Such words Yuan read scarcely heeding them any more. It did not make him angry now to hear his old father boast, and if he answered anything it was only to smile somewhat sadly because such boasting had once a power to frighten him, and now he knew it was only poor empty words. Sometimes he thought to himself, “My father grows old indeed. I must go to him in the summer and see how he does.” And once he thought moodily, “I might as well have gone this holiday for all the good it did me.” And he sighed and fell to reckoning how much of his debt could be paid by the summer, at the rate he could pay it, and hoping his wage would not be delayed or held back as it now was often in these troubled times which were not wholly old or wholly new and full of many uncertainties.
So there was nothing in the Tiger’s letters to prepare his son for what befell him.
One day when Yuan had only just risen from his bed and stood half washed beside his little stove, where every morning he laid his own fire and lighted it for warmth against the cold wet air, there was at his door a knock, timorous and yet persistent. He cried out, “Enter!” and there entered the last man he would have said could stand there, and it was his country cousin, the eldest son of his uncle, Wang the Merchant.
Yuan could see at once that some evil had befallen this little careworn man, for there were black bruises on his skinny yellow throat, and deep bloody scratches on his small withered face, and he had a finger gone from his right hand, and a foul rag dark with blood was red about the stub.
All these violent marks Yuan saw, and he stood speechless, not knowing what to say or think, he was so surprised. This little man, when he saw Yuan, began to sob but he held his sobs noiseless under his breath and Yuan saw he had some terrible tale to tell. He drew his garments quickly about him, therefore, and he made his cousin sit down, and he fetched some tea leaves in a pot, and poured water from the boiling kettle in the little stove and then he said, “Speak when you can and tell me what has happened. I can see it is some very fearful thing.” And he waited.
Then the man caught his breath and he began, but in a low small voice, looking often at the closed door to see it did not move, and he said, “Nine days ago and one night the robber bands came against our town. It was your father’s fault. He came to spend a while at my father’s house and wait for the old moon year to pass and he would not be still as an old man ought to be. Time and again we besought him to be silent, but he would boast everywhere how he planned to go out to war against this robber chieftain as soon as spring was come and how he would down him as he had before. And we have enemies enough upon the land, for tenants hate their landlords always, and be sure those somehow told the robbers to incite them. At last the chieftain grew angry and he sent men out to cry everywhere in scorn that he feared no old toothless Tiger, and he would not wait for spring, but he would begin war now against the Tiger and all his house. … Even so, my cousin, we might have stayed him, for hearing this, my father and I, we made haste to send him a great sum of money and twenty head of oxen and fifty head of sheep for his men to kill and eat, and we made amends for your father’s insult, and besought the chieftain not to heed an old man’s talk. So I say it might have passed except for a trouble in our own town.”
Here the man paused and fell into a fit of trembling and Yuan steadied him and said, “Do not hurry yourself. Drink the hot tea. You need not be afraid. I will do all I can. Tell on when you are able.”
So at last the man could go on, subduing his shivering somewhat, and he said, his voice still strained low and half whispering, “Well, and the troubles in these new times I do not understand. But there is a new revolutionary school in our town nowadays, and all the young men go there and they sing songs and bow their heads before some new god whose picture they have hanging on the wall and they hate the old gods. Well, and even that would not matter much, except they enticed one who was once our cousin before he took vows — a hunchback — you never saw him, doubtless.” Here the man paused to make his question, and Yuan answered gravely, “I have seen him once, long ago,” and he remembered now that hunchbacked lad, and he remembered his father had told him he believed the boy had a soldier’s heart in him because once when the Tiger passed by the earthen house the hunchback would have his foreign gun and he took the weapon and looked at its every part as fondly as though it were his own, and the Tiger always said, musing, “If it were not for that hump of his, I would ask my brother for him.”—Yes, Yuan remembered him, and he nodded and said, “Go on — go on!”
The little man went on then, and he cried, “This priest cousin of ours was seized by this madness, too, and we heard it said he was restless and not like himself for these last two years, ever since his foster mother, who was a nun nearby, died of a cough she had for long. When she lived she used to sew his robes and bring him some sweetmeats sometimes she made which had no beast’s fat in them, and then he lived quiet. But once she died he grew rebellious in the temple and at last he ran away one day and joined a band of a new sort I do not understand, except they entice the farming folk to seize the land for their own. Well, and this band joined with the old robbers and filled our whole town and countryside with confusion beyond any we have ever had, and their talk is so vile I cannot tell you what they say except they hate their parents and their brothers, and when they kill they kill first their own households. And then such rains as never were have fallen on the lands this year, and the people knowing flood sure and famine after, and made more fearless by the weak new times, have thrown aside their decency—”
Now the man grew so long at his tale and began trembling so again that Yuan could not bear it and he grew impatient and forced him on, saying, “Yes, yes, I know — we have had the same rains — but what has happened?”
At this the little man said solemnly, “This — they all joined together, robbers old and new and farming folk, and they fell on our town and sacked it clean, and my father and my brothers and our wives and children escaped with nothing but the little we could hide about us — and we fled to my eldest brother’s house, who is a sort of governor in a city for your father — but your father would not flee — no, he still boasted like an old fool, and the most he would do was to go to the earthen house on the land which was our grandfather’s—”
Here the man paused and then shivering more violently he said breathlessly, “But they were soon there — the chieftain and his men — and they seized your father and tied him by his thumbs to a beam in the middle room where he sat, and they robbed him clean and they took especially his sword which he loved, and left not one of his soldiers except his old hare-lipped servant who saved himself by hiding in a well — and when I heard and went secretly to his aid, they came back before I knew it and they caught me, and cut my finger off, and I did not tell them who I was or they would have killed me, and they thought me a serving man and they said, ‘Go and tell his son he hangs here.’ So I am come.”
And the man began to sob very bitterly and he made haste and unwrapped from his finger the bloody rag, and showed Yuan the splintered bone and ragged flesh, and the stump began to bleed again before his eyes.
Now Yuan was beside himself indeed and he sat down and held his head, trying to think most swiftly what he must do. First he must go to his father. But if his father were already dead — well, he must have hope somehow since the trusty man was there. “Are the robbers gone?” he asked, lifting up his head suddenly.