He could rattle off the names of all the merchant ships there, and seemed to have a sneaking regard for his old ship, for he plucked A Tsi nervously by the sleeve and talked excitedly to him, pointing to the Captain. "What does he want?" asked Helston. "He says, sir, that if you recapture the _Tsli Yamen_, the ship he belonged to formerly, he wants you to say a good word for him to the owners." "Tell him that if he answers all our questions truthfully we will not forget him." When this was explained to him he salaamed very vigorously, bending his long body three times to Helston. "How many white men are there on the island?" asked Cummins. He could not say. "Three?" No, there were more than three—four, five, or six, maybe, but he could not say. Asked as to the events just previous to the arrival of the squadron, he did not know much. Some two or three ships had been captured lately, no big ones, and the _Hong Lu_ had come in the same day as the destroyers, only early in the morning, from the south, he knew, for a friend of his was aboard her and had told him. She had brought two white men with her. "Could he describe them?" He pretended to limp. Evidently one was Hamilton, the lame Englishman, and the other, from his description, might have been Hopkins. "Are there any white men prisoners on the island?" It was Cummins who asked this, and he, in fact, had asked most of the questions since he had come down to the cabin, Captain Helston almost unconsciously giving way to him. "No prisoners, only engineers and soldiers. One white man in charge of the forts, two others in charge of all the ships’ engines. "They keep no white men prisoners. If they find one aboard a captured steamer they send him to the mainland in a junk." "Are there any white women on the island?" "No. Once there were two, but he thinks the white men began to quarrel amongst themselves, so they sent them away very quickly." "No chance of winning a wife here, sir," added Cummins, chuckling. "I’m not so certain about that," replied Helston, the hard lines on his careworn face softening. "Still thinking of that little minx Milly," growled Dr. Fox to himself. Cummins then showed the prisoner a rough plan of the island, copied from Ping Sang’s original chart, and, after A Tsi had explained it, the Chinaman roughly indicated the position of the forts, go-downs (warehouses), the white mens’ houses, the anchorage of the men-of-war and the captured merchant ships. "I think that we have obtained all we want to know from this man," Helston concluded. "Except about the amount of food on the island, he does not seem to know much. Does anyone want to ask him any further questions?" Cummins wanted to know what stock of coal there was on the island. As far as the man knew, there were enormous stacks of it on shore, and several ships laden with coal. "Does any ship ever leave the harbour by the small channel at the back of the island?"