Going to see what was meant, the young Chinese found his friend holding the candle above his head and pointing to a small door, standing slightly ajar, in the back of the image. It was so perfectly fitted that, had it been closed, no trace of an opening could have been discovered.
Climbing to the place, they easily opened the door, and through the aperture thus disclosed crawled into the very body of the rain-god. They found themselves in a space large enough for them to stand up or to lie in at full length, but filled with a confused litter of garments, masks, banners, and other paraphernalia of the priestly trade.
"It's the biggest kind of a find," said Jo, evidently much excited over this discovery, "and it gives me an idea; but I must eat before explaining, so let us go to tiffin."
The cooked eel, which Rob still insisted was nothing more nor less than a snake, looked and smelled so good that the latter's desperate hunger finally persuaded him to taste a morsel. Then he took another, and a few minutes later, gazing thoughtfully at a small heap of well-cleaned bones, he asked Jo if he didn't think they might cook a few more eels while they were about it. An hour later he declared that he had eaten one of the best meals of his life, and was altogether too well content with their present situation to think of travelling any farther that night.
Jo readily agreed that they should spend a few hours where they were, as he wanted time to think out a plan of escape, and believed that for the present this temple was as safe a place as they were likely to find. So, while they removed all traces of their presence, Rob arranged the priestly vestments they had found inside the rain-god into a sort of a bed, and a little later, lying on this, each of the lads gave the other an account of his adventures since they had parted in far-away America. Rob's story we know, as we do that of Jo up to the time of his commitment to prison in New York, charged with being a Chinese laundry-worker who had illegally entered the United States.
"I was kept there two weeks," he now said, "and treated worse than a dog all the time. They would not allow me to write or telegraph to you or any of my friends, and finally carried me off at night in a prison-van, together with a dozen coolies gathered from different parts of the country, who hated me because I had cut off my queue. After that we travelled handcuffed together, two and two, in a crowded immigrant-car, to San Francisco, where we were locked up in a filthy shed until a steamer was ready to sail. On our journey to that point we got very little to eat, but what we had was fairly good. The food given us in the shed was bad, but what we got on the steamer, where we were put in the hold, without being allowed to go on deck during the whole voyage, was simply rotten.
"The ship was under contract to deliver us at Shanghai; but when she anchored off Woo-Sung and they began to transfer us into a launch that would take us to the city, fourteen miles farther up the river, we were in such a horrible condition that the other passengers objected to having us on board. So we were set ashore at Woo-Sung and told we might walk the rest of the way.
"I was so sick and weak that, after we had walked a few miles, I gave out and laid down by the road-side. There, I suppose, I should have frozen to death, for it was bitter cold, winter weather, if a farmer had not found me and taken me to his house. My father afterwards made him a rich man for it. He fed, clothed, and kept me until I could get word to some friends in Shanghai, after which, of course, I was all right.
"Finding that my father had been transferred to Pao-Ting-Fu—between here and Pekin, you know—I went there; and when he heard how I had been treated, he was so angry that he swore he'd do everything in his power to drive foreigners out of China. He did drive a good many from his own district, especially railroad people; but when the Great Swords began killing them, he drew the line and said that that was going too far. One day a Boxer army came along with a lot of missionaries, whom they proposed to burn to death in the city temple. My father told them they must give up their prisoners to him, and when they refused he ordered out his own soldiers, killed a lot of the Boxers, rescued the missionaries, and sent them under guard to the coast. For that he was recalled to Pekin, and Mandarin Ting Yuan was put in his place. Last week that man turned over fifteen missionary people, some of them women and little children, to be tortured and put to death by the Boxers of Pao-Ting-Fu."
"But what were you doing all this time?" asked Rob, his face paling at thought of these horrors.