THE
JESUIT'S
TALE
0457
everything to the soldiers. I trusted you like a friend and you have
sold me. You are here to plead for my life, you double-dealing foreign
devil! But I'll never trust you again. Let them chop my head off
and my shoulders will only be relieved of a big burden. But I tell
you I'll
be
back again as a man within twenty years. Save your
breath now and spend it on me then, if you have twenty more years
to live!'
"The officer promised, before I left, to dispatch in my name
a petition to the governor. The next morning, however, the first
thing I saw from my window was a bloody human head placed in
a wooden cage nailed to the telegraph pole. Under it was a large
placard, filled with characters in a lustrous black, heavily marked
with lines and dots and little circles in red to punctuate as well as
to emphasize the key passages, and bearing in the end the full weight
of authority in the forms of three big square or rectangular seals in
vermilion. Even from that distance, I could distinguish words and
phrases like 'Wang,' 'kidnaper,' 'friendly nations,' 'entitled to protec–
tion,' 'to kill one man as an example to one hundred,' etc.
"So they had hoisted the head and the placard in front of my
church is if to tell me that mYi wrong had been avenged and that
my government should be satisfied now. But the man had died un–
repentant and under the erroneous impression that I had been the
informer. He should have known that with or without anybody to
inform against him he could never have got away with his money
since there was really a sort of net closing in on him and his gang
of evildoers. Of course I have regretted that the man should have
carried down to his grave the grudges he had thus borne me. But
what I have felt most sorry for
is
that I could not save him. I had
talked to him about repentance; I had tried to persuade him to let
me go and not to take one cent of the ransom; I had offered him
help if he would only try to be good. But the things he liked to hear
from me were what food we ate, how we built such a tall building
as our church, how many kinds of guns we generally used; in a
word, he was interested in the life that the 'foreign devils' led, but
the material side of life only. Perhaps, with the ransom in view he
had had some plans of buying some foreign guns, building a big
foreign house, and living like a foreign devil himself.
"But he had made a boastful promise that he would be back
