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Chinese way.
    There was nothing he could do for her now.
    After Wei, the mountains grew higher and the valley seemed less populated. It was almost a shock when a mining complex suddenly appeared in the window, complete with winding gear and mountains of glistening coal. Black-faced Chinese coolies were doing all the work, dragging carts of coal up ramps and tipping them into the railway wagons. Three German overseers were standing to one side, comparing notes about something or other.
    The train soon stopped at a station, and two more Germans got on. They ignored the Chinese people who had bowed to McColland then ignored him, too, as if intent on proving that race had no part in their arrogance. Which suited him well enough—if word of his escape were clicking along the telegraph wires, it clearly hadn’t reached them.
    But it had been clicking—he was almost certain of that. Failing to find him in Tsingtau, the Germans were bound to spread the net wider. They might not know he was headed their way, but the German authorities in Tsinan would certainly be on the lookout.
    The last major stop was Tschou-tsun. After the train pulled out, the conductor stopped for another chat, and there was no change in his manner to suggest fresh intelligence, causing McColl to wonder whether he himself was in flight from a phantom. Maybe the girl was still refusing to speak or didn’t know his name—that was something he should have asked Hsu Ch’ing-lan about. This wasn’t his finest hour, he realized. His report to Cumming would need some glossing.
    And he still had Tsinan to cope with. His best bet, he decided, was a variation on his departure from Tsingtau. On the journey down from Peking ten days earlier, he had noticed that Tsinan had two stations, one where travelers on the Peking–Pukow line changed for the Shantung Railway and another, closer to the town, that was served only by the latter. Any pursuers would assume he had a through ticket and would be waiting at the junction. If he got off at the town station and took a rickshaw across town, there was a reasonable chance he could sneak aboard the Pukow train without being seen.
    The last stage of the journey seemed eternal, but the straggling outskirts of Tsinan finally appeared in his window, and almost immediately the train began to slow. He grabbed his suitcase and made for the vestibule farthest from the luggage car and the conductor.
    The line was running along a slight embankment between a series of small lakes, the town visible beyond those to the south. The moment the train stopped, the Chinese passengers in theopen wagons were dropping the sides, leaping down to the ground, and hurrying away. Cautiously inching an eye around the corner of his carriage, McColl saw the conductor sharing a convivial word with another German stationmaster. There were no other uniforms on display.
    On the other side of the train, a team of coolies was transferring sacks of rice from a boxcar to a line of waiting carts. When the whistle blew and the train began to move, McColl stepped nimbly down and watched it steam away. It couldn’t be much more than a mile to the other station, and for a moment he considered simply walking down the track. But the land on both sides was open, and there was still too much light in the sky—he would stick to his plan.
    Which proved harder than expected. The rickshaw coolie he tried to engage spoke no dialect that McColl could understand and needed more than a little convincing from a better-traveled colleague that this foreigner wanted transport to the town’s other station—a station he could have reached much more simply and cheaply by staying on his train. Once persuaded that his prospective passenger wasn’t simply deranged—or at least not dangerously so—he allowed McColl into the seat, picked up the bamboo shafts, and set off at a steady jog for the city gate some two hundred yards distant.
    Passing through this, the rickshaw swayed along a