As I watched, the expression of bitterness was quickly changing, firming, as when new ice spreads its brooding feathers over a lake on a wintry night.

Then this tight-stretched, rope-muscled man leapt into a surprising action—an action of utmost charity.

He ran with springy steps across the deck, and cast off the painter of the sampan from the tholepins where it had been cleated, and in his wide-sleeved black gown jumped like a side-slipping crow from the deck of the junk onto the floorboards of the small boat, which heaved and skidded away from the junk with the crash of his weight. The boat whirled quickly away from us, with the Old Big miraculously standing up in it. Su-ling gasped once and was silent thereafter.

I heard the owner shout the head tracker’s name in a hoarse desperate cackle.

“Ayah!…Ayah!…” The junk was moving forward now.

I saw the owner bend down and pick up a sculling oar and straighten up, waving the T-handled blade to help keep his balance. The cup of a boat shook and dipped and spun in the mad waters, and now the owner’s face was toward us, howling the name of his head tracker, and now we saw his back as he fought, still standing, to keep his balance, making me think of the mock-drunk ropewalkers I had seen in the circuses of my boyhood.

He actually managed from time to time to dip the oar blade in the water, in a surely futile effort to speed his would-be merciful voyage. He went away from us very fast. From a distance, in that haste-spoiled water, we could not see whether the head tracker was getting his head out any more. The owner disappeared around a bend in the river, flapping and chopping in a regular semaphore of his amazing balance, a tiny black staggering figure in the huge water-cut from the rock mountain, a tiny human being way off there, erect, incredibly brave, crying out in the echoing gorge to his needed companion and support, whom he would save if he could.

—

“AYAH!…Ayah!…”

The cook, whose humming had stopped with the fall, and who afterwards had been standing on the deck watching with the rest of us, gave a quiet order to the drummer, suggesting a signal for a slightly faster pace, and reminding the drummer that the drum alone would set the trackers’ rate of progress now. In this way the cook paid tribute to the absence of the head tracker’s haunting chanteys, and also took command of the junk.

“Ayah!…Ayah!…Ayah!…Ayah!…”

I barely noticed how we got through the upper mouth of the gorge, for I was full of what I had seen, dazed by it, and sad.