“Can he speak English?”
“After a fashion; and half-a-dozen other languages too. Tell him he must come back with you. He’ll say he can’t leave home, but you say the one word ‘Dollar’ and he’ll come at once.”
“I understand, uncle,” was the reply; and the boy started off, feeling as if all the previous night’s experience had been a dream, and as if he were still only half-awake.
He was glad to escape from the dwelling over the offices, with their black, dismantled look, where all was charred wood, wet with the little deluge of water that had been poured thereon.
The lad sniffed two or three times involuntarily as he made his way out to pass through a crowd of staring idlers of all sorts and sizes, dressed in blue cotton jackets and trousers, save those whose costume half-way down was a pigtail only, the other half to the ground consisting of a pair of baggy, much-washed cotton trousers, tight at the ankles, and tucked into clumsy shoes with thick white soles. They were all staring vacantly at the damaged office and shattered windows; while the broken ladder, propped up in two pieces, was placed against the front of the house, and formed the greatest attraction of all, till Stan appeared, when about two hundred and fifty pairs of beady, piggish eyes were turned upon him, and there was a quiver of pigtails of all lengths, from a few inches to those of the finest growth, which tapped against the owners’ heels as they walked.
“I suppose I shall get to know one face from another in time,” thought Stan as the crowd made way for him, “but at present they all seem to be alike. My word! I do feel glad to get out. The place smelt like a school bonfire put out for fear of risk, or as the kitchen did when the cook upset part of the soup into the fire and made the rest taste just the same as this smells.—Oh, do get out of the way, some of you!” he said aloud impatiently. “Can’t you see that I’m in a hurry?”
“You wantee Sin?” said a high-pitched voice close behind; and Stan stopped short to face a particularly meek-looking, full-moon-countenanced Chinaman in the cleanest of cotton clothes, and without a wrinkle of trouble in his placid face.
“Wantee you? Yes,” said Stan angrily, for wakefulness, over-exertion, and hunger combined had put his nerves in a state of compound irritation. The sight of the man, too, brought up ideas of breakfast, as well as bitter annoyance against him for his desertion of them in their time of peril. “Why did you run away last night?”
“Lun away? Sin no lun away. Dlop down flat and clawl away so lobbee man not see.”
“Well, it’s all the same,” cried Stan. “Oh, you were a coward to desert us like that!”