No longer, no more terrible night, have I ever spent; but at last it did end—the darkness lessened, the uncanny search-light was switched off, and daybreak gradually revealed the gruesome sights which had been but half seen and only partially conjectured before.
Fortunately both the doctors of the Strong Arm came up to relieve me an hour after daylight, and I quickly scrambled down the hill, slipping and sliding in the mud.
I met Helston on the way down, and his face lighted up with relief when he saw me, and I was able to give him a fairly cheerful account of the wounded. He had landed with a couple of hundred men and driven the mob of Chinamen out of what was left of the town, and was now on his way to Hopkins's bungalow, guided by Hi Ling, the head boy.
"Come along with us, Doc, old chap. I want you to see Hopkins before you go off to the ship, if it is not too late."
We were close to the European bungalows, and Hi Ling led us straight to the one Hopkins inhabited, going on ahead of us.
As we approached we saw that everything was in disorder. Furniture, clothes, books, and papers were strewn all over the verandah, and a dead Chinaman lay sprawling half in, half out of a window.
"Looted during the night," I thought, and saw that Helston also thought so, and neither of us expected to find the American alive.
Hi Ling met us on the verandah, wringing his hands and moaning. We pushed aside a bamboo curtain and followed him into a room where everything was in still greater confusion, a trestle-bed overturned, drawers ransacked and their contents scattered, and lying on the floor was Hopkins himself, with a dead Chinaman beside him. The one we had seen from outside had probably been killed as he tried to escape.
Both had bullet wounds, and had evidently been killed by the revolver Hopkins still held in his clenched hand.
He was quite dead, and I must confess that I felt much relieved, because nothing could have saved him, and also I did not want him to speak to Helston of Milly, as I feared he might have done, for Helston was of such a peculiar disposition, that I was very anxious that he should know nothing about the photograph or the will which Hopkins had made in her favour—nothing, at any rate, till I had got him safely home.