A few hundred yards farther on a second snake crossed the road going so rapidly and viciously that it was almost impossible to follow with the eyes.
The boy opened his mouth but closed it without speaking. Two snakes—what did two snakes mean? It was something unlucky he had once heard; but he never thought that it might simply come from the undergrowth being disturbed by hidden feet. He was trying to think of the explanation—he knew there was an explanation—when the warning was made clear. A half-a-dozen men, with hideous painted masks over their faces, leaped out of the growing grain and fired from their hips. Crack, crack, crack went the shots. Wang the Ninth, stricken with alarm, threw himself instinctively on the ground, and wriggled into the kaoliang amidst the cries and groans of the others who never left the road.
He was alone once more—in the growing grain—perhaps twenty miles from his destination.
CHAPTER XXV
He spent a horrible night. Fear gained him completely, and he sobbed to himself for many hours as he wandered in the blackness of the fields.
He did not know whether his companions had been killed or whether they had been merely robbed and left on the roadside; but their despairing cries sounded in his ears unendingly, and he seemed to hear the vicious whistle of the bullets and to feel their wounds. A great compassion for the old wool-dealer who had been kind to him wrung his heart so acutely that several times he cried aloud. He sat down only to start up again—expecting to see phantom shapes, tormented with the fear that the wool-dealers' distressed spirits would for ever haunt him. Not until day was dawning did he care to lie down and even then he knew no sleep.
He tried to calculate how many days had passed since he had left the capital—was it six, seven or eight? And he was still wrestling with the problem, still attempting to thrust himself through obstacles which he did not understand. Sometimes he wondered why he had attempted this task. It was too big for a boy; yet he had been told that that was just the reason why he might succeed. He wondered why he did not give it up: he was not bound to go on. No one could possibly know what he did. Now he remembered how the inn-servant, when he was paid for a certain service, merely went and sat down in a lonely spot. Then, when he thought that thought anger gained him. His doggedness and his loyalty were aroused. He was not a mean fellow like that inn-servant. He would not turn back or surrender.
He must have dozed during these hours of dawn; for he awoke to find himself shivering under a fine rain which dripped through the grain and covered his face with dew. Rousing himself, he sat up and began munching some flour-cakes he still had with him. Now he made a vow that that very day he would push through and encounter his destiny cost what it might. Tightening his belt he started off.
As he scrambled through the fields he became gradually aware of a low thunder on the horizon. The sound puzzled him for the rain had stopped and the sun had come out from behind the clouds and it was fair weather and very hot. And yet as he walked this thunder increased—not slowly but very rapidly. At length he paused to listen.