After a little she was able to creep to the rail and peer out through the flowers. Frightened members of the crew were sculling the sampans back and forth, until at length the whole party, every man except the _laopan_ armed, fully assembled, set off inland.
Beyond an unpleasant headache she felt no injury. She sat for a little while; then again looked forward. The two guards were on the deck house, talking excitedly together. While she watched they climbed down, shouted at the huddled crew, fired a careless shot or two into the mass of them that brought down at least one. At length two of the crew went over the side, followed by the soldiers. A moment later the sampan appeared moving toward the shore, the two soldiers loudly urging on the oarsmen.
Dixie, swiftly then, rearranging her disordered hair as she walked, went down into the cabin.
A corridor extended along one side from the _laopans_ quarters under the steersman's house--sounds of stifled weeping came from there, apparently a woman or a girl--forward to the open space amidships. The rooms all gave on this corridor, the doorways hung with curtains of blue cotton cloth. Into one and another of these rooms she looked. There was bentwood furniture and bedding in each---the latter tossed about. On the walls hung neat ideographic mottoes. The grillwork about the windows and over the doors was of a uniform and quaint design.
Connor had taken for himself the rear room. There she found, beneath the window a heap of matting and bedding. Thoughtfully, deliberately, she lifted it off, piece by piece, exposing first a foot and leg, then a bony hand, finally the entire figure of what had been Jim Watson, known, of recent years, along Soochow Road and Bubbling Well Road as the Manila Kid. His clothing was slashed and torn in many places. About his middle, and about his head, were wide pools of blood that during a number of hours, evidently, had been drying into the boards of the deck. The neck, she observed, on closer examination, had been cut through nearly to the vertebrae.
During a swift moment she considered the grew-some problem; then carefully replaced the matting and bedding.
She went forward then to the end of the corridor; paused to look in her shopping bag, open the triangular bottle and drop a few of the green pills into the pocket of her middy blouse, under her handkerchief; closed the bag and stepped out on the low midships deck.