Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/192

 Their eyes moved to where Chun Lon sat beside the fortune of the Ingrams. He was apparently a fixture. He changed not a line of his face, not an attitude of his body, for what seemed hours on end. But presently he arose, with one lithe motion, and was gone, and a dirty tatterdemalion took his place, elaborately producing a large knife which he kept firmly clasped in his grimy fist. After Chun Lon's departure there was a prodigious running about, the big sweep began creaking on its pivot, the sail was hoisted and flapped in the new wind, and the boat began to move ahead.

It was an uninteresting country. Sometimes the dull marshy land would be relieved by the far-off glimpse of a pomegranate orchard drooping with scarlet fruit, or the huddled roofs of low huts. Sometimes a solitary old woman, cutting reeds, would straighten her bent back for a moment to look at the passing boat. A line of blue hills appeared dimly on the skyline. An occasional houseboat or a brown sampan came by. The boys watched idly, hardly knowing that they watched. Once a lonely procession passed on shore—a shuffling group with flaunting paper streamers and