By this time the Shans had swallowed their rice, and were ready to seize their poles. All sprang aboard, the Shans and Me Dain grasped the boating-poles, and the craft was soon being driven steadily up stream. For some time Jack watched the boatmen with deep interest. They drove their craft along just as a punt is propelled in England. Each man handled a long stout pole, and, where the water was shallow enough, he set the bottom of his pole in the gravelly bed and urged the boat forward. Where the water was too deep the craft was turned inshore, and the polers thrust the ends of their staves against the bank or against tree trunks lining the water's edge. Jack saw that quite deep holes had been made in many of the trunks where boatman after boatman had gained the purchase which sent his craft spinning up stream. "Well, Jim," said Jack, "this is a bit easier anyhow." "It is," sighed Dent, wiping the streaming sweat from his brow. "I was pretty near caving in, and that's a fact." "We'll drop the dacoits for a sure thing," said Buck. "They'll stop to hunt all about the place where they lose our trail, and then they'll follow up the pony for a dead cert." "True for you, Buck," replied Jim Dent. "We left no marks at all to show them where we got into the boat." They had embarked secretly by pushing the boat up to a big stone, and moving carefully in order to leave no trace. "Where does the road turn off from the river bank, Me Dain?" asked Jack. "We have passed it already, sahib," replied the Burman. "It is solid jungle on both banks now, with no path at all The dacoits cannot follow except along the river itself." "Then we've dropped 'em," said Jim Dent decisively. "We shall never see 'em again." And Jim's words proved to be right. They had at last eluded the pursuit of the blood-thirsty little Kachins. CHAPTER XIX. THE VILLAGE FESTIVAL. For three days the strong arms of Me Dain and the two Shan boatmen drove the river boat up the stream, and every day's journey brought them nearer to the mountains where the rubies were found, and among whose recesses they believed that Jack's father was a close prisoner in the hands of men who coveted rubies above all things. Jack said very little to his companions about the object of their journey, but his own thoughts were full of it at every waking moment. Since he had discovered that U Saw, the Ruby King, had a steam yacht, and that it had returned and gone up river shortly before their own arrival, he had felt no doubt whatever in his own mind as to his father's fate. He knew that the great ruby expert was on that yacht a close captive, and that he had been carried by secret ways, through the jungle and over the hills, to the place where U Saw was all-powerful, and would do his utmost to wrest from Thomas Haydon the knowledge which the latter certainly possessed of a great ruby-mine.