"I expect your chance is several times better than mine," laughed Rob, who for the moment was too light-hearted to give a serious thought to his own awkward predicament. "I would go quick enough if I could, but I haven't the money even to pay my fare to Hong-Kong. So it looks as if I'd have to stay here until I can earn the price of a ticket back to where I have just come from. Do you happen to know of any one who could give me a job?"
"I can't say at this moment," replied Mr. Bishop, regarding the lad keenly as he spoke; "but I may think of some one. Where are you staying?"
"Nowhere. I only came on this morning's boat, and my baggage still is on board."
"Then suppose you get it up here and stay with me for a day or two while you look around. I've a big house, with plenty of room, and shall be glad of your company. Besides, I expect you can help me a good deal with my Chinese studies."
"All right, sir," assented Rob, promptly accepting this proposition, "and I'll be back inside of an hour."
With this our lad hurried away, saying to himself as he went: "I believe I must be one of the luckiest fellows in the world, and only a little while ago I thought I was one of the most miserable. My biggest bit of luck, though, was having Jo come to live at Hatton and teach me Chinese, for that seems about the most valuable accomplishment a fellow can have out here. I do wonder what became of him."
Rob crossed the canal bridge, went out through the big gate, that promptly was opened at his approach, and turned down Heavenly Clouds Street with the assured air of one who had resided in Canton all his life. Then he received a shock, and at the same time proved himself to be one of the very newest of new arrivals in that crafty city of poverty-sharpened wits. On a bit of straw matting, spread above the granite flagging of the narrow roadway, lay a child three or four years old, apparently in the very grasp of death. Its eyes were closed, its pale features were distorted as though by a spasm; it was gasping for breath, and its hands were tightly clinched, while its poor little body was only partially hidden beneath a bit of ragged, blue cloth. Beside the dying child knelt a mother, bending over it and rocking her body to and fro in an agony of grief, while tears streamed from her eyes. She, too, was clad in rags, and evidently was in the last extremity of poverty, since she had not even a kennel in which to conceal her dying child from the curious gaze of the swarming street. No one stopped to speak with her or to offer her the slightest aid in this time of her sore distress; and as Rob, with swelling heart, gazed on this pitiful picture, he said to himself that all Chinese were brutes and unworthy the name of human beings.
"Can't something be done for them?" he asked of a passer-by, and speaking in Chinese; but the man only laughed and hurried on without answering. Then Rob spoke to the woman herself, but her grief was too great to permit her to take heed, and she only stroked the face of her dying child with gestures of despair. At this, feeling powerless to aid her by any other means, Rob drew a silver dollar from his pocket and gently laid it on the mat beside the little sufferer. Then he hurried away.
While he was within sight the woman did not alter her position nor offer to pick up his gift. Only when he had disappeared, and the stealthy hand of a street urchin was about to close over the coveted coin, did she snatch it from the mat, spring to her feet, deal the would-be thief a stinging box on the ear, pick up her opium-drugged child, and serenely walk away, well satisfied with the success of her carefully planned tableau. When Rob returned that way he wondered what had become of the dying child who had so excited his sympathies, and it was only on the following day, when he again saw them at the same place, going through the same performance, that he realized how he had been duped.
On that first morning he transferred his belongings from the steamer to the house of his newly made friend, who told him that, as there was nothing in particular for him to do just then, he was free to go where he pleased. So he strolled to the riverfront of the Shameen, where from one of the tree-shaded benches, placed at intervals along its length, he watched the wonderful life of the river, with its swarming junks and sampans. After a while, attracted by a huge white-and-yellow nondescript-appearing craft, moored in the stream at some distance above where he sat, he walked in that direction for a closer view. He had proceeded but a few steps when he was more than ever puzzled to note that above the object of his curiosity floated an American flag, while he also could see the grim muzzles of enormous guns protruding from various parts of its superstructure. It evidently was a ship of some kind, and also a man-of-war; but to Rob's eyes it was of even stranger appearance than the closely packed acres of Chinese craft surrounding it. He finally decided that it must be a wreck, resting on the bottom of the river, since its deck appeared to be but a few inches above the turbid waters, and he wondered why its crew, sauntering back and forth beneath the awnings, did not exhibit more concern.