“Am I to be turned into a Guy Fawkes?” muttered Stan angrily, as he gave himself a wrench in his seat to try and loosen his bandages.
But the result was vile. The captain of the party uttered a furious growl and made-believe to draw his sword, while a couple of his men seized the prisoner, holding him down fast, and a third dropped upon his knees and proceeded to tighten the thongs with such savage violence that the pain turned the lad faint, making him hang back quite lax, with the great drops of perspiration gathering on his forehead.
It was while everything seemed to be sailing round him that he became conscious of a peculiar, shaking motion which sharpened the pain he suffered. But the sickening sensation passed off, and he became fully conscious, to his great disgust, that he was being made the principal figure—carried shoulder-high as he was—in a triumphal procession on its way, so far as he could judge, back towards the great gate, which he could dimly see towering up in the distance.
They were right out in the country, with rice-fields and plantations in all directions, so that the inhabitants were scarce; but the people of the farm closed up as near as his captors would allow, and as they tramped slowly along, Stan from his elevated, swaying perch could see men at a distance throwing down the tools with which they were working, and trotting along with their tails bobbing between their shoulders, some to overtake, others to meet, and all to join in the procession.
“Why, they treat it as if it were some show—the wretches!” said Stan to himself. “Ugh! How I should like to give it to some of them! Grinning at me! Yes, actually grinning at me! Why, I believe they look upon me as a newly caught foreign devil, and they’re following to see me executed, or—Oh, surely they won’t do that!”
A sudden thought had flashed across his brain—an echo or reflection of something he had read or seen in connection with some poor wretch being kept as a captive by the Chinese and exhibited in a great bamboo cage.
The first effect of the thought was to send a shiver through him, chilling him to the bone; the following minute a sensation of heat made him flush to the temples, and he ground his teeth.
“Yes,” he said to himself, “they’d better! No, they daren’t. They’re pig-headed enough, but they must know that I’m an Englishman—well, an English boy, then,” he added correctively. “Oh, they daren’t! I’m only my father’s son—plain Stanley Lynn—but as soon as they knew at headquarters they’d send a gunboat to demand me; and—of course—yes, it’s a fine thing to be a British subject, for even if I am only a boy, our English Minister wouldn’t have a hair of my head injured—if he could help it.”
Stan thought this addition to his musings in a very different spirit to that which had preceded it. One minute he was proud and elated at the idea that he was an Englishman, with a general touch-me-if-you-dare sort of sensation making his eyes flash and sparkle and his cheeks glow; the next he was fully awake to the fact that he was a tightly bound prisoner, having a most abominable ride to some cage, alone and helpless among an inimical race of ignorant people who were delighted to see the predicament he was in—so much alone that, failing Wing, not one would raise a hand in his behalf. He was quite right about Consul and Minister and the stupendous machinery that would be set in motion to rescue his insignificant self, but there was the setting it in motion. All depended upon Wing.
“But where is Wing?” he said half-aloud, and he wrenched his head round to look back along the procession, half-expecting to see the poor fellow aloft in another chair, a prisoner, bound as well.