“See what a pretty plight you have got me into!” he cried. “When I came out to the gate before daylight to see if there was anything the gateman should not see, what did I find but the head of a man, and the blood that had flowed from him when he lost it! Now the police——”
“Do not distress yourself, sir,” replied the mutton-seller. “I will take care of the head, and when your k’an-men-ti speaks to me about the blood, as he is sure to do, I will tell him a newly killed sheep was left there by mistake. As to the gang starting any inquiries about their lost companion, that is the last thing they would dare or wish to do.”
All went as the ex-thief had outlined it, but that afternoon, as he was drumming on his chopping-block with a cleaver in the hope of attracting customers for the last morsels of mutton, whom should he see across the way but the same band of ruffians, minus, of course, one of those who had gathered the day before. Their heads were together again, but this time their furtive glances seemed to be turned not so much toward the rich man’s gate as upon the mutton-seller.
“Aha!” thought the latter, for he was inordinately clever in reading the gestures and glances of his former brethren-in-arms, “they suspect me of thwarting their plans and have decided to kill me.”
Therefore that night, when it was time for him to stretch out on his k’ang, he placed upon it, instead, a sheepskin that he had blown full of air and covered it over with some old clothes. Then he hid himself in the darkness outside.
It was exactly as he had suspected. Hardly had he begun to long for a cigarette when several forms slunk past him and entered his hovel. There came the dull sounds of as many blows as each thrust his knife into the sheepskin, followed by an escape of air resembling the pouring forth of blood; then the assassins disappeared again into the night.
Next day, after the briskness of trade had been succeeded by the apathy of the first Chinese meal-hour—for no profession which works by night can be expected to get up early—the former thief saw the same group huddled together across the way, staring at him as at a ghost. At length they straggled over to him, with a contrite and respectful, not to say admiring, air, and a spokesman addressed him with the highest honorifics of which such unschooled fellows are capable.
“Oh, Great Teacher,” he said, “we recognize in you, our revered Elder Brother, a very clever man, a man much more clever than ourselves. Will you not, therefore, become our leader, for with your cleverness and our agility how could we fail in any undertaking?”
“Your agility!” sneered the mutton-seller, meanwhile insultingly continuing his work. “Where have you picked up that false impression? I don’t believe you know the first rudiments of your profession, that you can even climb through the open window of a foreign devil and escape with his watch and wallet without being heard. I, forsooth, become the leader of a gang of clumsy, untrained louts who cannot so much as move a brick with their Adam’s apple! Away with you!”
Lanchow has been called the meeting-place of central Asia. This seemed to us something of an exaggeration, for to be worthy of such a title surely a city must have something more to show than sporadic examples of Oriental tribes and customs all but lost in a great sea of Chinese. But, for one thing, they told us, this was not the season of great markets, to which even princes of Tibet were attracted, and which brought samples of almost everything in the human line that the elder brother among continents has to offer. As it was, I ran across Tibetans, Mongols, Buriats, Kirghiz, and several other individuals who plainly belonged to none of these divisions, merely in strolling the streets. Then there were of course Russian refugees, and Cossacks, and single chance visitors from far-off countries not often represented, such as we Americans, for instance. Two or three Russian officers of the old régime were in the employ of the Tuchun, who had fished them from the stream that had been spasmodically flowing down through Kansu for the past four years, and who strutted the soft streets of Lanchow in all the glory of their pre-war uniforms and their disdainful, rather childlike demeanor. Our host and his fellow-missionaries, the active little Belgian who had grown more than gray in superintending the salt monopoly in two provinces, the densely bearded Catholic priest of similar origin, the over-conscientious, English-speaking postal commissioner from Canton, the Tuchun himself, and all the higher officials were constantly being appealed to in behalf of poverty-stricken aristocrats or of pitiful cases of suffering among mere ordinary human beings who had drifted down from the northwest and hoped to better their lot by pushing on to Peking or Shanghai. Just what impression such cases made on the Tuchun, who probably distinguished almost as little between different kinds of Caucasians as do the rank and file of Chinese, the handful of foreign residents were never quite sure; but they did know that he often gave money to Russian refugees—though their real benefactor was the Belgian salt official—and that the provincial Government furnished transportation to the next province for those incapable of making their own way. In fact, almost the only important duty of the “foreign office,” who had discoursed to me more or less in my own tongue on the unworthiness of Lanchow from its wall, was to adjust matters between muleteers and cartmen who did not feel that the Government should force them to carry penniless foreign devils—though of course they did not openly speak of them as such—for the mere pittance it offered.