Bobby gave a sleepy little laugh.

“What is it!” he asked.

“I was just thinking how mad we are making the captain.  He wouldn’t speak to me all through dinner.”

“I shall have a word to say to the captain to-morrow that will quite change his attitude.”

“What sort of a word?”

“Can’t you guess?”

Before Bobby could answer, their attention was arrested by angry shouts in the street behind them.  A drunken sailor, evidently from an English gunboat, was in fierce altercation with his jinrikisha-man, and was announcing to the world, in language compounded of all the oaths in his vocabulary, that he wished to be condemned to Hades if any more pumpkin-headed, pig-tailed Chinks got another bob out of his pocket.

Percival was for hurrying his precious charge past the belligerents and into the hotel, but Bobby insisted upon seeing the end of it.

“That sailor is fixing to get into trouble,” she cried.  “He doesn’t know what he is doing or saying.”

“I dare say he’ll manage very well,” said Percival, urging her on.

“But he isn’t managing, He’s making the coolie furious.  Don’t let him hit at him like that!  See, he’s caught hold of his queue!”

The patient Chinaman had received the supreme insult, and in a second he had flashed a short knife from his belt, and was lunging at the stupid, upturned face of the half-recumbent sailor.

Percival sprang forward and seized the descending arm.  He was not quick enough to arrest the force of the blow, but he succeeded in deflecting its course, and the blade, which would have given the sailor a decent burial at sea, sharply grazed Percival’s wrist, and buried itself in the side of the jinrikisha.

It was all so quickly done that by the time a crowd collected and the big Sikh policeman arrived in his yellow clothes and huge striped turban Percival had got Bobby safely into the hotel lobby.  He was exasperated beyond measure that this very evening, of all, should have ended in his participation in a vulgar street brawl.  So far he had succeeded in keeping Bobby from knowing that he was wounded, but the beastly scratch was bleeding furiously, and he had to keep his hand behind, him to prevent her from seeing it.

They hurried through the empty lobby and down the long corridor that led to the elevator.  Bobby was full of excitement over the recent adventure and the part Percival had played in it.

“My, but you were quick!” she said as they went up on the elevator.  “I had just time to shut my eyes and open them again, and it was all over.”

“Nothing to speak of,” said Percival, twisting his handkerchief tighter around his throbbing wrist.

“But you don’t mind my being proud of you, do you?” asked Bobby as the elevator stopped at his floor.  “When I see a man show courage like that, I just feel as if—­as if I’d like to squeeze him.”