Barbara groped and found the crop. Across the night she seemed to see an endless procession of stolid, sulphur-colored figures, linked with thin, rattling chains, filing into the humid, black mouth of a mine. Shuddering, she swung the stick with all her strength, and threw it from her down the steep, into the water that roared and tumbled far below.
CHAPTER XLIV
THE LAYING OF THE MINE
Doctor Bersonin lunched at the Tokyo Club.
For three days the rain had fallen steadily, in one of those seasons of torrential downpour which in Japan are generally confined to the typhoon season and which flood its low-lands, turn its creeks into raging rivers and play havoc with its bridges. For three days the sky had been a dull expanse of pearl-gray, and the city a waste of drenched green foliage and gleaming tile, whose roadways were lines of brown mud with a surface of thin glue, dotted with glistening umbrellas of oil-paper and bamboo. Under their trickling eaves the shop-fronts, dark and hollow and comfortless, had held the red glow of hibachi; teamsters had shown bristling tunics of rice-straw and loads covered with saffron tarpaulin; rick'sha had reeled past with rubber fronts tightly buttoned against the slanting spears of rain, and the foreign carriages that dragged by had borne coachmen swathed to the ears. This morning, however, the rain had ceased and wind had supervened.
The Club was cheerful, with a sprinkling of the younger diplomatic set, Japanese business men and journalists, all men of note. The up-stairs dining-room was full of talk as the expert arrived and chose a small table by himself.
While he waited, the boy brought him one of the English-printed newspapers, and he cast his eyes over the head-lines. He read:
SQUADRON'S SAILING ORDERS