"I can't tell you just how crazy I was. I remember that I grabbed up a handful of shells for my revolver and ran up toward the Hai-Yu Gap where the natives said Red Knife and his gang had disappeared. I remember also that Hartley, the surgeon, and a Frenchman ran after me and tried to pull me back, and when I wouldn't come with them that they ran along beside me. But I guess I out-distanced them, for after a time I was running alone up the dry bed of a stream where the Hai-Yu Gap cut the hills. I meant to get the boy and bring him back, but I suppose I might as well have tried to follow a black tracker into a tropic jungle as to follow the trail of Red Knife through those Tung-sha hills.
"I don't know how far I went. When night came I was lost—scrambling in the dark over bare rocks, slipping into gulleys and fighting my way out again. I suppose I made a terrific clatter and that Red Knife's men heard me coming when I was a long way off. At any rate they got me when I was off my guard—the yellow men pounced on me from behind the rocks and, though I think I did for one or two of them with my gun, they knocked me over the head. When I came to I was in the dusky interior of a stone house, bound and utterly helpless."
Wolcott Norris got up abruptly from his chair and, walking over to the window, looked out into the twilight at the snow-covered Pocassett landscape. When he came back to the fireplace he said to the three listeners who had followed them with their eyes but had not stirred:
"Maybe you've read of the devilish ingenuity of some of these Chinese brigands—there are wild stories and some are true and some are not, but the torture that Red Knife put me to in that stone house up beyond the Hai-Yu Gap was worse than death—or so it seemed to me.
"He was a short, broad-shouldered wretch with a thin, hairy mustache that curled round the corners of his mouth. That mouth of his and his black, slant eyes were the most vivid expressions of cruelty that I have ever seen. When I first saw him I thought of Genghis Khan, that ancient conqueror who is said to have slaughtered five million persons while he ruled over China. Red Knife brought in Ho Sen and my little boy and he made Ho Sen, who was trembling like a leaf, interpret the things he wanted me to know.
"'Foreign devil,' he said, 'what is worth more than your life to you? Ai, I know. This child is worth to you more than your life, therefore will I take him away.' And then he uncovered the baby's back and showed me a livid mark on the little chap's shoulder. 'See,' he said, 'he belongs to Red Knife now; he wears Red Knife's mark. My women will be very good to this little son of the foreigner. We will bring him up in our band; he will be clever like the white man. Who knows, perhaps he will be as good a thief as Red Knife himself!'
"I tried to think of something that I could say or do that would move this wretch's heart, but it was of no use. Poor Ho Sen was frightened to death, and when I begged him to try to escape and bring help from the village I little thought that he could do anything.
"'Take the boy back to the village,' I said to Red Knife through the interpreter, 'and do with me as you will.'
"'Yes, I will do with you as I will,' was his answer. 'I think I will put you in a hole in the ground and perhaps I will give you a toad and a lizard to keep you company. Red Knife wants no one to be lonely.'
"Red Knife—I've always supposed—did intend to put me out of the way by some diabolical method of his own. And then the idea of holding me for ransom apparently occurred to him, for he kept me in the stone house back in the hills day after day. Two or three times when I saw Ho Sen I begged him to run away from the bandits and take the little boy with him and tell my friends in the village where we were, but Ho Sen only looked at me and trembled. I couldn't much blame him for being terrified.