“No, above!” cried Rudolph, pointing.

After the mourners’ barge, at some distance, came hurrying a boat crowded with shining yellow bodies and dull blue jackets.  Long bamboo poles plied bumping along her gunwale, sticking into the air all about her, many and loose and incoordinate, like the ribs of an unfinished basket.  From the bow spurted a white puff of smoke.  The dull report of a musket lagged across the water.

The bullet skipped like a schoolboy’s pebble, ripping out little rags of white along that surface of liquid clay.

The line of fire thus revealed, revealed the mark.  Untouched, a black head bobbed vigorously in the water, some few yards before the boat.  The saffron crew, poling faster, yelled and cackled at so clean a miss, while a coolie in the bow reloaded his matchlock.

The fugitive head labored like that of a man not used to swimming, and desperately spent.  It now gave a quick twist, and showed a distorted face, almost of the same color with the water.

The mouth gaped black in a sputtering cry, then closed choking, squirted out water, and gaped once more, to wail clearly:—­

“I am Jesus Christ!”

In the broad, bare daylight of the river, this lonely and sudden blasphemy came as though a person in a dream might declare himself to a waking audience of skeptics.  The cry, sharp with forlorn hope, rang like an appeal.

“Why—­look,” stammered Heywood.  “He sees us—­heading here.  Look, it’s—­Quick! let me out!”

Just as he turned to elbow through his companions, and just as the cry sounded again, the matchlock blazed from the bow.  No bullet skipped.  The swimmer, who had reached the shallows, suddenly rose with an incredible heave, like a leaping salmon, flung one bent arm up and back in the gesture of the Laocooen, and pitched forward with a turbid splash.  The quivering darkness under the banyan blotted everything:  death had dispersed the black minnows there, in oozy wriggles of shadow; but next moment the fish-tail stripes chased in a more lively shoal.  The gleaming potter, below his rosy cairn, stared.  The mourners forgot their grief.

Heywood, after his impulse of rescue, stood very quiet.

“You saw,” he repeated dully.  “You all saw.”

The clutching figure, bolt upright in the soaked remnant of prison rags, had in that leap and fall shown himself for Chok Chung, the Christian.  He had sunk in mystery, to become at one forever with the drunken cormorant-fisher.

Obscene delight raged in the crowded boat, with yells and laughter, and flourish of bamboo poles.

“Come away from the window,” said Heywood; and then to the white-haired doctor:  “Your question’s answered, padre.  Strange, to come so quick.”  He jerked his thumb back toward the river.  “And that’s only first blood.”

The others had broken into wrangling.

“Escaped?  Nonsense—­Cat—­and—­mouse game, I tell you; those devils let him go merely to—­We’ll never know—­Of course!  Plain as your nose—­To stand by, and never lift a hand!  Oh, it’s—­Rot!  Look here, why—­Acquitted, then set on him—­But we’ll never know!—­Fang watching on the spot.  Trust him!”