He was wrong.  Whoever handled the Hakka boat was no fool, but by working upstream on the opposite shore, crossing above, and dropping down with the ebb, had craftily brought her along the shallow, so close beneath the river-wall, that not till now did even the little captain spy her.  The high prow, the mast, now bare, and her round midships roof, bright golden-thatched with leaves of the edible bamboo, came moving quiet as some enchanted boat in a calm.  The fugitives by the gate still thought themselves abandoned, when her beak, six feet in air, stole past them, and her lean boatmen, prodding the river-bed with their poles, stopped her as easily as a gondola.  The yellow steersman grinned, straining at the pivot of his gigantic paddle.

“Good boy, lowdah!” called Kneebone.  “Remember you in my will, too!” And the grinning lowdah nodded, as though he understood.

They had now only to pitch their supplies through the smoke, down on the loose boards of her deck.  Then—­Rudolph and the captain kicking the bonfire off the stairs—­the whole company hurried down and safely over her gunwale:  first the two women, then the few huddling converts, the white men next, the compradore still hugging his pole-axes, and last of all, Heywood, still in strange apathy, with haggard face and downcast eyes.  He stumbled aboard as though drunk, his rifle askew under one arm, and in the crook of the other, Flounce, the fox-terrier, dangling, nervous and wide awake.

He looked to neither right nor left, met nobody’s eye.  The rest of the company crowded into the house amidships, and flung themselves down wearily in the grateful dusk, where vivid paintings and mysteries of rude carving writhed on the fir bulkheads.  But Heywood, with his dog and the captain and Rudolph, sat in the hot sun, staring down at the ramshackle deck, through the gaps in which rose all the stinks of the sweating hold.

The boatmen climbed the high slant of the bow, planted their stout bamboos against their shoulders, and came slowly down, head first, like straining acrobats.  As slowly, the boat began to glide past the stairs.

Thus far, though the fire lay scattered in the mud, the smoke drifted still before them and obscured their silent, headlong transaction.  Now, thinning as they dropped below the corner of the wall, it left them naked to their enemies on the knoll.  At the same instant, from the marsh ahead, the sentinel in the round hat sprang up again, like an instantaneous mushroom.  He shouted, and waved to his fellows inland.

They had no time, however, to leave the high ground; for the whole chance of the adventure took a sudden and amazing turn.

Heywood sprang out of his stupor, and stood pointing.

“Look there!” he snarled.  “Those—­oh!”

He ended with a groan.  The face of his friend, by torchlight above the wall, had struck him dumb.  Now that he spoke, his companions saw, exposed in the field to the view of the nunnery, a white body lying on a framework as on a bier.  Near the foot stood a rough sort of windlass.  Above, on the crest of the field, where a band of men had begun to scramble at the sentinel’s halloo, there sat on a white pony the bright-robed figure of the tall fanatic, Fang the Sword-Pen.