Speculating about the fate of the yellow mariners who once had manned those clumsy sails, and about what scenes of bloody cruelty there must have been when those eight mad desperadoes attacked the ancient Chinese vessel, we sailed away and left them in their pirated junk. But I imagined, even when the old junk was hull down beyond the horizon, that I could hear an angry voice calling after us. CHAPTER XXVII WE REACH WHAMPOA, BUT NOT THE END OF OUR TROUBLES We were only seven men to work that ship, and after all these years I marvel at our temerity. Time and again the cry "All hands" would come down the hatch and summon the three of us from below to make sail, or reef, or furl, or man the braces. Weary and almost blind with sleep, we would stagger on deck and pull and haul, or would swarm aloft and strive to cope with the sails. The cook, and even Roger, served tricks at the wheel, turn and turn about with the rest of us; and for three terrible weeks we forced ourselves to the sheets and halyards, day and night, when we scarcely could hold our eyes open or bend our stiffened fingers. A Divine Providence must have watched over us during the voyage and have preserved us from danger; for though at that season bad storms are by no means unknown, the weather remained settled and fine. With clear water under our keel we passed shoal and reef and low-lying island. Now we saw a Tonquinese trader running before the wind, a curious craft, with one mast and a single sail bent to a yard at the head and stiffened by bamboo sprits running from luff to leech; now a dingy nondescript junk; now in the offing a fleet of proas, which caused us grave concern. But in all our passage only one event was really worth noting. When we were safely beyond London Reefs and the Fiery Cross, we laid our course north by east to pass west of Macclesfield Bank. All was going as well as we had dared expect, so willing was every man of our little company, except possibly the man from Boston, whom I suspected of a tendency to shirk, when late one evening the cook came aft with a very long face. "Well," said Roger, his eyes a-twinkle. "What's wrong in the galley, doctor?" "Yass, sah, yass, sah! S'pose, sah, you don't' know dah's almost no mo' wateh foh to drink, sah." "What's that you say?" "Yass, sah, yass, sah, we done share up with dat yeh Kipping and dah ain't no mo' to speak of at all, sah."