Chapter XIV

When, at the conclusion of my first ten days’ term in the jacket, I was brought back to consciousness by Doctor Jackson’s thumb pressing open an eyelid, I opened both eyes and smiled up into the face of Warden Atherton.

“The ten days are up, Warden,” I whispered.

“Well, we’re going to unlace you,” he growled.

“You observed my smile,” I said. “You remember we had a little wager. Don’t bother to unlace me first. Just give some tobacco to Morrell and Oppenheimer.”

“Who ever heard of a man,” Doctor Jackson said, “smiling after ten days in the jacket?”

“Unlace him, Hutchins,” Warden Atherton said.

“Why such haste?” I queried, in a whisper. “Why such haste? I don’t have to catch a train, and I am so comfortable as I am that I prefer not to be disturbed.”

But they unlaced me.

“No wonder he was comfortable,” said Captain Jamie. “He didn’t feel anything. He’s paralysed.”

“Your grandmother is paralysed,” sneered the Warden. “Get him up and you’ll see him stand.”

Hutchins and the doctor dragged me to my feet.

“Now let go!” the Warden commanded.

My body had been practically dead for ten days, and as a result, I had no power over my flesh. So I crumpled, pitched sidewise, and gashed my forehead against the wall.

“You see,” said Captain Jamie.

“A good actor,” retorted the Warden.

“You’re right, Warden,” I whispered from the floor. “I did it on purpose. Lift me up again, and I’ll repeat it. I promise you lots of fun.”

I shall not describe the agony of returning circulation. When they finally left me I lay for the rest of the day stupid and half-comatose. There is such a thing as anaesthesia of pain. And I have known that anaesthesia.

By evening I was able to crawl about my cell, but not yet could I stand up. I drank much water, and cleansed myself as well as I could; but not until next day could I eat.

The program, as given me by Warden Atherton, was that I was to rest up and recuperate for a few days, and then, if in the meantime I had not confessed to the hiding-place of the dynamite, I should be given another ten days in the jacket.

“Sorry to cause you so much trouble, Warden,” I had said in reply. “It’s a pity I don’t die in the jacket.”

At this time I doubt that I weighed more than ninety pounds. Yet, two years before, when the doors of San Quentin first closed on me, I had weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds.

There are those who wonder how men grow hard. Warden Atherton was a hard man. He made me hard, and my very hardness reacted on him and made him harder. And yet he never succeeded in killing me.

Ed Morrell wanted to know if I had succeeded with the experiment; but when he attempted to talk with me he was shut up by the guard.

“That’s all right, Ed,” I rapped to him. “You and Jake keep quiet, and I’ll tell you about it. The guard can’t prevent you from listening, and he can’t prevent me from talking. They have done their worst, and I am still here.”

Hour by hour, I rapped on and on the tale of my adventures. Morrell and Oppenheimer were able to do some talking.

“Hallucinations,” Oppenheimer rapped his verdict.

Yes, was my thought; our dreams and hallucinations come from our experiences.

“When I was a mailman I drank too much once,” Oppenheimer continued. “And I saw very strange things. I guess that is what all the novel-writers do.”

But Ed Morrell, who had travelled the same road as I, although with different results, believed my tale. He said that when his body died in the jacket, and he himself went forth from prison, he was never anybody but Ed Morrell. He never experienced previous existences. When his spirit wandered free, it wandered always in the present. As he told us, just as he was able to leave his body and gaze upon it lying in the jacket on the cell floor, so could he leave the prison. And, in the present, he could visit San Francisco and see what was occurring. In this manner he had visited his mother twice, both times finding her asleep. In this spirit-roving he said he had no power over material things. He could not open or close a door, move any object, make a noise, nor manifest his presence. On the other hand, material things had no power over him. Walls and doors were not obstacles. The real thing was he, was thought, spirit.

“The grocery store on the corner changed its master,” he told us. “I knew it by the different sign over the place. I had to wait six months after that before I could write my first letter, but when I did, I asked mother about it. And she said yes, it had changed.”

“Did you read that grocery sign?” Jake Oppenheimer asked.

“Sure thing I did,” was Morrell’s response. “Or how could I have known it?”

“All right,” rapped Oppenheimer the unbelieving. “You can prove it easy. Get yourself thrown into the jacket, climb out of your body, and go to San Francisco. Just about two or three a.m. they are running the morning papers off the press. Read the latest news. Then get here and tell me what you read. Then we’ll wait and get a morning paper, when it comes in, from a guard. Then, if what you told me is in that paper, I will believe you.”

It was a good test. I agreed with Oppenheimer that such a proof would be absolute.

“My mother believed in spirits,” said Oppenheimer. “When I was a kid she was always seeing them and talking with them and getting advice from them. But the spirits couldn’t tell her where the old man could find a job or find some golden coins or how to win in a lottery. Never. They told her rubbish, for example, that the old man’s uncle had had a goitre, or that the old man’s grandfather had died of galloping consumption, or that we were going to move, which was very easy, seeing as we moved on an average of six times a year.”

I think, had Oppenheimer had the opportunity for education, he would have been a good scientist. His logic was admirable. “You’ve got to show me,” was the rule by which he considered all things. Lack of faith had prevented Oppenheimer from succeeding in achieving the little death in the jacket.

You will see, my reader, that it was not all hopelessly bad in solitary. It might well be that we kept one another from insanity.

On the other hand, we had much and terrible pain. Our guards were brutes. Our surroundings were vile. Our food was filthy, monotonous, innutritious.

We had no books to read. Our knuckle-talk was a violation of the rules. The world practically did not exist. It was more a ghost-world. Oppenheimer, for instance, had never seen an automobile or a motor-cycle. He told me he had not learned of the Russo-Japanese war until two years after it was over. We were the buried alive, the living dead. Solitary was our tomb.

I taught Oppenheimer to play chess. Consider how tremendous such an achievement is—to teach a man, thirteen cells away, by means of knuckle-raps; to teach him to visualize a chessboard, to visualize all the pieces, pawns and positions, to know the various manners of moving; and to teach him it all so thoroughly that he and I, by pure visualization, were in the end able to play entire games of chess in our minds. In the end, Oppenheimer became a real master at the game—he who had never seen chess in his life.

I can only contemplate such exhibitions of will and spirit and conclude, as I so often conclude, that precisely there resides reality. The spirit only is real. The flesh is phantasmagoria and apparitional.

Chapter XV

I was once Adam Strang, an Englishman. The period of my living, as I can guess it, was somewhere between 1550 and 1650. It has been a great regret to me, that I had not been a good student of history.

I recollect so little of the first thirty years of my Adam Strang existence. I, Adam Strang, found myself on sandy islands somewhere near the equator in the western Pacific Ocean. There are thousands of people on these islands, although I am the only white man. The natives are big-muscled, broad-shouldered, tall. The king, Raa Kook, is at least six inches above six feet, and though he would weigh fully three hundred pounds, is so equitably proportioned that one could not call him fat. Many of his chiefs are as large, while the women are not much smaller than the men.

There are numerous islands in the group, over all of which Raa Kook is king. These natives with whom I live are Polynesian, I know, because their hair is straight and black. They love flowers, music, dancing, and games, and are childishly simple and happy in their amusements, though cruelly savage in their angers and wars.

I, Adam Strang, know my past, but do not think much about it. I live in the present. I am careless, improvident, uncautious and happy. Fish, fruits, vegetables, and seaweed—a full stomach—and I am content. No man dare lift hand or weapon to me. I am taboo, I am sacred.

I know all about how I happened to be there alone of all my ship’s company—it was a great drowning and a great wind; but I do not like to think about the catastrophe.

I lived for several years on the islands which are nameless to me, and upon which I am confident I was the first white man. I was married to Lei-Lei, the king’s sister. I was broad-shouldered, deep-chested, well-set-up. I was of value to Raa Kook and enjoyed his royal protection. I could work in iron, and our wrecked ship had brought the first iron to Raa Kook’s land. We went in canoes to get iron from the wreck. These natives were wonderful divers and workers under water. But on the land, due to my strength, I could beat any of them.

In those waters, at that time, the ships were rare. I might well have lived out my days there, in peace and fatness, under the sun, had it not been for the Sparwehr. The Sparwehr was a Dutch ship which found me.

Have I not said that I was a gay-hearted, bearded giant, irresponsible boy that had never grown up? When the Sparwehrs’ water-casks were filled, I left Raa Kook and his pleasant land, left Lei-Lei and all her sisters, and with laughter on my lips sailed away.

We were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty went together. Captain Maartens sought the islands of Solomon, old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find.

We crossed the Straits of Japan and were entering the Yellow Sea on our way to China, when we laid the Sparwehr on the rocks. We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn across a heartless sea. It was winter, there was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever having been visited by navigators. We were eighteen. The rest had perished.

Captain Maartens touched me and pointed upward. Twenty feet below the truck there was a cliff. Above the cliff was a cleft. Two days and nights we were on that cliff, for there was way neither up nor down. The third morning a fishing-boat found us.

The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the villagers were getting us down. They were a poor and wretched folk, their food was difficult even for the stomach of a sailor. Their rice was brown as chocolate.

Their houses were earthen-walled and straw-thatched. Here we lay and rested for some days. The village was on an island, and the villagers must have told about us to the mainland; for one morning three big junks arrived.

One Korean was surrounded by half a dozen attendants, clad in silk. Kwan Yung-jin, as I came to know his name, was what might be called magistrate or governor of the district or province. Fully a hundred soldiers were also landed and marched into the village. I stepped forward as interpreter, for already I knew several Korean words. But Kwan Yung-jin scowled, turned his back and addressed the head man of the village while his six satellites made a cordon between us. Kwan Yung-jin gave a command. Several of the soldiers approached Tromp, who was sitting on the ground. Tromp was rather stupid, and before he knew what was doing a plank, with a scissors-like opening and closing, was about his neck and clamped.

Then the trouble began, for it was Kwan Yung-jin’s intention to plank all of us. Oh, we fought with a hundred soldiers and many villagers, while Kwan Yung-jin stood apart in his silks. Here was where I earned my name Yi Yong-ik, the Mighty.

“Oh God, what will happen then?” asked Vandervoot, another sailor, when we had been taken aboard.

We sat on the open deck. And from the high poop Kwan Yung-jin gazed down at us as if he did not see us. To the mainland we were taken and thrown into a stinking, vermin-infested prison. Such was our introduction to the land of Cho-Sen.

In prison we lay for many days. Kwan Yung-jin had sent a dispatch to Keijo, the capital, to find what royal disposition was. In the meantime we were a menagerie. From dawn till dark our barred windows were besieged by the natives, for no member of our race had they ever seen before. Ladies in palanquins came to see the strange devils cast up by the sea, too.

I have often thought that Kwan Yung-jin suffered from indigestion. Without any reason, whenever the whim came to him, we were all taken out on the street before the prison and well beaten with sticks.

We were pleased when an end to our beatings came. This was caused by the arrival of Kim. Kim? He was a captain of fifty men when I met him. He was in command of the palace guards. And in the end he died for the Lady Om’s sake and for mine. Kim—well, Kim was Kim.

Immediately he arrived the planks were taken from our necks and we were lodged in the best inn. We were still prisoners, but honourable prisoners, with a guard of fifty mounted soldiers. The next day we were on way to the royal palace. The Emperor, so Kim told me, had expressed a desire to gaze upon the strange sea devils.

It was a journey of many days. In a way we were a travelling menagerie. All the country folk flocked to the roadside to see us pass. It was an unending circus procession.

We ate white rice, meat which we found to be dog, and the pickles. And there was drink, real drink, not milky slush, but white stuff distilled from rice, a pint of which would kill a weakling and make a strong man mad and merry.

Due to my strength I was more an honoured guest than a prisoner, and I rode by Kim’s side. Kim was young. Kim was human. Kim was universal. He and I talked and laughed and joked the day long and half the night. I learned their language. And I learned the Korean points of view, the Korean humour. Kim taught me different songs

Hendrik Hamel encouraged and urged me in my friendship with Kim: Kim’s favour went through me to him and all our company. I here mention Hendrik Hamel as my adviser.

Keijo was a vast city where all the population was dressed in white. This, Kim explained, was an automatic determination and advertisement of caste. Thus, at a glance, could one tell, the status of an individual by the degrees of cleanness or of filthiness of his garments.

After resting in an inn for several days, we were summoned before the Emperor. The Emperor advanced to look us over. He was a merry monarch. Not more than forty, with a clear, pallid skin that had never known the sun, he was paunched and weak-legged. His eyes were bleared, the lips twitching and trembling from the various excesses in which he indulged. His servants began to mock at us, and everybody was laughing.

I had the will and the fearlessness. A palace eunuch, tickling my neck with a feather from behind, gave me my start. I gave no sign, made no move, until I had located him. Then, like a shot, without turning head or body, merely by my arm I hit him. My fist met his cheek and jaw. He landed in a heap on the floor a dozen feet away.

There was no laughter, only cries of surprise and murmurings and whisperings of “Yi Yong-ik.” Again I folded my arms and stood. Proud, disdainful, I met the eyes upon me and made them turn away—all eyes but one. These were the eyes of a young woman. She was the Lady Om, princess of the house of Min. Did I say young? She was fully my own age, thirty.

She alone looked me in the eyes without wavering until it was I who turned away. There was neither challenge nor antagonism in her eyes—only fascination.

“Stop it!” I thundered in their own language. Oh, I had a chest and a throat. I am sure such a loud command had never before cracked the sacred air of the Emperor’s palace.

The great room was aghast. Only the Lady Om made no sign nor motion but continued to gaze wide-eyed into my eyes which had returned to hers.

Then fell a great silence. A multitude of eyes timidly stole back and forth from the Emperor to me and from me to the Emperor.

“He speaks our language,” said the Emperor at the last.

“I was born with this language,” I replied. “I spoke it at my mother’s breast. I was the marvel of my land. Wise men journeyed far to see me and to hear. But no man knew the words I spoke. In the many years since I have forgotten much, but now, in Cho-Sen, the words come back like long-lost friends.”

I certainly made an impression. The Emperor swallowed and he asked:

“How do you explain this?”

“The gods of birth were careless,” I answered, “and I was mislaid in a far land and nursed by an alien people. I am Korean, and now, at last, I have come to my home.”

The Emperor interrogated Kim.

“He was always speaking our language, from the time he came out of the sea,” Kim lied.

“Bring me the garments,” I said, “and you will see. And leave my slaves alone. They have journeyed far and are weary. They are my faithful slaves.”

In another room Kim helped me change. He was a good fellow.

“I am of the blood of the house of Koryu,” I told the Emperor, “that ruled at Songdo many years ago.”

This ancient history was told me by Kim on the long ride.

“These,” I said, when the Emperor had asked me about my company, “these are my slaves, all except that old man there”—I indicated Captain Maartens—“who is the son of a free man.”

I told Hendrik Hamel to approach.

“This one,” I continued on, “was born in my father’s house of a slave who was born there before him. He is very close to me. We are born on the same day, and on that day my father gave me this man.”

Taiwun, the Emperor’s brother, was a great drinker, and in the night wore he challenged me to a drinking. The Emperor was delighted, and commanded a dozen of the noblest drinkers to join us. Of course, I won.

The palace was a city in itself, and we were lodged in a sort of summer-house that stood apart. The princely quarters were mine, of course, and Hamel and Maartens, with the rest of the sailors, had to live in what remained.

I was summoned before Yunsan, the Buddhist priest. It was his first glimpse of me and my first of him. Lord, Lord, what a man and a mind was Yunsan! He knew things of other lands and places that no one in Cho-Sen dreamed to know. Did he believe my fabled birth? I could not guess, for his face was less changeful than a bowl of bronze.

What Yunsan’s thoughts were only Yunsan knew. But in him, this poor-clad priest, I sensed the power in all the palace and in all Cho-Sen. I sensed also, that he wanted to use me.

I answered, too, the summons of the Lady Om, following a cat-footed eunuch through quiet palace byways to her apartments. She lodged as a princess should lodge. She, too, had a palace to herself, among lotus ponds where grow little trees centuries old. Bronze bridges spanned her lily ponds, and a bamboo grove screened her palace apart from all the palace.

The Lady Om did not waste time. There were women about her, but she regarded their presence no more than a carter his horses. I sat beside her on deep mats that made the room half a couch, and wine was given me and sweets, served on tiny, foot-high tables inlaid with pearl.

Lord, Lord, I looked into her eyes—But wait. Make no mistake. The Lady Om was no fool. I have said she was of my own age. She knew what she wanted. She knew what she did not want. It was because of this she had never married, although all pressure had been vainly put upon her to compel her to marry Chong Mong-ju, the cousin of the Lady Om.

The Lady Om was a flower. Her religion was a series of abstractions, partly learned from Yunsan, partly worked out for herself. She was beautiful—yes, very beautiful!

I have said she was no fool. In this first meeting I mentioned what I had told all the Court, that I was a Korean of the blood of the ancient house of Koryu.

“Stop it,” she said, tapping my lips with her peacock fan. “No child’s tales here. Know that with me you are better and greater than of any house of Koryu. You are…”

She paused, and I waited.

“You are a man,” she completed. “Not even in my sleep have I ever dreamed there was such a man as you in the world.”

Lord, Lord! And what could a poor sailor do? I blushed, and the Lady Om clapped her hands for her women, and I knew that the audience was over. I knew, also, there would be other audiences, there must be other audiences.

“The woman is a woman,” said Hamel, after deep cogitation. “Win to her, and some day we will get ship and escape from this cursed land. I’d give half the silks of the Indies for a meal of Christian food again.”

He regarded me intently.

“Do you think you can win to her?” he questioned.

It was the challenge. He smiled.

“But not too quickly,” he advised. “Quick things are cheap things.”

Strange days followed: my audiences with the Emperor, my drinking bouts with Taiwun, my conferences with Yunsan, and my hours with the Lady Om. Besides, by Hamel’s command, I was learning from Kim all the court etiquette and manners, the history of Korea and of gods old and new, and the forms of speech. I was a puppet—puppet to Yunsan, who had need of me; puppet to Hamel, who had some plans. Only with the Lady Om was I man, not puppet.

In the meantime, however, I was caught up in a palace intrigue I could not understand. There was something against Chong Mong-ju. There were cliques and cliques within cliques that made a labyrinth of the palace. But I did not worry. I left that to Hendrik Hamel. To him I reported every detail that occurred when he was not with me. As my slave he insisted upon attending me everywhere.

“Stand by me,” I told Kim, “and whatsoever you wish will be yours. Do you have a wish?”

“I would command the palace guards,” he answered.

“Wait,” said I, “and that will you do. I have said it.”

I left scheming and intriguing to Hamel and Yunsan, who were the politicians. I was mere man and lover, and my time was merrier than theirs. I think the Lady Om guessed the truth and kept it to herself.

The time came when our marriage was mooted. The palace was the pulse of Cho-Sen, and when the palace rocked, Cho-Sen trembled. And there was reason for the rocking. Our marriage would be a blow straight between the eyes of Chong Mong-ju. He fought, but Yunsan was ready. The half of the provincial priesthood was his, with, in addition, all the priesthood of the great cities.

“You must grow your hair for the marriage knot,” Yunsan warned me one day.

It was promulgated by imperial decree that I was a prince of Koryu. Next, I was made governor of the seven home provinces of ancient Koryu. In Cho-Sen seven is the magic number.

Lord, Lord, a sailor… I was a governor of seven provinces, where fifty thousand troops awaited me. Life, death, and torture, I carried at my disposal. I had a treasury and a treasurer.

While Yunsan and the Lady Om at Keijo completed the disgrace of Chong Mong-ju, I proceeded to make a reputation for myself. Of course it was really Hendrik Hamel at my back. Through me Hamel taught our soldiers drill and tactics and strategy.

Back to Keijo and the Lady Om. Lord, Lord, she was a woman. For forty years she was my wife. No voice was raised against the marriage. Chong Mong-ju, in disgrace, had retired to somewhere on the far north-east coast. Yunsan was absolute. The Emperor grew more weak-legged and blear-eyed due to the ingenious deviltries devised for him by Yunsan. The Lady Om and I got all we desired. Kim was in command of the palace guards. Kwan Yung-jin, the provincial governor who had planked and beaten us when we were first cast away, I had shorn of power and banished for ever from appearing within the walls of Keijo.

Oh, and Johannes Maartens. Despite my new greatness, I could never forget that he had been my captain. According to my tale first told in Court, he was the only free man. The sly old fox! I little guessed his intent when he asked me to make him governor of the little province of Kyong-ju. And he took four sailors with him.

Gorgeous were the two years that followed. My seven provinces I governed mainly though men selected for me by Yunsan. The Lady Om possessed a summer palace on the south coast, which we frequented much.

Hamel’s plans grew fast. He began to play to have me made admiral of the Cho-Sen navy of boats, and to inquire of the details of the store-places of the imperial treasury. I could put two and two together.

Now I did not care to depart from Cho-Sen except with the Lady Om. When I said the possibility of it she told me that I was her king and that wherever I led she would follow. As you will see it was truth, full truth.

It was Yunsan’s fault for letting Chong Mong-ju live. Disgraced at Court, nevertheless Chong Mong-ju had been too popular with the provincial priesthood. His emissaries were everywhere, went everywhere, gathering the provincial magistrates. The strength of Chong Mong-ju’s palace clique grew. Chong Mong-ju corrupted even the palace guards, whom Kim commanded. And while Yunsan slept, while I devoted myself to sport and to the Lady Om, while Hendrik Hamel perfected plans for the looting of the Imperial treasury, and while Captain Maartens schemed his own scheme, Chong Mong-ju was not seen.

Lord, Lord, when the storm broke! Captain Maartens really precipitated the catastrophe, and what he did was very favourable for Chong Mong-ju.

The people of Cho-Sen are fanatical ancestor-worshippers, and that old pirate with his four sailors raided the tombs of the gold-coffined kings of the ancient land. The work was done in the night, and for the rest of the night they travelled for the sea-coast. But the following day a dense fog lay over the land and they lost their way. He and the sailors were caught by the local magistrate, one of Chong Mong-ju’s adherents. Only Tromp escaped in the fog, and was able, long after, to tell me of the adventure.

That news sprang the palace revolution. By midnight all was over. At nine in the evening the conspirators compelled the Emperor to order the immediate attendance of the heads of all departments, and as they presented themselves, one by one, before his eyes, they were murdered. Yunsan and Hendrik Hamel were badly beaten and made prisoners. The seven other sailors escaped from the palace along with the Lady Om. They were enabled to do this by Kim, who held the way, sword in hand, against his own warriors. Unfortunately he did not die of his wounds.

Chong Mong-ju was in the saddle. Heads of officials fell everywhere, being replaced by Chong Mong-ju’s appointees; but there were no risings against the dynasty.

Captain Maartens and his three sailors were buried to their necks in the ground of the open space before the palace gate. Water was given them that they might live longer to yearn for the food. They say old Maartens lived longest.

Kim was slowly crushed to death, bone by bone and joint by joint, by the torturers, and was a long time in dying. Hamel, whom Chong Mong-ju divined as my brains, was executed by the paddle—in short, was promptly beaten to death to the delighted shouts of the Keijo people. Yunsan was given a brave death. He was playing a game of chess with the jailer, when the Emperor’s, or, rather, Chong Mong-ju’s, messenger arrived with the poison-cup. “Wait a moment,” said Yunsan. “You should be better mannered than to disturb a man in the midst of a game of chess. I shall drink directly the game is over.” And while the messenger waited Yunsan finished the game, winning it, then drained the cup.

Chong Mong-ju did not kill the Lady Om and me. We were not even imprisoned. The Lady Om was degraded of all rank and divested of all possessions. An imperial decree was promulgated and posted everywhere in Cho-Sen to the effect that I was of the house of Koryu and that no man might kill me. It was further declared that the eight sailors who survived must not be killed. They were to be outcasts, beggars on the highways. And that is what the Lady Om and I became, beggars on the highways.

Forty long years of persecution followed, for Chong Mong-ju’s hatred of the Lady Om and me was deathless. He was favoured with long life as well as were we cursed with it. I have said the Lady Om was a wonder of a woman. Somewhere I have heard that a great lady once said to her lover: “A tent and a crust of bread with you.” In effect that is what the Lady Om said to me.

Every effort I made to escape beggary was in the end frustrated by Chong Mong-ju. In Songdo I became a fuel-carrier, and the Lady Om and I shared a hut that was vastly more comfortable than the open road in winter weather. But Chong Mong-ju found me out, and I was beaten and planked and put out upon the road. That was a terrible winter, the winter poor Vandervoot froze to death on the streets of Keijo.

In Pyeng-yang I became a water-carrier, until Chong Mong-ju sought me out, and I was beaten and planked and set upon the highway.

Ever it was the same. There was never a time or place that the long arm of Chong Mong-ju did not reach out and punish and thrust me upon the beggar’s way. Everywhere the messages were sent to Chong Mong-ju at Keijo–of me, of my comings and goings and doings.

There was no escape. Never was I permitted to cross the northern frontier. The guards carried the commands of Chong Mong-ju to every village and every soul in all Cho-Sen. I was a marked man.

Lord, Lord, Cho-Sen, I know your every highway and mountain path, all your walled cities and the least of your villages. For forty years I wandered and starved over you, and the Lady Om ever wandered and starved with me. What we in extremity have eaten! I have stolen bones from dogs, gleaned the public road for stray grains of rice, robbed horses of their steaming bean-soup on frosty nights.

It is not strange that I did not die. Two things supported me: the first, the Lady Om by my side; the second, the certain faith that the time would come when my thumbs and fingers would fast-lock in the gullet of Chong Mong-ju.

For forty years I was a beggar of Cho-Sen. Of the fourteen of us that were cast away only I survived. The Lady Om was a little, toothless old woman; but she carried my heart in hers to the end. For an old man, I still retained great strength. My face was withered, my yellow hair turned white, my broad shoulders shrunken, and yet much of the strength of my sailor days resided in my muscles.

So I was able to do what I shall now relate. It was a spring morning on the cliffs, the Lady Om and I sat warming in the sun. We were in the rags of beggary, prideless in the dust, when a shadow fell upon us. It was the great litter of Chong Mong-ju, borne by eight servants, with outriders before and behind and attendants on either side.

Chong Mong-ju must have been nearly eighty that spring morning on the cliffs when he signalled for his litter to be rested down that he might gaze upon us whom he had punished for so long.

“Now, O my king,” the Lady Om mumbled low to me, then turned to whine an alms of Chong Mong-ju, whom she affected not to recognize.

And I knew what was her thought. The moment had come at last. So I, too, affected not to recognize my enemy, I, too, crawled in the dust toward the litter whining for mercy and charity.

The attendants wanted to drive me back, but Chong Mong-ju restrained them. He lifted himself on a shaking elbow. His withered old face was transfigured with delight as he gloated on us.

“O my king,” the Lady Om whined to me in her beggar’s chant; and I knew all her love and faith in my emprise were in that chant.

I held up my brass begging bowl, and whined more dolefully, and bleared my eyes to hide the blue fire I knew was in them, and calculated the distance and my strength for the leap. Then my hands closed on Chong Mong-ju’s throat. The litter overturned.

Soon heavy horsemen’s whip-butts began to fall on my head. But Chong Mong-ju could not escape me, and I know he was dead when darkness descended upon me there on the cliffs by the Yellow Sea.