At the first rays of dawn the forward deck would be again astir. Sails would be hoisted, ropes hauled aboard and coiled; and the shining yellow craft would resume her journey down-stream, with carven and brightly painted eyes peering fixedly out at the bow, with carefully tended flowers perfuming the air about the after gallery, a thing of rich and lovely color even on the rich and lovely river; slipping by busy ports, each with its vast tangle of small shipping and its innumerable families of beggars in slipper-boats or tubs awaiting miserably the steamers and their strangely prodigal white passengers. T'ai-ping itself, of bloody memory, lay still ahead; and farther yet Nanking the glorious, and Chin-kiang, and the great estuary. Slowly the huge craft would drift and sail and tie, moving patiently on toward the Shanghai of the ever-prospering white merchants, the Shanghai that somewhat vaingloriously had dubbed itself “the Paris of the East.” And no one of the thousands, here and there, that idly watched the golden junk as it moved, not without a degree of magnificence, down the tireless current, was to know that a Manchu viceroy, a prince hunted to the death by his own blood, a statesman known to the courts of great new lands, was in hiding within those timbers of polished cypress. Nor would they know that a princess, his daughter yet strangely of the new order, voyaged with him clad in the simple costume of a young Chinese woman. Nor would they dream of certain inexplicable whites. Nor would they have cared; for the voyage of the yellow junk was but a tiny incident in the crowded endless drama of the river; to the millions of struggling, breeding, dying souls along the banks and on the water, merely living was and would be burden enough. So China merely lives—dreaming a little but hoping hardly at all—with every eye on the furrow or the till; lives, and dies, and—lives again and on.
Late in the third afternoon, Rocky Kane, sitting, head forlornly in hands, in his narrow room, heard a light step—heard it with every sensitive nerve-tip—and, springing up, softly drew his curtain. But the quick eagerness faded from his eyes; for it was Dixie Carmichael.
Her thin lips curved in the faintest of smiles as she moved along the corridor toward her own curtained door. But then, as she passed and glanced back, her skirt, in swinging about, caught on a nail; caught firmly; and as she stooped to release it, a string of pearls swung down, broke, and rolled, a score of little opalescent spheres, along the deck, a few of them nearly to Rocky's feet. He stooped—without a thought at first—picked them up and turned them over in his fingers; then, stepping forward to return them, observed with an odd thrill of somewhat unpleasant excitement, that the girl had gone an ashen color and was staring at him with something the look of a wild and hostile animal. She turned then; glanced with furtive eyes up and down the corridor; and swiftly gathering up the remaining pearls clutched them tightly in one hand, extending the other and saying, in a quick half-whisper: “Give me those.”
He hesitated, confused, unequal to the quick clear thinking he felt, even then, was demanded of him.
“What are you doing with them?” he asked.
“Not so loud! Come here!” She was indicating her own doorway; even drawing the curtain; while her head moved just perceptibly toward the room immediately beyond her own where Miss Hui Fei, he knew, would be resting at this time.
“Where did you get them?” he asked, huskily, doggedly.
There was a long pause. Again her subtle gaze swept the corridor. “You'd better step in here,” said she, very quiet. “I've something to say to you.”
Sensing, still confusedly, that he ought to see the thing through, struggling to think, he yielded to her stronger will.
She followed him into the room and let the curtain fall. “Give me those pearls,” she commanded again.