I took a Chinese sampan, and with sail and oar beat up that yellow river for an hour to find the Major in Command. When I got to his office, he had gone to tiffin. Where did he tiffin? The answer was a shake of the head. Nobody could disturb the gallant major while he was tiffining, no matter how urgent the caller's business was. When would he return? Within one hour and a half. Well, we would have just a little more than another hour in which to catch that transport, even if we got permission to take it. And somehow cooling heels in the ante-chamber of the Major while he tiffined had no particular charm for me just then, so I decided very quickly to start back by Chefoo and Shanghai, even if it did take five extra days and perhaps cause us to lose the steamer for home. So we gathered our things together and took passage on a British steamer for China. A Chinese sampan took the ever-faithful Takeuchi and me with our luggage to the ship. I handed Takeuchi two purple fifty-sen bills that the army issues in Manchuria as scrip--to give to the Chinaman--and started up the gangway toward the Captain's cabin. Takeuchi thought I had gone, but I looked around just in time to see him thrust one of the bills in his own pocket, give the Chinaman the other, put his right foot against the Chinaman's breast, and joyously kick him down the gangway into the sampan. Selah! The joy of being on a British ship with the Union Jack over you and no Japanese to say you nay! Never shall I forget that England liberated the slave. She freed some of the White Slaves of Haicheng. To avoid floating mines we anchored that night outside the bar, but next morning we struck the wide, free, blue seas, with an English captain, whose tales made Gulliver's Travels sound like the story of a Summer in a Garden. Without flies, fleas, mosquitoes, or scorpions, we slept when and where we pleased and as long as we pleased. Once more we wore the white man's clothes and ate his food and drank his drink, and were happy. In the afternoon we passed for miles through the scattered cargoes of Chinese junks that had been destroyed by the Japanese while on their way to supply the Russians at Port Arthur, and that night we saw the flash of big guns as once more we swept near the fortress we had hoped to see. A sunny, still day once again and we were at Chefoo, where in the harbor we saw--glory of glories!--an American Man-of-War. Ashore Chefoo was distinctly shorn of the activities that lately had made the town hum. There were only a Russian or two there from a destroyed torpedo-boat, a few missionaries in rickshaws and dressed like Chinese, a few queer-looking foreign women in the streets, and a lonely, smooth-shaven young man from Chicago, who ran a roulette-wheel and took in more kinds of Oriental currency than I knew to exist. "I am sorry the Russians have gone," he said; "they were great gamblers."