The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
THE SHAM-POO
"WELL, all seems to be serene outside," Mark whispered. "Beasts and snakes in the corners or not, it's time we found out what this place is like."
They each moved cautiously to a wall and began feeling the slimy stone. They came quietly toward one another, working carefully all over the wall-surface. Mark's hand passed unexpectedly over a moist little lizard, and he jumped back. The creature clicked and hissed, and scurried off up a crack.
"That's your cobra," Mark said to Alan. "Glory, he did give me a turn, though!"
The tour of the room was completed, and the boys stood together in the middle of it.
"There's absolutely nothing but the door, and that's bolted," Alan said.
"And if we try anything on it, we'll wake up our heathen friends," Mark added. "Hop on my shoulders, will you, and see what the ceiling's like."
Alan scrambled up and stood precariously on his brother's shoulders, Mark's arms twined around the other's legs. He stretched his hands out.
"It's wood—beams and stuff—rottenish," he stated.
"Rotten enough to give anywhere?" Mark asked.
"I don't know. Go over toward the corner; it's apt to be punk where water's run in, down the joinings. Easy now, I'm no acrobat!"
"Easy yourself," Mark whispered; "you're no bit of thistledown."
"Wait a minute!" Alan muttered. "Stand still. There's a hole I can get my hand into."
"For heaven's sake don't go hauling anything that'll make a big smash," Mark cautioned.
"I'm not. It's rotten as can be. I'm easing off little chunks of it with my hands. Here, you take 'em; they'll make a noise if I drop
Mark reached up, and Alan put into his hand crumbling slivers of rotten wood.
A little at a time the hole grew larger.
"There's a whole board I can wiggle loose, if I keep at it," Alan explained. "Can you hang on any longer! By jingo! it goes right out-of-doors."
Indeed, a star looked strangely in at the ragged opening from a small space of distant sky.
Mark rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand.
"Skip down for a minute," he said, "before I'm completely finished."
Alan descended, and they both stood leaning against the wall, looking up at the hole that was not yet large enough to help them.
"It all depends on whether or not I can get that board away," Alan said. "I don't know how far it keeps on being rotten."
"Have another go at it." Mark commanded. "I'm ready, if you are. Up!"
He stood swaying to his balance, and Alan caught again at the crumbling beams. He tugged at the edges of the hole, and something gave all at once with a muffled, crunching noise. Alan lurched wildly and snatched at the other side of the hole. The opening yawned wide, filled with stars. Alan pulled himself up, kicking desperately, flung a leg over the wall-top and sat astride a stout beam, looking out over soundless dim roofs lit only by vague starlight.
"Quick!" he whispered, reaching down his hand to Mark.
His brother caught it and scaled the wall, and both slid cautiously down the treacherous roof and softly dropped to the ground below. The rambling wings of the ruined house stretched around them. They stumbled over fallen slabs of marble and slipped on the mossy edge of unseen, empty lotus-pools. Now following the wall, now creeping out into the shadow, they won at last to the gate by which they had entered the mansion. In the great hall the boat-coolies lay stretched in uncouth postures, sleeping heavily beside the last embers of their fire. The opium-lamp that had drugged their senses till dawn smoked faintly. Farther on, from a doorway, another faint glow crept out.
Mark and Alan slipped past the coolies and flattened themselves against the wall outside this door. Mark, with infinite caution, peered around the stone doorpost. With his side toward them, Chun Lon sat bending above a small lamp. His long knife lay beside him, and there was ranged at his feet a glimmering group of golden bars and jade cups. A ruby shone like fire in the palm of his yellow hand. The treasure box stood open before him.
With one silent leap Mark hurled himself upon Chun Lon, a knee firmly planted on his chest, a hand pressed crushingly over the Chinaman's opened mouth. Alan was beside him now, the knife in his hand, clasped till his knuckles grew white. Chun Lon's eyes never left the gleaming blade that hung above him.
They gagged him with Alan's handkerchief and Mark's necktie, and bound him hand and foot with his own gay, tasseled sash. They wrenched the ruby from his closed hand, and hurriedly packed into its box the fortune of the Ingrams—all with a swift, tense precision. Then Mark quickly blew out the lamp and closed the moldering door. It fastened with a great wooden pin, and Alan drew this into place.
"To the boat!" Mark whispered, once clear of the hall. "And look sharp, in case they've posted a guard."
But there was no sound, no movement, as they stumbled on through weed-grovm streets, in the shadow of silent houses, over carven stone bridges that spanned only a trickle of slimy water, and out at last through the city-gate to the reeds of the river-bank. There they stopped, breathless, to look back at the ghost city, black beneath the stars.
"Will you ever forget the look in his eyes?" Alan breathed.
"Not for a while," Mark said. "The sooner we get out of China, the better."
That, however, was quite another story—getting out of China. Time enough for that when they had escaped this sinister city. But there lay the boat, still and untenanted, pulled up into the sedge. The boys got the precious box safely on board, and then, leaping into the ooze, pulled and pushed and struggled till the boat swung out, slithering through muddy reeds, and floated clear. They scrambled aboard, and with mighty thrusts poled her out into the rippled water and turned her into the stream. For her size she was very light, with her bamboo deckhouse; she drifted buoyantly, nosing along beside the dark banks.
"We can't see how this sail proposition works now," Mark said. "We'll get it up, if we can, with the first wink of daylight. If we keep poling and yulowing, we'll get on fairly fast."
So pole and yulow they did, till their weary arms could move no longer, and a flat sun rose through the mist across rice-paddies. They let her drift then, and Mark steered while Alan routed out a great bag of rice and the boat-brazier.
"I don't exactly relish boiling it in river-water," he said, "but seeing that we'll have to live on this stuff for dear knows how long, we might just as well begin to get used to it."
The rice was edible and welcome, despite an entire absence of salt and the presence of a curious muddy taste. They ate sitting cross-legged on deck, Mark with his arm hooked over the steering-oar and an eye for the freaks of the winding stream. The wind was coming now, right astern, and the boys got up the sail, which they thought a weirdly contrived affair. So, sailing and yawing and yulowing, the strange craft flitted off down the river-reaches—what river her captain knew not, but he prayed that it might join the Whangpoo, for near the mouth of the Whangpoo lay Shanghai.
But Mark knew little of the devious ways of Chinese streams. This one had no affiliation whatever with the Whangpoo. It was still winding leisurely toward the Sien Kang. For two foreigners with no map, no compass, total ignorance of the Chinese language, and a strong desire for speed and secrecy to try to reach Shanghai in a native boat from somewhere near Saoshing was certainly utmost folly. Even without a sight of the map, Mark recognized this to be so, but he saw no other solution of their problem. They had no money—nothing but a box of treasure and a few "cash" which they had found in the boat; their own money had been taken from them during that first night. If they could find a European settlement they could get help, Mark knew well, but all the towns and villages they passed presented a discouraging water-front of native houses perched on stilts above sticky mud-flats, where pigs and pariah dogs roamed dejectedly. Beyond usually rose the grey-white shape of the pagoda, and perhaps some ancient mansions among fir-groves, but no trace of Western civilization. There might or might not be some English official, some American missionary, yet how could the boys be sure of finding him among the babbling, uncomprehending crowd?
No, it was out of the question, so they sailed on. When the wind fell, Mark and Alan each took their trick at the sweep and sculled their boat erratically onward. Many other craft passed; sometimes the Chinese stared at the boys with a shrewd, curious gaze.
"Though we must look pretty much like some sort of coolies by this time," Alan commented.
Their appearance, in truth, was rather wild. They were extremely dirty, their hair unbrushed and their faces sun-browned. Mark wore a blue linen coat which he had found on board, and looked like some strange outcast from the frontiers of civilization. Their first night they passed in some discomfort. When darkness made navigation at first difficult and then impossible, they moored their vessel, which Mark had christened the Sham-Poo in a desperate spirit of merriment. They tied her up to the desolate bank of what seemed uninhabited country, and took turns at keeping a lookout, with Chun Lon's knife in reach. Mark's watch had stopped during some of the excitement, and though he had set it by the sun as accurately as possible, he mistrusted it for the purpose of telling actual time. However, it registered hours and minutes, and by it the boys timed their "watches" with shipboard precision.
Fear of pursuit by Chun Lon had died. Even if his coolies could have roused before daylight and set him free, there was no other boat at hand for the chase. In the crowded maze of waterways that netted the land it was impossible for him to know which one the boys had chosen to navigate. His natural supposition, too, would be that that they would try to retrace the route to Nangpoo, instead of turning boldly in an unknown direction. So the boys presently ceased their anxious survey of each passing boat, their startled scrutiny of every Chinese face that might be Chun Lon's. This was new adventure now, adventure exciting, perilous, and uncertain enough without the added apprehension of pursuit.
It was not so bad, there in the boat, Mark reflected. If you looked at in the light of an exploring expedition, or of roughing it on the water, it was a pretty good sort of adventure, in fact. The lamp being out, it was impossible to see the strange, many-legged things which crept and crawled and clambered in the boat. On the other hand, there were the same stars to see that hung over Resthaven, good familiar lamps by which to steer a ship. Then he remembered that there were no stars at this hour in Resthaven, and that Jane, in all likelihood, was walking out to Bluff Point before luncheon. What would he have thought if he could have known that these stars of the Eastern Hemisphere hung above Jane, too!
By the time that Alan went on watch and Mark lay down for the dubious comfort of sleep on the hard floor, a late moon had climbed above the dark, waving fingers of the reeds. Alan watched it swim upward between the stars, faintly lighting the flat bank and the stream on which there sometimes passed the mysterious shape of a silently gliding junk.