The police officials were quite ready to release the teacher and the other man upon our statements, but they would not allow the cook to go. His hands were kept tightly bound and he was chained to a post by the neck. The soldier who arrested him was his sole accuser, but of course, others would appear to uphold him in his charge if it were necessary.
The cook was as innocent as any one of the missionaries, but it required several hours of work and threats of complaint to the government at Foochow to prevent the man from being summarily executed.
We were not able to get any mail from Foochow during the rebellion because the constant stream of Northern soldiers on their way up the river had paralyzed the entire country to such an extent that all the river men had fled.
The soldiers were firing for target practice upon every boat they saw on the river and dozens of men had been killed and then robbed. The Northern commander told us frankly that this could not be prevented, and when we announced that we were going to start with all the missionaries down the river on the following day, he was very much disturbed. He insisted that we have American flags displayed on our boats to prevent being fired upon by the soldiers.
Although it had taken eight days to work our way laboriously through the rapids and up the river from Foochow to Yen-ping, we covered the same distance down the river in twenty-four hours and had breakfast with Mr. Kellogg at his house the morning after we left Yen-ping. In two days our equipment was repacked and ready for the trip to Futsing to hunt the blue tiger.
CHAPTER VI
HUNTING THE "GREAT INVISIBLE"
For many years before Mr. Caldwell went to Yen-ping he had been stationed at the city of Futsing, about thirty miles from Foochow. Much of his work consisted of itinerant trips during which he visited the various mission stations under his charge. He almost invariably went on foot from place to place and carried with him a butterfly net and a rifle, so that to so keen a naturalist each day's walk was full of interest.
The country was infested with man-eating tigers, and very often the villagers implored him to rid their neighborhood of some one of the yellow raiders which had been killing their children, pigs, or cattle. During ten years he had killed seven tigers in the Futsing region. He often said that his gun had been just as effective in carrying Christianity to the natives as had his evangelistic work. Although Mr. Caldwell has been especially fortunate and has killed his tigers without ever really hunting them, nevertheless it is a most uncertain sport as we were destined to learn. The tiger is the "Great Invisible"—he is everywhere and nowhere, here today and gone tomorrow. A sportsman in China may get his shot the first day out or he may hunt for weeks without ever seeing a tiger even though they are all about him; and it is this very uncertainty that makes the game all the more fascinating.
The part of Fukien Province about Futsing includes mountains of considerable height, many of which are planted with rice and support a surprising number of Chinese who are grouped in closely connected villages. While the cultivated valleys afford no cover for tiger and the mountain slopes themselves are usually more or less denuded of forest, yet the deep and narrow ravines, choked with sword grass and thorny bramble, offer an impenetrable retreat in which an animal can sleep during the day without fear of being disturbed. It is possible for a man to make his way through these lairs only by means of the paths and tunnels which have been opened by the tigers themselves.