The owner let Old Pebble take charge of everything. The head tracker was in high spirits after his breakfast, and he made a game of the unloading. All the men shouted and laughed as they worked. Old Pebble’s enjoyment of the process was boundless. I was fascinated by his negotiation to hire fifty porters, each of whom, I gathered, was to get four coppers, the equivalent then of two American pennies, to carry load enough for a sturdy quadruped some three and a half rough miles around the rapids. Old Pebble stood in front of a crowd of ragbag men and boys from the village and called them out one by one. He felt obliged to discuss the qualifications of each porter, to discover each man’s strength and delicacy of pace, as if the Old Big’s junk nested a cargo of fine-wrought jade, and not baled cotton, to be carried up the path around danger.

From time to time the owner intervened in the morning’s work, and he outdid himself with the great loudness of his voice and the darting of his eyes; he was the perfect spokesman for the anger that is the child of anxiety. He seemed dreadfully afraid of the rapids. During the unloading he danced from rock to rock like a threatened sea lion, on each perch cocking his head, gazing at the scattering of his once-compact wealth over a quarter-mile of riverbank, and then, in a quick and terror-stricken glance, forcing himself to examine the rapids ahead. He cursed his men and blasphemed against the river-guarding god. He blamed the porters for their delays and delayed them still further by the length of his sermons on their sloth. He counted the bales of his cargo over and over, and often cried out in mid-count that he had lost track of his numbers.

It was late in the morning before we were ready to leave, and off we set then in single file up a rocky path. To my distress I discovered that the owner had delegated the cook to walk along with our party and look out for the goods, including Su-ling. I should have foreseen that the cautious Old Big would take out an insurance policy, in the person of the rascally cook, to warrant his most precious chattel.

We walked at the head of the procession of overladen, singing, groaning porters up a series of terraces, climbing all the while, around a wide bay formed by a bend in the river. As we climbed away from the river on a path that wound among rocks and gorse-like shrubs, the sun, which had been behind a morning overcast, came flashing out, and the forenoon seemed suddenly a holiday for me.