“Sit quiet,” he said.  “A boat full of men.  I do not like their looks.”

Two or three of the voices hailed together, raucously.  The steersman, leaning on the loom of his paddle, made neither stir nor answer.  They hailed again, this time close aboard, and as it seemed, in rage.  Glancing contemptuously to starboard, the lowdah made some negligent reply, about a cargo of human hair.  His indifference appeared so real, that for a moment Rudolph suspected him:  perhaps he had been bought over, and this meeting arranged.  The thought, however, was unjust.  The voices began to drop astern, and to come in louder confusion with the breeze.

But at this point Flounce, the terrier, spoiled all by whipping up beside the lowdah, and furiously barking.  Hers was no pariah’s yelp:  she barked with spirit, in the King’s English.

For answer, there came a shout, a sharp report, and a bullet that ripped through the matting sail.  The steersman ducked, but clung bravely to his paddle.  Men tumbled out from the cabin, rifles in hand, to join Rudolph and the captain.

Astern, dangerously near, they saw the hostile craft, small, but listed heavily with crowding ruffians, packed so close that their great wicker hats hung along the gunwale to save room, and shone dim in the obscurity like golden shields of vikings.  A squat, burly fellow, shouting, jammed the yulow hard to bring her about.

“Save your fire,” called Captain Kneebone.  “No shots to waste.  Sit tight.”

As he spoke, however, an active form bounced up beside the squat man at the sweep,—­a plump, muscular little barefoot woman in blue.  She tore the fellow’s hands away, and took command, keeping the boat’s nose pointed up-river, and squalling ferocious orders to all on board.

“The Pretty Lily!” cried Rudolph.  This small, nimble, capable creature could be no one but Mrs. Wu, their friend and gossip of that morning, long ago....

The squat man gave an angry shout, and turned on her to wrest away the handle.  He failed, at once and for all.  With great violence, yet with a neat economy of motion, the Pretty Lily took one hand from her tiller, long enough to topple him overboard with a sounding splash.

Her passengers, at so prompt and visual a joke, burst into shrill, cackling laughter.  Yet more shrill, before their mood could alter, the Pretty Lily scourged them with the tongue of a humorous woman.  She held her course, moreover; the two boats drifted so quickly apart that when she turned, to fling a comic farewell after the white men, they could no more than descry her face, alert and comely, and the whiteness of her teeth.  Her laughing cry still rang, the overthrown leader still floundered in the water, when the picture blurred and vanished.  Down the wind came her words, high, voluble, quelling all further mutiny aboard that craft of hers.

“We owe this to you.”  The tall padre eyed Rudolph with sudden interest, and laid his big hand on the young man’s shoulder.  “Did you catch what she said?  You made a good friend there.”