“What the devil do you suppose their game is?” gasped the Australian. “Something foxy, or I’m a dingo. Never saw a pig-tail look a bob in the face before without grabbing for it.”
The dean of the shopkeepers, a shifty-eyed old fellow with a straggly grey cue, swung suddenly round upon us.
“Belly fine duck,” he grinned.
Our faces froze with astonishment.
“Dinner all light?” he went on, “Belly good man, me. No takee dollies for chow. Many Chinyman takee plenty. You fink allee same me. No damn fear. One time me live Flisco by white man allee same you, six year. Givee plenty dollies for joss stick. Me no takee for chow.”
The Celestials 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 “pidgin” English fluently and had understood our every word.
We spent the afternoon in acquiring a Chinese vocabulary for the days to come. Nor were these jungle merchants poor tutors. At dusk they prepared a second feast, after which two of them shouldered our packs and led the way through the wilderness to a point on the main line, where the locomotive of the work train was to halt on its way south. If we had not progressed many miles during the day, we had at least discovered an entirely new side to the Chinese character.
Freed of its burden of flat cars, the engine raced like a thing of life through the cool, silent night, taking the curves at breathless angles. We sat high up on the tender chatting with the Eurasian driver, who, having a clear right of way, left his throttle wide open until the station lights of Choung Kae flashed up out of the darkness. There was no hotel in the village; but the railway agent sent his coolies to arrange a first-class coach for our accommodation. The lamps lighted, the leather cushions dusted, a chettie set within reach, and our chamber was ready. A servant brought a bundle of Bangkok newspapers, and we sat late into the night, listening, for the first time in weeks, to the voice of the outside world.
At noon next day a passenger train left Choung Kae, and for hours we rumbled across inundated paddy fields, with frequent halts at excited bamboo villages. Then towering pagodas rose slowly above the southern horizon, the jungle died away, and at five o’clock the daily train of Siam pulled in at the Bangkok station. It is doubtful if Rice, meeting us face to face, would have recognized the men of whom he had taken leave in the streets of Rangoon just three weeks before. Until we had shaved and washed in a barber’s booth we had not the audacity to introduce ourselves as white men to an innkeeper of the Siamese capital.
Somewhat to our disappointment, Bangkok was in no sense the barbaric metropolis of heartless infanticides we had so often pictured to ourselves in fighting eastward through the jungle. Spread out in the low, flat basin of the Menam, there was something of monotony in her rambling rows of weather-beaten cottages. Her ill-paved streets were intersected by many canals, alive with shipping in the morning hours, but stagnant during the rest of the day with low-roofed boats yawning at their moorings. Pagodas and rambling temples and monasteries were everywhere, occupying a large proportion of the city’s area, yet unusual neither in architecture nor in Oriental ugliness. To the traveler who has seen the Far-East elsewhere, there was little novelty in the capital except her floating houses, set on bamboo rafts in the Menam and rising and falling with the tide.