Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/188

 drooping eyelids from under which he directed a a piercing gaze at the boys. But Mark was awake now, and sprang into a sitting position. Chun Lon's knife flickered dangerously near, and Mark sat still. Everything was painfully clear to him, all at once. He wondered how long they had been in their drugged sleep and what remote waterway this was where the boat drifted. He decided to assume a matter-of-fact manner with Chun Lon and try to come to terms.

"Very hungry," he said, as a beginning.

Chun Lon hooted some sort of command below, and Mark, his eyes sharply directed toward a floor-crack, saw the cook ladle a quantity of rice from the men's own rice-pot into a bowl. It arrived untampered-with, and the boys ate thankfully.

Alan addressed Mark cautiously in atrocious school-boy French, because of Chun Lon. "Avez-vous any idée!" he inquired.

"Not much," Mark returned, gloomily.

"Pouvons-nous battez eux?" Alan hazarded, with visions of fair fight and Chinese bodies splashing one after the other into the river.

"Non," Mark said, briefly; "trop."