Part 8

"Of what might be done to them. The illustrious viceroy at Moukden is very strict. Even a foreign devil may not be killed without leave. Why? Because if one is killed, there is trouble. The kings of the foreign devils are angry, and many good Chinese heads have to fall. They have sent to ask leave to behead the barbarian: better still, to slice him. He fought like a hill tiger when they caught him, and two men even now lie wounded."

"How did they catch him?"

"A Canton man, mafoo to his excellency General Ping at Moukden, overtook him riding in the hills. He was making a bird's noise with his lips; that was suspicious. But the Canton man was wary. He spoke to him as a friend, and rode alongside. Where did he come from? Thus asked the Canton man. The barbarian shook his head and answered in pidgin, the tongue of the foreign devil in the south. Yah! That was his ruin. Our Canton friend also speaks pidgin. 'You come from Canton?' says he. 'Yes.' 'What part? Where did you live? Do you know this place or that? What is your business?' Those were his questions; a shrewd fellow, the Canton man. He left him at the next village; then followed with six strong men. They got ahead of him, hid in a copse by the roadside, and when the foreign devil came up, rushed out upon him. They were seven; but it was a hard fight. Ch'hoy! These barbarians are in league with a thousand demons; that is why they are so fierce and strong. But they got him at last, and brought him here; worse luck! he shall suffer for it yet."

The crowd drew nearer to their helpless prisoner, stared at him, jeered, cast stones and offal, and, worked up by the teller of the story, were only kept from tearing him to pieces by the guard and the bars of the cage. Exposed without shelter to the broiling sun, Jack was dizzy and faint. His clothes had been torn to tatters in the struggle, his pigtail wrenched from his head. He had had no food for many hours, and, what was worse, no water.

He had been able to catch the gist of what the chief speaker in the crowd had said. How stupid of him to whistle--a thing a Chinaman never does! How unlucky that he had met a man from Canton! The dialects of the north and south differ so much that by professing to be a Southerner he had come so far on his journey undetected; but in conversation with a Cantonese his accent had inevitably betrayed him. And now he knew that he could expect no mercy. A European carries his life in his hands in China whenever he ventures alone out of the beaten track. In Manchuria just then, with the natives embittered by the wanton destruction of their towns and villages, the chances of a captive being spared were infinitesimal. Only fear of the mandarins had apparently caused them to hold their hands in his case; but Jack had little reason to suppose that the mandarins would interfere to protect him. No order would be issued; but the villagers would receive a hint to do as they pleased; and Jack well knew what their pleasure would be. In the unlikely event of diplomatic pressure being afterwards brought to bear, the mandarins could still repudiate responsibility, and the villagers would suffer; several, probably the most innocent, would lose their heads. But Jack knew that he had placed himself outside the protection of the British flag. Neither the mandarins nor the villagers had anything to fear.

The sun went down; the village watchman beat his wooden gong; and the group gradually dispersed. Only the guard was left. Parched with thirst, Jack ventured to address him, asking for a cup of water. The man, with more humanity than the most, after some hesitation acceded. He was generous, and brought also a mess of rice. Greatly refreshed by the meal, scanty though it was, Jack felt his spirits rising; with more of hope he began to canvass the possibilities in his favour. But he had to admit that they were slight. There was just one ray of light, dim indeed; but a pin-point glimmer is precious in the dark. He had heard the villagers mention the brigand Ah Lum, the chief of the Chunchuses, who had levied upon their oxen. This was the chief whom Wang Shih had left Moukden to join. If Jack could only communicate with Wang Shih there might still be a chance for him.

He began a whispered conversation with his guard, and learnt that, a few days before, Ah Lum's band was known to be encamped in the hills some twenty miles to the south-west. It was resting and recruiting its strength after a severe brush with a force of Cossacks, who had almost succeeded in cutting it to pieces during a raid on the railway.

"Do you know Wang Shih?"

"No; Ah Lum has several lieutenants. His band numbers nearly eight hundred; there were more than a thousand before the fight with the Russians."

"You know what a dollar is?"

"It is worth many strings of cash."

"Well, if you will take word to Mr. Wang about me, I will give you fifty dollars."

"Where will you get them from?" asked the man suspiciously. "Were you not searched, and everything taken from you?"

"True, I was searched; but the foreign devil has ways of getting money that the Chinaman does not understand. It is a small thing I ask you to do. The reward is great; fifty dollars, hundreds of strings of cash. You will never get such a chance again."

True to the oriental instinct for haggling, the man argued and discussed for some time before he at last agreed to Jack's proposition.

"You must make haste," said Jack. "If the messenger to the mandarin returns before you, I shall be killed and you will get no money."

The man at once explained that it was impossible for him to leave the village; he must find a messenger.

"Very well. He is to find Wang Shih and say that Jack Brown from Moukden is in peril of death. You can say the name?"

"Chack Blown," said the man.

"That will do. Now, when can you send your man?"

The guard said that he would be shortly relieved; then he would lose no time. In a few minutes a man came to take his place, and Jack, with mingled hopes and fears, settled himself in a corner of the cage, to sleep if possible. Half an hour later the guard returned with the welcome news that a messenger had started, after bargaining for twenty of the fifty dollars, and would travel all night on foot, for he had no horse, and to hire one would awaken suspicion.

"But," added the guard, "he is a trusty man, much respected, and a great hater of foreign devils, like all good Chinamen. If he had had his way the honourable foreign devil would have been executed this afternoon."

"Then how comes it," asked Jack, "that he is willing to go as messenger?"

The guide looked puzzled.

"Surely the honourable barbarian understands? Did I not explain that I promised Mr. Fu twenty dollars?"

Even in his misery Jack could not forbear a smile. His messenger was doubtless the man who had led the chorus of threats and insults a few hours before. The man's convictions were no doubt still the same; but the prospect of a few dollars had completely divorced precept from practice.

Then Jack reflected that the enterprise was a poor chance at the best. There was little likelihood of the man finding Wang Shih in time, and if he found him, it was uncertain whether his sense of gratitude was sufficiently keen to bring him to the rescue. Yet, in spite of all, Jack's impatient eager thought followed the messenger, as though hope could give him winged feet.

He spent a miserable night. In that hill country even the summer nights are cold; and his clothes having been well-nigh torn from his back, he had scant protection. He slept but little, lying awake for hours listening to the mice and rats scampering around the cage, and to the long-drawn melancholy howls of the village dogs.

Soon after dawn he heard a great commotion in the village. His pulse beat high; he hoped that Wang Shih had arrived. But when his friendly guardian came to resume duty, his heart sank, for he learnt that the headman's messenger to the local mandarin had returned, bringing word that the barbarian should be suitably dealt with by the guild. The mandarin had evidently washed his hands of the matter; the guard had no doubt that when the headman was ready Jack would be taken before him, and he must expect no mercy. The people had never ceased to grumble at the delay in executing him; and nothing could be hoped of the headman, for he was a native of Harbin, and bore a bitter grudge against the Russians, who in constructing their railway had cut through his family graveyard, and in defiling the bones of his ancestors had done him the worst injury a Chinaman can suffer. Jack was to have no breakfast; his captors were so sure of his fate that they thought it would be a mere waste to feed him.

An hour passed--a terrible hour of suspense. The villagers began to gather round the cage, and their looks of gleeful and malicious satisfaction struck Jack cold. All at once they broke into loud shouting as a posse of armed yamen-runners forced their way through. Jack was taken out of the cage, and, surrounded by the runners and followed by the jabbering crowd, was marched to the headman's house. He there found himself in the presence of a dignified Chinaman, a glossy black moustache encircling his mouth and chin, his long finger-nails denoting that he did not condescend to menial work. He was in fact a prosperous farmer, who, besides possessing large estates (to which he had no title) in the Forbidden Country, carried on an extensive trade in ginseng, a plant to which extraordinary medicinal virtues are attributed by the Chinese, and so valuable that a single root will sometimes fetch as much as L15 in the Peking market. The headman, feeling the importance of the occasion, had got himself up in imitation of a magistrate, wearing a round silk buttoned cap and a blue tunic.

He had evidently made a study of the procedure in a mandarin's yamen. He was the only man seated at a long table; at each end stood a scribe with a dirty book, which might or might not have been a book of law, outspread before him; at his right hand stood a man with a lighted pipe, from which during the proceedings the headman took occasional whiffs; in front stood a group of runners in weird costumes, wearing black cloth caps with red tassels. From the sour expression on the Chinaman's face Jack knew that he was already judged and condemned; but he held his head high, and gazed unflinchingly on the stern-visaged Chinaman.

It is proper for a prisoner to take his trial on his knees, and one of the runners approached Jack and sharply bade him kneel. He refused. Two other men came up with threatening gestures, and laid hands on him to force him down. He resisted; he had the rooted European objection to kowtow to an Asiatic. With too much good sense to indulge himself in heroics, he yet recalled at this moment by a freak of memory the lines written on the heroic Private Moyse of the Buffs. His back stiffened; there was the making of a pretty wrestling match; but the headman, mindful of the stout fight when the prisoner was arrested, and desiring that the proceedings should be conducted with decorum, ordered his men to desist. Then he began his interrogatory.

"You are an Russian?"

"No, an Englishman."

"Where have you been living?"

"In Moukden."

"What have you been doing there?"

"I lived with my father."

"Who is he?"

"He is a merchant."

"What is his name?"

"He is known as Mr. Brown of Moukden."

"What did he trade in?"

"In many things. He supplied stores of all kinds."

"To the Russians?"

"Yes."

"Assisting them to build the iron road that is the ruin of Manchuria?"

"I believe your august emperor gave the Russians permission."

"Do not dare to mention the Son of Heaven. Do not dare, I say, you foreign devil! Where is your father now?"

"I do not know. He was arrested by the Russians."

"Why?"

"They accused him of giving information to the Japanese."

"Did he give information?"

"No."

"Ch'hoy! Then clearly he was in league with the Russians. He, too, is worthy of death. What brought you into the Shan-yan-alin mountains?"

"I am trying to find my father. I was on my way to Moukden."

"Do you know that the Ch'ang-pai-shan is sacred to the emperor? Nobody is allowed to tread these hills, on pain of death."

"I am in your honour's august company."

The headman winced and blinked. That was a home-thrust. He grew angry.

"Enough! You are a foreign devil. By your own confession you have been in league with the Russians, assisting them in their impious work, disturbing the feng-shui in the most sacred city of the virtuous Son of Heaven. You are found in insolent disguise within the limits of the Forbidden Mountains; you resisted lawful arrest, to the severe injury of two of my officers. It is clear that you are a vile example of the outer barbarians who are scheming to drive the Manchu from his immemorial lands, defiling the graves of our fathers, and bringing our sons to shame. You are not fit to live; every one of your offences is punishable with death; in their sum you are lightly touched by my sentence upon you, that you suffer the ling-ch'ih, and then be beheaded. Confess your crimes."

Jack had answered the man's questions briefly and calmly, and listened with unmoved countenance to his speech. The decision was only what he had expected. The worst was to come. He knew that by the laws and customs of China he could not be executed until he had acknowledged the justice of the sentence and made open confession of his crime; he knew also that, failing to confess voluntarily, he would be tortured by all the most fiendish methods devised by Chinese ingenuity until confession was extorted from his lacerated, half-inanimate frame. The end would be the same; for a moment, in his helplessness and despair, he thought it would perhaps be better to acquiesce at once and get it over. But then pride of race stepped in. Could he, innocent as he felt himself to be, act a lie by even formally acquiescing in the sentence? He did not know how far his fortitude would enable him to bear the tortures in store; but he would not allow the mere prospect to cow him. He had paused but a moment.

"I have nothing to confess," he said.

The headman gave a grunt of satisfaction.

"Put him in the cage," he said.

Jack's blood ran cold in spite of himself. The word used by his judge was not the name of the cage in which he had already been confined, but meant an instrument of torture. Amid the exultant hoots of the crowd of natives, who spat on the ground as he passed, he was hauled from the presence and taken to a yard near by. In the centre of it stood a bamboo cage somewhat more than five feet high. Its top consisted of two movable slabs of wood which, when brought together, left a hole large enough to encircle a man's neck, but too small for his head to pass through. The height of the cage was so adjusted, that when the prisoner was inside with his head protruding from the top he could only avoid being hung by the neck so long as his feet rested on a brick. By and by that would be removed; he might defer strangulation for a short time by standing on tiptoe, but that would soon become too painful. Jack had never seen the instrument in use, but he had heard of it, and he quailed at the imagination of the torture he was to endure.

His arms were bound together; he was locked into the cage; his head was enclosed; and the mob jeered and yelled as, the brick being knocked away after a few minutes, he instinctively raised himself on his toes to ease the pressure on his neck. How long could he endure it? he wondered. Had the messenger failed to find Wang Shih? Had some perverse fate removed the Chunchuse band at this moment of dire peril? Humanly speaking, his salvation depended on Wang Shih, and on him alone: was his last hope to prove vain? Should he now yield, confess, and spare himself further torture? Already he was suffering intense pain; he gained momentary relief for his feet by drawing up his legs, a movement which brought his whole weight upon his neck; but that was endurable only for a few seconds. He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the yelling mob; pressed his lips together lest a moan should escape him: "I will never give in, never give in." he said to himself; "pray God it may not be long."

The pain became excruciating; he no longer saw or heard the yelling fiends gloating over every spasm of his tortured body; he was fast sinking into unconsciousness, and the headman, fearful of losing his victim, was about to give the order for his temporary release, when suddenly his ears caught the sound of galloping horses. The noise around him lulled; he heard loud shouts in the distance, and drawing ever nearer. Then the crowd scattered like chaff, and through their midst rode a brawny figure brandishing a riding-whip of bamboo. Dashing through the amazed throng at the head of thirty shouting bandits he leapt from his horse, sprang to the cage, tore away the catch holding the two panels together, and Jack fell, an unconscious heap, to the bottom of the cage.

The first alarm being now passed, the villagers raised a hubbub. They clustered about the new-comers, protesting with all their might that the prisoner was merely a foreign devil, an impious pig. But Wang Shih cleared a space with his whip; then, springing to the saddle again, he raised his voice in a shout that dominated and silenced the clamour of the mob.

"Hai-yah! What are you doing, men of Tang-ho-kou? Is this foreigner a Russian that you treat him thus? A fine thing truly! You skulk in your fangtzes, afraid to come out with the honourable Ah Lum and me and fight the Russians, and yet you are bold enough to catch a solitary man, a friend of the Chinaman, and to misuse him thus because he is alone! Know you not that he is an enemy of the Russians? They have imprisoned his father; it is reverence for his father that brings him here. Is filial piety so little esteemed in Tang-ho-kou to-day? Ch'hoy! I see your headman aping a lordly mandarin; let him listen. I say you are lucky I do not burn your village and execute a dozen of you as you were about to execute the stranger. But I will be merciful. I will take from you a contribution of five thousand taels for my chief; and your headman--ch'hoy! he shall stand for half an hour in the cage. That shall suffice. But beware how you offend again. Learn to distinguish your friends from your enemies--an Englishman from the Russians whom the dwarfs of Japan are helping us to drive back to the frozen north. Take heed of what I say--I, Wang Shih, the worthless servant of his excellency Ah Lum, the virtuous commander of many honourable brigands."

This speech made an impression upon the crowd. The headman was beginning to slink away, but Wang Shih noticed the movement and sent one of his men after him. In spite of his protests he was dragged to the cage, from which Jack, now fully conscious, had been removed; he was fastened in it, and compelled to tiptoe as his erstwhile prisoner had done. But after some minutes Jack, with a vivid remembrance of his own sufferings, interceded for the wretched man, and Wang Shih released him, bidding him collect from the villagers the tribute he had demanded. The presence of the thirty well-armed Chunchuses was a powerful spur to haste, and within half an hour the amount was raised. Meanwhile Jack's neck had been bathed, and his muscles were beginning to recover from the strain to which they had been put. He declared that he was well enough to ride away with his deliverers. He had first to pay the guard the fifty dollars agreed upon. Not wishing to disclose the hiding-place in the soles of his boots where he kept his notes, he borrowed from Wang Shih the necessary sum in bar silver. Then, mounted upon a horse borrowed from the headman's own stables, he rode with the brigands from the village.

*CHAPTER IX*

*Ah Lum*

Ishmaels--The Chief--Fair Words--Wise Saws--Ah Fu's Tutors--An Honorary Appointment--Chopping Maxims--A Deputation--Hunting the Boar--A Forest Monarch--Charging Home--The Knife--A Close Call

The Chunchuse camp, Jack learnt as he rode, was some thirty miles distant in the hills. It had been shifted; it was always shifting; that was why the intervention of Wang Shih had been so nearly too late.

Jack was somewhat amused when he reflected on the strange company in which he found himself. He had heard a good deal about these redoubtable bandits, but never till this day had he seen any of them. Their bands were, he knew, very miscellaneous in their composition. Escaped prisoners, whether guilty, or innocent like Wang Shih, frequently sought refuge with one or other of the brigand chiefs. Men who had been ruined in business, or were too indolent for regular work; men possessed of grievances against the mandarins, or by a sheer lust of adventure and lawlessness; helped to swell their numbers; and Mr. Brown had once remarked that they reminded him of the motley band that gathered about David in the cave Adullam: "Every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented".

The name Chunchuse means "red beard", and was originally applied by the natives to any foreigner. Since the bandits were almost all clean-shaven, like the majority of Chinamen, Jack could only conjecture that they were styled "red beards" from some fancied resemblance of their predatory ways to the methods of the hated foreigners. They were held in terror by all the law-abiding inhabitants, and the machinery of the Chinese government was totally unable to keep them down. Since the coming of the Russians they had grown in numbers and in power. Knowing every inch of the country they were able to wage an effective guerrilla warfare against the invaders, often surprising scouting parties of Siberian riflemen or Cossacks, raiding isolated camps, damaging the railways, and capturing convoys.

Jack was interested in taking stock of his strange companions. They were tall strapping fellows, powerfully built, with muscular and athletic frames, and they included men of every race known in Manchuria. Their costumes differed as greatly as the men themselves. Some were clad in the usual garb of Chinamen; others had black cloth jackets with brass buttons, tight-fitting trousers, and long riding-boots reaching to the knees. Their heads were covered with knotted handkerchiefs of red, black, or yellow cotton, beneath which their pigtails were coiled up out of sight. Each carried a rifle and a revolver stuck in his leather belt.

On the way to the camp Wang Shih gave Jack a few particulars about the band, in which he had already risen to a high position. Ah Lum, the chief, had been for many years notorious for the daring with which he would swoop with a few men on rich merchants travelling through the country, even though they might be escorted by Chinese soldiers. But since the outbreak of the war such sources of gain had ceased, and he had gradually collected a very large following for the purpose of conducting irregular operations against his country's despoilers. All were magnificent horsemen; the Russians had in vain endeavoured to hunt them down; and the very rifles they carried were the spoil of successful raids.

After a ride of about five hours through the hills, Wang Shih's party reached the Chunchuse camp. It was a strange mixture of shelters, many of them huts built of the stalks of kowliang, yet arranged, as Jack noticed, in a certain order. Conspicuous in the middle of the camp was a large tent, in which, as they approached, Jack recognized the Russian service pattern. This too was evidently part of the spoil of a raid.