From the fleet of fire junks various cargoes were to be unloaded with all speed, and at this the coolies toiled.  Numberless crates, boxes, and bags came ashore to be stowed away in long, low buildings, or loaded into long lines of rough, boxlike carriages that then went scurrying off behind countless snorting and puffing fire-horses to the east, always to the east and north.  Strange engines, which the Foreign Devils saw to it that they handled most tenderly, were also much in evidence, and always, at all hours the uniformed men with their bristling arms and clanking equipment crowded into the carriages and were whisked off to the east, always to the east and north.  They went with much strange shouting and, to Kan Wong’s ears, discordant sounds that they mistook for music.  Yet now and then other strings of carriages came back from the east and north, with other men—­men broken, bloody, lacking limbs, groping in blindness, their faces twisted with pain as they were loaded into the waiting fire-junks to recross the rough sea.

Then came the turn of the coolies to be crowded into the boxlike carriages and to be whisked off to the east.  With them went tools—­picks, shovels, and the like—­for further work, upon the nature of which Kan Wong, unquestioning, speculated.  It was a slow, broken journey that they made.  Every now and then they stopped that other traffic might pass them, going either way; mostly the strange men in uniforms, bristling with guns, hurrying always to the east and north.

At last they too turned north, and as they did so the country, which had been smiling, low, filled with soft fields and pretty, nestling houses, little towns and quiet, orderly cities, changed to bleak fields, cut and seared as by a simoom’s angry breath.  Still there were little towns—­or what had been little towns, now tumbled ruins—­fire-smitten, gutted, their windows gaping like blind eyes in the face of a twisted cripple.  Off to the east hung angry clouds from which the thunder echoed distantly; a thunder low, grumbling, continual, menacing, and through the clouds at night were lightning flashes of an angry red.  Toward this storm it seemed that all the men were hurrying, and so too were the coolies of whom Kan Wong was one.  Often they chattered speculatively of the storm beyond.  What did it mean?  Why did the men hurry toward instead of away from it?  Truly the ways of the Foreign Devils were strange!

As they drew nearer to the storm, the river dreams of Kan Wong returned.  This was indeed the land of the Dragon’s wrath.  The torn and harrowed fields, the empty, broken towns, the distant, grumbling storm, and the armed men, hurrying, always hurrying toward the east and north where the clouds darkened and spread—­all this was in the tales that his father’s father had told him of those fifteen mad years when the Yangtze Valley crouched trembling under the fiery breath of the Dragon’s wrath.  Here once more he saw the crumbling towers and walls of Hang Gow in fresh rain.  Here was the ruthless wreck that even nature in her fiercest mood could never make.  Truly the lure of the Dragon’s blood in him was drawing him, magnet-like, to the glory of his ancestors.