One noon I was sharing a meal with the head tracker, the rope handler, and a shift of trackers, and I believe the cook himself had paused to sweep a bowlful of rice into his mouth on brisk chopstick ends. Mostly the cook’s eating consisted of tasting; only rice went down in bolts. The eaters, except for me, were squatting on their hams, their heels hard on the deck; I had found that my feet fell asleep in that position so popular in China, so I sat cross-legged leaning back against a big coil of bamboo rope. We were eating fried fish. We were a calm circle; the cook had mildly joked about the impoliteness of the yang-kuei-tzǔ, the foreign devil, me, who had not the common courtesy to compliment his hosts by an occasional graceful slurp or any other slight audible signal of relish, for he ate, the cook said, as silently as a turtle.

To this I replied that in my country only pigs’ food was greeted with pigs’ noises.

“What,” asked the rope handler, a dull and serious-minded boy who took everything I said as an attack on China, “is wrong with pigs?”

With a startling suddenness, the head tracker emitted an angry cry, leapt to his feet, charged across perhaps ten feet of deck, and with purple face flew at the throat of one of the trackers. I saw the victim of this amazing assault, a farm boy fresh-shipped on the river, who had been the butt of much foredeck raillery because of his greenness and clumsiness aboard, but who was willing and hard-working—I saw him look up in a moment of terror at his on-hurtling assailant, and he tried to let free a shout, but the flying noose of Old Pebble’s hands hit his Adam’s apple just then, and only a sickening gurgle came out. The head tracker was shrieking curses. The boy’s head flew back and hit the deck. The other men went on eating with a dreadful kind of caution, like that of bystanders in the Occident at an unspeakable accident, who are so afraid of being dragged into court as witnesses that they turn their eyes from the event with frozen equanimity. I thought the head tracker was having a mad fit of some kind. I wanted to try to stop the terrible thrashing but was somehow held back by the iron hand of the others’ indifference—and also possibly by a recollection of how strong Su-ling had said the head tracker was.

At last Old Pebble let up. The boy lay on the deck barely conscious, moaning and rolling his eyes.

The head tracker stood up. The bow steersman, in a quiet conversational voice, as if nothing more serious had happened than the upsetting of a bowl of rice, asked the panting head tracker, “What did the boy do, Old Pebble?”

“Didn’t you see him?” the head tracker said, raging. “He turned his fish over!”