Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/147

Rh poison-shop will be handin' me over as soon as he hears the news of the shindy down the Chien-men Road."

Panic fear caught hold of the corporal, body and soul, and he wrestled with it in the darkness. He knew not whither to turn. Hiding among the Chinese in the city was impossible, and to take to the open road meant capture at Tientsin or Taku if he made his way that far in a flight toward the seacoast. To go blindly into the country about Peking, unarmed and penniless as he was, knowing perhaps five words of Chinese, was to drag out the finish in slow starvation, or to be picked up by a foreign outpost, or to fall among hostile natives. He was as helpless as a castaway adrift on a raft in mid-ocean. The penalties of capture or surrender seemed worse than any sort of death, for Corporal Sweeney had been a good soldier, bred to a hardy outdoor life.

The disgrace tortured him, and either alternative of his situation was unthinkable. Yet after three hours of trembling in his trap, he would have welcomed the chance of flight into the open, beyond the