"An' five years more, for attempted escape," he groaned, "an' two clane enlistments behind me, an' promotion a cinch in the next six months. Never a coort martial ag'in' me. It was all the —— samshu. Serves a white man right for foolin' with haythen liquor. An' they'll be pullin' me out of here in no time at all. Holy Mother! where kin I go?"
The disgraced soldier turned as a new dread smote him.
"An' the Boxer swine that kapes this poison-shop will be handin' me over as soon as he hears the news of the shindy down the Chien-men Road."
Panic fear caught hold of the corporal, body and soul, and he wrestled with it in the darkness. He knew not whither to turn. Hiding among the Chinese in the city was impossible, and to take to the open road meant capture at Tientsin or Taku if he made his way that far in a flight toward the seacoast. To go blindly into the country about Peking, unarmed and penniless as he was, knowing perhaps five words of Chinese, was to drag out the finish in slow starvation, or to be picked up by a foreign outpost, or to fall among hostile natives. He was as helpless as a castaway adrift on a raft in mid-ocean. The penalties of capture or surrender seemed worse than any sort of death, for Corporal Sweeney had been a good soldier, bred to a hardy outdoor life.
The disgrace tortured him, and either alternative of his situation was unthinkable. Yet after three hours of trembling in his trap, he would have welcomed the chance of flight into the open, beyond the walls of the nightmare city. The Chinese landlord had not returned, and it seemed likely that intruders had been warned away from the smoky room with the hole in the oiled paper of the side wall. The deserter had found a bottle of samshu, and tried to brace his nerves with a swallow of it, but the smell sickened him, and he flung it against the brick partition, in a passion of rage at the source of his cyclonic ruin. The heavy, yellow liquid guttered across the floor, and the stench of it drove the soldier into the courtyard, where the chatter of Chinese voices sent him quaking back into his little inferno.
He was not a coward, but he was alone in the darkness with such fears as wrested from him all weapons. Somewhere outside, a Chinese watchman, drifting along on his rounds, was beating a gong to frighten away evil-doers. The measured bong, bong, bong caused the fugitive to wish that sudden death might overtake the harmless old gentleman, for at each stroke it seemed as if tacks were being driven into his skull. Toward midnight Corporal Sweeney fell into a stupor of complete exhaustion that was no more than a caricature of sleep. A scratching on the paper door and a falsetto whisper awoke him, and he sprang to his feet, striking out in the gloom, to ram his fist through the fragile panel into something yielding which cried:
"O-w-w—a-i-i! Me, master; You Han. Somet'ing do-ing, all l-l-ight?"
The deserter extended a muscular arm, grasped a handful of wadded coat, and dragged the visitor in with one lightning sweep. Then, trying to choke his amazed voice into a whisper, he croaked:
"Oh, me cock-eyed darlin' lad! An' how did you dig me out? I niver felt like kissin' a Chink before. Now get me out o' this, or I'll break your back over me two knees. I'm down an' out this time. Are you goin' to give me up for the sake o' the rewarrd?"
The boy, whom the corporal had picked up, a starving outcast from a plundered village, on the march to Peking, tried to tell what he knew in painfully Pidgin English, shattered by his master's interruptions. He had learned that the corporal was a day overdue in camp, and had started out to find him early that morning. Then came the tragedy and the escape, the tidings of which were brought to the camp with the body of Private Smathers. You Han had heard the name "Sweeney" scattered through the excited talk of the company, until he pieced together a working impression of what had happened. He had ransacked canteens, tea-houses and gambling-dens from the camp to the Tatar city wall until he began to pick up the trail from groups at the street corners who had seen the "madman runaway soldier."