The ensign paid no further attention to him but pushed the nearest Chinaman toward the gangway.
"Get along, boys," he remarked, "your Uncle William is in a hurry." As the smaller of the two seemed averse to haste he gave him a slight forward impetus with his pipe-clayed boot. The two descended more rapidly and he followed. A sudden regret took possession of him as he thought of the possibility of his never seeing Smith again—of his dying of thirst, aground in a dried-up lake—or of being tortured to death in a cage in a Chinese prison.
"Good-by, Smithy," he called over his shoulder. But there was no answer.
The launch was bobbing at the foot of the steps, its screw churning the water into a boiling froth that reflected a million strange gleams against the warship's water line. The Chinamen hesitated.
"Get along, boys," he repeated, stepping into the stern sheets. "We've got a long way to go and we might as well begin—Newbegin."
The Chinamen huddled under the launch's canopy, the boy gave the word to go ahead, the bell rang sharply and the launch started on its long trip up to Shanghai.
Slowly the Ohio receded from him, somber, implacable, sphinxlike. On her bridge a man was wigwagging to the Oregon with an electric signal. The searchlights from the war vessels arose and wavered like huge antennæ feeling for something through the night, now and again paving a golden path from the launch to the ships. The illusion was that the vessels were moving away from the launch, not the launch from them. Out of the zone of the searchlights the water was black and lonesome. Just as soon as the ships got far enough away to appear stationary the launch seemed racing through the water at a hundred miles an hour. Other launches shrieked past bearing to their ships officers who had just come down by train to Woosung. Up the Whompoa River the ten-mile-distant lights of Shanghai cast a dim, nebulous glow against the midnight sky. Two hours later the little Dirigo seemed to loom out of the darkness and come rapidly toward them as the launch ran up to her gangway.
"Is that you, McGaw?" called the boy sharply. "Here are two Chinks, an interpreter and another one. Fix 'em up somewhere. We start up the Yang-tse as soon as you can get up steam. I want to make Nanking by day after to-morrow sunrise. Send ashore and get the pilot. Don't waste any time, either."
"All right, sir," answered the midshipman, "we can start in half an hour, sir."
The boy ran up the ladder, followed slowly by the Chinamen. At the cabin companionway he paused and looked at his watch. It was half after one o'clock.