their guns, I turned giddy, shuddering
at the darkness and the loneliness, and with a nameless fear lying at
the center of life like a lurking shadow of an unknown, unseen foe.

They addressed me, but I cared not what they said. I pretended I could
not speak Chinese, watched the quartet form a circle, and talk slowly
and low, and it did not need the mind of a prophet to see that they were
discussing how best they could capture me. Were they going to kill me?
My boy and the other friends I had in the place were sleeping
blissfully, ignorant that their master was in such trying straits. I was
asked my name, and the inquirers, not over civil, were told. They again
asked me for something, I knew not what, probably for my passport. I
had none, and cursed my luck that I had forgotten to pack it when I had
left Tong-ch'uan-fu.

To me it was quite evident that they were deciding my destiny, or so it
seemed in the stillness of the night. Looking upwards, I wondered
whether I was soon to learn the secret of the stars and sky, and those
men seemed to watch the secret workings of my soul. Outside the wind
made moan continuously.

Suddenly my door opened noisily, a light was flashed upon us, and I saw
the bulky form of the landlord. Then all was well. Soon one of my men
appeared, and explained that the soldiers were on their way to meet an
official who was coming from Tali-fu, that their instructions were that
they would meet him at Hungay. They took me for the "gwan."

So my end was not yet. But now, months afterwards, when I stand and
listen to the wind at midnight, there seems borne to me in every sob and
wail a memory of that hateful night and the four soldiers with their
guns.

It seemed not long afterwards that I was awakened by noises on the
doorstep. Looking out, I found a bullock, its four feet tied together
with a straw rope, writhing in its last agonies; the butcher, in his
hand a cruel 24-inch bladed knife still red with blood, smiling the
smile of ironic torture as he looked down upon his struggling victim. He
straightway skinned the animal and cut up the carcass immediately in
front of my door, where Lao Chang waited to get the best cut for my
dinner. My three fellow-lodgers squatted alongside, going through their
apologetic ablutions as if naught were happening. Their dirty face-rags
were wrung and rewrung; they got to work with that universal tooth-brush
(the forefinger!), and that the dead body of a bullock wa