If she had only let him finish! There had been something—some point—he was getting at. He hadn't meant to tire her or hurt her.... When the tall eunuch came for the little princess he angrily drove the fellow away. For Hui Fei was sleeping now, peacefully, like the warm little child in his arms.
An English gunboat was the first relief craft to arrive; in the cool dawn; a tiny craft, built for the river, with a white freeboard low as a monitor's and bridge structure forward of the thin high funnel. The small boat that came ashore made a number of trips, taking off the passengers and the surviving white officers of the Yen Hsin.
His excellency refused, with calm courtesy, to set foot on the English gunboat that was built for the river; he would wait for the junk that had been sent for.
Dawley Kane found his son, nodding, with the picturesquely-clad child in his arms. The boy, glancing at the sleeping Hui Fei whose head rested comfortably on the rolled-up waistcoat, gave the child now to the patiently waiting eunuch, then fairly dragged his father to the boat. With the Japanese, Kato, and oddly distant to the big mate and the suddenly exotic-appearing viceroy in his richly embroidered satins who had been after all only casually, for a few days, in their lives, they embarked.
They had nearly reached the gunboat when those on the bank heard young Kane's voice raised in hot protest. There was a moment of argument; then a splash. The boy could be seen then swimming back to shore. And Dawley Kane, turning his back, went on to the gunboat, stepped aboard, and disappeared. Rocky clambered, dripping, up the bank; came straight to Duane, a staring, exhausted youth, very white.
“I can't do it.” he panted. “They've just told me—Kato and the pater—about this terrible trouble of the viceroy's and—and Miss Hui Fei's.... The pater said it was time I—got clear of any new entanglement. I quit him. Oh, I suppose you'll think me a—damn fool, but”—at this point he nearly broke into tears—“but I love that girl, Mr. Doane! If I can't be of some use to her—now, in this awful trouble—I don't want to live. Will you—help me? And let me help?”.... And, all blind confidence, he offered his hand to the big mate; who took it.
The gunboat hoisted anchor and swung about, heading down-stream. Passing her, upward bound, came a large junk, with the rig of a trader from Szechuen, her single huge rectangular sail, brown-umber 'n tint and closely ribbed with battens of bamboo, flat against the one mast that towered clumsily amidships. The eight long sweeps, in the low waist and forward, moved rhythmically in time with the syncopated, wailing chant of nearly a hundred oarsmen. The tai-kung crouched, bamboo pole in hand, just within the prow.
The hull was of cypress, stained from stem to stern with yellow orpiment and rubbed to a polish with oil. The high after-deck structure, all of fifty feet in length, terminating in a projecting gallery-twenty feet or higher above the water, was carved everywhere in intricately decorative designs; as were, also, the roof over the tillerman's stand on the deck house and the gallery railing (just within which stood a row of flowering plants in yellow and green pots). The many small windows along the sides were glazed with opalescent squares of ground oyster shells and glue; those across the stern (under the gallery) with stained glass.
To no one aboard the gunboat or among the still waiting groups on the bank did the thought occur that this craft might be engaged in other than peaceable business. Her like were not an uncommon sight along the always crowded river. The passing attention she drew was merely that aroused by a richly decorative object moving beautifully (with a remarkably detailed reflection) through the flat water, that itself glowed under the red and gold of the early morning sky like a great sheet of burnished old copper. It was not observed that three white faces peered warily out of the shadow, behind as many opened windows; nor could it easily be seen that the figure in blue, sitting, knees drawn up, on the deck house just behind the laopan who mercilessly urged on the sweat-shining oarsmen, was none other than the redoubtable Tom Sung.