You Han struggled to his knees and with his teeth loosed the knotted cinch, and the pack fell from the mule. The boy writhed over on the corporal and tried to raise the dead weight, tried to talk to him in a wordless and appealing whimper. The deserter strove to rise, and failed until he dully comprehended that the boy sought to make him mount the mule, or at least to hitch him in tow with the lead-rope. Then the soldier awoke, and fighting off the death that had almost mastered him, lurched to one knee and pushed You Han toward the mule that was standing over them. His voice thick and rasping as if his tongue were of sandpaper, the deserter succeeded in saying:
"Get aboard that mule. No Chinese village in mine. Better man than me—you an' mule both better men. You won't? —— —— you, take that!"
The deserter swung his fist against the jaw of the struggling boy, and the blow went home with the last flicker of the old-time fighting strength of Corporal Sweeney. You Han dropped limp, as if shot. Then the fugitive from army justice braced himself, tried, and failed to lift the light body in his arms. Three times he tried and failed, and then, as the mule swerved, he fell against it and dropped the lad across its back, like a bundle of quilts. The cinch, trailing in the sand, tripped the man, and he slipped it over You Han and pulled it tight before he fell back in the tossing sand. The mule stumbled a step or two with its burden, found that it was free and in a moment tottered beyond the vision of the deserter.
Not more than a hundred yards away a camel-trail lay encamped against the storm, and to the Mongolian drivers, huddled in furs close to their beasts, came a little dun mule half dragging an unconscious Chinese youth, whom they took for dead as they wonderingly cut him loose from his lashing.
Daylight and the tail of the sand-storm had come before he was able to speak, and the camels were jostling into the line of march. The swarthy drivers scoffed at the story told by the raving stranger, until the bell-camel shied at something nearly buried in the sand. You Han fought the greedy northerners off until he had disclosed a figure in army blue and a clean-cut Irish face whose expression was vastly peaceful.
The last silver coin was gone from the knotted sash of You Han after he had persuaded the camel-men to carry the body to the village where Corporal Sweeney had expected to find a refuge from fear.
THE LAST PILOT SCHOONER
Young James Arbuthnot Wilson slipped into the Standard building with an uneasy air as if he were vaguely on the defensive. Six months of work in the "City Department" had not rid him of the feeling of a cat in a strange garret. The veterans of the staff were rather pleased that this should be the attitude common among young reporters. It showed that the office machine was geared to high tension when every man, short of five years' service, was thankful to find his "job" had not slid from under him between two days.