Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/153

Rh sounding louder to him than the clatter of cavalry. You Han drove the mule at a gallop and said no word except once, when he turned and remarked:

"Samshu no good, master. Floget it. Dlink water, all l-l-ight."

At daylight the cart was beyond the outer wall of Peking, heading west, as aimless a derelict as ever tossed in uncharted seas. You Han did not veer toward his own home on the Pei-ho, for he knew that it lay in the track of the traffic to Tientsin, and that over the ruins of his village floated the flag of an American infantry outpost. The dawn came clear and cold, but sad in the gray aspect of tenantless villages, and the litter of ungarnered millet-fields stretching over the flat lands to the horizon. The driver told the deserter that the last foreign outpost had been passed, and that he might get out and walk with safety. Half frozen, bitterly bruised from tossing between floor and roof of the springless cart, hungry and weak, the deserter climbed from his ignominious hiding-place and trudged in silence along the rutted highway.