Part 23

Chatting amiably, the twain came to the wharf and climbed the gangway of the _Whang Ho_. That anxious first mate, Mr. Parkinson, pitiably afraid lest he lose his billet and be turned adrift because he had failed to prevent the desertion of the crew, brightened perceptibly at sight of Charley Tong Sin and concluded that this influential young man had been persuaded to mend the troubles.

“Come to my room, if ye please,” said Captain O’Shea to the smiling comprador, “and I will summon my chief engineer. He will tell you that the steamer is not fit to make three knots an hour, and then we will go below.”

The shipmaster beckoned Mr. Parkinson to follow. The trio were passing through the wide hall of the main cabin when Captain O’Shea halted. Swinging on his heel, he stood facing Charley Tong Sin, who started slightly, for the visage of Captain O’Shea was stern and lowering.

What followed was instantaneous. The shipmaster’s fist shot out and collided with the jaw of the comprador, who measured his length on the floor and appeared to be wrapped in slumber. Only the toes of his neat patent-leather shoes oscillated gently. The expression of his face was singularly peaceful. The oblique eyelids were closed.

The aghast Mr. Parkinson sputtered in great dismay:

“My God, sir, what have you done? We’ll all go to jail for this. This is Jordan, Margetson’s right-hand man.”

“I have given him a sleeping-powder,” said O’Shea. “Take him by the heels while I carry the other end of him and we will lock him in a spare state-room. Put a guard over him. If he squeals, hit him again and keep him quiet.”

The mate was about to renew his protests, but his voice died in his throat. Perceiving that he wavered miserably, Captain O’Shea spoke once more, and his accents were hard:

“You can make your choice, Mr. Parkinson. Ye sail with me and you play my game or you can go ashore to rot and starve on the beach, same as when I picked ye out of the gutter. I have given this dirty young Chinese blackguard a taste of what is coming to him. Will ye fall to or shall I kick you out of the ship?”

“I--I will take your orders, sir,” stammered the other.

“Then help me get this steamer to sea. We will wait for no more Chinese sailors. Muster all hands on the upper deck.”

They came piling up from the hold and the dining-room abaft the galley, where most of them had been at breakfast. The inanimate comprador was no longer visible.

“Will you sail with me at once or lose the chance of making the voyage?” demanded O’Shea. “Some of you will have to shovel coal and others wash dishes and do seamen’s duty on deck. But I will pay ye extra for it, and we will take this old box of a steamer to where we want to go.”

The response was hearty and unanimous. The adventurers could think of no worse fate than to be once more stranded in Shanghai. They were well fed, they had slept in clean beds again, and their employer was a man who could be trusted to deal with them fairly. With a spirited cheer they scattered to their various stations. The chief engineer spoke briefly, his gray whiskers standing out in the morning breeze:

“Nobody but a wild Irishman would have the nerve to take this painted coffin to sea with a gang of misbegotten greenhorns to man her. I have steam enough to give her steerage-way whenever you’re ready to cast off, Captain O’Shea.”

“Then let go, fore and aft,” roared the master. “Are ye pilot enough to take her down the river, Mr. Parkinson?”

“I could do it with both eyes shut, but I’m not so familiar with the coast to the north’ard.”

“I have a pilot for the part of the coast and the river we are bound for,” grimly returned O’Shea. “He is locked in a spare state-room just now. He will know that part of China very well, for ’tis me opinion that he has been there before.”

V

Over a mournful, muddy expanse of the China Sea wallowed a top-heavy river steamer whose engines raised protesting clamor like an assemblage of threshing-machines. The gods of the air and water were in a kindly mood or else she would have opened up and foundered ere now. In the spray-swept wheel-house stood Captain Michael O’Shea, swaying easily to the crazy roll and lurch of the _Whang Ho_ and scanning the low dim coast with a pair of glasses. Clinging to the window ledge beside him was a young man of a Chinese countenance whose raiment, the handiwork of a fashionable British tailor, was sadly rumpled and soiled. The whole aspect of the young man was rumpled, in fact, not to say excessively forlorn, and now and then he pressed his hand against a painful jaw. It was difficult to imagine that he had been an ornament of clubs, a pattern for the gilded youth, and the smartest comprador between Tientsin and Singapore.

The plight of Charley Tong Sin was made poignantly distressing by the fact that in the process of acquiring the vices of the Occident he had lost his grip on the essential virtues of the Orient. His native stoicism had been sapped and the fatalistic attitude of mind which meets death without so much as the flutter of an eyelid was eaten with dry-rot. In other words, the comprador was willing to pay any price to save his own skin, although his father before him would have suffered himself to be sliced to death by inches sooner than “lose face” in the presence of a foreigner.

Captain Michael O’Shea’s method of extracting information from this kidnapped passenger had been brutally simple and direct. Charley Tong Sin was informed that he could make a clean breast of it or be thrown overboard. And the shipmaster, when he was thoroughly in earnest, had a way of conveying the impression that he meant what he said. He believed that he knew his man. The comprador was strongly reluctant to have his head lopped off by the sword of a native executioner, which was very likely to happen if this terrible O’Shea should turn him over to the Chinese authorities. Given the promise of immunity in exchange for a confession, he could flee to Japan or the Straits Settlements and live handsomely in the society of other Chinese exiles with the funds that he had piled up during his brief and brilliant business career. Likewise there would be opportunities in shipping and commerce for a comprador of his uncommon ability.

“I would honestly enjoy killing you, Charley,” said Captain O’Shea as they stood together in the wheel-house of the _Whang Ho_. “You are a smart lad, but ye got too gay with me, and you overplayed your game when ye slipped under the counter of this steamer in a sampan in the dark of the night and got busy with the red paint. That sort of silly jugglery was the Chinese of it, I suppose. Now, I have tried to make it plain that your life is not worth a pinch of snuff to any one of us. There is not a man in the ship that wants to lay eyes on Shanghai ever again. They will be only too glad to quit the country if they have the price in their pockets, and I will give them the price. So ye must not hold to the notion that we are afraid of getting in trouble on your account.”

“I am worth more to you alive than if I am dead,” sullenly muttered Charley Tong Sin. “Is it not so? You think I will be handy as a pilot, as an interpreter? I have been doing a deuce of a lot of thinking. I am no fool, Captain O’Shea. I know pretty well when I am licked. I made a botch of it in Shanghai. You went blundering about like a buffalo, and I thought it was a cinch to get you out of the way.”

“’Twas the luck of the Irish that pulled me through,” said O’Shea. “Now we understand each other, Charley, me lad. I am staking all I have--me life and me money--to get to the bottom of this infernal secret society you have mixed yourself up with. ’Tis an instrument I am for the good of humanity. And if ye turn state’s evidence to enable me to make a clean, thorough job of it, I think I am justified in giving you a chance to hot-foot it out of China.”

“Let us call it a bargain, Captain O’Shea. As we used to say in New York, I am up against it good and plenty. To commit suicide, as many Chinese would do in a fix like this, is all tommy-rot. Charley Tong Sin could have no more gin cocktails--what?”

“You can begin the confession right away,” exclaimed the shipmaster.

“One thing at a time,” cheerfully replied the comprador. “I will take you to the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells and the village of Wang-Li-Fu. Then you will find many very interesting things to ask me to talk about.”

“And ye hope to give me the slip in the meantime,” and Captain O’Shea showed no ill-will. “Very well, Charley. One thing at a time. Now take these glasses and have a look at the coast. By my reckoning, we are far enough to the north’ard to begin to haul inshore.”

The _Whang Ho_ was laboring abeam of a monotonous expanse of marshy islands and ragged shoals made by the silt of river floods. The shifting channels were poorly charted, for trade sought the inland water-ways. The fact that the _Tai Yan_ steamer, with McDougal and Jim Eldridge on board, had somehow found a passage leading from the sea convinced Captain O’Shea that he could do likewise with a considerably smaller vessel. Charley Tong Sin had admitted that he knew the way in, and he was no more anxious to be drowned than the rest of the company.

“With good luck we can scrape over the sandbars on the afternoon tide,” said the comprador, “and anchor in deep water for the night. I cannot show you where to go in the dark. There are no lights.”

The _Whang Ho_ edged steadily nearer the coast. Her crew gazed ahead at the frothing breakers that tumbled over the far-extended shoals, and appeared unhappy. By a miracle their steamer was still under them after struggling through rough winds and high seas, and now they were to be wrecked, so all signs indicated, in a God-forsaken region of sand and swamp and mud. However, there was no whimpering. Captain O’Shea, their overlord, had a trick of knocking a man down and then listening to his complaints. And he was as ready with a word of commendation as he was with his disciplinary fists.

“Mr. Kittridge, if we hit bottom, put it to her and jam her over,” he remarked to the chief engineer. “A chum of mine by the name of Johnny Kent that sailed with me and held your berth used to clamp his safety-valves when he had urgent need of steam. Did ye ever try it?”

“God forbid!” fervently ejaculated Mr. Kittridge; “but in this crazy tub a man will do anything. If you find yourself flyin’ to glory with a section of a boiler pokin’ in the small of your back, don’t lay it against me, sir.”

“I like the way ye talk, Mr. Kittridge. Stand by your engines, if ye please, for we will be in the white water before long.”

The _Whang Ho_ sheered to one side and shouldered past the outermost shoals. O’Shea took the wheel, and Charley Tong Sin, cool and quick-witted, told him how to follow the turbid, twisting channel that wound its course between the sea and the wide mouth of the estuary. More than once the steamer scraped the oozy bottom, hung and shivered while the breakers pounded her, and then stubbornly forged ahead, timbers groaning, boilers hissing, propeller kicking up clouds of mud astern. It was evident that the channel had shoaled in places since any other steamer had made the passage, and it was not at all certain that the _Whang Ho_ could stand the strain of forcing her way to sea again.

“I have not been here since two years ago,” said the comprador. “It is worse than I expected, you bet! Ai oh, a man that sails with you dies a dozen deaths, Captain O’Shea.”

“I find it more comfortable than living in the best hotel in Shanghai,” very pointedly returned the shipmaster as he climbed the spokes of the big wooden wheel with hands and feet and wrenched the _Whang Ho_ clear of a hungry sand-spit. By now she was fairly in the midst of the marshy islands that extended from the watery main-land. The violence of the surf was broken and the tide moved in broad, sluggish currents. Mr. Parkinson, who was swinging the sounding lead, shouted that the channel had deepened to five fathoms. The steamer had survived the passage.

Two miles farther inland she let go anchor in a wide lagoon. The afternoon had waned. A cloudy twilight was closing down. On every hand stretched a flat, unbroken region of swamp and creeks and rivers. No villages were visible nor groves of trees against the sky-line to mark the situation of a temple. A few small fishing-boats with ragged sails fled at sight of the foreign steamer. The comprador waved his hand to starboard and exclaimed:

“Yonder it is, the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells, as you call it in English. Wait till the tide goes down, and you will find out pretty quick why the Chinese give it that funny name.”

“’Tis a filthy-looking country,” quoth Captain O’Shea. “It looks like one great big sewer, with the yellow water and the sludge and the slime on the banks.”

“It was all very well drained one time, long ago,” explained Charley Tong Sin. “Then there were many people and towns. The Tai Pings destroyed the canals and played the dickens with everything. And nothing has been repaired, so the people don’t live here any more.”

“And where is this place called Wang-Li-Fu?” demanded O’Shea.

“Six miles up that stinking river. You think you will see the Painted Joss to-morrow, Captain?”

“The Stinking River and the Painted Joss! You are loosening up, Charley. I am near the end of me journey when you say things like that. I have heard of them before.”

“Two other foreign men--only two--have seen the Painted Joss, and it was unfortunate for them.” The comprador said this softly and with an evil grin. He had overstepped the mark. Captain O’Shea gripped him by the neck and shook him savagely as he thundered in his ear:

“Any more of that, and I will forget the bargain we made. One of those men was a friend of mine, and by rights I ought to drill ye with a bullet as a favor to him.”

Between chattering teeth Charley Tong Sin, suddenly abject, begged for his life. Presently he moved restlessly from one deck to another, but always a man followed and kept watch of him, as Captain O’Shea had ordered. The ship’s company, most of them off duty and wearied with the stress and hardships of the voyage, gathered under an awning stretched between the deck-houses and talked in low tones. This melancholy, empty landscape had a quality curiously depressing. With the falling tide the swamps and the muddy banks were laid bare and the air became foul and heavy with the smell of decayed vegetation, of ooze, of dead fish. The ebb and flow of salt-water failed to cleanse and sweeten these sluggish streams and stagnant lagoons and abandoned canals.

The men who had followed Captain O’Shea to this place were no longer so many vagabonds and failures struggling for survival. They had been welded together, in a way. They were an organization with something like _esprit de corps_ and could be depended on to act as a unit. Such a feeling as this brings to life dead self-respect and shattered confidence. They knew not at all what the morrow might bring forth, but every one of them was anxious to play the man, to stand the test, to redeem himself in his own sight, to justify Captain O’Shea’s faith in him.

It was not a night to invite sleep. The adventurers felt the immense loneliness of this loathsome anchorage. It was unlike the populous China which they had hitherto known. One might believe, with the natives, that ghosts and demons had power to curse and blast a region in which some violation of the _fung-shui_, or sacred rites of wind and water, had angered the supernatural influences. The breeze died to a dead calm. The lifeless air reeked with the stenches from the mouth of the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells.

It was drawing toward midnight when Mr. Kittridge came on deck and said to Captain O’Shea, who was sitting with a group of his men:

“I shall have to start the pumps, sir. The vessel is leakin’ much worse than when I first reported it.”

“Um-m, I was hoping we could lay her on a beach after we have finished our business up the river and calk her plates,” replied the master of the _Whang Ho_. “Is she making water faster than you can handle it, Mr. Kittridge?”

“She acts to me as if a plate dropped clean out of her a few minutes ago, sir. The pumps may help, but I have a notion that the whole rotten, blankety river is runnin’ into her.”

Captain O’Shea jumped below and was promptly convinced that the gloomy diagnosis of the chief engineer had a large basis of fact. The water was fairly rushing into the holds and gurgling over the ballast. Likely enough, the battering passage in from sea had sheared and wrenched away enough rusty rivets to weaken the junction of two or more plates, and they had been unable any longer to withstand the pressure. It really made no difference whether or not this theory was the correct one. The fact was that the venerable _Whang Ho_ had suddenly decided to lay her bones in the mud with six fathoms of water above her keel. Mr. Kittridge pensively caressed his gray whiskers and remarked with a sigh:

“I mentioned the pumps from force of habit. It’s really ridiculous to stay below any longer, Captain. We gave the bloody old tub more than she could stand, and she’s peacefully chucked it up. She’s sinkin’ very quiet and decent, I’ll say that for her.”

“’Tis time we said good-by to her,” quoth O’Shea. “Draw your fires, if you can, Mr. Kittridge, and I will get the boats ready.”

“I do seem to find trouble wherever I go,” sadly murmured the chief engineer.

The men on deck took the news with no great show of excitement. This was the kind of voyage which one could not reasonably expect to be commonplace. To have to escape from a sinking steamer was an episode, not a disaster. In few words, Captain O’Shea assured them that he had no intention of letting this uncomfortable little happening interfere with the business for which he had employed them. The insurance underwriters would be out of pocket, but who cared a rap for them, anyhow? Thereupon he issued orders, swiftly, intelligently, with masterful vehemence. The two boats which appeared most serviceable were swung outboard and held ready to launch. They would hold a dozen men each without crowding. Water-kegs were filled, the galley and store-room ransacked for tins of meat and biscuit, bags of potatoes and rice. The fire-arms and cutlasses were served out and the cases of ammunition divided between the two boats. Meanwhile the _Whang Ho_ continued to sink with a certain dignity and decorum. One could find nothing dramatic in this shipwreck. Every one moved with haste, but there was no outcry.

Only one mischance marred the exodus from the _Whang Ho_. All hands were absorbed, and quite naturally, in delaying their departure as little as possible. Delay meant something worse than wet feet. In fact, the main deck was almost level with the water when the boats were ready to shove clear. For once the _Whang Ho_ had moved rapidly, although in a lamentable direction. With so much to do in so short a time, it was not extraordinary that the vigilant espionage which surrounded Charley Tong Sin should be relaxed, not to say forgotten, for a moment. Even Captain O’Shea neglected to keep an eye on him, the business of abandoning ship on a dark night at excessively short notice being calculated to tax the resources of the most capable commander.

The comprador took advantage of these distractions to erase himself from the scene. The boats were held against the side of the steamer, while the captain took tally of the men in them, scrambling from one boat to the other with a globe lantern swinging in his fist. Charley Tong Sin was indubitably missing. O’Shea leaped on board the moribund _Whang Ho_, which was now sobbing and gurgling tremendously, and made a flying search of the cabins and state-rooms. It was obvious that this elusive young Chinese had not vanished below decks, where by now nothing but a fish could exist. And unless Captain Michael O’Shea wished to join the fishes, it was time for him to go.

Chagrined and anxious, he returned to his boat, and the men frantically plied oars. A moment or two later the _Whang Ho_ went under with very little fuss, meeting her end with the calm of a Chinese philosopher. The boats rocked in the waves that rolled away from the place where she had been, and the rays of the lanterns revealed many large and greasy bubbles.

Captain O’Shea wasted no time in sentimental regrets. The _Whang Ho_ was a dead issue. What vitally concerned him was the whereabouts of that valuable passenger, Charley Tong Sin. It was absurd to suppose that he had fallen overboard and given up the ghost. A rascal of his kidney had as many lives as a cat. It was much more plausible to surmise that he had unostentatiously laid hold of a life-belt, slipped over the stern, and made for the nearest shore. The boats moved to and fro, looking for him, but the darkness, misty and opaque, made it hopeless to discover the head of a swimmer who by this time might have left the water and concealed himself in the marsh.

“I misdoubt that me policy was sound,” said Captain O’Shea to Mr. Kittridge. “Maybe I ought to have shot him, anyhow.”

“It would ha’ been a good job,” grunted the chief engineer. “And now he’ll streak it for this village of Wang-Li-Fu and give an alarm.”

“Precisely that. But unless he can pick up a sampan or a fishing-boat he will make slow headway flounderin’ through the swamps and swimming the creeks. ’Tis up to us to beat him to it.”

Mr. Parkinson, who was in command of the other boat, was ordered to steer alongside for consultation. It was promptly agreed that the party should first find the mouth of the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells and then move up-stream without delay. It would be slow and blundering navigation, but if three or four miles could be traversed before daylight they might tie up to the bank and reconnoitre within striking distance of their goal.

“I do not know what kind of a mess we will hop into,” O’Shea told them before the boats separated. “We may have to fight our way, thanks to that slippery divil of a comprador, and I am not asking ye to go anywhere that I will not go meself. Some of you are not trained to use weapons, but if ye will cut loose and blaze away and not think too much about your own skins, we can make it uncomfortable for a slather of Chinese. There is plenty of ammunition, so don’t scrimp yourselves.”

The boats slid slowly into the entrance of the wide, sluggish stream. The lanterns were extinguished. The only sound was the cadenced thump of the thole-pins. If any of the men felt the prickly chill of cowardice, they kept it to themselves. Now and then the keels furrowed the mud, and when the boats stranded hard and fast, the crews waded overboard and shoved them ahead. Thus the little flotilla progressed until dawn flushed the eastern sky and the vapors, streaming upward from the marshes, curled and drifted like filmy clouds. Higher ground and the green, checkered squares of tilled fields were discernible a short distance beyond.

The boats turned into the mouth of a tiny creek where the tall rushes curtained them from observation. This was a favorable halting place, and a cold breakfast was hastily eaten. O’Shea had a poor opinion of fighting on an empty stomach. He addressed himself with marked deference to a very neatly dressed man with iron-gray hair who had said little during the voyage. His face was haggard and his eyes were tired with weariness of living.

“You have seen service, sir, and ye have led drilled men,” said O’Shea. “The cards are dealt, but from now on you can play them better than I. I will be obliged to ye for advice.”

The cashiered officer looked grateful. This kind of recognition had power to move him. With a diffident manner, as if his professional opinion had long since ceased to interest any one, he replied: