Wolcott Norris laughed.
"I remember that Ho Sen, my Chinese servant boy, used to say when the baby howled 'Nice stlong lung; he'll glow nice, big man! And by Jingo! How that little chap did grow! Those were days crowded with happiness and before we knew it we'd been in Tung-sha more than a year. The mine was beginning to require additional machinery and everything looked good for the future. We were so contented there in our bungalow that I suppose we never thought of anything happening to burst our bubble of happiness—at least I don't remember that any worries troubled our minds."
The mining engineer paused in his story and passed his hand across his brow. A minute went by, during which the hushing sound of the fire alone broke the stillness of the room. Teeny-bits, Neil Durant and Ted Norris sat without moving; their eyes were on the red and yellow fireplace flames, but what they saw was a bit of the old Chinese Empire, in-land on a tributary of the Yangtse—and a bungalow at Tung-sha. The mining engineer was silent so long that finally they looked up—and, seeing the expression on his face, looked quickly down again—as those turn away their faces who look by mistake too deeply into the intimate thoughts of another.
"Bad water and Red Knife wrecked Tung-sha," said Wolcott Norris abruptly. "The water was contaminated somehow—typhoid got into it. Our little colony was hard hit and when that second summer was over the youngster I told you about didn't have any mother—she was sleeping the long sleep out there at the foot of the Tung-sha hills."
The mining engineer's voice had grown thick—it was as if another person were speaking.
"I should have told you more at the start about Red Knife," he said. "He was a Chinese robber—the chief of a gang of hill-men who for years had levied tribute from those poor, ignorant people of Honan. His name was a living terror—I have never seen such abject fear on the faces of human beings as one day when a rumor passed among our mine workers that Red Knife was in the hills near by waiting to pounce down upon them. They reminded me of sheep huddling together to escape wolves.
"From the time when the company first started operations at Tung-sha we realized that this bandit was working against us—for the reason, of course, that he knew we would lessen his power. I questioned Ho Sen one day and learned that Red Knife had sent word around that if the 'foreign devils', as he called us, dug further into the hills man-eating dragons would come out and destroy the villages. We had to pay extra to get labor after that."
"Why did they call him Red Knife?" asked Neil Durant.
"Because that was his symbol—a red knife—and his followers were said to carry red-bladed daggers.
"Red Knife chose his time well. He came down on our little settlement at the height of the typhoid scourge. It was only a few days after Marion had been buried and I was up at the mine attending to some last arrangements so that I could leave. I had made up my mind to take Winslow—that's what we'd named the little boy—out to Shanghai, for Tung-sha was no place for a motherless youngster. In broad daylight I heard the natives wailing and yelling, and then the mine workers began to cry out that Red Knife had swooped down from the hills. The white men who were with me pulled out their guns and we ran down to the bungalows. We were too late, however; Red Knife had come and gone—and with him had gone Ho Sen and the boy. Three or four of the natives lay in the street with their throats cut and the rest of them were so frightened that at first I couldn't get them to tell me anything, but finally I made out that Red Knife's men had carried the baby away in a basket and that Ho Sen had gone with them, voluntarily or as a prisoner I did not know.