The liberality of my purse for a short day and a half, with its concomitant luxurious living, has so thoroughly demoralized the unaccustomed river-men, that they encroach still further upon my bounty and forbearance by revelling all night in the sensuous delights of opium, at my expense, and turning up in the morning in anything but fit condition for the road.  Putting this and that together, I conclude that we have not yet readied Kan-tchou-foo; but the carriers have developed into an insufferable nuisance, a hinderance to progress, rather than a help, so I determine to take them no farther.

I tell them nothing of my intentions until we reach a lonely spot a mile from the city.  Here I tender them suitable payment for their services and the customary present, attach my loose effects to the bicycle and about my person, and motion them to return.  As I anticipated, they make a clamorous demand for more money, even seizing hold of the bicycle and shouting angrily in my face.  This I had easily foreseen, and wisely preferred to have their angry demonstrations all to myself, rather than in a crowded city where they could perhaps have excited the mob against me.

For the first time in China I have to appeal to my Smith & Wesson in the interests of peace; without its terrifying possession I should on this occasion undoubtedly have been under the necessity of “wiping up a small section of Kiang-se” with these two worthies in self defence.  In the affairs of individuals, as of nations, it sometimes operates to the preservation of peace to be well prepared for war.  How many times has this been the case with myself on this journey around the world!

The barometer of satisfaction at the prospect of reaching Kui-kiang before the appearance of old age rises from zero-level to a quite flattering height, as I find the pathways more than half ridable after delivering myself of the dead weight of native “assistance.”  Twelve miles farther and I am approaching the grim high walls of a large city that instinctively impresses me as being Kan-tchou-foo.  The confused babel of noises within the teeming wall-encompassed city reaches my ears in the form of an “ominous buzz,” highly suggestive of a hive of bees, into the interior of which it would be extremely ticklish work for a Fankwae to enter.  “Half an hour hence,” I mentally speculate, “the pitying angels may be weeping over the spectacle of my seal-brown roasted remains being dragged about the streets by the ribald and exultant rag, tag, and bobtail of Kan-tchou-foo.”

Reflecting on the horrors of cotton, peanut-oil, and fire, I sit down for half an hour at a peanut-seller’s stall, eat peanuts, and meditatively argue the situation of whether it would be better, if seized by a murderous mob, to take the desperate chances of being, like Cameron, rescued at the last minute from the horrors of incineration, or to take my own life.  Fourteen cartridges and a 38 Smith & Wesson is the sum total of my armament.  Emptying my revolver among the mob, and then being caught while reloading, would mean a lingering death by the most diabolical tortures, processes that the heathen Chinee has reduced to a refinement of cruelty unsurpassed in the old Spanish inquisition chambers.