It was the head tracker’s marvelous swift response that captured my admiration at first, his split-second solicitousness when he heard a cry of pain, his finding in mid-air, as it were, the only way to save the injured boy. But there was more to it than that. His action, which could not have been mulled over in his mind, showed a deep, instinctive love of life, a compassion, an optimism, which made me feel very good—and perhaps were among the things that got me started thinking again about the dam.

That evening on deck, however, the head tracker was for some reason extremely cruel to the farmer boy, not failing to remind him every few minutes that his injury (it was bad: his ankle was as big as his thigh) was nobody’s fault but his own, for having overturned the carcass of a fish aboard a river vessel.

When, troubled by the boy’s pain, I intervened and pointed out that until that afternoon the much-advertised consequence of the boy’s ignorant blunder with the fish had been supposed to be disaster to the junk, not to himself, I became the receptacle of Old Pebble’s scorn, and I wished I had not spoken, and I went aft and covered my ears to shut out the pursuing shouts.

I think that this perhaps was the crucial time: that I might have realized at that moment, had I been more sensitive, the extent of the head tracker’s feelings toward me—feelings of suspicion and resentment and fear, which were so soon to catch on fire.

The boy, now useless, was put ashore the next morning with a few coppers of cash at a village called Tsingshih. What ever could have become of him?

—