Hills of Han: A Romantic Incident. Samuel Merwin

when she joined him on the deck, that she was riding at the two days as if they were to be her last on earth. Intensely, soberly happy, she was passing through a golden haze of dreams, leaving the future to be what it might.

      They sat, hand in hand, in the bow. She sang, in a light pretty voice, songs of youth in a young land—college ditties, popular negro melodies, amusing little street songs.

      Very, very late, on the last evening, after a long silence—they had mounted to the boat deck—he caught her roughly in his arms and kissed her.

      She lay limply against him. For a moment, a bitter moment—for now, in an instant, he knew that she had never thought as far as this—he feared she had fainted. Then he felt her tears on his cheek.

      He lifted her to her feet, as roughly.

      She swayed away from him leaning against a boat.

      He said, choking:

      “Can you get down the steps all right?”

      She bowed her head. He made no effort to help her down the steps. They walked along the deck toward the main companionway. Suddenly, with an inarticulate sound, he turned, plunged in at the smoking-room door, and was gone.

      Early in the morning the ship dropped anchor in the muddy Woosung. The breakfast hour came around, then quarantine inspection; but the silent pale Betty, her moody eyes searching restlessly, caught no glimpse of him. He must have taken a later launch than the one that carried Betty and the Hasmers up to the Bund at Shanghai. And during their two days in the bizarre, polyglot city, with its European façade behind which swarms all China, it became clear that he wasn't stopping at the Astor House.

      The only letter was from her father at T'ainan-fu.

      She watched every mail; and inquired secretly at the office of the river steamers an hour before starting on the long voyage up the Yangtse; but there was nothing.

      Then she recalled that he had never asked for her address, or for her father's full name. They had spoken of T'ainan-fu. He might or might not remember it.

      And that was all.

CHAPTER III—THE SHEPHERD

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      AT the point where the ancient highway, linking Northern China with Thibet, the Kukunor region and Mongolia, emerges from the treeless, red-brown tumbling hills of Hansi Province there stands across the road—or stood, before the revolution of 1911—a scenic arch of masonry crowned with a curving elaborately ornamented roof of tiles. Some forgotten philanthropist erected it, doubtless for a memorial to forgotten dead. Through this arch the west-bound traveler caught his first view of the wide yellow valley of the Han, with its yellow river, its square-walled, gray-green capital city, and, far beyond, of the sharp purple mountains that might have been cut out of cardboard.

      The gray of old T'ainan lay in the massive battle-mented walls and in the more than six square miles of closely packed tile roofs; the green in its thousands of trees. For here, as in Peking and Sian-fu they had preserved the trees; not, of course, in the innumerable tortuous streets, where petty merchants, money-changers, porters, coolies, beggars, soldiers and other riffraff passed freely through mud or dust, but within the thousands of hidden private courtyards, in the yamens of governor, treasurer, and provincial judge, in temple grounds outside the walls, and in the compound of the American Mission. At this latter spot, by the way, could be seen, with the aid of field-glasses, the only two-story residence in T'ainan; quite a European house, built after the French manner of red brick trimmed with white stone, and rising distinctly above the typically gray roofs that clustered about its lower windows.

      There were bold gate towers on the city wall; eight of them, great timbered structures with pagoda roofs rising perhaps fifteen yards above the wall and thirty above the lowly roadway. The timber-work under the shadowing eaves had sometime been painted in reds, blues and greens; and the once vivid colors, though dulled now by weather and years, were still richly visible to the near-observer.

      Many smaller settlements, little gray clusters of houses, lay about the plain on radiating highways; for T'ainan boasted its suburbs. The hill slopes were dotted with the homes and walled gardens of bankers, merchants and other gentry. On a plateau just north of the Great Highway stood, side by side, two thirteen-roof pagodas, the pride of all central Hansi.

      About the city, on any day of the seven, twisting through the hundreds of little streets and in and out at the eight gates, moved tens of thousands of tirelessly busy folk, all clad in the faded blue cotton that spells China to the eye, and among these a slow-moving, never-ceasing tangle of wheeled and fourfooted local traffic.

      And along the Great Highway—down the hill slopes, through suburbs and city, over the river and on toward the teeming West; over the river, through city and suburbs and up the hills, toward the teeming East—flowed all day long the larger commerce that linked province with province and, ultimately, yellow man with white, at the treaty ports, hundreds of miles away. There were strings of laden camels with evil-looking Mongol drivers; hundreds and thousands of camels, disdainfully going and coming. There were hundreds and thousands of asses, patient little humorists, bearing panniers of coal lumps and iron ore from the crudely operated mines in the hills. There were hundreds and thousands of mule-drawn carts, springless, many with arched roofs of matting.

      Along the roadside, sheltered by little sagging canopies of grimy matting, or squatting in the dirt, were vendors of flat cakes and vinegary sumshoo and bits of this and that to wear. Naked children swarmed like flies in the sun.

      The day-by-day life of the oldest and least selfconscious civilization in the world was moving quietly, resistlessly along, as it had moved for six thousand years.

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      Reverend Henry B. Withery, on a morning in late March, came, by springless cart, out of Kansu into T'ainan. A drab little man, with patient fervor in his eyes and a limp (this latter the work of Boxers in 1900). He was bound, on leave, for Shanghai, San Francisco and home; but a night at T'ainan with Griggsby Doane meant, even in the light of hourly nearing America, much. For they had shared rooms at the seminary. They had entered the yielding yet resisting East side by side. Meeting but once or twice a year, even less often, they had felt each other deeply across the purple mountains.

      They sat through tiffin with the intent preoccupied workers in the dining-room of the brick house; and Mr. Withery's gentle eyes took in rather shrewdly the curious household. It interested him. There were elements that puzzled him; a suggestion of staleness in this face, of nervous overstrain in that; a tension.

      The several native workers smiled and talked less, he thought, than on his former visits.

      Little Mr. Boatwright—slender, dustily blond, always hitherto burning with the tire of consecration—was continually fumbling with a spoon, or slowly twisting his tumbler, the while moodily studying the table-cloth. And his larger wife seemed heavier in mind as in body.

      Mr. Withery found the atmosphere even a little oppressive. He looked up about the comfortable, high ceiled room. Mounted and placed on the walls were a number of interesting specimens of wild fowl. Elmer Boatwright, though no devotee of slaughter or even of sport, had shot and mounted these himself.

      Withery asked him now if he had found any interesting birds lately. The reply was little more than monosyllabic; it was almost the reply of a middle-aged man who has lost and forgotten the enthusiasm of youth.

      There was talk, of course; the casual surface chatter of folk who are deeply united in work. A new schoolroom was under construction. Jen Ling Pu, a native preacher, was doing well at So T'ung. The new tennis court wasn't, after all, long enough.

      During