The response was hearty and unanimous. The adventurers could think of no worse fate than to be once more stranded in Shanghai. They were well fed, they had slept in clean beds again, and their employer was a man who could be trusted to deal with them fairly. With a spirited cheer they scattered to their various stations. The chief engineer spoke briefly, his gray whiskers standing out in the morning breeze: “Nobody but a wild Irishman would have the nerve to take this painted coffin to sea with a gang of misbegotten greenhorns to man her. I have steam enough to give her steerage-way whenever you’re ready to cast off, Captain O’Shea.” “Then let go, fore and aft,” roared the master. “Are ye pilot enough to take her down the river, Mr. Parkinson?” “I could do it with both eyes shut, but I’m not so familiar with the coast to the north’ard.” “I have a pilot for the part of the coast and the river we are bound for,” grimly returned O’Shea. “He is locked in a spare state-room just now. He will know that part of China very well, for ’tis me opinion that he has been there before.” V Over a mournful, muddy expanse of the China Sea wallowed a top-heavy river steamer whose engines raised protesting clamor like an assemblage of threshing-machines. The gods of the air and water were in a kindly mood or else she would have opened up and foundered ere now. In the spray-swept wheel-house stood Captain Michael O’Shea, swaying easily to the crazy roll and lurch of the _Whang Ho_ and scanning the low dim coast with a pair of glasses. Clinging to the window ledge beside him was a young man of a Chinese countenance whose raiment, the handiwork of a fashionable British tailor, was sadly rumpled and soiled. The whole aspect of the young man was rumpled, in fact, not to say excessively forlorn, and now and then he pressed his hand against a painful jaw. It was difficult to imagine that he had been an ornament of clubs, a pattern for the gilded youth, and the smartest comprador between Tientsin and Singapore. The plight of Charley Tong Sin was made poignantly distressing by the fact that in the process of acquiring the vices of the Occident he had lost his grip on the essential virtues of the Orient. His native stoicism had been sapped and the fatalistic attitude of mind which meets death without so much as the flutter of an eyelid was eaten with dry-rot. In other words, the comprador was willing to pay any price to save his own skin, although his father before him would have suffered himself to be sliced to death by inches sooner than “lose face” in the presence of a foreigner.