The rest of the company had grouped themselves about us, laughing gleefully at the surprise which the old man had sprung on us. Of the eight Chinamen in the hut, six spoke English and had understood every word we had said.
We spent the afternoon there while those jungle merchants taught us the Chinese names of things we would be likely to need. At dusk they prepared a second feast, after which two of them shouldered our packs and led the way through the wilderness to a place on the railroad where the engine of the work-train would stop on its way south.
Freed of its burden of flat cars, the engine raced like a thing of life through the cool, silent night, turning around the curves so swiftly that it almost tipped sidewise. We sat high up, chatting with the Eurasian driver, who allowed the engine to rush madly on until the station lights of a large village flashed up out of the darkness.
At noon the next day we boarded a passenger train and rumbled across flooded rice-fields, stopping often at excited bamboo villages. Then towering pagodas rose slowly above the southern sky-line, the jungle died away, and at five o’clock the daily train of Siam pulled in at the Bangkok station. By that time we did not look like white men. Until we had shaved and washed in a barber’s shop we did not dare introduce ourselves as such to any innkeeper of the Siamese capital.
CHAPTER XXVI
ON THE WAY TO HONG-KONG
Spread out in the low, flat valley of the Menam, Bangkok was a dull city of rambling rows of cottages. Her poorly paved streets were crossed by many canals, on which low-roofed boats and floating houses set on bamboo rafts were rising and falling with the tide.
The people of the city were dull and careless. They had the black teeth, the bristling pompadour, and they wore no more clothing than their brothers of the trackless bush. There were many Chinamen and some Europeans.
We found that deck passage to Hong-Kong cost next to nothing, and four days after our arrival we went to buy tickets at the steamship offices. The next afternoon a “wild woman” paddled us lazily across the Menam in a raging downpour, and set us aboard a small steamer that was officered by five Germans and manned by a hundred Chinese seamen, stokers, and stewards. When the Germans and Chinese talked together they spoke English.
Three hours after we boarded the vessel she cast off her shore lines and slipped down over the sand-bar at the mouth of the river. Never before had she carried white men as deck passengers. The Chinese thought the deck belonged to men of their race, and that we had no business there. They glared at us with scowls and snarls when we came on board, and tried their best to get in our way and to bump against us while about their work. We laughed at their unfriendly acts, and, choosing a place back of the wheel-house, took our coats off and settled down for a long and tiresome voyage.
