“Well, master, we may as well sleep now. We can talk matters over when we go to the town in the morning. A couple of great baskets of vegetables will be ready for us in the morning, and we shall have plenty of time to talk over our plans as we go along.”
CHAPTER IV
A RESCUE
An hour after dawn they started. Early as it was the vegetables had been cut and packed in three large baskets, and after paying for them they put the straps of the baskets across their foreheads and started. The loads were fairly heavy and although Ah Lo carried his without difficulty, Rex found the strap press very heavily on his forehead.
“I was thinking it over in the night, master,” Ah Lo said, when they had gone a short distance.
“Donʼt call me master, Ah Lo; you know that we agreed that you should always call me Shen Yo.”
“I will try to do so. Well, I have been thinking it over, and I consider that if we succeed in getting the ladies away, we should at first go north. The search will be made for us chiefly on the roads to Tientsin and Pekin. The distance is about the same to both towns. They will scarcely suspect that we have gone north, and if we travel all night, hide in a rice–field during the day, and then again travel all night, we should be beyond the reach of searchers, and could then travel round to Pekin, which would, I think, be safer than Tientsin, where the Boxers will always be in numbers. Of course we must have disguises for the ladies. Their best plan would be to dress as boys. Chinese women do not travel about, and their doing so would at once give rise to suspicion. We must, of course, get some stain to give them the proper native colour. When we have turned our faces towards Pekin we must state that you and I are going to enlist in the Chinese army, that we have friends in Pekin, and that the boys are going with us to get any work they can. We can account for our guns by saying that we have obtained them from some of the Boxers who had brought them from Tientsin.”
“Yes, we must stick to them if we can,” Rex agreed. “As they are magazine rifles we ought to be a match for any twenty of these villagers or a dozen Boxers; and at any rate, if the worst came to the worst, we could be killed fighting and not be put to death by slow torture.