[2] Present, gratuity.
"What!" roared the boy. "Pay him! Tell him to go to hell!"
McGaw watched the boy as he stamped up and down the deck running his hands through his hair and wondered if he had a touch of sun. The mandarin's messenger still remained in an attitude of expectancy in the bow of the sampan. Suddenly the midshipman saw his superior officer rush to the side of the Dirigo and throw a Mexican silver dollar at the Chinaman, who caught it with surprising dexterity.
"Tell him," shouted the boy to Yen, "to say to the erfu that he could not find us, that we had gone away before he could deliver his message!"
The fat Chinaman prostrated himself in the sampan.
"He say allight," remarked Yen.
"Do you believe what he said?" demanded the boy threateningly of McGaw.
"Sure," said the midshipman, "that's right enough! That old friend of Yen's was out here again about an hour ago, snooping around, drunk as a lord. He'd been loading up on samshu ever since he went ashore. He says that Wu was killed over a month ago, that his head is on a temple gate five hundred miles north of here, and that the smoke over there is caused by burning brush on the hillsides. The rebellion is all over until next year. It's a great note for us, isn't it?"
But the boy made no reply. He was staring straight through McGaw out across the lake. Suddenly he stepped close to the midshipman and muttered quietly:
"Say, old man, for the sake of old times, can you forget all that?"