The lines were ready; Old Pebble waved up from the junk. The head tracker ordered the hawsers cast off that had held the vessel against the bank. We saw him take his outspread stance then, and up went his neck like a spar, till he seemed proud and ready.

“The Old Big looks sick,” Su-ling said. We could see the owner standing by the mast.

“You can’t even see his face,” I said.

“He’s afraid,” she said.

I saw a motion of Old Pebble’s left hand, and fifteen men on the bow sweep heaved it hard over. The big hull sluggishly nosed away from the bank, and the main towing hawser slowly lifted as it took strain from the three-hundred-odd trackers to its point of lodgment halfway up the mast.

All at once the junk was in the raging waters of the approach, shearing out swiftly from shore. It heaved and swayed and seemed beyond being steered. Above the buzzing of the pilots around us, above the rush of the rapids, we heard the dismal whining chant of the bow sweepers as they fought their great oar back toward the bank, leading the huge hull that way, too.

I heard a scream. Our cook was running down the tracking bund, shrieking like a crazy man, “No! No good! No good! The second gate! Go for the second!”

The pilots all laughed.

The junk was indeed tending toward the first of the sluices, an inhospitable little twisted tongue of water perhaps thirty feet from shore. On deck Old Pebble stood as if paralyzed, his arms upraised, doing nothing. “He’s mixed up,” Su-ling said in a miserable voice. He did look as if he were surprised by the circumstances in which he found himself.

“The second gate! The second gate!” the cook screamed again and again.

At the time I was quite certain that the head tracker could not hear the cook’s hysterical shouts from such a distance, for the junk was right in the midst of the worst rushing of all, and Old Pebble stood stock still and seemed to be waiting for someone else to take charge.

All at once the junk began to swing broadside to the current, and the whole craft heeled sharply to starboard, the mast swinging slowly over like a fainting man.

“Finished!” Su-ling cried. “Finished! Finished!”

The towline whipped as the mast leaned over, and the three hundred and fifty men on the bank staggered and were pulled back down the bund several steps, so that their unison pace was broken.

The pilots, who had been laughing a moment before, were now silent or softly groaned, for each could imagine himself on that tilting foredeck. Several of them cried sharply, “Ayah!”—the trackers’ word, which on the pilots’ lips was a shout of despair and pity.