It made you feel queer to see so many
gaunt, wild faces together. The beggars stared about at the sky, at the
sea, at the ship, as though they had expected the whole thing to have
been blown to pieces. And no wonder! They had had a doing that would
have shaken the soul out of a white man. But then they say a Chinaman
has no soul. He has, though, something about him that is deuced tough.
There was a fellow (amongst others of the badly hurt) who had had his
eye all but knocked out. It stood out of his head the size of half a
hen's egg. This would have laid out a white man on his back for a month:
and yet there was that chap elbowing here and there in the crowd and
talking to the others as if nothing had been the matter. They made a
great hubbub amongst themselves, and whenever the old man showed his
bald head on the foreside of the bridge, they would all leave off jawing
and look at him from below.
"It seems that after he had done his thinking he made that Bun Hin's
fellow go down and explain to them the only way they could get their
money back. He told me afterwards that, all the coolies having worked in
the same place and for the same length of time, he reckoned he would be
doing the fair thing by them as near as possible if he shared all the
cash we had picked up equally among the lot.
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