Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/256

 Miss Macdougal was perhaps less credulous now. She looked keenly at Mark.

"If all this is true," she said, "you're to be pitied. But it's not been my habit to indulge much in play-acting. I fear the best I can do for you is to send you on to the Settlement; there are Americans there, and if any can help you, it's there they can."

She fished in her bag and gave him a handful of cash—"for the chair-coolies," she explained,—and then she gave directions to his porters and left him swiftly. Mark stood looking after the swinging chair, wondering miserably if it would, then, be impossible for any one to believe him. He settled himself in his own chair, the coolies lurched forward, and he turned about—much as Alan had done—to catch a last glimpse of the little Sham-Poo.

The European settlement of Changhow lies four miles outside the Chinese city proper, on a sort of bund that faces the canal. The few ugly foreign buildings stand aggressively alone, and Changhow goes busily about its own affairs without the help or hindrance of the settlement. Mark alighted outside the walls of the administrative building, brushed as much