“Well, it was not pleasant, my lad,” said the manager, smiling; “but you couldn’t help its being degrading, and you gave them the slip.”
“But you’ll send a report to my father and uncle, so that they can lay the matter before the Consul?”
“I will if you like; but if I do, it will be a very long business. It will be to maintain the English dignity, but only at the expense of a few poor wretches in a distant part of the country, who will be taken and bastinadoed—perhaps decapitated.”
“Oh! I don’t wish that,” cried Stan quickly.
“Whether you wish it or not it will be done, to quiet the foreign settlers and traders and to keep up our prestige. It may be right, only the mischief is that the right men will not be punished.”
“What! not the soldiers?”
“No,” said Blunt; “they’ll escape for certain. The mandarins will never catch them.”
“Then I shouldn’t like to feel that I had been the cause of the punishment of innocent people. But I do feel that such a crime as the murder of poor Wing ought not to go unpunished.”
“So do I,” said Blunt; “and it must not. But, as I say, we don’t know that he is dead yet.”
“But where is he?”