“Perhaps he’s lying,” said Captain Kneebone, drowsily.

“Wish he were,” snapped Heywood.  “No such luck.  Too stupid.”

“That case,” grumbled the captain, “we’d better signal your Hakka boat, and clear out.”

Again their hollow eyes questioned each other in discouragement.  It was plain that he had spoken their general thought; but they were all too hot and sleepy to debate even a point of safety.  Thus, in stupor or doubt, they watched another afternoon burn low by invisible degrees, like a great fire dying.  Another breathless evening settled over all—­at first with a dusty, copper light, widespread, as though sky and land were seen through smoked glass; another dusk, of deep, sad blue; and when this had given place to night, another mysterious lull.

Midnight drew on, and no further change had come.  Prowlers, made bold by the long silence in the nunnery, came and went under the very walls of the compound.  In the court, beside a candle, Ah Pat the compradore sat with a bundle of halberds and a whetstone, sharpening edge after edge, placidly, against the time when there should be no more cartridges.  Heywood and Rudolph stood near the water gate, and argued with Gilbert Forrester, who would not quit his post for either of them.

“But I’m not sleepy,” he repeated, with perverse, irritating serenity.  “I’m not, I assure you.  And that river full of their boats?—­Go away.”

While they reasoned and wrangled, something scraped the edge of the wall.  They could barely detect a small, stealthy movement above them, as if a man, climbing, had lifted his head over the top.  Suddenly, beside it, flared a surprising torch, rags burning greasily at the end of a long bamboo.  The smoky, dripping flame showed no man there, but only another long bamboo, impaling what might be another ball of rags.  The two poles swayed, inclined toward each other; for one incredible instant the ball, beside its glowing fellow, shone pale and took on human features.  Black shadows filled the eye-sockets, and gave to the face an uncertain, cavernous look, as though it saw and pondered.

How long the apparition stayed, the three men could not tell; for even after it vanished, and the torch fell hissing in the river, they stood below the wall, dumb and sick, knowing only that they had seen the head of Wutzler.

Heywood was the first to make a sound—­a broken, hypnotic sound, without emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words torn from him by ventriloquy.

“We must get the women—­out of here.”

Afterward, when he was no longer with them, his two friends recalled that he never spoke again that night, but came and went in a kind of silent rage, ordering coolies by dumb-show, and carrying armful after armful of supplies to the water gate.  He would neither pause nor answer.

The word passed, or a listless, tacit understanding, that every one must hold himself ready to go aboard so soon after daylight as the hostile boats should leave the river.  “If,” said Gilly to Rudolph, while they stood thinking under the stars, “if his boat is still there, now that he—­after what we saw.”