But the rebels had by this time got together no less than three thousand men, and were holding three impregnable positions on the adjacent hills, and had effectually cut off communication by the main road.  Despite their numbers, they were afraid to strike, however, and lucky it was for the city that the leaders were not sufficiently trusted by their followers, many of them pressed men—­men who had joined the rebelling ranks merely to save their own necks and their houses.  At this time the pen-fu (a sort of mayor of the city) demanded that the missionaries working among the Hua Miao, and two lady workers paying a visit to that place, should return from Shih-men-K’an (70 li away), as he could not protect them in the country.  A special messenger was dispatched, demanding instant departure, and in the dead of night—­a bitter wintry night, icy, dark, slippery, and cold—­these ladies came under cover to the city.

They reached the mission premises without molestation.

By this time a new ch’en-tai (brigadier-general) had arrived from the capital, having been sent as a man who could handle the situation successfully.  He was a Liu Ta Ren, who had previously held office in the city, and whose cunning a Scotland Yard detective might envy.[P]

Rumors grew more and more serious; the mandarins went all round the countryside endeavoring to pacify the people, and the foreigners could do nothing but “sit tight” through these most trying days.  The suspense of being shut up in one’s house during a time of trouble of this nature, hearing every rumor which lying tongues create, and unable to get at the facts, is far worse than being in the thick of things, although this would have at once been fatal.  But one needs to have lived in China during such a time to understand the awful tension which riots occasion.

The rioters were stationed as follows:—­

     1.  Weining, in Kwei-chow, to the southeast 1,000 men

     2.  Kiang-ti Hill, in Yuen-nan, to the south 1,000 men

     3.  Several places around the city, to the west as far as the River
     of Golden Sand 1,000 men

On March 13th a night attack was expected.  Breathless, the foreigners waited in their suspense, but it passed off without serious damage being done.  On the Sunday, the missionaries, almost at their wits’ end with mingled fear and excitement, occasioned by the strain which weeks of anxiety must bring to the strongest, feared whether their services would be got through in peace.

Meetings were being held all around the city, and gradually the mandarins gained small successes.  Prisoners—­miserable specimens of men fighting for they hardly knew what—­were captured and brought to the city, and, on March 16th, sixteen human heads, thrown in one gruesome mass into a common basket, with upturned eyes gaping into the great unknown, hideous-looking and bearing still the brutish stare of hysterical craving and morbid rage, were carried by an armed squad of military to the yamen.