about their mistress. Mai Lin had no sense of propriety.
"Ha, you are still squeamish?"
"Quiet, I said."
Mai Lin let out a long yawn.
Ahcho tried to think of where the kidnappers might have taken the boy. There was little chance that the opium sots from the nearest hamlet had been involved. They existed only in an ineffectual haze, although he did not blame the Reverend for starting his search there. By the Reverend's description, though, Ahcho could tell that the bandits had traveled a great distance to get here. If still alive, the boy was no doubt being taken far away.
Over the past seven years, Ahcho had accompanied the Reverend further than any men from Shansi Province had gone before. They had seen the Mongolian steppes and the great Gobi Desert, about which Ahcho had previously heard only fantastical stories. He admired the Reverend in many ways, but not least because the younger man had shown Ahcho a world he had dreamed of since he was a child. And now, the Reverend's only son was out there in that vast land.
"She kept calling for her boy," Mai Lin's grating voice interrupted again. "So I gave her something to ease her."
"The Master doesn't like you giving her that," he said.
Mai Lin let out a disgusted puff of air. "He should understand by now that I know best. I saved her twice already when she lost the other babies. The man thinks only Jesus can perform miracles. I am better than that long-faced Ghost Man with the straw-colored hair. You have seen the picture of him in the chapel? Why would anyone believe a person with pink skin and watery eyes the color of a summer sky? That Jesus person doesn't even look healthy."
"This is a sacrilege, you know. Besides, you should be careful. Their bodies aren't like ours."
"That is my point. You be careful of the Jesus man. He is not one of us." She reached into a pouch, and her fingers reappeared with more betel quid, which she packed into her already full cheek.
Ahcho sucked harder on his pipe and watched the small clouds billow and disappear into the darkness around them. The grasses on all sides swayed. How could the Reverend possibly go back into that unfathomable landscape to rescue his son? The long mission trip that had taken place before the mistress had arrived from America was, without a doubt, the most remarkable experience of Ahcho's life. And yet he knew his tired body could not go forth for months on end like that again. At sixty, he was too old. He shook his head and told himself not to worry. There would be time to consider such options. What was that expression the Reverend liked to use about a cart and a horse?
"I am not the one who needs to keep track of my charge," Mai Lin started again with a chuckle. "You let yours wander off, and look where he ended up. He is a grown man, but I believe he had never seen anything like that before." Mai Lin's laugh scraped at Ahcho's weary heart, but her eyes sparkled with mischief that was hard to resist.
"Yes," he conceded, "the Master was out of his element."
She spat into the bushes. "It's high time he had some fun," she said.
"Woman," Ahcho scolded.
"Aha," she said and pointed at him. "You know what I'm saying."
Ahcho straightened up and knocked on the porch railing with his knuckles. He was too old for such talk. It was not proper. Mai Lin adjusted her skirts around her and spat onto the ground. He sensed that she was too tired to tease him any longer, and he was glad.
"It's strange," she said after a moment, "but the Mistress calls out not just for her son and her other babies who were never born but also for the others, the ones who died long ago."
"What ones who died long ago?"
"You know, the other American children. They never live long in Shansi." She shrugged again and spoke as if this were a fact. "They do not belong here and are simply whisked away."
"What are you saying? Of course they belong here," Ahcho said, puffing on his pipe to calm himself. The woman could agitate a stone in a dry riverbed.
"No, they don't," Mai Lin said almost cheerfully. "Remember the boy who was washed off in the Fen River when it rose too high? He fished like a man without the sense of a man. And that other