In the waist stood four of the German officers, huddled together like frightened sheep.
“You bloody Dutchman!” cried the Australian, shaking his fist in the face of the first mate. “You’d hang back and see a man killed. If there was one Englishman on board we’d clean out that bunch.”
The Chinamen had retreated; but fearing that they would throw our bundles overboard, we armed ourselves with two stout clubs and again started aft.
“Keep avay!” shrieked the first mate, “You make riot and ve all get kilt!”
“It’d be no loss,” growled James, over his shoulder. We marched around the deck house, swinging our weapons, and rescued our “swag” without mishap. In our haste, however, we forgot our shoes and the Australian’s helmet. Once more we turned back towards the scene of conflict.
“Let dem alone,” pleaded the chief engineer, “vy you pick fight?”
Having no desire to flaunt our belligerency in the face of the crew, and fancying their anger had cooled by this time, we tossed aside our clubs and continued unarmed. Grouped abaft the deck house, the Chinamen allowed us to pass unmolested. We stooped to pick up our footwear.
“Kang kweitze!” screeched the chief steward, and before we could straighten up they were upon us. It was a more savage battle than the first. The remaining bamboo stools were wrecked at the first onslaught. We struggled forward and had all but freed ourselves again when James stumbled over a bollard and fell prone on the deck. A score of Celestials swarmed about his prostrate form; every man of them struck him at least a dozen blows with some weapon. Whole constellations of shooting stars danced before my eyes as I sprang to his assistance. A Chinaman bounded forward with a scream and struck at me with a long, thin knife. Instinctively I threw up my right hand, grasping the blade. It cut one of my fingers to the bone, split open the palm, and slashed my wrist. But the fellow let go of the weapon and, thus unexpectedly armed, we were not long in fighting our way back to the waist.
When we had washed our wounds in salt water and bound them up as best we could, we marched to the cabin to charge the captain with cowardice. He denied our assertion and, to prove his valor, armed himself with two revolvers and led the way aft. It was with considerable satisfaction that we watched a dozen of our assailants show wounds they had received in the encounter. The commander endeavored to make light of the affair, but assigned us to an unfurnished cabin in the deck house and left us to spend a feverish and painful night on the slats of the narrow bunks. In the morning there was not a spot the size of a man’s hand on either of our bodies that was not black and blue. The Australian, too, had suffered an injury to the spine, and all through the voyage he was confined to his comfortless couch, where he subsisted chiefly on black pills doled out by the skipper, not only because his appetite had failed him but because he lived in constant fear of being poisoned by the Chinese “boy” who served us.
Eight weary days the decrepit old tramp wheezed like an asthmatic crone along the indented coast of Cochin-China. On the morning following the anniversary of my departure from Detroit two small islands of mountainous formation rose from the sea on our port bow. Several junks, manned by evil-faced, unshaven Monguls, bobbed up out of the dawn and, hooking the rail of the Paklat with grappling-irons, towed beside us, shouting offers of assistance to the passengers possessed of baggage. More verdant islands appeared and when we slipped into the horseshoe harbor of Hong Kong it was still half shaded by the wooded amphitheater that incloses it.