“Two other foreign men--only two--have seen the Painted Joss, and it was unfortunate for them.” The comprador said this softly and with an evil grin. He had overstepped the mark. Captain O’Shea gripped him by the neck and shook him savagely as he thundered in his ear: “Any more of that, and I will forget the bargain we made. One of those men was a friend of mine, and by rights I ought to drill ye with a bullet as a favor to him.” Between chattering teeth Charley Tong Sin, suddenly abject, begged for his life. Presently he moved restlessly from one deck to another, but always a man followed and kept watch of him, as Captain O’Shea had ordered. The ship’s company, most of them off duty and wearied with the stress and hardships of the voyage, gathered under an awning stretched between the deck-houses and talked in low tones. This melancholy, empty landscape had a quality curiously depressing. With the falling tide the swamps and the muddy banks were laid bare and the air became foul and heavy with the smell of decayed vegetation, of ooze, of dead fish. The ebb and flow of salt-water failed to cleanse and sweeten these sluggish streams and stagnant lagoons and abandoned canals. The men who had followed Captain O’Shea to this place were no longer so many vagabonds and failures struggling for survival. They had been welded together, in a way. They were an organization with something like _esprit de corps_ and could be depended on to act as a unit. Such a feeling as this brings to life dead self-respect and shattered confidence. They knew not at all what the morrow might bring forth, but every one of them was anxious to play the man, to stand the test, to redeem himself in his own sight, to justify Captain O’Shea’s faith in him. It was not a night to invite sleep. The adventurers felt the immense loneliness of this loathsome anchorage. It was unlike the populous China which they had hitherto known. One might believe, with the natives, that ghosts and demons had power to curse and blast a region in which some violation of the _fung-shui_, or sacred rites of wind and water, had angered the supernatural influences. The breeze died to a dead calm. The lifeless air reeked with the stenches from the mouth of the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells. It was drawing toward midnight when Mr. Kittridge came on deck and said to Captain O’Shea, who was sitting with a group of his men: “I shall have to start the pumps, sir. The vessel is leakin’ much worse than when I first reported it.” “Um-m, I was hoping we could lay her on a beach after we have finished our business up the river and calk her plates,” replied the master of the _Whang Ho_. “Is she making water faster than you can handle it, Mr. Kittridge?” “She acts to me as if a plate dropped clean out of her a few minutes ago, sir. The pumps may help, but I have a notion that the whole rotten, blankety river is runnin’ into her.”