On the index finger of the same hand was a massive gold ring.
Beside him lay a woman, who was tending the opium, even as I had seen Ba do a few hours earlier. She was dressed in a long stole-like garment of bright green.
Neither of the pair moved or looked towards us, and for a few seconds their indifference to our presence seemed complete and contemptuous. When he had finished the pipe he had been smoking, he sat up and nodded to Tho, who saluted him in the vernacular, saying as he did so:
"Linh-binh, you must surrender and come with us. Fools, but not grave men, resist the inevitable."
There was a tremor in his voice, and a gleam in the little sergeant's eye that said only too plainly how gladly he would have slain the rebel then and there.
I noticed a glitter on the floor near the bed, bent down and picked up a Spencer carbine and a belt full of cartridges. Attached to it was a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, and a holster containing a revolver of an American pattern.
The linh-binh slid off the couch and stood before us.
"Cannot I die now?" he said to Tho.
"No! no! we are to take you alive. Such are the orders which must be obeyed." Then to me: "Camarade, you who are as strong as an ox, will you hold his arms behind his back one little moment?"