Not a word was said as the sampan floated down the river. For some minutes Bob was too much amazed to take in anything beyond the mere fact that he had escaped from his prison; his brain was in a whirl; the events of the last few hours seemed a dream. He crouched in the boat, covered by the cloak thrown over him by one of his rescuers: his outer garments had been left at the foot of the tower. But collecting himself by degrees, he noticed that one of the men stood in the bow with a long pole fending off the spars of ice that jutted out into the stream, while the other lay almost horizontal in the boat. Both were Chinamen, as he judged from their pigtails. There was floating ice on all sides, and the progress of the sampan was a succession of bumps. Sometimes it came to a stop, and the curved bow was pushed on to a large floe by the pressure of ice behind. But the man with the pole knew his work. A touch here, a push there, or a vigorous shove sent the light craft on its way again; and all the time the second Chinaman lay motionless, saying never a word. Meanwhile the noise of alarm and pursuit from Antung struck Bob’s ears, and his thoughts were divided between wonder concerning the identity of his preservers, the strangeness of their intervention, and anxiety lest it should after all prove vain. He heard a deep bell booming, the blare of bugles, the shouts of men: by and by from the right came the sound of galloping horses. At this moment the man in the bow dropped silently into the boat beside his comrade, and the vessel was left to take its course. It was scarcely more than level with the surface of the water, and must have been invisible in the dark night at the distance of a few yards. Even if it were seen from the bank, the horsemen dared not approach the waterway owing to the rotten state of the ice: all that they could do was to fire at it, with no certainty of aim. Gradually the sounds from the shore diminished, and at last died away; the Chinaman resumed his work with the pole, and floating, jolting, stopping, jerking forward again, the sampan went safely on its way.