“God in heaven, what now!” asked Vandervoot, another cuny, when we had been bundled aboard a junk.

We sat on the open deck, like so many trussed fowls, when he asked the question, and the next moment, as the junk heeled to the breeze, we shot down the deck, planks and all, fetching up in the lee-scuppers with skinned necks.  And from the high poop Kwan Yung-jin gazed down at us as if he did not see us.  For many years to come Vandervoot was known amongst us as “What-Now Vandervoot.”  Poor devil!  He froze to death one night on the streets of Keijo; with every door barred against him.

To the mainland we were taken and thrown into a stinking, vermin-infested prison.  Such was our introduction to the officialdom of Cho-Sen.  But I was to be revenged for all of us on Kwan Yung-jin, as you shall see, in the days when the Lady Om was kind and power was mine.

In prison we lay for many days.  We learned afterward the reason.  Kwan Yung-jin had sent a dispatch to Keijo, the capital, to find what royal disposition was to be made of us.  In the meantime we were a menagerie.  From dawn till dark our barred windows were besieged by the natives, for no member of our race had they ever seen before.  Nor was our audience mere rabble.  Ladies, borne in palanquins on the shoulders of coolies, came to see the strange devils cast up by the sea, and while their attendants drove back the common folk with whips, they would gaze long and timidly at us.  Of them we saw little, for their faces were covered, according to the custom of the country.  Only dancing girls, low women, and granddams ever were seen abroad with exposed faces.

I have often thought that Kwan Yung-jin suffered from indigestion, and that when the attacks were acute he took it out on us.  At any rate, without rhyme or reason, whenever the whim came to him, we were all taken out on the street before the prison and well beaten with sticks to the gleeful shouts of the multitude.  The Asiatic is a cruel beast, and delights in spectacles of human suffering.

At any rate we were pleased when an end to our beatings came.  This was caused by the arrival of Kim.  Kim?  All I can say, and the best I can say, is that he was the whitest man I ever encountered in Cho-Sen.  He was a captain of fifty men when I met him.  He was in command of the palace guards before I was done doing my best by him.  And in the end he died for the Lady Om’s sake and for mine.  Kim—­well, Kim was Kim.

Immediately he arrived the planks were taken from our necks and we were lodged in the beet inn the place boasted.  We were still prisoners, but honourable prisoners, with a guard of fifty mounted soldiers.  The next day we were under way on the royal highroad, fourteen sailormen astride the dwarf horses that obtain in Cho-Sen, and bound for Keijo itself.  The Emperor, so Kim told me, had expressed a desire to gaze upon the strangeness of the sea devils.