V
在接下来的两个小时里，我们都到达了旅店，在那里他们用热酒给可怜的Bcnoni的伤口敷药。然后，大家就如何处理瘸腿的骡子和受伤的司机进行了激烈的讨论。有一件事是显而易见的：我们必须在当天下午出发。这对贝诺尼来说似乎很残酷，但这是几件坏事中最小的一件。如果他只是严重擦伤，那么在他好转之前，他将会更加僵硬和疼痛。如果是更严重的情况，我们最好的办法是马上带他去看医生。
Over the Frozen Yalu
By Alice Tisdale
FEBRUARY 1917 ISSUE
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I
WE had planned it for two years now, — a cart journey over the frozen Yalu. The first winter it was so bitter cold that no foreigner could risk it. It is now February of the second year. With a succession of freezes and thaws, the rivers in Southern Manchuria have not yet become safe for cart travel. It looks as if we should have to give it up again, for the partial trails in the virgin forest are scarcely passable unless frozen.
Here’s to the luck of the roamer! We have had a week of continued cold weather and at last the Yalu has frozen over. They say that, if we start immediately, we can finish the river part of our journey before the ice breaks. The Yalu forms the eastern boundary of Manchuria, with Korea lying just across. The great river winds and winds for about two hundred miles, then divides, one branch following the Korean shore, one the Manchurian. In between these branches is a triangular-shaped piece of Manchuria, almost entirely cut off from the mainland, separated from her own by these bridgeless tributaries. Higher up, the branches dwindle to thin streams, and Manchuria again becomes one. But as this takes place in the impenetrable land near the Long White Mountain, the lonely inhabitants of the triangle must depend upon the winter ice and summer junks for outside communication. This leaves an inbetween time of thin or floating ice. As my husband’s business takes us some two hundred miles up the eastern side of the triangle, to a big lumbering town, and then across a wide stretch of country full of ranges of mountains covered with forests, the danger is that we may be caught in this veritable island at the time of its isolation.
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Here’s to the dear kind gods who look after wanderers! We shall trust them not to block our path with floating cakes of ice, leaving us, like Crusoe, on a separate portion of the earth. Such a journey! It would rejoice the heart of any vagabond. Days and days on the ice, among the tilled and partially tilled hills of the lower reaches of the river. Then a plunge into that isolated triangular-shaped treasure-land, a faroff country full of hidden coal, copper, and gold, stretches and stretches of glorious timber and — bandits and wild animals! It is the country holding the Chinese pot of gold at the end of China’s rainbow. From confiscated Korea the Japanese follow this rainbow with hungry eyes.
But to the white world, this part of Manchuria along the Yalu is almost unknown. Younghusband and a couple of comrades spent a year’s furlough there in 1888. Since then this inaccessible wilderness of wealth has been left almost to itself, so far as the occidental explorer is concerned, only now and then a business man venturing into its wild, unsettled regions. Some ten years ago a picturesque Englishman, famed all over Manchuria for his erratic doings, went through it hunting a gold mine, the concession papers for which he made out himself, and they were afterwards proved fraudulent. Occasionally, in the years since, large firms operating in the Orient have sent a white man through. There are also rumors of a sea-pilot and his wife who, long ago, went by native boat for a holiday part way up the river. But never before had a woman gone over the whole of this territory, or attempted any of it in the winter.
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It’s pack and go. We have just been down to the foreign store of the little port where we live. It closely resembles a country store at a four-corners in America. A Gobi dust-storm — a veritable brown blizzard — had blown up, but donning dust-goggles and great coats, we ventured forth. What cared we? In a few hours, we will once more be together on the trail — a new one, an untried one. Once more, out came the rough clothes of the road. Not a feminine garment went into that chest. I could have hugged for very joy the good stout shoes, the breeches, and rough jacket. They meant for me freedom from the proprieties which sometimes crush from life some of its buoyant gayety.
We caught the night express for Antung, the great port of the Yalu. The train pulled slowly out into the blizzard and the night, slipping past deserted Russian barracks, eloquent of the great Russian advance; here and there the Russian cemeteries spoke all too eloquently of the later retreat. On that Buddhist plain, many days from the frontier, the Greek crosses of the huddled graves looked lonely and exiled.
In time Mukden was gone and the monotonous prairies. Close against the cold window-pane I pressed my face, straining my eyes into the blizzard for one glimpse of the eternal hills. ‘ Hurry, hurry, fire-cart! the trail, the trail under the open sky, the trail among the hills, is just ahead.’ And then I went to sleep and slept until we pulled into Antung in the early morning.
All the next day we were busy. First, there were the carts to get — one for ourselves and one for those indispensable factors, the ‘ boy’ and the middleman. We began early on these, for we knew by experience that it would be an all-day job to complete the Oriental bargaining. The carters must, of course, start far in excess of the fair price, and we far below. Then, by night, without either of us ‘losing face,’ we would reach an in-between price; the middle-man, and the carters, and the boy, and various other hangers-on would have carefully arranged the little matter of ‘ squeeze ’ attendant upon the transaction. Has it been said, ‘There is six feet of ground awaiting the man who tries to hustle the East’? Let it also be said that the six feet await him even sooner should he seek to eliminate ‘squeeze.’
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The list of the clothes we are to wear is appalling: two suits of flannel underwear each, flannel shirts, fur-lined trousers, sweaters, short leather furlined coats, heavy shoes, and then the final layer — sheepskin coats with the wool so thick we can scarcely move in them, and Chinese felt moccasins to go over our big shoes.
Our greatest asset is our boy. He lived in Harbin during the winter of the plague; he was one of the retinue of the picturesque Englishman when he went hunting the gold mine. He has been a carpenter, a farmer, a coolie, a boy, and a boatman. He changes his role as easily as the chameleon its color. In times of stress on the road, such flexibility is salvation.
Thus attired, thus equipped, on the twenty-first of February we left Antung — the last place we were to see for many a day that had even the first prerequisites of civilized comforts. ‘It is good to cast them all away,’—so sang our hearts as at six o’clock in the morning, in blackest darkness, we stepped from the overheated hotel into thequiet cold, just before dawn. Our two carts, covered with heavy blue cloth and lined with furs, stood ready at the door; the carters moved around, giving a last greasing to their wheels. The foodboxes, looking very small to hold a month’s rations, were roped on the back; then came the clothes chest, also roped on. The bedding-roll was put in the back of the cart. Last of all, on top of the grain sacks of our last journey, we stuffed in a thin mattress which we were to use on the k’angs1 at nighttime. This mattress was our latest device for making endurable the jolting of the oaken cart-bodies which sit, with no gentle intermediary of springs, directly on a solid oak axle.
I had grown to twice my usual size in my layers of clothes, and the cart, with its furs and mattress, seemed to have shriveled; but, by dint of much pushing by my husband and much pulling on my own part, I managed to crawl in. My husband jumped to his usual place across from the driver; the boy and the middle-man were already in the cart behind; the ‘ escort,’ consisting of one soldier, walked ahead. Somewhere from within the bundle of animated clothes which represented the driver, we heard the tzu-tzu, the equivalent of the Yankee ‘gid-dap.’ We were off, rumbling over the snow-covered streets of Antung! Turning once and then again, we had left Antung behind. In another half hour we had reached the frozen river where lay the trail of the winter.
II
I have surely sipped some potion meant for gypsies; for as soon as we were in that bumpy cart, with the surety of days afield, my spirit took on a serenity peculiar to ourwandering days. By the time we had reached the river, the knack of riding in a Peking cart had come back to me, and I snuggled down into my furs.
‘Happy?’ asked my husband.
I sighed contentedly.
The front of the cart, with its fur curtain rolled up, was a window, arched at the top, framing for me the pageant of the winter frontier-land. On either side were the white hills, over our heads was the gray sky, before us the frozen Yalu. Above it, far to the horizon, there snaked along, now on one side, now on the other, a dark streak. Thus had the winter road been blazed out to avoid thin ice, and rapids where the water flowed too fast to freeze.
Tinkle, tinkle went the tiny bell on the shaft-mule; click, clack went the cart as the mules trotted briskly over one of the very few good roads a Chinese mule ever sees. The sun came over the mountain-tops, touching that deathlike gray world with an elfin touch, transforming it into a shimmering glory. In that radiant morning, over the sparkling ice and snow moved the peasants, bent on business, bent on pleasure, rejoicing with the married children, mourning for the dead. Black spots advanced out of a shining haze, grew large, took on shape.
‘I see trees as men walking,’ said I laughing.
‘They are Koreans,’ said my husband.
They were all in white, with their billy-cock hats perched rakishly on top of fur bonnets. From the soft shining distance there emerged great producecarts pulled by long lines of mules, with dark hooded figures huddled on the top of the load. Foot-travelers came along, sombrely clad, bent low under the loads on their backs. Slog, slog, they moved past us. There were sledges drawn by the family ox. By the ox’s side plodded the man of the family; on the sledges, wrapped in padded blankets, sat gay little ladies, jewels in their glossy hair. From the blankets peeped bright-eyed babies, their cheeks red with cold and daubs of paint. Now that the crops were harvested they were all going visiting.
By and by there came a funeral procession, a startling splash of color. Musicians in Lincoln green carried great gold-colored instruments. Faint fragments of the dirge, now high wailing, now deep groaning, reached us, grew louder, shrieked in our ears, and passed. The procession followed — a long line of muffled black figures carrying the paper paraphernalia of the dead: gaudy red-paper chairs, a great blue cart, as large as the real ones passing, tall phantom servants, and gay paper-doll ladies riding large birds of luck, looking as witchlike as Mother Goose on her broomstick sweeping the sky. Pace, pace from the bank above, came the great catafalque in a clinging mantle of red, borne aloft by beggars gathered in at random, their rags flapping bizarrely below their hastily donned garments of state. In sackcloth walked the mourners.
The little padded driver drowsed. The right-hand mule, resembling the famous Modestine, tried to take every snowy by-path, shied at every familiar and unfamiliar object. But we were very gay and light-hearted and never minded anything — just watched the peasant world file past us.
‘Hey!’ cried my husband, as that wicked white mule gave an extra jump, ‘wake up here, Schnicklepenutz, and tend these mules.’
‘He’s not a German, he’s got a queue,’ I protested.
‘I can’t help it, he’s square-headed and got short legs, and Schnicklepenutz he shall be,’ shouted my husband from over the top of his fur collar.
So Schnicklepenutz he remained to the end of the chapter, and drowsed as well under that name as under any other.
‘ And Benoni shall be the name of the driver of the other cart,’ my husband continued; ‘ I feel that he is marked for tragedy.’
Far into the evening we rode under the pale rays of the moon. We were going to do a splendid day’s work—a hundred and twenty li (forty miles). The road was good, the mules were fresh, and we unconscious of our cart-bruises, because we had not as yet slept on them. Somewhere about nine o’clock we drove our mules up the bank into the street of the first town from Antung. The street was dark and empty, for the curfew rings up here at eight o’clock. All the shutters were closed; the three or four iron bars of each door were slid into place. We found the shop we were looking for; the middle-man descended and hammered on the door until some one within shouted through the cracks, asking who we were.
'Kai mun, kai muni’ (Open your doors, open your doors!) ‘ We are from Antung. We have business with you.’
‘Wait, wait!’ they cried, ‘we must ask the head-man.’
More questions from within, more waiting. Then the bars were slid back, and we were received with Eastern politeness, served with tea as we warmed our hands over a charcoal brazier, and then given a warm k’ang in an inner room.
Ah me! the change in our spirits in twenty-four hours! All we desired the next morning when we woke, was to be left in peace on the warm k’ang. We were so stiff and sore that we did not like to think of carts. But unfortunately our business was soon done. We had only one difficulty with the shop-owner. Some time before, he had been sent a set of brass signs for advertising purposes. Considering it the rankest extravagance to expose such beautiful things to the elements, he had carefully wrapped them up and put them away. When this matter had been arranged to our satisfaction and his disapproval, we had only to break bread with our host and we were again on our way.
There was a north wind and it was snowing — great heavy flakes. The river had become a stranger. We were speechless, enthralled, unable, to take our eyes from so wildly compelling a thing. The heaps of snow looked vague and unnatural; the piles of ice took on eerie shapes. At four, in a snowy twilight, we saw the sign of an inn — the hoops of red cloth, nothing but a dark scarecrow dangling from a long pole stuck in the snow on the high bank above us.
Trusting that the swinging rags told the truth, — for the bank hid any sign of the inn itself, — we ordered the carters to drive up the track. With the last strain of the mules up the embankment, we found ourselves in the inn courtyard, with its hastily built brushwood fence, the dead leaves still clinging. The building was a long, one-storied mud hut, with thatched roof.
We entered. Behold what the frontiersman had created! The long room was the scene of homely industry. From the centre rafter hung a big oil-lamp, shedding its rays over a patriarchal family as busy as a hive of bees. By the clay stove sat the grandfather feeding the fire with twigs, and tending a brood of children playing on a dirt floor packed hard, swept clean. From one corner came the merry whir of grinding mill-stones, as a blindfolded donkey walked round and round, while a woman in red with a wonderful headdress gathered up the heaps of yellow cornmeal that oozed from the gray stones. More women in red threw the bright meal high in the air, winnowing it of its chaff; others leaned over clay mortars, pounding condiments with stone pestles.
Men were hurrying here and there with firewood, cooking for the travelers. One end of the room was reserved for these wayfarers, but the k’ang at the other end was divided into sections. From each rafter over each section swung quaint little cradles; in each cradle was a little brown baby, each baby tended by a larger child. Far away from the loud clamor of the western world, we fell asleep in a clean inner room, to the soft sound of swinging cradles and grinding mill-stones.
III
Six days, and the first stage of our journey is over. We have reached the town standing just where the river branches. To-morrow we start up the right arm of the triangle, cutting ourselves off from the mainland. The shopkeepers with whom we are staying have given us a k’ang in the cake-kitchen. In a niche above the ovens sits the kitchen god. It is evening now, and a little scullery-boy is making the rounds of all the gods. He has just offered incense and chin-chinned to the kitchen’s guardian angel. I wonder if he looks after vagabonds also — if they don’t possess kitchens of their own?
I woke in what seemed the dead of night, so black it was, with only the tiny points of light from the incense glowing in the room. My husband was calling, ‘ Wake up, wake up, thou sleepy head; ’t is time to burn our bridges.’ Then the boy entered and stuck a lighted candle in some melted wax on the k’ang table. The stage was set for our plunge into the country that might become isolated.
Despite our early rising it was midforenoon before we left. The boy had been warned in a dream of bandits, and it caused a grave discussion; all the owners of the shop stopped work to take part in it. The upshot of it was that the yamen doubled our escort.
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Almost as we started, the character of the country began to change: the slopes of the hills grew sharper, the valleys narrower, scattering hardwood trees appeared, the villages became fewer and fewer, the grain-towers we saw less and less often. The tracts of tilled land were far apart now.
It was cold, hard work climbing. A few steps forward, and a step back we slid. When we stood, at last, on the windy tops, there was inner vision from these vantage-points. We looked at the grandeur of the far-stretching earth. Under the brilliant Manchurian sky we could see for miles and miles, range after range of winter white hills, bare and brown in spots where the wind had blown the snow away. A few brown huts and the brown circling road way below us were the only signs of habitation. All things material receded. Even the hills stood aloof, clothed in cold snow. We dwelt apart in spiritual calm. We felt at one with the learned man of India who had at his finger-tips all the ways of London, all the affairs of India, and yet renounced everything and departed far into the hills, where, on the brow of a mountain, he made himself into a beggar and a holy man, there to spend the years working out the riddle of existence. We were one with t he Hebrew crying, ‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.’ We were one with the first Chinese frontiersman who had made it his duty to build a wayside shrine just where the road went over the brow of the hill, leaving a tree to spread its protecting branches in wind and calm, in rain and sunshine, over the crude altar. We longed to offer incense there, and to toll the bell that hung from a branch of the tree, and thus announce to the valley that one more man had felt the need of something beyond food and raiment.
Three days more. Finally, there began to be timber on the slopes. There was scarcely a hut. The first day we lost our way entirely and found ourselves fifteen li off our road. That meant two hours more added to the traveling day and it brought us at tiffin to no inn at all. The next day we met a peasant boy pulling a sled.
‘How far is it to the inn of the Virtuous Family?’ our escort cried, stopping him on the road.
‘To hell with you! ’ the boy answered. ‘I’m not going along the road to tell you the way,’ he finished insolently.
‘I’ll teach you to insult a soldier out on official business!’ roared our escort, hitting him with the butt of his rifle.
Then, so quickly that it made us blink, down from a hut on the hillside came the men of the boy’s patriarchal family. The oldest one, with a quavering voice but a strong right, arm, belabored our erstwhile brave soldier and marched him off to the hut on the hill. Night was coming down through the narrow valley. We were a bit rueful over the loss of half our escort , but concluded that one was as good as two of such brave men, and hurried along without more ado.
When we entered the inn that night we beheld a witch’s cave. Great clouds of smoke circled to the dim rafters, great clouds of steam rose from the huge caldrons standing over the open braziers. Over them leaned tall men of the North, their faces sinister in the alternate gloom and flashes of light from the wood fires. On t he long k’angs down each side of the room, sprawled the shadowy figures of uncout h wayfarers. By the dark, grotesquely small k’ang tables they hunched, drawing in hot draughts of tea with a loud sucking sound. The earth floor was wet and slimy with the melting snow from the feet of many comers. The dried meat, the baskets of condiments hanging by crooked sticks from the dimly seen rafters, took on fantastic and savage shapes.
Our frugal meal of hot tea, sausage, and dry bread finished, we crawled under the blankets on one end of the warm k’ang, for we were to get no privacy that night (there was no inner room that we could either beg or command). The warmth was acceptable, and despite the smoke and flaring fires we fell asleep.
I was dreaming that I was in Dante’s Inferno when I awoke to find it no idle dream. Many a late traveler had come in while we innocently slept. The cooking-pots at the end of the k’angs, whose fires served the double purpose of heating the k’angs through a system of flues and cooking extra large quantities of chow, had been filled to their utmost capacity, with a proportionate amount of fire built under them. So while the innkeepers did a thriving business, and we slept, the stove beds grew hotter and hotter, until the grateful heat of early evening turned into a red-hot grill. Wearily we turned and turned. The sensation was that of freezing on our upper side and grilling on our lower. Poking holes in the paper windowpanes, we watched for the dawn.
With the first streak of light we roused our retinue. That day we were to make Mao Erh Shan, the Mecca of the lumbering man. Every one was tired, and a tired Chinaman, be he a big brave soldier or a stalwart carter, is a whining crying baby. By noon one soldier had left his pony to wander riderless while he rode on the back of our cart; the other refused to trot his animal. ‘It was colder trotting,’ he complained. The carters, too, refused to hurry; they also were tired and their mules as well. ‘ Let us stop,’they coaxed. When we refused they all started to turn in at a wretched inn twenty li short of Mao Erh Shan, our destination. We were in despair. Then the boy, our staff and our rod in difficulty, came to the rescue. He climbed up on the soldier’s pony and beat him into a wabbling trot. His long fur gown flapped to the four winds; the pony baulked and plunged, but the boy beat on and on with the silly little whip, until our mules caught the excitement and actually trotted. The twenty li were made, and Mao Erh Shan. Thus ended the second stage of our journey.
IV
Even as we opened our eyes the next morning we were conscious that we were no longer in the silent white wilderness. All round us rose the sounds and smells of teeming life. Our breakfast quickly eaten, we were out on the street. Rough characters with strong, insolent faces slouched along; the restaurants were as thick as flies in summer. The occasional shops looked incredibly prosperous for China. There was none of the almost penurious thriftiness that usually marks even the wealthiest shops. The owners boasted that they had refused the agency of several large foreign firms. ‘It does n’t pay to bother with them,’ they said arrogantly. They saw things large; they ‘ talked big.’
Everywhere were the evidences of good wages, of the large profits ot a new country. It reminded one of the mad life of Alaska when the miners came in with their pokes of gold. Money came easily and it went even more easily. Lust and license ran riot as they do in lumbering camps the world over, only here there was the momentum gained from a wild oriental abandon. On the edge of the clean new country men were crazed with the possession of money easily obtained.
After two days of struggle with these men swollen with power, my husband decided to move on. We could delay no longer. It was March now, and we still had seven days’ journey through the forest to the other tributary, which we must cross to get over to the mainland of Manchuria. In a half hour after leaving the roaring, rioting town we were in the thin edge of the virgin forest underneath which lay China’s hidden treasure.
Oh, the wonder of those days! We saw the earth almost as it was made in the beginning. Deeper and deeper we penetrated, higher and higher we climbed. There was ineffable stillness and peace boundless, eternal. We had passed, for the time, far away from man. We saw the activities of our lives in the perspective of the past days of toiling travel. At last we stood on the highest pass in all our journey. Around us lay sunshine and sparkling snow; close at hand a dead pine, bare and naked, stood out majestically. Down the slopes marched the trees; far off the mountains were gray, hidden in fastrising snow squalls. A great wind came biting against us. It was a supreme moment.
Having crossed the last high range of mountains, we descended into the more sheltered land on the other side. With a gasp we realized that there was something new in the air, something living, something fresh. ‘Look! ’ I cried. We looked around us at the ground, at the sun; we looked at each other. We reached our hands out beyond the cart. The wind touched them softly.
My husband groaned. ‘It looks like spring, it feels like spring, it smells like spring, and by gorry, it is spring! A few days like this and the river will be too rotten to risk the carts on it.’
‘It can’t be,’ I said. ‘Why, it was only yesterday that we ran and thrashed around to keep from freezing.’
‘And we have nearly a thousand li more to do,’ continued my husband.
‘Wake up, wake up, old Schnicldepenutz,’ we both cried, poking the driver’s drowsy, padded back. ‘It’s going to be a race with spring. None of your Eastern procrastination.’
Thud, our cart roundly struck a stone in the soft snow. We had n’t time to consider its message before we saw ahead the undeniable sheen of water in the two cart-tracks down each side of the road.
‘This afternoon,’ we decided, ‘we must go a long way before we stop. Somehow we’ve got to manage to hustle the East and we’ve got to get started sooner at noon than we usually do.’
Oh, for the best-laid plans of mice and men!
‘We’ll have beans, boy,’ we said; ‘and tell the carters chop, chop, must hurry.’
‘Master,’ replied the boy, ‘carters say must stop, very late now, to-morrow can go.’
‘Why?’ we cried.
‘Mules very tired.’
We were paying the carters by the day; hence the need for rest.
‘Tell carters, must go. No go, no money to-day.’
The boy departed and we went on with our beans.
‘All right,’ said the boy returning, ‘can go little way.’
But we had no sooner finished our beans than a soldier from the town entered, clicked his heels (if one can be said to click heels booted in cloth shoes), and stood at attention.
‘The head-man of the town invites you to be so good as to remain here for the rest of to-day. There is a band of two hundred hung-hu-tzes [bandits] coming down from the North. He has sent out the soldiers, but there may be fighting on the road, and will you be so kind as to wait, at least until to-morrow?'
Of course there was nothing to do but ‘ be so kind as to wait.’ The carters had a lovely, quiet afternoon of snoring sleep after their midday wine; for us there was nothing to do but go out and ruefully survey the snow melting in the afternoon sun, and sit in the inn listening to tales of bandits.
Whether it was due entirely to fate, or whether the gods conspired against us, I really cannot say. I am inclined to believe the latter. I think the gods reasoned this way: ‘We cannot allow any one to hurry the East, however necessary it may be to him personally. If it is once allowed, there is no telling where it will stop. We must save a few quiet corners, else gods, and fairies, and beloved vagabonds will disappear.’
Be that as it may, we had carried out our rushing programme for only two days when, in a wide valley between hills, our shaft-mule fell lame. First he began going very slowly, then he limped, and finally, as we came to the end of the valley and started on the inevitable pull upwards, he refused altogether to go on. What were we to do? Schnicklepenutz got down to look him over. He grunted angrily; it was evident that he was not going to risk the life of a perfectly good mule.
Then there was a consultation and an argument; everybody got out. First Benoni climbed down from his cart, then came the boy, then our middleman extricated himself, and last of all, as he could not be heard in the discussion, down jumped my husband. Sun, the middle-man, who liked ease and not too many hours in a cart, was for stopping. Schnicklepenutz, who wished to lose neither his mule nor his three good dollars a day, was also all for stopping. The boy, who cared not a fig for the mule, the money, or the ease, was for going on; not that he felt the danger of delay, — to that all Chinese are superbly indifferent, — but he was highly disgusted with them all. We, who did not intend to risk our lives on the rotten ice of the far-away river, were for hunting for a new equipment; only we knew all too well that, if our retinue wanted something else, however acquiescent they might seem to our wishes, the new equipment would not be forthcoming. Then Benoni, who was a relative of Schnicklepenutz and wanted to keep intact the mules and money of the family, offered a solution: put our big white pulling-mule in the shafts and give the lame one the lighter work. Since the big white one had never been in the shafts and was an ill-tempered beast to boot, he, Benoni, would be the driver, as he was the best hand with the animals.
The leather buckled, the ropes tied, the strings of the mysterious harness knotted, the big mule gave a wicked shake in the shafts, then started to climb without more ado. The scheme had worked! By our watches we had lost only half an hour.
Up we climbed, the big mule pulling bravely and the alert Benoni flicking the ears of all three at just the moment to avoid every frozen lump, every stone. It was a work of art, the ascent of that pass! We almost concluded to ride down in order to save time and see Benoni’s fine work. Still, as Schnicklepenutz, his heavy brain working more slowly, had not reached the brow of the hill, we might as well walk, especially as Benoni was discreetly tying our wheels. We waved him on; it is never safe to be ahead of the carts on a down grade, for sometimes they take a sudden slide. Benoni, whip and lines in one hand and the other free to steady the cart, ran along at the side. ‘ Tzu, tzu, oah, oah.’ The white mule squared his haunches, planted all his four feet firmly; the cart with its locked wheels slid behind him.
We danced after them down the wintry road. Faster and faster they went. We fell behind, panting, and then stopped, transfixed to the spot. The mules were running; the cart was hopping at their heels. Benoni was plunging along, but never for an instant did he stop swinging that circling whip.
Now the mules were galloping! The cart seemed to be climbing up their backs. The melting snow hid a glaze of slippery ice, and Benoni’s felt shoes were his undoing. Running full tilt, down he went, his whip still waving, and slid headlong over the ice. In one lightning moment the heavy studded wheel of the cart rode over him. We closed our eyes.
When we looked, Benoni was dragging himself by means of his hands back up the road toward us. His first instinct pulled him away from that awful solitary experience back to his fellows. Not far below him was his cart all tangled in some underbrush, hanging just above a precipice, and the mules lying flat in the snarled harness, with one shaft pinning the white mule to the ground.
By this time we had all, even the supercilious boy, reached Benoni. Why he was alive we could not understand; but we found that the ugly wheel had passed over his leg only, and his padded trousers — two or three pairs — had saved it from being broken. There was the mark of the iron studding on his flesh, and his face was white and drawn with suffering. With set teeth he got up on his feet and took a few steps toward the inn in the valley below. Schnicklepenutz had already departed to view the wreck of his possessions. Hurt relatives were all very well, but what about hurt mules and broken carts? We turned round to see his short legs astride one mule’s head. The bad mule had grown restive and was endangering the cart and the mules, himself included. We bethought ourselves of our own possessions, corralled a passerby for Benoni to lean upon, and departed. The stout cart and stouter mules were all right, but the ropes that held our boxes to the back of the cart had broken, and our clothes, business reports, and cherished rations were scattered far down the ravine. A morning lost, a lame mule, a hurt driver, our few biscuits in the mud at the bottom of the ravine, business reports torn, and no farther toward that river.
‘ We will not try to hustle the East,’ ruefully said my husband; ‘even the mules are against it. Still, there’s the river!’
V
In the course of the next two hours we all reached the inn, where they applied hot wine to poor Bcnoni’s wounds. Then there was a furious discussion as to what to do with the lame mule and the hurt driver. One thing was evident: we must start that afternoon. It seemed cruel to Benoni, but it was the least of several evils. If he were only badly bruised, he would be stiffer and sorer long before he was better. If it were something worse, our best course was to get him to a doctor at once.
Theories were good, but who should drive? It takes a long time to learn to guide the proverbially stubborn mule with the flick of a whip and a few guttural notes. Up came the boy. Why had we not thought of him before? Was n’t he a carpenter, a poler of boats, a farmer? He could not drive very well, but he could flick the whip and Benoni promised to sit out in front and give the tzu tzus and oah oahs, and Schnicklepenutz was to drive each cart in turn down the passes. With such highly specialized labor we started.
The first day was finished. We had moved slowly but surely toward our destination. A second day and then a third, and we were started on the fourth. By changing our course we had struck an unfrequented road. Our highly specialized labor was very slow. That day we had to grit our teeth anew. There is no quitting on the trail, even if a steep pass does suddenly confront you toward dark, after the evening freeze has set in and made the melting streams, that had covered the road during the day, turn to a smooth glare. Lame mule, sick driver, every one had to buckle to the work in hand. Every one except the sick driver was out to lighten the pull-back of the carts. The drivers clucked and clucked, and when the mules slipped and gave up, slash! went the whips, goading them on to a frantic leap. Our ‘ escort ’ and my husband pushed from behind; Sun and I followed with rocks to block the wheels if the cart started sliding. We were on the last steep grade. The lame mule, panting, sweating, went down; the cart slid; our stones did not hold, and back toward the other cart it began to glide. Frantically we clawed the freezing earth for fresh blocks. It was a sickening moment, but we got them there in time.
Just how that last grade was made I do not know. My whole will was set on the task of not breaking down. I must not be a quitter. Long ago I had honestly earned the name of ‘ trail woman ’ from my husband, and I was not going to lose it now. So I kept saying to myself, ‘Brace up and be a man.’ So saying, and watching the moonlight streaming over the valley, I kept plodding behind my husband toward a light that seemed to evade our approach. Then, after an eternity, we were at the inn and drinking hot tea that brought tears to my eyes. It was just the tea, I am sure; my husband did not see them.
Benoni secured a driver for his team and we got a whole outfit to take the place of Schnicldepenutz’s. Such a cart! It was like the one-hoss shay — so old that if it broke at all it would be a final break-up; and the driver resembled his vehicle. Old in limb and soul, he had no interest in anything but a large bean-cake for fodder which, with the stubbornness of old age, he was determined to put directly under the place where I sat. And we named him Jehoshaphat. We planned it all out: six hundred li to do; ten li an hour, ten hours a day, a stop of one day at the station on the river. And then across — if the gods were good!
We made the river in the seven days! They said carts were still crossing, but that was not altogether reassuring. The Chinese often cross frozen rivers till some one falls in. Still, we thought the thaws had not been sufficient to melt the thick underlying masses of ice. If only we could choose a lucky place!
To the river we went in the gray early morning. We all sat perched on the front of the cart (the inside would be a death-trap should we go through). There were several tracks. We picked the safest-looking. On to the ice we drove. Slash! went the driver’s whip, flicking each mule’s ears. They plunged into a wild gallop. We were halfway over. We could feel the ice bend under us. Jehoshaphat, the stolid, became motion incarnate. His arms flapped, his whip flew. He waved his feet, drummed them on the shaft-mule’s quarters. He yapped like a dog as the ice crackled round us. Faster! Faster!
We stood again on the good firm ground of Manchuria, and lo, all motion had left Jehoshaphat. He looked like a lump of flesh unquickened by a spark of life. We looked behind us: our other cart was safe also. But over the place where we had just crossed spread a widening crack. The triangular land was entering into its spring isolation.
The heated brick beds found in Chinese inns. — THE AUTHOR.↩