Dragon's blood

Henry Milner Rideout

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• Publié par: mashog
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 34
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dragon's blood, by Henry Milner Rideout
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Title: Dragon's blood
Author: Henry Milner Rideout
Release Date: November 27, 2003 [EBook #10321]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRAGON'S BLOOD ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sjaani and PG Distributed Proofreaders
DRAGON'S BLOOD
by
HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT
with illustrations by
HAROLD M. BRETT
1909To
CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND,
15 Hollis Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dear Cope,
Mr. Peachey Carnehan, when he returned from Kafiristan, in bad shape but
with a king's head in a bag, exclaimed to the man in the newspaper office,
"And you've been sitting there ever since!" There is only a pig in the
following poke; and yet in giving you the string to cut and the bag to open, I
feel something of Peachey's wonder to think of you, across all this distance
and change, as still sitting in your great chair by the green lamp, while past a
dim background of books moves the procession of youth. Many of us,
growing older in various places, remember well your friendship, and are glad
that you are there, urging our successors to look backward into good books,
and forward into life.
Yours ever truly,
H. M. R.
Sausalito, California.
CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS
I. A LADY AND A
GRIFFIN
II. THE PIED PIPER
III. UNDER FIRE
IV. THE SWORD-PEN
V. IN TOWN
VI. THE PAGODA
VII. IPHIGENIA "Good-by! A pleasant voyage" ... Frontispiece
VIII. THE HOT NIGHT
IX. PASSAGE AT ARMS Rudolph was aware of crowded bodies, of yellow
X. THREE PORTALS faces grinning
XI. WHITE LOTUS
XII. THE WAR BOARD He let the inverted cup dangle from his hands
XIII. THE SPARE MAN
XIV. OFF DUTY He went leaping from sight over the crest
XV. KAÚ FAI
XVI. THE GUNWALE
XVII. LAMP OF HEAVEN
XVIII. SIEGE
XIX. BROTHER MOLES
XX. THE HAKKA BOAT
XXI. THE DRAGON'S
SHADOW
CHAPTER IA LADY AND A GRIFFIN
It was "about first-drink time," as the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, bound for
Shanghai and Japan ports, observed to his friend Cesare Domenico, a good
British subject born at Malta. They sat on the coolest corner in Port Said,
their table commanding both the cross-way of Chareh Sultan el Osman, and
the short, glaring vista of desert dust and starved young acacias which led to
the black hulks of shipping in the Canal. From the Bar la Poste came
orchestral strains--"Ai nostri monti"--performed by a piano indoors and two
violins on the pavement. The sounds contended with a thin, scattered
strumming of cafe mandolins, the tinkle of glasses, the steady click of
dominoes and backgammon; then were drowned in the harsh chatter of Arab
coolies who, all grimed as black as Nubians, and shouldering spear-headed
shovels, tramped inland, their long tunics stiff with coal-dust, like a band of
chain-mailed Crusaders lately caught in a hurricane of powdered charcoal.
Athwart them, Parisian gowns floated past on stout Italian forms; hulking
third-class Australians, in shirtsleeves, slouched along toward their
mailboat, hugging whiskey bottles, baskets of oranges, baskets of dates; British
soldiers, khaki-clad for India, raced galloping donkeys through the crowded
and dusty street. It was mail-day, and gayety flowed among the tables, under
the thin acacias, on a high tide of Amer Picon.
Through the inky files of the coaling-coolies burst an alien and bewildered
figure. He passed unnoticed, except by the filthy little Arab bootblacks who
swarmed about him, trotting, capering, yelping cheerfully: "Mista
Ferguson!-polish, finish!--can-can--see nice Frencha girl--Mista McKenzie, Scotcha
fella from Dublin--smotta picture--polish, finish!"--undertoned by a
squabbling chorus. But presently, studying his face, they cried in a loud
voice, "Nix! Alles!" and left him, as one not desiring polish.
"German, that chap," drawled the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, lazily, noticing
the uncertain military walk of the young man's clumsy legs, his uncouth
clothes, his pale visage winged by blushing ears of coral pink.
"The Eitel's in, then," replied Cesare. And they let the young Teuton vanish
in the vision of mixed lives.
Down the lane of music and chatter and drink he passed slowly, like a man
just wakened,--assailed by Oriental noise and smells, jostled by the races of
all latitudes and longitudes, surrounded and solitary, unheeded and
selfconscious. With a villager's awkwardness among crowds, he made his way
to a German shipping-office.
"Dispatches for Rudolph Hackh?" he inquired, twisting up his blond
moustache, and trying to look insolent and peremptory, like an employer of
men.
"There are none, sir," answered an amiable clerk, not at all impressed.
Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first plunge intothe foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading shyly toward the
Quai François Joseph. He slipped through the barrier gate, signaled clumsily
to a boatman, crawled under the drunken little awning of the dinghy, and
steered a landsman's course along the shining Canal toward the black wall
of a German mail-boat. Cramping the Arab's oar along the iron side, he
bumped the landing-stage. Safe on deck, he became in a moment stiff and
haughty, greeting a fellow passenger here and there with a half-military
salute. All afternoon he sat or walked alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a
fierce and gloomy stare the squalid front of wooden houses on the African
side, the gray desert glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Canal
stretching southward into the unknown.
He composed melancholy German verses in a note-book. He recalled
famous exiles--Camoens, Napoleon, Byron--and essayed to copy something
of all three in his attitude. He cherished the thought that he, clerk at
twentyone, was now agent at twenty-two, and traveling toward a house with
servants, off there beyond the turn of the Canal, beyond the curve of the
globe. But for all this, Rudolph Hackh felt young, homesick, timid of the
future, and already oppressed with the distance, the age, the manifold, placid
mystery of China.
Toward that mystery, meanwhile, the ship began to creep. Behind her,
houses, multi-colored funnels, scrubby trees, slowly swung to blot out the
glowing Mediterranean and the western hemisphere. Gray desert banks
closed in upon her strictly, slid gently astern, drawing with them to the
vanishing-point the bright lane of traversed water. She gained the Bitter
Lakes; and the red conical buoys, like beads a-stringing, slipped on and
added to the two converging dotted lines.
"Good-by to the West!" thought Rudolph. As he mourned sentimentally at
this lengthening tally of their departure, and tried to quote appropriate
farewells, he was deeply touched and pleased by the sadness of his
emotions. "Now what does Byron say?"
The sombre glow of romantic sentiment faded, however, with the sunset.
That evening, as the ship glided from ruby coal to ruby coal of the gares,
following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her search-light along
arsenically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced the deck in a mood
much simpler and more honest. In vain he tried the half-baked philosophy of
youth. It gave no comfort; and watching the clear desert stars of two
mysterious continents, he fell prey to the unbounded and unintelligible
complexity of man's world. His own career seemed no more dubious than
trivial.
Succeeding days only strengthened this mood. The Red Sea passed in a
dream of homesickness, intolerable heat, of a pale blue surface stretched
before aching eyes, and paler strips of pink and gray coast, faint and distant.
Like dreams, too, passed Aden and Colombo; and then, suddenly, he woke
to the most acute interest.
He had ignored his mess-mates at their second-class table; but when the
new passengers from Colombo came to dinner, he heard behind him theswish of stiff skirts, felt some one brush his shoulder, and saw, sliding into
the next revolving chair, the vision of a lady in white.
"Mahlzeit" she murmured dutifully. But the voice was not German. Rudolph
heard her subside with little flouncings, and felt his ears grow warm and red.
Delighted, embarrassed, he at last took sufficient courage to steal
sideglances.
The first showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in the
plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very charming,
with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her spoon that, to
Rudolph's eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he was shocked to
encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance, from large, dark-blue
eyes, not devoid of amusement.
"She laughs at me!" fumed the young man, inwardly. He was angry,
conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own boldness.
"I have been off