The coolie swerved, stopped, tilted his shafts to the ground. Rudolph
entered a sombre, mouldy office, where the darkness rang with tiny
silver bells. Pig-tailed men in skull-caps, their faces calm as polished
ivory, were counting dollars endlessly over flying finger-tips. One of
these men paused long enough to give him a sealed dispatch,--the message
to which the ocean-bed, the Midgard ooze, had thrilled beneath his
tardy keel.
"Zimmerman recalled," the interpretation ran; "take his station; proceed
at once."
He knew the port only as forlorn and insignificant. It did not matter.
One consolation remained: he would never see her again.
CHAPTER II
THE PIED PIPER
A gray smudge trailing northward showed where the Fa-Hien--Scottish
Oriental, sixteen hundred tons--was disappearing from the pale expanse
of ocean. The sampan drifted landward imperceptibly, seeming, with
nut-brown sail unstirred, to remain where the impatient steamer had met
it, dropped a solitary passenger overside, and cast him loose upon the
breadth of the antipodes. Rare and far, the sails of junks patched the
horizon with umber polygons.
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