they were caught and
tossed about in waves as large as houses. Peter kept his eye on the
rotting thong, and marveled because it actually held.

Deposited on the edge of Ching-Fu's bund, he confessed his poverty, and
offered his shirt in payment. The shirt was of fine golden silk, woven
in the Chinan-Fu mills. For more than a year it had worn like iron,
and it had more than an even chance of continuing to do so.

Peter stripped off the shirt before a mob of squealing children, and
the coolie scrutinized it. He accepted it, and blessed Peter, and
Peter's virtuous mother, and called upon his green-eyed gods to make
the days of Peter long and filled with the rice of the land.

CHAPTER XVI

With the coming of noon Peter sat down under a stunted cembra pine tree
and contemplated the distant rocky blue ridge with a wistful and
discouraged air. He removed from his trouser-pocket two yellow loquats
and devoured them.

He was dreadfully hungry. His stomach fathered a dull, persistent
ache, which forced upon his attention the pains in his muscles and
bones. It was their way of complaining against the abuse he had heaped
upon them during the past twenty-four hours.

He was beginning to feel weak and dispirited. His was a constitution
that arose to emergencies in quick, battling trim; but when the
emergency was past, his vitality seemed to be drained.

He looked down the muddy brown road as he finished the second loquat
(which he had stolen from a roadside farm in passing) and estimated
that Ching-Fu was all of ten miles behind him. Walking through the
pasty blue mud in his bare feet, with the rain streaming through his
hair and down his beard and shoulders, had been tedious, trying.
Several times he had stopped, with his feet sinking in the clay, and
cursed the Yangtze with bitterness.

What had become of Bobbie MacLaurin? Had that noble soul been snatched
down by the River of Golden Sands?

He cursed the river anew, for Bobbie was a man after God's own heart.
Never had there lived such a generous, such a fine and brave comrade.
More than once the mule-kick which lurked behind those big, kind, red
fists had saved Peter from worse than black eyes.

He would never forget that night on the pier at Salina Cruz, when the
greaser had flashed out a knife, bent on carving a hole in Peter's
heart--and Bobbie had come up from behind and knocked the raving
Mexican a dozen feet off the pier into the limpid Pacific!