A door opened, and in from the deck came an extraordinarily tall man, stooping as he entered. On his cap, in gilt, was lettered, “1st Mate.” He took the seat opposite Mr. Kane, senior, next to the head of the table. It seemed to Miss Andrews that she had never seen so tall a man; he must have stood six feet five or six inches. He was solid, broad of shoulder, a magnificent specimen of manhood. And though the hair was thin on top of his head, and his grave quiet face exhibited the deep lines of middle age, he moved with almost the springy-step of a boy. If others at the table were difficult to place on the scale of life, this mate was the most difficult of all. With that strong reflective face, and the bearing of one who knows only good manners (though he said nothing at all after his first courteously spoken, “Good morning!”) he could not have been other than a gentleman – Miss Andrews felt that – an American gentleman! Yet his position… mate of a river steamer in China…!

The atmosphere about the table was constrained throughout the meal. The Chinese stewards padded softly about. The one-eyed man stared around the table without the slightest expression on his impassive face. The girl in the middy blouse kept her head over her plate. Miss Andrews once caught Rocky Kane glancing at her with an expression nearly as furtive as that of the thin man in the check suit. It was after this small incident that young Kane began helping her to this and that; and, when they rose, followed her out to her deck chair and insisted on tucking her up in her robe.

“These fall breezes are pretty sharp on the river,” he said. “But say, maybe it isn’t hot in summer.”

“I suppose it is,” murmured Miss Andrews.

“I’ve been out here a couple of times with the pater. You’ll find the river interesting. Oh, not down here” – he indicated the wide expanse of muddy water and the low-lying, distant shore – “but beyond Chinkiang and Nanking, where it’s narrower. Lots of quaint sights. The ports are really fascinating. We stop a lot, you know. At Wuhu the water beggars come out in tubs.”

“In tubs!” breathed Miss Andrews.

Miss Means joined them then, book under arm; and met his offer to tuck her up with a crisply pointed, “No, thank you!”

He soon drifted away.

Said Miss Andrews: “Weren’t you a little hard on him, Gerty?”

“My dear,” replied Miss Means severely – her Puritan vein strongly uppermost – “that young man won’t do. Not at all. I saw him myself, one night at the Astor House, going into one of those private dining-rooms with a woman who – well, her character, or lack of it, was unmistakable!.. Right there in the hotel… under his father’s eyes. That’s what too much money will do to a young man, if you ask; me!”

“Oh…!” breathed Miss Andrews, looking out with startled eyes at the gulls.

It was mid-afternoon when Captain Benjamin remarked to his first mate: “Tex Connor’s got down to work, Mr. Duane. Better try to stop it, if you don’t mind. They’re in young Kane’s cabin – sixteen.”

Number sixteen was the last cabin aft in the port side, next the canvas screen that separated upper class white from upper class yellow. The wooden shutters had been drawn over the windows and the light turned on within. Cigarette smoke drifted thickly out.

They were slow to open. Doane heard the not unfamiliar voice of the Manila Kid advising against it. He had to knock repeatedly. They were crowded together in the narrow space between berth and couch, a board across their knees – Connor twisting his head to fix his one eye on the intruder, the Kid, in his check suit, a German of the customs and Rocky Kane. There were cards, chips and a heap of money in American and English notes and gold.

“What is it?” cried Kane. “What do you want?”

“You’d better stop this,” said the mate quietly.

“Oh, come, we’re just having a friendly game! What right have you to break into a private room, anyway?”

The mate, stooping within the doorway, took the boy in with thoughtful eyes, but did not reply directly.

Connor, with another look upward, picked up the cards, and with the uncanny mental quickness of a practised croupier redistributed the heap of money to its original owners, and squeezed out without a word, the mate moving aside for him. The German left sulkily. The Kid snapped his fingers in disgust, and followed.

Doane was moving away when the Kid caught his elbow. He asked: “Did Benjamin send you around?”

Doane inclined his head.

“Running things with a pretty high hand, you and him!”

“Keep away from that boy,” was the quiet reply.

The thin man looked up at the grave strong face above the massive shoulders; hesitated; walked away. The mate was again about to leave when young Kane spoke. He was in the doorway now, leaning there, hands in pockets, his eyes blazing with indignation and injured pride.

“Those men were my guests!” he cried.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kane, to disturb your private affairs, but – ”

“Why did you do it, then?”

“The captain will not allow Tex Connor to play cards on this boat. At least, not without a fair warning.”

The boy’s face pictured the confusion in his mind, as he wavered from anger through surprise into youthful curiosity.

“Oh…” he murmured. “Oh… so that’s Tex Connor.”

“Yes. And Jim Watson with him. He was cashiered from the army in the Philippines. He is generally known now, along the coast, as the Manila Kid.”

“So that’s Tex Connor!.. He managed the North End Sporting in London, three years ago.”

“Very likely. I believe he is known in London and Paris.”

“He’s a professional gambler, then?”

“I am not undertaking to characterize him. But if you would accept a word of advice – ”

“I haven’t asked for it, that I’m aware of.” An instant after he had said this, the boy’s face changed. He looked up at the immense frame of the man before him, and into the grave face. The warm color came into his own. “Oh, I’m sorry!” he cried. “I needn’t have said that.” But confusion still lay behind that immature face. The very presence of this big man affected him to a degree wholly out of keeping with the fellow’s station in life, as he saw it. But he needn’t have been rude. “Look here, are you going to say anything to my father?”

“Certainly not.”

“Will the captain?”

“You will have to ask him yourself. Though you could hardly expect to keep it from him long, at this rate.”

“Well – he’s so busy! He shuts himself up all day with Braker, his secretary. The chap with the big spectacles. You see” – Kane laughed self-consciously; a naively boyish quality in him, kept him talking more eagerly than he knew – “the pater’s reached the stage when he feels he ought to put himself right before the world. I guess he’s been a great old pirate, the pater – you know, wrecking railroads and grabbing banks and going into combinations. Though it’s just what all the others have done. From what I’ve heard about some of them – friends of ours, too! – you have to, nowadays, in business. No place for little men or soft men. It’s a two-fisted game. This fellow spent a couple of years writing the pater’s autobiography: – seems funny, doesn’t it! – and they’re going over it together on this trip. That’s why Braker came along; there’s no time at home. The original plan was to have Braker tutor me. That was when I broke out of college. But, lord!..”

“You’ll excuse me now,” said the mate.

Meantime the Manila Kid had sidled up to the captain.

“Say, Cap,” he observed cautiously, “wha’d you come down on Tex like that for?”

“Oh, come,” replied the captain testily, not turning, “don’t bother me!”

“But what you expect us to do all this time on the river – play jackstraws?”

“I don’t care what you do! Some trips they get up deck games.”

“Deck games!” The Kid sniffed.

“You’ll find plenty to read in the library”

“Read!..”

“Then I guess you’ll just have to stand it.”

For some time they stood side by side without speaking; the captain eying the river, the Kid moodily observing water buffalo bathing near the bank.

“Tex has got that Chinese heavyweight of his aboard – down below.”

“Oh – that Tom Sung?”

“Yep. Knocked out Bull Kennedy in three rounds at the Shanghai Sporting. Got some matches for him up at Peking and Tientsin. Taking him over to Japan after that. There’s an American marine that’s cleaned up three ships’.” He was silent for a space; then added: “I suppose, now, if we was to arrange a little boxing entertainment, you wouldn’t stand for that either, eh?”

“Oh, that’s all right. Take the social hall if the ladies don’t object. But who would you put up against him?”

“Well – if we could find a young fellow on board, Tex could tell Tom to go light.”

“You might ask Mr. Doane. He complains he ain’t getting exercise enough.”

“He’s pretty old – still, I’d hate to go up against him myself… Say, you ask him, Cap!”

“I’ll think it over. He’s a little… I’ll tell you now he wouldn’t stand for your making a show of it. If he did it, it ‘ud just be for exercise.”

“Oh, that’s all right!”

Miss Means awoke with a start. It was the second morning out, at sunrise. The engines were still, but from without an extraordinary hubbub rent the air. Drums were beating, reed instruments wailing in weird dissonance, and innumerable voices chattering and shouting. A sudden crackling suggested fire-crackers in quantity. Miss means raised herself on one elbow, and saw her roommate peeping out over the blind.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It looks very much like the real China we’ve read about,” replied Miss Andrews, raising her voice above the din. “It’s certainly very different from Shanghai.”

The steamer lay alongside a landing hulk at the foot of broad steps. Warehouses crowded the bank and the bund above, some of Western construction; but the crowded scene on hulk and steps and bund, and among the matting-roofed sampans, hundreds of which were crowded against the bank, was wholly Oriental. From every convenient mast and pole pennants and banners spread their dragons on the fresh early breeze. A temporary pen-low, or archway, at the top of the steps was gay with fresh paint and streamers. In the air above were scores of kites, designed and painted to represent dragons and birds of prey, which the owners were maneuvering in mimic aerial warfare; swooping and darting and diving. As Miss Means looked, one huge painted bird fell in shreds to a neighboring roof, and the swarming assemblage cheered ecstatically.

Soldiers were marching in good-humored disorder down the bund, in the inevitable faded blue with blue turbans wound about their heads. It appeared as if not another person could force his way down on the hulk without crowding at least one of its occupants into the water, yet on they came; and so far as our two little ladies could see none fell. Fully two hundred of the soldiers there were, with short rifles and bayonets. Amid great confusion they formed a lane down the steps and across to the gangway.

Next came a large, bright-colored sedan chair slung on cross-poles, with eight bearers and with groups of silk-clad mandarins walking before and behind. Farther back, swaying along, were eight or ten more chairs, each with but four bearers and each tightly closed, waiting in line as the chair of the great one was set carefully down on the hulk and opened by the attending officials.

Deliberately, smilingly, the great one stepped out. He was a man of seventy or older, with a drooping gray mustache and narrow chin beard of gray that contrasted oddly with the black queue. His robe was black with a square bit of embroidery in rich color on the breast. Above his hat of office a huge round ruby stood high on a gold mount, and a peacock feather slanted down behind it.

Bowing to right and left, he ascended the gangplank, the mandarins following. There were fifteen of these, each with a round button on his plumed hat – those in the van of red coral, the others of sapphire and lapis lazuli, rock crystal, white stone and gold.

One by one the lesser chairs were brought out on the hulk and opened. From the first stepped a stout woman of mature years, richly clad in heavily embroidered silks, with loops of pearls about her neck and shoulders, and with painted face under the elaborately built-up head-dress. Other women of various’ ages followed, less conspicuously clad. From the last chair appeared a young woman, slim and graceful even in enveloping silks, her face, like the others, a mask of white paint and rouge, with lips carmined into a perfect cupid’s bow. And with her, clutching her hand, was a little girl of six or seven, who laughed merrily upward at the great steamer as she trotted along.

Blue-clad servants followed, a hundred or more, and swarming cackling women with unpainted faces and flapping black trousers, and porters – long lines of porters – with boxes and bales and bundles swung from the inevitable bamboo poles.

At last they were all aboard, and the steamer moved out.

“Who were all those women, in the chairs, do you suppose?” asked Miss Andrews.

“His wives, probably.”

“Oh…!”

“Or concubines.”

Miss Andrews was silent. She could still see the waving crowd on the wharf, and the banners and kites.

“He must be at least a prince, with all that retinue.”

Miss Andrews, thinking rapidly of Aladdin and Marco Polo, of wives and concubines and strange barbarous ways, brought herself to say in a nearly matter-of-fact voice: “But those women all had natural feet. I don’t understand.”

Miss Means reached for her Things Chinese; looked up “Feet,”

“Women,”

“Dress,” and other headings; finally found an answer, through a happy inspiration, under “Manchus.”

“That’s it!” she explained; and read: “‘The Manchus do not bind the feet of their women.’”

“Well!” Thus Miss Andrews, after a long moment with more than a hint of emotional stir in her usually quiet voice: “We certainly have a remarkable assortment of fellow passengers. That curious silent girl in the middy blouse… traveling alone…”

“Remarkable, and not altogether edifying,” observed the practical Miss Means.