Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 206, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1920 — Yellow Men Sleep [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Yellow Men Sleep

By JEREMY LANE

CHAPTER lll—Continued. When repairs were finished, the unpatoted sloop nosed out of the bay gnd breasted the tameless blue. ,The reptsin had whipped three Chineys Into the crew, and the lad loved them. The mate, also Swedish but inclined to silence, had frightened two negroes up from the back rooms of the city, to add to the quota, A Hindu, wild-eyed and bony, hauled at the sheets, frequently pausing to weep at his own ignorance. On these later occasions, the silence of the mate was broken. Their cook, a salty Irishman, whose life was for some reason tn the gold districts above the bay, cursed with a frantic might his good-will to the new-comer, Stephen March, when the boy confessed In himself a line of Celtic blood. Stephen was happy. His days were filled with strong drink, labor, and dreams. The captain had read three books in English. and he now read them again, aloud to his midshipman. They were the "Travels of Marco Polo," a fathomless treatise on "The Art of Toxins," and the Bhagavadgita. The pages of these three —golden, fragrant, and terrible—were written afresh 'n the eager listener. He strove to conceal how they bit his pride. He slaved at the ropes with the yellow men, and someHpies laughed with them; but they watched him with narrowed eyes and a lowering of the chin, and even Donegan at the stove practised more careful ways in Stephen’s presence. Tn the evenings there were tales of China and her deep, mad deserts. Vague yet irresistible, these yellow strands were drawing him' to MidAsia. Lordliness stirred In his breast. The voyage was an affair of months, gale-cut, but Stephen March had made his own Inner arrival. But he was twenty when he reached the In-Shan mountains beyond the Chin* walk The caravan had left hint at the village khan, for they were turning southward to cross the Hwaugho and proceed upon the Ho-tau plains, over a trail that might once 'have heard merchants whispering the news of Jesus. Here March waited, having no gold. Then, with the urgent, mysterious summons still haunting him, he was forced to turn his back upon the desert, and return to Peking for money. The English girl whom he married to the square city of Peking found in him the quality of lordship. They prospered together. When he was twenty-seven, he went again to the gap In the long Wall, in the north. He had camels and provisions, and a radiant heart. The unknown treasure beckoned. A dimremembered throne seemed waiting out there. But the sleeted storms of winter came against him. and his caravan diminished, until the robbers fell upon them and left their bodies for the wolves when spring should come. Only one other returned with Stephen March —bis Olney boy, who had gone mad with desert fears. The English wife was In mourning, and ’a small child was (earning to walk in the garden court of the Peking house. Then the three of them went to America, where Stephen found much gold, and his Englishwoman had less difficulty in teaching the mothertongue to her son, Andrew. She longed for her lords and their ways—many of them long since turned to quiet dust In some abbey—and the spirit of England must have heard, tor she was taken intWhe bosom of that assembly. Her de»h sharpened the old desire to Stephen, and when Andrew was sixteen, father and son had journeyed together to the far W es Peking, and to the Great Wail and

summer had withered the beasts; how their inspired trail across the sandcrusts and along the rim of gray pits had been dotted with fallen men and camels. The traders Sad warned them, and cursed their purpose, but they had pressed on. away from the troddep routes to north and south, straight into the west, always westward and to the north, until a party of dusty horsemen had ridden thep down, robbed them, and turned them back. Parley was useless. Andrew’s father spoke a language they understood ; yet they gave bit one reply. Broken with defeat, the white man and his son and two drivers returned to the village of Shan-sung. Their camel’s eyes' were black and loose with coming death. Andrew March, when he was thirty, (est his father in Peking, and started westward with a summer caravan. His wife went with him—a high-born Irish girt who refused to stay back. Something In the great Gobi had magnetized her, as well. Her lover’s quest was her own. She loved the twisty old villages of the Interior, loved the fog over the millet fields, the peasants who went about half with age and disease, and she was ready to sing when the sun dime through upon the dripping tiles of a farmer’s cottage. But she could not stop in the pleasant lanes that wandered up from the marshes. Like Andrew, (n whom she believed, she was yearning for the secret of the desert, though she could give no reason. "In the world, we are exiled.” she had said, and possibly she thought their exile'would end if they could find the heart of Mongolia.

Through that memorable summer she had ridden beside her husband. Andrew March planned a southern approach from the Chen-tan break in the Wall, where the forests are thick. In autumn the camels grew fat, and the winter months found them plodding through the rain and snow of the sheltered ridges. Spring came, and the wanderers turned northward, following the clearings through the woods. Eithna’s heart beat high. But as they journeyed, the trees failed in the rocky earth, and an unreal summer stiffened the spine of every camel. The sand blazed on all sides, sparkling upon worn rocks. Andrew had striven to smooth all things for his Elthna. She laughed at his worries.' She was drawing closer to the heart of beauty and romance. They halted in a bleak settlement where a stream had once passed. Now but a muddy spring remained Midsummer beat into their bodies. Eithna’s child was bonf —the only new, clean thing within a thousand miles. Perhaps the immensity of sky, the staring emptiness of the horizon, affected the rosy newcomer. .There was no wall of sorrow from her tiny lips, only a deep-drawn murmur. In their hut the Tartar vfeman, gaunt and hairy, was an unsuspected miracle of tenderness and sagacity. In the following spring, when the glare of the daytime was accompanied by swelling heat, Andrew with his wife and child set forth again. There was no trail. The camels were uneasy. Andrew was worn. He longed to go on, as Eithna did; yet the impulse to turn back was strong Within him. But dhe had told him lightly, and perhaps truly, that China to the south and east would be quite as Inconvenient and much less sanitary than the pathless land before them. The child gravely regarded, sand, rocks and the clear sky, and learned to laugh happily whenever Andrew came to take her. A doll was made of silks and a jackal bone. A shining lizard was also - added to the March family for her entertainment

The beasts grew thin and dry. The wind, a monster serpent of the air, swept before them and over them, reddened the camels’ eyes and darkened their milk. In Eithna’s cheeks the color deepened, and she refused to turn back. Andrew lost count of the days. Two of the pack-animals were killed for food and drink, and a third went down for the lack of the same. The baby girl prospered, and Eithna whispered her songs under the starlight of a grotesque world. * The riders came. From out the west, a little to the north they appeared, a dozen or more —huge men <mounted on short-legged horses, shaggy and half wild. They were silver-eyed Hamitic men. their movements as ineomprehensible as their words. They circled about the young father, and as they drew ta closer, he was ready to fire on them and fight it out. But his legk became suddenly weak, and the sky reeled earthward —and when he awakened It was deep night. The desert was silent and horrible. His body ached, felt thick and clumsy. Then he found the tiny feathered dart, still clinging to his shoulder where they had blown it the poisoned barb under the skin. Andrew had been unconscious for hours. Eithna and the child were gone. Madly he kicked the camels and I raced. In the pale far light of the hMrrrn he thought he could follow [ the tracks of the horses. H* was able

to do so without difficulty, but Jound to his terror that each rider had taken a different direction," radiating out from the point of attack. He did not know which to follow. He was alone. Sanity left him. The camels whimpered and started back the way they had come. Andrew roused from his delirium in the hut where his baby Helen had been born, and the familiar bearded female was watching him. Fever had held him in this hut for many days. From caravansaries to the south he gathered up camels and men and horses and provisions and started northward again In search of his own. Most of the men refused to ride with him beyond the trees, into the forbidden land. Bright-eyed alarm prevented, although a few consented to accompany the white man. Softly moaning wind covered their tracks as they went They moved in large Irregular circles, always northward, searching, until they deserted Andrew for a madman. Stephen March came to find his son, and ended these desperate wanderings. He pieced out the story Andrew could not tell, and gently guided him back to Peking. A ransom was raised, great enough to impoverish the house of March. Now, to carry the ransom to the riders, came the British expedition, and its failure is still on the tongues of certain old-timers. Out of thirty stalwart, sweating, sun-helmeted men, four staggered back to Shan-sung, with a tale of skin-wounds that brought bitter death, and whole mirages of hell. Their mouthlngs were not taken down officially. The stories were tinctured with lunacy, so decided the wise listeners at the legation. Elthna March was never found.

In eighteen years some of the bitterness had faded out of this for Andrew March. His ways were as recondite as those of bls father, his desires farflung to shadowy worlds. To him Eithna was lest, but not forever. His

sorrow was never a blank. He realized how completely an Easterner he was, how Oriental in character. The blessing was that it gave him a Chinese patience. About the time that Con Levlngton was finding the deep places of America, and dipping In rather freely for a young person, Andrew March’s attentiow*had centered upon Chee Ming, newly arrived in Dory street. This Chinese shared his business with no man, intentionally. March had been so light a shadow upon him that the attack in the Wedger house was a real surprise. Levington had worked delicately, and March permitted himself to hope as he had not dared hope for eighteen years. He had seen a peculiar promise in the way Levington had made that stampede down the street in Cincinnati. Con .was close to the elements, had imagination, vigor, and a laugh. In him were centered now all the hopes of an unhappy man. On the night train. Con secured a section, and as a precaution slept in Ue upper berth. He Inserted himself between the stiff brown Pullman blankets, and stared for a moment up into the close curve of the car roof. He thought of the Sonali parchment map against his ribs-—tissue-thin in its tiny leather sack, resembling a Mongol charm, but in this case utilitarian rather than religious, so marked as to guide him —and of the two unusual men whose messenger he was, and who had filled the pouch in his belt with heavy coins and paper, i But the lull of the rushing train, the clicking monotony of the the fresh air that shot in thrtfagh the ventilators, and fatigue wereklaiming an organ-

ism newly tuned to health; and Lovington fell asleep. * He took bls next-mornink’s walk along the swaytag aisles, from coach to coach. He abandoned caution, and felt again a sense of well-being. The breakfast coffee had been good. The train was long and fast He liked to stretch his legs. His spirit rose. While awaiting bls turn ta the barber’s chair, he saw a familiar figure swing into the smoking compartment Con felt the subconsciousness jerk at bis nerves. The man was short and stocky, with a very large, eigar disfiguring his mouth, in a brown-check-ed suit of clothes that gave youth to his appearance despite the gray bristles that were cropped above his ears, beneath the, rim of a brown derby. “Jee, if it ain’t Con Levington I” said the flashy person, throwing out a stubby but newly manicured right hand. “How are you. Stub?” “Never finer, son. It’s great to see you. Where you been keepln’ yourself? They tell me you are hlttln’ the ‘strait and narrow’; how about it?” “Who told you that?” returned Levington, with a laugh. "Don’t we all know it?" exclaimed Stubby Taggart. “Ajin’t saw you at the club since Christmas.” “Was down Cincinnati way,” said Con, aware of another backward rub on his nerves. “I’m no good in cold weather.” “But you sure do eat up them nights tn spring—ain’t I saw you do it, Connie! —when the weather is wooly and soft, and the winter linin’ goes off your taster, and you feel a drought cornin’ on that’ll last you till snow fles again.” I Stubby cackled with head thrown back until the derby was to danger. The other men In-the compartment found it difficult to be as bored as they wished to appear. “I guess they had a spell of hot weather down to Cincinnati, didn’t they?” and Stub set himself off in another fit of laughter. Levington nodded, grinning. Then Taggart lowered hi?! voice discreetly and whispered in his young friend’s ear: "On the level, now, how the did you keep from gettln’ a ride In the blue buggy? They tell me you had everything your own way, with a gat in both mlts.”

“I don’t remember the details,” answered Con, as he shifted the conversation. “What have you been doing. Stubby? You look prosperous. Don't tell me you’ve gone to work.” A hurt expression covered the red, puffy face, but a smile was to it “Work? Work? Ain’t I always been the little hummln’ beq for work?” “I thought perhaps you had a treeful by this time.” “Not at the present price o’ liquor. And say, we’re goto’ through a dry state in a few minutes. I’m In one already. You don’t happen to have a drink anywheres on you?” So they chatted, and the past was shifting before the young man, lurid and restless as a lava lake by night. They talked of the club members —of Spike Taylor and Jim and Posy Mason —those high-strung, wayward children who keep Mother Law awake of nights, and perhaps never come home to her at all. At Vancouver he found there was not sailing that day. At four the following afternoon Levington went down to his ship, the Ensurta Queen, not of a regular line to the Orient. He remained to the cabin while she cleared. At dinner the next day there was animated conversation, but Con was not listening. He Y as watching the steward choose a chair for Cedi Wedger’s Chinese cook, Chee Ming. The wrinkled Celestial looked blankly around the dining-room, allowed his narrow eyes to rest on Levington a moment, looked at him and through him and then on to finish the survey, without the least flicker of recognition.

The “feathered needle” of Chee Ming threatens disaster to Con. .

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

“Jee, If It Ain’t Con Levington.