I went aft, perspiring. I had lost face badly, I knew, and I was very angry with myself for having spoken a word about the theft. He had trimmed me very skillfully and made me a laughing-stock. Thenceforth, whenever there would be a burst of laughter among the trackers, forward, I would be obliged to think they were savoring over again the head tracker’s handling of the angry young foreigner. Why had he stolen the watch? Was it because my watch was a threat to the timepiece in his head? Was it because my dam was a threat to his very existence?

About an hour later Su-ling, who had gone up forward for some hot tea and had stayed to talk there awhile, came back. I was alone on the conning deck. She came straight to me and in a furious whisper she said: “You foreign devil! Why did you speak about changing the river in front of him that way yesterday? I warned you!”

My anger over the watch, and my shame at having lost face, stirred me and I challenged her: “What harm was there in it? Why are you so excited about it now?”

“What harm? Old Pebble is three-quarters crazy over what you said—that’s the harm.”

“He did not seem the least bit crazy when he sat with us this morning, or when I talked to him not long ago at rice-time.”

“He would not show you how he feels! He has been saying all kinds of wild things all day. Now he says he thinks you brought a curse on board; he says you are trying to spoil the river for us all.” She no longer seemed angry with me; only afraid. “I don’t know what he’ll do,” she miserably said.

Part Four: The Path

We dropped our moorings and got ready to track into Wind-Box Gorge against a swift current early in the morning under a light haze.

The river was rising very fast. While our trackers were laying out their lines, a downbound junk passed us. Its bow steersman shouted across to us that the river had risen thirty feet in three days on Goose-Tail Rock at the upper mouth of the gorge. Su-ling had told me about this great sentinel-rock, which in wintertime at low water looks, she had said, like a huge reclining tiger; in summer it vanishes under the flood waters. As she had described it, I concluded that it must have been bigger than the Sphynx of Gizeh. Now it was almost wholly submerged, and in a few days, when it would be covered, the authorities would take its disappearance as their accustomed cue to shut down river traffic altogether, until the waters would fall and the danger abate. Ours would be among the last few junks to go up.