"She's gone," repeated Captain Kneebone. "No boat for us."
But the compradore, dragging his bundle of sharp halberds, poked an inquisitive head out past the captain's, and peered on all sides through the smoke, with comical thoroughness. He dodged back, grinning and ducking amiably.
"Moh bettah look-see," he chuckled; "dat coolie come-back, he too muchee waitee, b'long one piecee foolo-man."
He was wrong. Whoever handled the Hakka boat was no fool, but by working upstream on the opposite shore, crossing above, and dropping down with the ebb, had craftily brought her along the shallow, so close beneath the river-wall, that not till now did even the little captain spy her. The high prow, the mast, now bare, and her round midships roof, bright golden-thatched with leaves of the edible bamboo, came moving quiet as some enchanted boat in a calm. The fugitives by the gate still thought themselves abandoned, when her beak, six feet in air, stole past them, and her lean boatmen, prodding the river-bed with their poles, stopped her as easily as a gondola. The yellow steersman grinned, straining at the pivot of his gigantic paddle.
"Good boy, lowdah!" called Kneebone. "Remember _you_ in my will, too!" And the grinning lowdah nodded, as though he understood.
They had now only to pitch their supplies through the smoke, down on the loose boards of her deck. Then--Rudolph and the captain kicking the bonfire off the stairs--the whole company hurried down and safely over her gunwale: first the two women, then the few huddling converts, the white men next, the compradore still hugging his pole-axes, and last of all, Heywood, still in strange apathy, with haggard face and downcast eyes. He stumbled aboard as though drunk, his rifle askew under one arm, and in the crook of the other, Flounce, the fox-terrier, dangling, nervous and wide awake.
He looked to neither right nor left, met nobody's eye. The rest of the company crowded into the house amidships, and flung themselves down wearily in the grateful dusk, where vivid paintings and mysteries of rude carving writhed on the fir bulkheads. But Heywood, with his dog and the captain and Rudolph, sat in the hot sun, staring down at the ramshackle deck, through the gaps in which rose all the stinks of the sweating hold.