This was said to give the soldier an opportunity for seeing that no other person was in the room, which fact he would report to his comrades.
As they examined the furious crowd besieging the gate, Jo exclaimed, even more angrily than before:
"Those be no Chang-Chow men, but our friends and own people. They are the dancers, who, together with the good priests, pray constantly for rain, and who went out to the shrine of the holy rain-god but an hour ago. Ah, but you shall smartly suffer for closing a gate of their own city against them. Hasten and open it again if you would have the setting sun behold your worthless head still upon your wretched shoulders."
Thus saying, the young officer spurned the trembling soldier with his foot and followed him down the stairway. In another moment the great gate was opened to the torrent of frantic humanity that rushed in demanding to know what had become of the foreign devil whom they had seen enter only a few minutes before, and where the soldiers had hidden him. Also why they had closed the gate in the very faces of his pursuers.
"Give him up to us," shrieked the priests, "that we may kill him, for doubtless it is he who keeps away the blessed rain."
The denials of the guard that they even had seen any foreigner, or that they had closed the gate, were so little heeded by the clamorous throng, that it might have gone hard with them had not Jo secured a hearing by firing a shot from his revolver, a weapon that he alone of all those present possessed.
"The guard has not seen the foreign devil or surely they would have arrested him," he cried, in the awed silence that followed his shot. "Nor did they close the gate, for they would not dare without my orders, and I gave none. Nor could one man, not even a foreign devil, close the gate unaided, since it often has been tried and they have proved too heavy. Only by magic could he have done this thing, and by magic must he have blinded the eyes of the soldiers so that they did not see him pass them into the city. But your priests have magic as well as the foreigners, and by means of it he may be discovered. Let us then again close the gate that he may not escape, and search for him in every quarter of the city. When he is found let his head promptly be cut off, before he has time again to use his magic. Thus shall the city be purified and the wrath of the rain-god be appeased. Protect the empire! Exterminate foreigners!"