issing several times, and yelling at the top of his raucous lungs for
companions to help him. In no time figures carrying flaming torches
clattered down into the hold and Chris, his own shape regained, knew
he would have to be quick as he had never been quick before.

[Illustration]

With a flick the new knife was open in his hand and the blade pressed
with all his strength against the hull of the _Vulture_. He was
crowded into a corner as far as possible from the advancing row of
torches and shouting men. Frantic rats, terrified by the flames of the
torches and the reverberating noise, scampered over Chris's feet or
ran up over his bending back and shoulders, but he did not move. The
blade whirled in the stout wooden side of the _Vulture_, but it seemed
no time before the flicker and wavering red of the nearest torches
sent their flares over him from a distance. Chris could make out the
silhouette of hunting figures as the first black trickle of sea water
pierced through the side of the ship and stained the dry planks. Still
the boy pushed the knife on a moment more until the water was a steady
spurt, wetting his hand with its coolness. Then, as the torches sent
their flames moving into the obscure corner where he had been, a fly
soared up and out, over an empty metal plate and four dead rats, over
the stooped screaming figure of a humpback, and a scattered line of
searching men, out to the freshness of the night and the open sea.

Only Osterbridge Hawsey, curious at the torches and the shouting,
looked out the cabin door in time to see a tiny boat scud past, back
toward Tahiti. And only in his befuddled dreams did he puzzle over how
the small craft could sail against the wind, or wonder how it could
sail so well, when it seemed to be made of rope.

CHAPTER 28

Chris and Amos lay belly down in a low clump of pine scrub at the top of a
precipitous rocky pinnacle. Below them in the blistering noon lay the
palace walls of the Lord of the Seven Seas, Descendant of the Sun and the
Moon, Overlord of the Mountains and the Plains, Prince of all the Isles,
Father of Plenty, and Brilliance-Before-Which-All-Cast-Down-Their-Eyes, the
Emperor of China.

The two boys were uninterested in titles. Somewhere within that
city-within-a-city, inside the enormous spread of the palace walls
that were surrounded in their turn by the city of Peking, lay the goal
they had come so far to seek, the Jewel Tree of the Princess of Chi