"Fan-kwei!"
"Look at his eyes! How big! Round as the moon. See how they goggle and glare!"
"Yah! Ugly beast! His nose! Look at it! Like the beak of a hawk."
"And his hair! Ch'hoy! Like the fleece of a sheep."
"And his clothes! Ragged as a quail's tail."
"No doubt of it, he is a foreign devil, ugly pig."
"Why still alive? Kill him at once, say I. Foreign devils are dangerous to keep. One come, thousands follow. Kill at once; if we had done that with the Russians, no more trouble. He will bring ill-luck on the village. What luck have we had since the Russians came digging into the Hill of a Thousand Perfumes? Who can say how many demons they let loose?"
"Yah! Who has found ginseng since then, who? Nothing but ill-luck now. An Pow dead, strong as he was; Sun Soo drowned in the river; all our oxen carried off by Ah Lum and his Chunchuses. Hai! hai! And this foreign devil will make things worse. Why did they not chop off his head at once?"
To this conversation, carried on within a few feet of him, Jack listened in a somewhat apathetic spirit. He was utterly dejected, worn out, humiliated. He lay in a large wooden cage near the headman's house in the village of Tang-ho-kou in the Long White Mountains. It was a secluded spot, in a district supposed to be sacred to the emperor's ancestors, where it was sacrilege even for a Chinaman to tread. The inhabitants were an exclusive community, ruled by a guild, owning only nominal allegiance to the emperor, and essentially a self-governed republic. They were unmolested, for government is lax in Manchuria, and the Long White Mountains are far from the capital and difficult ground to police; theoretically the guildsmen went in danger of their heads, practically they were monarch of all they surveyed.
A group of the villagers was collected on this July evening about the cage, discussing the foreign prisoner, interrupting their conversation to snarl at him.