Slowly the junk righted itself, for the towline had gone as taut as a piano string; all the trackers were leaning forward and pawing at the earth as if their own lives were at stake.

As the deck leveled itself, Old Pebble still stood there with an ashen face, with his arms still stretched over his head, his fists clenched, doing nothing.

Again the nose of the junk began to turn, and it was clear that this time the boat would broach to, and I felt sure that it would capsize.

Just then Old Pebble dropped his arms and clutched at his chest and side, and I thought for a moment he was having some kind of heart attack. But I saw that he was tearing at his great encumbering silk gown of dignity, and in a moment he had it off, and all pretense was off him, and his face had lost its bewildered look, and he ran like a common crewman for a long lizard—a bamboo pole with a hook on it.

As the junk began to heel over very slowly, Old Pebble staggered across the heaving deck, waving the lizard against the sky. He reached up and caught the towline with the hook and pulled it downwards.

He shouted something to the dozen men on the great bow sweep. They pushed down on the treetrunk that served for a handle for the huge oar, and two of them looped over it two bights of bamboo hawser which lashed it amidships with its blade out of water.

Then the men reeled like twelve drunkards to Old Pebble’s side on the rearing deck and with him pulled down on the towline, and with shouts they forced it downwards until it was securely boused in a notch under the stem beam on the starboard side.

By this time the cook, seeing what Old Pebble was doing, had started running up the bund again, and with shrieks that were the best he could do for song, he gave the trackers a rhythm for their steps.

The junk righted itself. The biased leverage of the towline’s new purchase pulled it around. It nosed upstream and slowly inched outward from the shore. When the craft was at the tip of the tongue of the second sluice, Old Pebble and the bow sweepers cast off the boused line.

I glanced up at the flock of pilots. They were pale, and there was no longer a trace of derision on their faces, for they had seen an unexpected flash of courage and seamanship and command do something they could not have done in a thousand years with stately wags of their long-nailed fingers.

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