“Tip me off when the next one tries it,” said James.
Out of a corner of an eye I watched a soldier steal up on my companion and reach for his depleted “swag.”
“Now!” I shouted.
The Australian whirled and caught the trooper’s musket in both hands. The fellow let go of it with a scream, and the whole following band, sergeant, soldiers, villagers, and bold, bad man turned tail and fled.
Miles beyond we met two lone soldiers perambulating northward, and, knowing that they were sure to stop at the post of our recent adversaries, we forced the musket upon them and plodded on clear of conscience.
Once more we were benighted in the jungle and again the ground was soggy and the trees alive with monkeys. On the following day, for all our sleepiness and blistered feet, we tramped a full thirty miles and spent that night in an odoriferous bamboo hut, much against the owner’s will—and our own.
Forty-eight hours after our escape from the soldiers we reached Pakhampo, an important village numbering several Europeans among its inhabitants. With one of these we took dinner. His house floated on a bamboo raft in a tributary of the Menam, his servants were “wild men” of his own training, and his wife a native. Unfeminine as is the female of Siam, with her black teeth and her bristling pompadour, half the white residents of the kingdom, many of them men of education and personality, are thus mated.
A German syndicate has undertaken the construction of the first railway of Siam. We struck out along the top of the unfinished grade in the early afternoon, and, no longer hampered by entangling undergrowth, set such a pace as we had not before in weeks. Long after dark we reached the residence of a German superintendent of construction, who gave us leave to sleep in an adjoining hut, in which were stored several tons of dynamite. An hour’s tramp next morning brought us to “rail head” and the work train. Hundreds of Chinese coolies, in mud-bespattered trousers and leaf hats three feet in diameter, swarmed upon the flat cars as they were unloaded. With them we jolted away through the sun-scorched jungle.
Ten miles south the train took a siding and stopped before a stone quarry around which had sprung up a helter-skelter Chinese village. A deluge drove us into a shop where samshoo, food, and coolie clothing were sold, and we whiled away a gloomy morning in discussing the characters of the proprietors, whose chief pastime, when they were not quarreling over their cards, was to toss back and forth about the room a dozen boxes of dynamite. At noon they set out on these same boxes a generous dinner of spitted pork, jerked duck, and rice wine; and invited us to join them. We did so, being hungry, yet anticipating a sad depletion of our funds when the quarter-hour of Gargantua came. All through the meal the Chinamen were most attentive. When it was ended they rolled us cigarettes in wooden wrappers, such as they smoked incessantly even while eating.
“Suppose they’ll want the whole bloody fortune now,” sighed James, as I drew out money to pay them. To our unbounded surprise, however, they refused to accept a copper.