“Bring those men at once, dead or alive, you scoundrels,” he shouted stentoriously, “and in a hurry, too!”
“Aye, aye,” responded a hundred throats, and a number of men left the courtyard at once.
The camp must have been some distance away, for it was over half an hour and nearly candle-lighting time before the two men, each carried on a litter on the shoulders of six men, were brought in.
The first man was covered up in blankets, and pretended to be unconscious; but he proved to have no fever, had a slow pulse, and absolutely no wound but a scratch at the lower end of his right shoulder-blade, which might have been made by a finger-nail, or possibly by a pistol-ball grazing the skin.
The hypocrite Chang bent over me as I was examining, and asked in a voice of pretended sympathy:
“Is he badly hurt? Can he recover? And how long will he be ill?” to which I replied:
“Not badly hurt; he will recover; and I will guarantee he is all right day after to-morrow if you will send him at once to my railroad hospital at Fengtai.”
I said this, thinking that the British minister in Peking, Sir Claude MacDonald, might be glad to get hold of these men for proper punishment, and that if they were in the hospital at Fengtai they could easily be obtained; otherwise I would have ordered this man to be dismissed at once as shamming.
The second man also pretended to be much worse off than he really was, but he did in fact have a small bullet-wound in his shoulder, from which I extracted with forceps a fragment of blue cotton cloth, and then sent him also to the hospital, predicting his recovery within ten days.