The Girl of the Golden Gate
second and third thwarts and gazed round him in terror. Two of the three Chinese in the bows seized oars and stood like warders at a gate.

The boat was riding in a mass of planks and railroad ties—the deckload of the stranger which had sent the Cambodia to the bottom. Every sea was armed and eager with death. Some carried their bludgeons and clubs openly; others hid them under their white-crested capes, flashing them out treacherously and suddenly as the boat rode wildly to the assault. The sides and bottom of the boat would have been no more than paper under the slightest blow from a piece of this wreckage: a touch and every life in it would have been flotsam. Hunger, thirst, and the terrors of the night were forgotten in the menace of the battle which the yellow giant at the steering oar captained with a master hand.

The white man, kneeling between the thwarts, began shouting orders and warnings. Chang, his thick cue streaming in the wind, his jaw set, his face as expressionless as a piece of parchment, seemed oblivious of what this white man did until he saw him start to heave his big form to a standing position. Then he hurled a curse at him that was like a blow—a curse learned of the sea and white men's lips.

But to the women the giant kept calling, "Bimeby him all go way!" and there was faith in his voice and it passed into their hearts. As often as the boat shuddered from an assault cheated of its death strength he abjured them to be unafraid. No white man could have been more gentle or thoughtful.

Through it all Emily Granville clung to Lavelle's hand as she had in the night. What the Chinaman had said kept forcing itself uppermost in her mind—if the man who lay across her lived, all would live.

Even as Chang had promised the boat passed out of the wreckage. The wind dropped suddenly and peace began its entrance into the sea's worried blue bosom. The sun, leaping to its day's work overhead, touched the boat with its warmth. Emily, following Chang's glance round the horizon, saw a speck away to leeward. It might be another boat he told her.

"Hi!" cried one of the coolies forward, pointing up to windward where the broken half of a boat went by.

"No good look him that way!" shouted Chang, but too late. Emily and Shanghai Elsie saw the grim sea grist and the body of a little boy in pajamas tangled in it. Their eyes met—the Magdalen's and hers of the sheltered life—and they wept together, cheek against cheek, in an 
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