"Wo-pu-ssu (I shall not die)," he used to rejoin defiantly. "I shall find a way—you see."
Then he would march off with his fists energetically clenched and his ugly features drawn-up in a frown, walking with long, unnatural strides like the foreigners walked; and the strangers would ask who was this boy who did not hesitate to express his opinions so rudely in contradiction to his seniors.
After a number of days something did happen. There was a terrible commotion, and the boy stood literally with his mouth open because certain foreigners—a race he thought above common human emotions—ran from house to house as if possessed and cried out words which seemed to him like the words of fear.
The news leaked out soon enough so that every one knew it. Twenty-four hours had been given the foreigners to leave—they were summarily ordered away, men, women and children irrespective of rank and occupation. Failing compliance they would be driven away by gunfire. That was the Imperial pleasure.
Wang the Ninth went blankly among his compatriots trying to find out whether it was flight or not. He heard it said that carts were being requisitioned by some foreigners for great sums of money; then almost immediately he heard the story denied. Some one had ruled that it would be more dangerous to flee than to stay. They must stay, it was said. He had the feeling that the mystery was beyond solution. It was evidently quite impossible to know what was going to happen. Even his master shook his head. Nobody knew anything worth knowing.
That night passed in confusion.
They were half-way through the next morning when everybody cried that one of the important foreigners had gone out and been summarily killed.
After that for several hours there was a great tide of weeping and running about, and the boy felt lost. Nobody paid the slightest attention to him: every one seemed dazed. In the afternoon, when things were quieter, the sharp crack of rifles sounded and for the first time in his life he heard the hard vicious flight of bullets. After some momentary fear, his natural audacity slowly returned, and he stole near the barricades trying to find out who was firing and at whom. Stray shots had hit two of the foreign soldiers at the barricades and also two of his fellow-countrymen, who sat nursing their hurts like men infinitely surprised.
He was sent for water for one of the wounded soldiers; and when he came back he was just in time to see a foreign doctor make a neat cut in the wounded man's arm, and to the sound of tremendous foreign curses pull out a thin slip of a bullet with a pair of forceps—a bullet which was passed from hand to hand and examined as closely as though it were a jewel.
This facility of curing a wound delighted him. He went round telling his compatriots that so long as they did not go through your head, these vaunted bullets were not so terrible after all, as the foreign doctors could pull them out at will.