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waists. 
    The Americans watched the bamboo rod rise and fall and heard the sickening thud of wood on flesh and bone; as the fallen Annamese struggled to raise himself from the dusty road they saw blood welling from the crimson weals on his back. His eyes were squeezed tight in agony, and he and the other three men locked in the shafts grunted loudly with exertion as they strove to get the heavy carts rolling again. Gradually they began to move and the colon flayed each of them in turn once more to increase their speed. As the carts came abreast of the Americans seated in their stationary rickshaws, the Annamese who had fallen opened his eyes, and his pain-clouded gaze locked for a moment with Joseph’s. Then his lids fell closed again and the veins in his neck and forehead bulged as he strained afresh against the neck halter. 
    When the carts had moved on Joseph turned a horrified face to his brother. “Those poor devils looked nearly dead, Chuck.” 
    The elder boy nodded grimly. “That certainly wasn’t betel juice on their backs this time.” 
    A thin, stoop-shouldered Frenchman wearing a pince-nez, who had been watching and listening from the curbside, stepped into the road suddenly and leaned close enough to Chuck for the American boy to smell the garlic on his breath. “They are prisoners! Convicted criminals! They deserve nothing better. Don’t feel sorry for them. All outsiders make that mistake.” He spoke heavily accented English, screwing up his pinched sallow face in disgust. He carried a silver-topped malacca cane and he waved this vaguely in the direction of the strolling crowds all around them. “These people are not like the white races. Don’t think that. Most of them are idle, work-shy, good-for-nothing. Don’t waste your sympathy on them.” He peered belligerently through his pince-nez from one brother to the other, then turned and stumped off, shouldering his way roughly through the oncoming crowds of Annamese. 
    The Sherman brothers looked at each other in silence. ‘Then Chuck shrugged dismissively and raised his eyebrows. “Like the captain of the Avignon said, it’s another world — different from ours.” 
    When his coolie picked up the shafts and broke into his loping stride, Joseph found he couldn’t look at the narrow, sweat- streaked shoulders bobbing in front of him without seeing the bleeding welts caused by the French colon’s cane. A sudden surge of compassion washed through him, and when they reached the governor’s palace Joseph rashly thrust two piastres into the coolie’s cupped hands, thanking him over and over again in French. This was more than three times the normal fare, and the astonished Annamese stood between the shafts of his vehicle staring after Joseph in amazement until he and Chuck disappeared inside the palace. 

4 
    The white stone palais of the governor of Cochin-China was built in the grandiloquent, neoclassical style favored by those fervently patriotic Frenchmen who had erected the great public buildings of Paris in the late nineteenth century. Surrounded by formal gardens in a square off the Rue de Ia Grandière, its imposing façade of fluted Doric columns and carved balustrades had been designed to serve as an enduring testament in stone to the colonial nation’s confident pride in itself. A high-domed cupola of glass and wrought-iron crowned its roof, and from a flagstaff on its summit the French tricolor fluttered in the faint evening breeze as Chuck and Joseph Sherman arrived. They found their parents waiting for them at the top of a wide terrace of marble steps, and the governor’s aide-de-camp conducted them to the reception through a series of lofty, marble-floored chambers forty feet high. 
    In the grand salon white-robed Annamese servants glided silently among the potted palms with silver trays, serving chilled champagne to a big crowd of colons already gathered there. The French men were identically garbed in black trousers and