“EVEN AS THE KNIFE DESCENDED, MY SAVIOUR JAMMED HIS WEAPON SQUARELY INTO THE CHINAMAN’S EAR.”
The officer’s wife, strangely enough, had not a scratch on her. She was in a dead faint, but both she and the child were practically uninjured. The explanation of her escape seems to have been that the Chinaman’s wrist fell with full force on the baby, thus preventing the knife from doing any damage to either.
The poor boy, though conscious, was plainly mortally wounded. He made no complaint, and smiled faintly as we carried him back to a vacant berth in one of the Pullmans.
About daylight, at one of the longer stops, several of the passengers dragged the murderer’s horribly-battered body forward to the baggage-car. They did not carry him, but dragged him, and, as it was in the spring, the road-bed was very muddy. When the body reached the baggage-car the features were absolutely hidden in a combined coating of dried blood and slime.
Then, as we got under way again, a physician on the train, with myself and others, searched the remains. The dead man had on two pairs of trousers, and, sewn inside his shirt, fifteen hundred dollars in greenbacks. In his purse he had a first-class ticket from Pittsburg to San Francisco and, what was still more singular, a paid-up life insurance policy for five thousand dollars in favour of one Ah Say, of Evanston, Wyoming.
We rolled the body into a corner and looked over his few effects. Presently one of the men, who was sitting on a trunk facing us, gave a peculiar gasp and turned as white as blotting-paper. His eyes were fixed staringly on something behind our backs. We turned with one accord.
The supposedly dead Chinaman—a Chinaman with a body as full of holes as a sieve—was sitting up! I cannot convey in words the indescribably hideous effect of that face, caked as it was with gore and filth. Only a ghastly red crack of mouth was visible, grinning in demoniac vacancy, and two burning black slants which indicated his eyes.
The doctor was the only man who had his nerve in that excruciating moment.
“Well, John, how d’you feel now?” he said, speaking in a tone that was even jocular.