The smoky, dripping flame showed no man there, but only another long bamboo, impaling what might be another ball of rags.

The two poles swayed, inclined toward each other; for one incredible instant the ball, beside its glowing fellow, shone pale and took on human features.

Black shadows filled the eye-sockets, and gave to the face an uncertain, cavernous look, as though it saw and pondered.
How long the apparition stayed, the three men could not tell; for even after it vanished, and the torch fell hissing in the river, they stood below the wall, dumb and sick, knowing only that they had seen the head of Wutzler.
Heywood was the first to make a sound--a broken, hypnotic sound, without emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words torn from him by ventriloquy.
"We must get the women--out of here." Afterward, when he was no longer with them, his two friends recalled that he never spoke again that night, but came and went in a kind of silent rage, ordering coolies by dumb-show, and carrying armful after armful of supplies to the water gate.

He would neither pause nor answer.
The word passed, or a listless, tacit understanding, that every one must hold himself ready to go aboard so soon after daylight as the hostile boats should leave the river.

"If," said Gilly to Rudolph, while they stood thinking under the stars, "if his boat is still there, now that he--after what we saw." At dawn they could see the ragged flotilla of sampans stealing up-river on the early flood; but of the masts that huddled in vapors by the farther bank, they had no certainty until sunrise, when the green rag and the rice-measure appeared still dangling above the Hakka boat.
Even then it was not certain--as Captain Kneebone sourly pointed out--that her sailors would keep their agreement.