"What did I hit?" he asked.

"A big oak tree," said Ted Norris.

"I knocked it down, didn't I?" asked Teeny-bits. "My head feels as if I did."

His friends laughed with a happy abandon in which there was a quality that expressed release from a great fear.

Under the doctor's orders Teeny-bits remained in bed the rest of the week, though he declared on the second day that he was feeling fit and wanted to get up. Meanwhile the holidays came to an end. Phillips and Whipple departed for Jefferson School and at the same time most of the other vacationers in the Poca.s.sett settlement went their various ways.

Neil Durant and Ted Norris, however, insisted on staying until Teeny-bits was entirely recovered. A part of each day they sat about the cabin talking over school and college life.

"If you fellows would only wait a year I might go to college with you,"

Teeny-bits said one day, half jokingly.

"I might do it at that," said Neil Durant. "Father has been talking to me about staying out a year and working before I start in."

"That's not a bad idea," said Wolcott Norris. "Most of the fellows to-day enter college with a pretty vague notion of what they're going to do and it might help a lot to get out and work for a year or so before you continue your education. I think it would be time well spent."

The conversation was brief, but it began something which was destined to come to pa.s.s.

During these days while he was recovering, Teeny-bits had the opportunity to accomplish the thing for which he had envied Neil Durant on the night of the accident,--to become better acquainted with Wolcott Norris. While Ted and Neil, who had recovered from his sprained ankle, were out on snowshoes and skis, the mining engineer and the new captain of the Ridgley team spent many hours together. The admiration that Teeny-bits had felt for this man with the straight figure and the keen eyes steadily increased. Here, he said to himself, was a man whose character showed in his face and whose life any one would do well to imitate. There was something about Wolcott Norris that inspired Teeny-bits with a feeling of confidence, and somewhat to his surprise he found himself telling the mining engineer things that he had never told even to such good friends as Neil Durant or Snubby Turner,--confidences about his own feeling toward the other members of the school, hopes for the future and something of the ambitions for the attainment of which he meant to strive. For some reason which he could not a.n.a.lyze it seemed entirely natural to be conversing intimately--even after such a short acquaintance--with Wolcott Norris.

"You two fellows seem to be getting pretty chummy," said Ted Norris one afternoon when he and Neil came in and found Teeny-bits and the mining engineer engaged in conversation. "What's all the deep talk about?"

"Why don't you pull up some chairs and sit down?" asked Wolcott Norris.

It was just at the beginning of twilight and the flickering fire was already making shadows on the beamed ceiling of the cabin. Neil and Ted Norris pulled off their leather coats and stretched themselves out comfortably with their feet toward the blaze.

"Now," said Ted, looking at Wolcott Norris, "is the time for you to spin us a yarn."

"Yes," replied the mining engineer gazing at the three of them with an expression that they later remembered, "I guess this _is_ the time to spin you a yarn."

To their surprise he got up abruptly from his splint-backed chair and went out to his bedroom. As he returned he was thrusting something into his coat pocket.

"After I got through Jefferson," he said, when he was sitting in front of the fireplace once more, "I went to technical school to study engineering--mining engineering--which meant that when I started out to work I traveled round the country from one place to another, and within a short time I had a commission to go to China. When I went I took some one with me."

Wolcott Norris paused and for a minute or two gazed straight before him.

None of the three listeners interrupted the silence; there had been a quality in the mining engineer's voice which had made them feel that they were about to hear something unusual.

"Here's her picture," he said, and took from his pocket the object he had placed there on entering the room a few moments before. He handed it to Teeny-bits, who bent forward a little so that the glow from the firelight fell on the photograph. Neil Durant and Ted Norris leaned toward him and the three of them saw the likeness of a young woman with smiling eyes and fine, clear features.

"Mighty nice looking," said Neil Durant. "She reminds me of some one I've seen before, I can't think where."

There was a slight unsteadiness in Wolcott Norris' voice when he spoke again, but he overcame it and went on with his story rapidly.

"We were married just after I got my new job, went out to San Francisco and sailed for China on the j.a.panese steamer _Tenyo Maru_. It was a wonderful world to us then--more wonderful than I can describe to you.

Rain or shine, every day was a perfect day, and we sailed on and on in that little old steamer out across the Pacific until we came at last to Asia. For several months we were in Shanghai at the headquarters of the company, then they sent me up into the province of Honan to a little place called Tung-sha on a tributary of the Yangtse in a country that was pretty wild.

"There was gold and copper back in the hills and the company intended to carry on extensive operations if the ground proved worth while. How strange it seemed to us to find a bit of a foreign colony--a handful of Americans and British and French, missionaries and representatives of the company--set down in a region that for no one knows how many thousand years had belonged to the yellow men. You go about in China and you see those old, old temples and the weather-worn houses and the ancient hills, bald and bare, and you feel as if antiquity were casting a spell over you. A person who hasn't lived among the Chinese can't imagine what a strange, superst.i.tious people they are; more than any other race on the face of the earth they are bound to the past--and I suppose when we came up there to Tung-sha and began to dig tunnels in their hills we were breaking the precedent of the past. Still we didn't really expect any trouble--and for many months all went smoothly. Some wonderful things happened up there in that out-of-the-way corner of the world. We lived--Marion and I--in a three-room bungalow with a roof that sloped like the roof of a temple, and here that first springtime something very fine came into our lives--a son was born to us. He was a husky little youngster--and maybe he couldn't yell!"

Wolcott Norris laughed.

"I remember that Ho Sen, my Chinese servant boy, used to say when the baby howled 'Nice stlong lung; he'll glow nice, big man! And by Jingo!

How that little chap did grow! Those were days crowded with happiness and before we knew it we'd been in Tung-sha more than a year. The mine was beginning to require additional machinery and everything looked good for the future. We were so contented there in our bungalow that I suppose we never thought of anything happening to burst our bubble of happiness--at least I don't remember that any worries troubled our minds."

The mining engineer paused in his story and pa.s.sed his hand across his brow. A minute went by, during which the hushing sound of the fire alone broke the stillness of the room. Teeny-bits, Neil Durant and Ted Norris sat without moving; their eyes were on the red and yellow fireplace flames, but what they saw was a bit of the old Chinese Empire, in-land on a tributary of the Yangtse--and a bungalow at Tung-sha. The mining engineer was silent so long that finally they looked up--and, seeing the expression on his face, looked quickly down again--as those turn away their faces who look by mistake too deeply into the intimate thoughts of another.

"Bad water and Red Knife wrecked Tung-sha," said Wolcott Norris abruptly. "The water was contaminated somehow--typhoid got into it. Our little colony was hard hit and when that second summer was over the youngster I told you about didn't have any mother--she was sleeping the long sleep out there at the foot of the Tung-sha hills."

The mining engineer's voice had grown thick--it was as if another person were speaking.

"I should have told you more at the start about Red Knife," he said. "He was a Chinese robber--the chief of a gang of hill-men who for years had levied tribute from those poor, ignorant people of Honan. His name was a living terror--I have never seen such abject fear on the faces of human beings as one day when a rumor pa.s.sed among our mine workers that Red Knife was in the hills near by waiting to pounce down upon them. They reminded me of sheep huddling together to escape wolves.

"From the time when the company first started operations at Tung-sha we realized that this bandit was working against us--for the reason, of course, that he knew we would lessen his power. I questioned Ho Sen one day and learned that Red Knife had sent word around that if the 'foreign devils', as he called us, dug further into the hills man-eating dragons would come out and destroy the villages. We had to pay extra to get labor after that."

"Why did they call him Red Knife?" asked Neil Durant.

"Because that was his symbol--a red knife--and his followers were said to carry red-bladed daggers.

"Red Knife chose his time well. He came down on our little settlement at the height of the typhoid scourge. It was only a few days after Marion had been buried and I was up at the mine attending to some last arrangements so that I could leave. I had made up my mind to take Winslow--that's what we'd named the little boy--out to Shanghai, for Tung-sha was no place for a motherless youngster. In broad daylight I heard the natives wailing and yelling, and then the mine workers began to cry out that Red Knife had swooped down from the hills. The white men who were with me pulled out their guns and we ran down to the bungalows.

We were too late, however; Red Knife had come and gone--and with him had gone Ho Sen and the boy. Three or four of the natives lay in the street with their throats cut and the rest of them were so frightened that at first I couldn't get them to tell me anything, but finally I made out that Red Knife's men had carried the baby away in a basket and that Ho Sen had gone with them, voluntarily or as a prisoner I did not know.

"I can't tell you just how crazy I was. I remember that I grabbed up a handful of sh.e.l.ls for my revolver and ran up toward the Hai-Yu Gap where the natives said Red Knife and his gang had disappeared. I remember also that Hartley, the surgeon, and a Frenchman ran after me and tried to pull me back, and when I wouldn't come with them that they ran along beside me. But I guess I out-distanced them, for after a time I was running alone up the dry bed of a stream where the Hai-Yu Gap cut the hills. I meant to get the boy and bring him back, but I suppose I might as well have tried to follow a black tracker into a tropic jungle as to follow the trail of Red Knife through those Tung-sha hills.

"I don't know how far I went. When night came I was lost--scrambling in the dark over bare rocks, slipping into gulleys and fighting my way out again. I suppose I made a terrific clatter and that Red Knife's men heard me coming when I was a long way off. At any rate they got me when I was off my guard--the yellow men pounced on me from behind the rocks and, though I think I did for one or two of them with my gun, they knocked me over the head. When I came to I was in the dusky interior of a stone house, bound and utterly helpless."

Wolcott Norris got up abruptly from his chair and, walking over to the window, looked out into the twilight at the snow-covered Poca.s.sett landscape. When he came back to the fireplace he said to the three listeners who had followed them with their eyes but had not stirred:

"Maybe you've read of the devilish ingenuity of some of these Chinese brigands--there are wild stories and some are true and some are not, but the torture that Red Knife put me to in that stone house up beyond the Hai-Yu Gap was worse than death--or so it seemed to me.

"He was a short, broad-shouldered wretch with a thin, hairy mustache that curled round the corners of his mouth. That mouth of his and his black, slant eyes were the most vivid expressions of cruelty that I have ever seen. When I first saw him I thought of Genghis Khan, that ancient conqueror who is said to have slaughtered five million persons while he ruled over China. Red Knife brought in Ho Sen and my little boy and he made Ho Sen, who was trembling like a leaf, interpret the things he wanted me to know.

"'Foreign devil,' he said, 'what is worth more than your life to you?

Ai, I know. This child is worth to you more than your life, therefore will I take him away.' And then he uncovered the baby's back and showed me a livid mark on the little chap's shoulder. 'See,' he said, 'he belongs to Red Knife now; he wears Red Knife's mark. My women will be _very_ good to this little son of the foreigner. We will bring him up in our band; he will be clever like the white man. Who knows, perhaps he will be as good a thief as Red Knife himself!'

"I tried to think of something that I could say or do that would move this wretch's heart, but it was of no use. Poor Ho Sen was frightened to death, and when I begged him to try to escape and bring help from the village I little thought that he could do anything.

"'Take the boy back to the village,' I said to Red Knife through the interpreter, 'and do with me as you will.'

"'Yes, I will do with you as I will,' was his answer. 'I think I will put you in a hole in the ground and perhaps I will give you a toad and a lizard to keep you company. Red Knife wants no one to be lonely.'

"Red Knife--I've always supposed--did intend to put me out of the way by some diabolical method of his own. And then the idea of holding me for ransom apparently occurred to him, for he kept me in the stone house back in the hills day after day. Two or three times when I saw Ho Sen I begged him to run away from the bandits and take the little boy with him and tell my friends in the village where we were, but Ho Sen only looked at me and trembled. I couldn't much blame him for being terrified.

"One night there was a jabbering and yelling round the stone house and I thought Red Knife had killed Ho Sen, for I saw him no more. Two days later there was more commotion and the whole band began to prepare to depart. I hoped that an expedition had come from the town--and that in fact was actually what happened. Some of the Imperial Government troops led by the white men were on Red Knife's trail, but Red Knife knew those hills too well. He and his gang went farther back and took me along, helpless. The horrible part of it all was that the little boy seemed to have disappeared, and when I asked what had become of him these yellow men only jabbered at me in their outlandish tongue. We traveled all day and all night and finally camped in some limestone caves. There I became very sick and I hoped that I should die because the future didn't seem to hold anything at all for me. I know I was delirious for a long time; things seemed very hazy--a confused coming and going of the natives and the jabbering of their singsong voices. Perhaps that sickness was what saved my life, for when I came to the end of my delirium I was lying there deserted in the limestone cave. I suppose Red Knife thought that the 'foreign devil' was dying and that I was only an enc.u.mbrance in his retreat. I don't know how long I had remained in the cave and I can't tell you how I managed to make my way out of that wilderness of hills and dry river beds, but Providence must have guided me, for I finally stumbled down into the village of Tung-sha and found Hartley, the surgeon, and three or four of the Europeans still there.

"I was delirious again for a time and didn't know what went on around me. But Hartley pulled me through and I found myself asking what had happened. They told me that the native troops of the Imperial Government had come up and that the foreign colony had led an expedition back into the hills. They hadn't been able, however, to overtake Red Knife and had finally abandoned the expedition partly because of the doubtful loyalty of the Chinese troops, who weren't over eager to chase Red Knife. That whole region in those days needed only a spark to set it aflame against all foreigners.

"There was one surprising bit of news, something that gave me a great desire to live. Ho Sen, poor, faithful Ho Sen, had escaped from Red Knife. He had come crawling to Hartley's bungalow at midnight several days after the raid, carrying in his arms the boy, and had fallen unconscious at the doorsteps. Hartley took them in and found the boy little the worse for his experiences, but Ho Sen died that same night and had been in his grave more than two weeks when Hartley told me the story. Meanwhile they had given up hope of ever seeing me alive again, and when the colony decided that it was unsafe for the women to stay at Tung-sha any longer they sent the boy down to Shanghai with an American missionary by the name of Singleton, who was going back to the United States. She had become deaf during her service in China and was returning to the States for treatment.

"Of course I started for Shanghai as soon as I was able to get about, going down the Yangtse in a river boat. But again I was too late. When I arrived I discovered that this Miss Singleton had gone to the office of the company and on their advice, after she had reported my death, had taken the baby with her when she sailed for San Francisco. She had the address of my brother--Ted's father--and said that she would deliver the child to them in New York. That's about the end of the story, except that I was never able to trace Miss Singleton beyond San Francisco. In Shanghai I came down with typhoid and was delayed three months in getting back to America. Then I discovered that my little son never arrived in New York--as far as any one knew--and the result of the investigations that I carried on through the police and private detective agencies established only the fact that the young missionary was on the steamer when it arrived at San Francisco and that she and the baby disembarked with the other pa.s.sengers.