the east and north where the
clouds darkened and spread--all this was in the tales that his father's
father had told him of those fifteen mad years when the Yangtze Valley
crouched trembling under the fiery breath of the Dragon's wrath. Here
once more he saw the crumbling towers and walls of Hang Gow in fresh
rain. Here was the ruthless wreck that even nature in her fiercest mood
could never make. Truly the lure of the Dragon's blood in him was
drawing him, magnet-like, to the glory of his ancestors.
The one who had them in charge and spoke their tongue gave them their
tools and bade them dig narrow ditches head deep. From them they ran
tunnels into deep caves hollowed out far under the ground. They burrowed
like moles, cutting galleries here and there, reinforcing them with
timbers, and lining them with a stone which they made out of dust and
water. Many they cut, stretching far back behind the ever present storm
in front of them, while from that storm cloud, in swift and unseen
lightning bolts that roared and burst and destroyed their work often as
fast as it was completed, fell death among them, who were only
labourers, not soldiers, as Kan Wong now knew those Foreign Devils in
the strange and dirty uniforms to be.
As the storm roared on, never ceasing, it stirred the Dragon's blood in
Kan Wong's veins. The pick and shovel irked his hands as he swung them;
his palms began to itch for the weapons that the soldiers bore. Now and
then he came upon a gun where it had dropped from its owner's useless
hands. He studied its mechanism, even asking the Foreign Devil overseer
how it was worked, and, being shown, he remembered and practised its use
whenever opportunity offered. He took to talking with his
fellow-workers, some of whom had themselves fought with the rebels of
New China, who, with just such Foreign Devils' tools, had clipped the
claws of the Manchu Dragon, freeing the Celestial Kingdom forever from
its crooked grip. He took much interest in these war implements. He
became more intimate and friendly with his fellows, feeling them now to
be brothers in a danger that had awakened the soldier soul beneath the
brown of his coolie skin.
Little could he make of all the strife about him. All of which he was
sure was that this was the Dragon's Field, and he, a Son of the Dragon,
had been guided to it to fulfil a destiny his forefathers had begun in
the Yangtze Valley when with the "Hairy Rebels" they had waged such war
as this. The flying death all about him that now and then claimed toll
of one of his own kind was but a part of it; but all the time he grew to
hate his humble work and long for a part, a real part, in the fighting
that raged ahead, where an unseen enemy, of whom he grew to think as his
own, hurled destruction among them. Often he spoke of this to the gang
under him, imbuing them with the spirit of the Dragon's blood that,
eager to fulfil its destiny, once more boiled within him.
Then one day the storm grew more furious. The thunder was a continual
roll, and both from the front and rear flew the whining lightning bolts,
spewing out death and destruction. Many a coolie fell, his dust buried
under the dust of this fierce foreign land, never to be returned and
mixed with that of his own Flowery Kingdom. Now and then came "stink
pots," filling the air with such foul vapours that men coughed out their
lives in the putrid fumes. The breath of the Dragon, fresh from his
awful mouth, was wrapped about them in hot wrath.
Past them the soldiers streamed, foul with fight, their hot guns
spitting viciously back into the rolling, pungent grey fog that followed
them malignantly. Confusion reigned, and in that confusion a perfect
riot of death. On all sides the soldiers fell, blighted by the Dragon's
breath. The coolies crouched in the heaped-up ruins of their newly dug
ditches, knowing not which way to turn, bereft of leadership since the
Foreign Devil who commanded them was gone, buried beneath a pile of
earth where a giant cracker had fallen.
Suddenly Kan Wong noticed that there were no more soldiers save only
those who lay writhing or in still, twisted heaps upon the harrowed
ground. The coolie crowd huddled here alone, clutching their futile
picks and shovels, grovelling in helpless panic. Disaster had overtaken
them. The Dragon was upon them, and they were unprotected. All about
them in scattered heaps lay discarded equipment, guns, even the
sharp-barking death-spitting, tiny instrument that the soldiers handled
so lovingly and so gently when it was not in action. But those who
manned the weapons had passed on, back through the thick curtain of
smoke that hung between them and the comparative safety of the rear.
Kan Wong's eyes were ahead, striving to pierce the pungent veil that hid
the enemy. Suddenly his keen eyes noted them--the strange uniforms and
stranger faces, ducking forward here and there through the hell of their
own making. The blood of the Dragon within him boiled up, now that the
enemy was really near enough to feel the teeth and claws of the Dragon's
whelps. This was the hour for which he had lived. This was the Tai-ping
glory come again for him to share. Reaching down, he picked up the rifle
of a fallen soldier, fondled its mechanism lovingly for a moment, and
then, cuddling it tenderly beneath his chin, his finger bade it spit
death at the misty grey figures crawling through the greyer fog in
front.