Chapter 23

When Peter snapped off the switch he found that he was trembling, trembling from his knees to his neck. With a feeling akin to guilt he wiped the sweat from his face and walked unsteadily to the rail which overhung the cargo-well.

He lighted an Abdullah, and watched the little smoke pool, which the wind snatched and tossed up into the booms and darkness.

It must have been a nightmare, this scene just past. What an incredible, a preposterous request for a woman to make! And the more thought he fed to the enigma the more incredible and unreal it became.

It was too big and complex a thought to hold all together in his tired brain now. In the morning he would tackle it with some zest, with an inner eye washed clean by a long sleep. Just now he felt the need of relaxation, and as he smoked, his thoughts flitted afar, to come back now and then, irresistibly drawn by the vivid picture painted in his mind by Romola Borria.

His eyes, commanders of his thoughts, traveled out over the stern, which rose and sank with a ponderous, wallowing sound in the heaving ground swells, and he made out the weaving and coiling, the lustrous but dim windings of the phosphorescent wake.

As he became more accustomed to the shadowy, pointed darkness of the steerage cabins, he became aware of a small figure crouching on the hatch-cover near the starboard rail. He studied this intently, and at length he made out the long, black queue of the Chinese girl who had stared at him in such bewitching fashion a little earlier in the day.

And his mind was carried back at the thought of this small maiden to the grim and red Tibetan city, whose memories now were scarcely more than a confused and hideous dream. He pictured again the splendors of the blue-domed white palace which reposed like a beast of prey atop the red filth disgorged by the cinnabar mine.

Peter's heart thumped in youthful resentment as the thought of that evil spirit came to him now. When would he meet the Gray Dragon face to face? When would he again penetrate the stronghold of that unhappy red city? Who could say? Probably never.

The small Chinese girl on the hatch-cover had found him staring at her, and with a little shiver of surprise Peter made the discovery that she was smiling archly at him; and she inclined her head. She was beckoning? It seemed so, indeed.

Because Peter was a youth of deep and subtle understandings, he did no more than nod slightly, and forthwith descended the companion-ladder to the well, and crossed the well to her side.

Her eyes were given a queer little twinkle by the near-by electric which burned dimly over the door of the engine-room galley, and she motioned him to be seated. He squatted, Chinese fashion, and she took a deep, sighing breath, holding out her hands with a quick gesture.

Across her wrists and drooping to her knees and beyond them into the shadow was a strip of heavy, deep-blue silk. All down its length were stitched small, round dots of dark red. Peter knew this for a sarong, an ornamental waist-sash, affected by most Javanese gentlemen and many Australians and New Zealanders.

While he hesitated, she laid this in his lap with a shy impulsiveness.

"It is yours, sar," she informed Peter in English of a very strange mold. She spoke in a rather high-pitched, bell-like voice, pure and soft, and tinkling with queer little cadences. "It is yours, sar. I made it for you."

Indubitably the girl was Eurasian. Asiatic features predominated, with the exception of her eyes, which were more round than oblique, from which circumstance Peter could surmise that her Aryan blood, provided she was a half-caste, came from her mother's side; the predominance of the Mongolian in her features being due to an Asiatic father, a Chinese.

The colorless face, relieved by the bright color of her lips, the slightly oblique eyes, told him that; yet her accents were those of a Javanese, a Malay from the south.

"You made this--for me?" replied Peter, surprised.

"Oh, yes, sar," said the tinkling little voice.

"Well, that is fine. It is beautiful," he said, feeling his way with prudence. "And how much do I owe you, small one?"

She shook her head indignantly.

"It is a geeft," she informed him. "I am no longer poor, my lord. I can now give geefts. I like you. I give this to you."

Peter was moved momentarily beyond speech.

"You are very fine, _busar satu_," went on the tiny, musical voice. "So is this sarong. You will wear it, great one, around thy middle?"

"Around my middle, to be sure, small one," laughed Peter; "until my middle is clay, or until the sarong is no more than a thread."

"Well said, _busar satu_!" The girl giggled, bobbing her small head in happy approval. "It is twice blessed: with my love and with my foolish blood, for I pricked my finger on the wicked needle. But I covered that spot with a red mata-ari (sun). You can never, never tell."

"Assuredly not!" cried Peter gaily.

"Let the sarong be wound about thy middle," commanded the Chinese maiden. "Arise, sar, and wind it about thy middle."

And Peter did rise, winding the sarong about his lean waist twice, allowing one end to dangle down on his left side in a debonair and striking fashion. If set off his slim figure in a rather bizarre way.

"It's bully!" he exclaimed, pirouetting with one hand on his head after the style of the matador.

"It is bully!" she echoed, in such quaint reflection of his exclamation that Peter laughed outright. "Now, sit down again, sar," she invited. And when Peter had again disposed himself at the side of this light-hearted young person, she went on:

"I am coming a long, long way to visit my aged grandmother (may the green-eyed gods grant her the twelve desires!) who lives Canton-way. My dear father sells opium. He has grown rich in that trade, even though the stupid eyes of the Dutch _babis_ are on him all the while. When I have seen my ancient grandmother, and given her geefts, I will go home, to the south, Macassar-way."

"Now, where, oh where, do I fit in this scheme?" was what Peter thought. "What have I that this maiden desires?"

"Ah, _busar satu_!" the maiden was saying, deftly and unaffectedly patting the sarong. "It is bully! And now----"

"And now----" intoned Peter calmly, for even as a life pays for a life, and an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, so does a gift pay for a gift.

"And now," went on the maid from Macassar, whose father had grown rich in the opium-trade under the very eyes of the Dutch, "tell me but one thing, my lord--is Hong Kong safe for such as I?"

"When one is young and virtuous," spake Peter in the drone of an ancient fortune-teller, "one keeps her eyes pinned on the front. One hears nothing; and one becomes as discreet of tongue as the little blue sphinx at Chow-Fen-Chu."

"Those are the words of Confucius, the wise one," retorted the little bell-like voice with a tinkling laugh. "I need no guide, then? I have heard that China is unsafe. That is why I asked."

"Small one," replied Peter, with a smile of gravity and with much candor in his blue eyes, "in China, such a one as you are as safe as a Javanese starling in a nest of hungry yellow snakes. You will travel by daylight, or not at all. You will go from Kowloon to your venerable grandmother by train. You will carry a knife, and you will use it without hesitation. Have you such a knife?"

The small head bowed vehemently.

"In Hong-Kong you will go aboard a sampan and be rowed Kowloon-way, from whence the train runs by the great river to Canton."

"That will be safe, that sampan?"

"I will make it safe, small one. For I will go with you as far as Kowloon, if that is what you wish."

"And does the brave one admire my sarong?" the small voice wavered.

"It shames my ugly body," said Peter. "Now run along to bed--_kalak_!" And he clapped his hands as the small figure bobbed out of sight, with her long, black pigtail flopping this way and that.