"Him bad man. More better die," said Chang to Emily.

Again there was a cry from Rowgowskii and the boat moved with a quick jerk as he caught hold of the anchor drogue.

These cries brought to Emily Granville a memory so poignant and vivid that action was born of the shock. She moved swiftly from the Shanghai woman's side and shook Lavelle by the shoulder.

"Tell these Chinamen—tell them not to let this man drown!" she cried at him.

Lavelle sat up with a moan. His head dropped forward.

"Don't you hear? Haven't you murdered enough already? Are you altogether a fiend? Hear him crying now!"

Lavelle straightened. She shrank from the glance he leveled upon her. It was defiant, fearless, burning with challenge.

"I never——" His lips, forming in a tense straight line, cut the speech off sharply at the breath of another word. The old look of pain came into his eyes—the pain she had seen there when he stood at the desk in the steamship agency—and he turned away.

Rowgowskii had crawled along the drogue and was hanging now to the bow. Lavelle hurled an angry order in Chinese at the coolies forward and they sprang to their feet. They dragged Rowgowskii aboard and dropped him in an exhausted, shivering heap.

Chang moved aft to where Lavelle sank wearily on the seat built against the air-tank casing and handed him the revolver. He began an apology.

"More better him dead," he said, and Lavelle silenced him with one word that made the giant cower beside him like a dog under a lash.

Emily, seeing this, wondered, for she recalled, with a shudder, the fierceness of this big yellow man in the night.

CHAPTER VII

As the dawn had come quickly, so order sprang out of chaos under Lavelle's quiet voice of command. There was no shouting; no bluster—a certain proof always that it has been given to a man to speak with authority. A word—more often it was but a nod or a wave of the hand—and as if by magic these yellow men translated it into some needed action.

One of the first things Lavelle caused to be done was the moving of the boat's two water breakers aft. He gave each one a drink, apportioning to the coolies what he gave to the others and even 

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