Part 25 (2/2)

”I was following beside him, but I saw nothing to justify his words.

”Why do you think the plates are buried here?' I said.

”'Look at the air bubbles comin' up, Governor,' he answered.”

Walker stopped, then he added:

”It's a thing which I did not know until that moment, but it's the truth. If hard-packed earth is dug up and repacked air gets into it, and if one pours water on the place air bubbles will come up.”

He did not go on, and I flung the big query of his story at him.

”And you found the plates there?”

”Yes,” he replied, ”in the false bottom of an old steamer trunk.”

”And the hobo got the money?”

”Certainly,” he answered. ”I put it into his hand, and let him go with it, as I promised.”

Again he was silent, and I turned toward him in astonishment.

”Then,” I said, ”why did you begin this story by saying the hobo faked you? I don't see the fake; he found the plates and he was ent.i.tled to the reward.”

Walker put his hand into his pocket, took out a leather case, selected a paper from among its contents and handed it to me. ”I didn't see the fake either,” he said, ”until I got this letter.”

I unfolded the letter carefully. It was neatly written in a hand like copper plate and dated from Buenos Aires:

_Dear Colonel Walker_: When I discovered that you were planting an agent on every s.h.i.+p I had to abandon the plates and try for the reward. Thank you for the five thousand; it covered expenses. Very sincerely yours,

D. MULEHAUS.

THE BLOOD OF THE DRAGON

BY THOMAS GRANT SPRINGER

From _Live Stories_

Kan Wong, the sampan boatman, sat in the bow of his tiny craft, looking with dream-misted eyes upon the oily, yellow flood of the Yangtze River.

Far across on the opposite sh.o.r.e, blurred by the mist that the alchemy of the setting sun trans.m.u.ted from miasmic vapour to a veil of gold, rose the purple-shadowed, stone-tumbled ruins of Hang Gow, ruins that had been a proud, walled city in the days before the Tai-ping Rebellion.

Viewing its slowly dimming powers as they sank into the fading gold of the mist that the coming night thickened and darkened as it wiped out the light with a damp hand, Kan Wong dreamed over the stories that his father's father--now revered dust somewhere off toward the hills that dimly met the melting sky line--had told him of that ruined city, wherein he, Kan Wong, had not Fate made men mad, would now be ruling a lordly household, even wearing the peac.o.c.k feather and embroidered jacket that were his by right of the Dragon's blood, that blood now hidden under the sun-browned skin of a river coolie. Kan Wong stuffed fine-cut into his bra.s.s-bowled pipe and struck a spark from his tinder box. Through his wide nostrils twin streamers of smoke writhed out, twisting fantastically together and mixing slowly with the rising river mist. His pipe became a wand of dreams summoning the genii of glorious memory. The blood of the Dragon in his veins quickened from the lethargy to which drudgery had cooled it, and raced hotly as he thought of the battle past of his forefathers. Off Somewhere along the river's winding length, where it crawled slowly to the sea, lay the great coast cities.

The lazy ripples, light-tipped, beckoned with luring fingers. There was naught to stay him. His sampan was his home and movable, therefore the morrow would see him turning its bow downstream to seek that strange city where he had heard, dwelt many Foreign Devils who now and then scattered wealth with a prodigal hand.

In that pale hour when the mist, not yet dissipated by the rising sun, lay in a cold, silver veil upon the night-chilled water, he pushed out from the sh.o.r.e and pointed the sampan's prow downstream. Days it took him to reach salt water. He loitered for light cargoes at village edges, or picked up the price of his daily rice at odd tasks ash.o.r.e, but always, were it day or night for travel, his tiny craft bore surely seaward. Mile after slow mile dropped behind him, like the praying beads of a lama's chain, but at last the river salted slightly, and his tiny craft was lifted by the slow swell of the sea's hand reaching for inland.

The river became more populous. The crowding sampans, houseboats, and junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing population failed to find ground s.p.a.ce in its maggoty swarming. As the stream widened until the farther bank disappeared in the artificial mist of rising smoke and man-stirred dust, the Foreign Devils' fire junks appeared, majestically steaming up and down--swift swans that scorned the logy, lumbering native craft, the mat sails and toiling sweeps of which made them appear motionless by comparison. A day or two of this and then the coast, with Shanghai sprawling upon the bank, writhing with life, odoriferous, noisy, perpetually awake.

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