Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/195

 the water and scattered at the slow splash of the yulow. This was a lonely place. Little villages had dropped behind; their lamps burned dimly far astern. Occasionally a great junk, her square sails blotting the sky, flew past with her crew singing in weird unison their wailing oar-song. Sometimes the man in the prow of the boat sent forth a tremulous, eerie cry to the wind. Herons rose now and then from the bank, flapping ponderously up from the reeds with a mournful croak.

There seemed, all at once, to be some commotion among the crew. Again came a running to and fro, a quick jabbering. Then there loomed against the pallid west the uneven grassy outline of a crumbling city-wall, fallen here and there in rounded gaps and here and there rising to its full height, black and solid. The boat was run into a reedy inlet where no current stirred. She was poled and pushed and pulled in among a tangle of rushes and marsh-grass, and came to rest.

Chun Lon's figure darkened the open end of the boys' quarters, and he beckoned with one thin finger outlined against the dusk. One of the boat-coolies shouldered the box and trotted