"What is going on below? Are you all mad or drunk with the juice of poppies? Cannot I meditate in peace without being disturbed by the howlings of you swine? How dare you come up here without orders? Answer me, dog, and son of generations of dogs, before I cause you to be beaten with a hundred blows!"
The terrified soldier, who held a petty office, corresponding to that of corporal of the guard, recoiled from the presence of his angry superior, who, if he had chosen, could have him beaten even to death, and, kotowing until his forehead touched the stones, answered:
"Know, your honorable excellency, that the outer gate has been closed without knowledge of any in the guard-house, and beyond it many persons, mad with anger, are clamorous for admittance. It is a mystery; and before opening the gate I came up here for a look at the outsiders, to make certain that they are not enemies."
"Closed, pig? How can it be that the gate is closed without orders from me, the keeper of the gate? This thing must be examined into," cried the young officer, with every appearance of extreme anger. "Let it be opened without delay. But first come with me and look at these outside howlers. It may be, even as your stupidity suggests, that they are men from Chang-Chow, who have ever been unfriendly to this city because of its greater prosperity."
This was said to give the soldier an opportunity for seeing that no other person was in the room, which fact he would report to his comrades.
As they examined the furious crowd besieging the gate, Jo exclaimed, even more angrily than before:
"Those be no Chang-Chow men, but our friends and own people. They are the dancers, who, together with the good priests, pray constantly for rain, and who went out to the shrine of the holy rain-god but an hour ago. Ah, but you shall smartly suffer for closing a gate of their own city against them. Hasten and open it again if you would have the setting sun behold your worthless head still upon your wretched shoulders."
Thus saying, the young officer spurned the trembling soldier with his foot and followed him down the stairway. In another moment the great gate was opened to the torrent of frantic humanity that rushed in demanding to know what had become of the foreign devil whom they had seen enter only a few minutes before, and where the soldiers had hidden him. Also why they had closed the gate in the very faces of his pursuers.
"Give him up to us," shrieked the priests, "that we may kill him, for doubtless it is he who keeps away the blessed rain."
The denials of the guard that they even had seen any foreigner, or that they had closed the gate, were so little heeded by the clamorous throng, that it might have gone hard with them had not Jo secured a hearing by firing a shot from his revolver, a weapon that he alone of all those present possessed.