The three boys lying, half covered with empty burlap bags, on the bare
earth at the back of the apartment chuckled softly as Jimmie's face
brightened at the small picture he drew verbally, of the luxurious Boy
Scout clubroom in the City of New York.

"New York is a barren island as compared with this place," one of the
boys, Jack Bosworth by name, declared. "Just think of the odor of the
Orient all around us!"

Jimmie wrinkled his nose in disdain and turned back to the window out of
which he had been looking. The other boys, Ned Nestor, of the Wolf
Patrol, and Jack Bosworth and Frank Shaw, of the Black Bear Patrol, all
of New York, pulled their coarse covering closer under their chins and
grinned at the impatient Jimmie, who was of the Wolf Patrol, and who was
just then on guard.

It wasn't much of a window that the boy looked out of, just an irregular
hole in a bare wall, innocent alike of sash and glass. Away to the east
rolled the restless waters of the Gulf of Pechili, which is little more
than a round bay swinging west from the mystical Yellow Sea.

To the south ran the swift current of the Peiho river, on the opposite
bank of which lay the twin of Taku, Chinese town where Jimmie stood
guard. Tungku, as the twin village is named, looked every bit as forlorn
and disreputable as Taku, where the boys had waited four days for
important information which had been promised by the Secret Service
department at Washington.

The gulf of Pechili and the Peiho river glistened under the October sun,
which seemed to bring little warmth to the atmosphere. Junks of all