The suspense
of being shut up in one's house during a time of trouble of this nature,
hearing every rumor which lying tongues create, and unable to get at the
facts, is far worse than being in the thick of things, although this
would have at once been fatal. But one needs to have lived in China
during such a time to understand the awful tension which riots
occasion.
The rioters were stationed as follows:--
1. Weining, in Kwei-chow, to the southeast 1,000 men
2. Kiang-ti Hill, in Yuen-nan, to the south 1,000 men
3. Several places around the city, to the west as far as the River
of Golden Sand 1,000 men
On March 13th a night attack was expected. Breathless, the foreigners
waited in their suspense, but it passed off without serious damage being
done. On the Sunday, the missionaries, almost at their wits' end with
mingled fear and excitement, occasioned by the strain which weeks of
anxiety must bring to the strongest, feared whether their services would
be got through in peace.
Meetings were being held all around the city, and gradually the
mandarins gained small successes. Prisoners--miserable specimens of men
fighting for they hardly knew what--were captured and brought to the
city, and, on March 16th, sixteen human heads, thrown in one gruesome
mass into a common basket, with upturned eyes gaping into the great
unknown, hideous-looking and bearing still the brutish stare of
hysterical craving and morbid rage, were carried by an armed squad of
military to the _yamen_.
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