_By_ Paul Ellsworth Triem
Closeted with the Surveyor of Customs were his chief inspector,
a clean-cut young fellow named Greaves, and a bullet-headed,
thick-shouldered man who went by the name of Burke.
[Illustration]
Burke was speaking:
“There’s just two of ’em in on this job. One is Lee Hin, a Chink that
dresses like a white man and spends money like it was water. The other
is the man I got acquainted with and got the dope out of. His name is
Ward—Jerry Ward. He’s boatman and runner for Lee Hin. I’ve found out
that they’re intending to pull off a job in a day or two. We can make a
cleaning on them—get them with the goods on!”
Chief Jordan, a florid old fellow with iron-gray hair and kindly,
observant gray eyes, regarded Burke with disfavor, as if he were
examining a particularly noxious variety of insect or reptile. He pursed
his lips and looked deprecatingly at his assistant.
“What do you think, Charlie?” he asked.
“We haven’t much to go on,” Greaves replied, his voice also tinged with
dislike. “If Mr. Burke would tell us a little more—”
Burke shook his bulldog head and growled deep down in his throat.
“You gents know as well as me that I’m taking my life in my hands as it
is. This Lee Hin is bad medicine. He’s got the craft of a Chink and the
education of a white man. If you’ll leave it all to me, I’ll frame things
so’s you’ll get your birds. If you don’t—”
Mr. Burke clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with an air of
finality. His furtive eyes were defiant, as if he perceived the disgust
his presence created. Moreover, there had been a dogged restraint and
circumspection in all that he said—carefully selecting his details,
presenting some which would serve his purpose, suppressing others which
might incriminate him.
“All right.” Jordan whirled his chair toward his flat-topped desk. “You
keep in touch with Mr. Greaves here, and we’ll work with you. Of course
you’re after the reward—”
Again Burke interrupted, doggedly, obstinately:
“Not altogether, Chief. I could have made more by setting in with Lee
Hin. I’m an honest man, and I don’t take to this kind of job. But of
course I’ll accept whatever money there is in it.”
Charlie Greaves escorted Burke to the outer office and, with a feeling of
relief, saw him depart.
“Well, Charlie, this is one end of the business that I call nasty,” Chief
Jordan said, as the inspector re-entered the inner office. “I’d give five
dollars for a chance to kick that scoundrel all the way out of here and
down into the street!”
“I’ll raise you five: I’d give ten!” Greaves replied. “Of course, he’s in
on this thing, but he’ll fix it so that we can’t do a thing to him!”
Jordan nodded.
“Sure! And we’ve got to take up with even a cur like this, when he has
anything definite to offer. All right—you keep tab on him and let me know
if anything develops.”
* * * * *
In Lee Hin’s shack two lights were burning. One was in the front room,
furnished with a square pine table (on which stood the first light) and
two steel cots covered with drab army blankets.
The second light was in Lee Hin’s study, at the back of the shack. On
a high stool, before an enameled bench, which ran the entire length of
this second room, sat Lee Hin himself. He was clad in white, from head to
foot, and over his mouth and nose he wore a mask of padded cotton.
The part of his face that was visible outside of this mask was keen
and animated. His dark eyes glowed, and there was a double furrow of
concentration between them. He was stooping over a glass slide, on which
he had just dabbed a drop of a milky culture from a test tube. He worked
fast, adding a minute drop of stain, then dropped a cover glass into
place and slipped the slide upon the revolving stand of his microscope.
This done, Lee Hin looked up at the young man standing at the other side
of the room.
“Better not come too close, Jerry,” the Chinaman warned, with a
singularly tranquil and impersonal voice. “You know—there is death in the
air of this room sometimes. I’m willing to risk my own life, but not the
lives of my friends.”
In spite of the impersonality of his voice, there was a subtle magnetism
about the Oriental: a radiation of power, which marked him as a born
leader of men. His eyes warmed with the mellow light of friendship as he
raised them to Jerry Ward’s face.
Jerry shuffled nearer the door, glancing suspiciously at the rows of
culture tubes stacked in orderly ranks at the back of the enameled bench.
“I never can make out what the devil you want to tinker with them crazy
little bugs for, Hin,” he observed discontentedly. “If I had as much jack
as you got—”
“Money is not all there is in life, Jerry,” Lee Hin interrupted.
“There is friendship—and service! I am doing this for my country. Her
fisheries represent a tremendous source of wealth. The fungology and the
bacteriology of fishes—it is an inexhaustible subject!”
He paused, glanced keenly at his companion, then abruptly changed the
topic:
“I see you have not changed your clothing, my friend. I know only too
well what that means. The _Shanghai_ is due in this evening. Jerry, can’t
you see how this is going to end? Let me tell you something: that false
friend of yours, Burke, is even now scheming to get the best of you. Do
you know what is in his mind?”
Jerry shook his head, defiance and wonder in his eyes.
“I will tell you. He has fallen in love with Irene—with your girl. In his
malignant pig brain, he is thinking how he can get you out of the way. I
can feel it whenever he comes near—he radiates hatred like a pestilence!”
Jerry laughed uneasily.
“You’re buggy, Hin,” he replied. “Burke won’t try to put no Indian sign
on me—he daresn’t. He’d pull himself in, if he shoved me!”
Lee Hin turned to his microscope.
“What is willed to be, will be,” he observed sententiously. “No man can
overcome his destiny.”
Jerry tiptoed out of the room presently, much after the manner of an
embarrassed gentleman with a hiccough trying to get quietly out of
church. He felt ill at ease. There was something about Lee Hin——
He reflected, as he seated himself on the bench outside of the shack
and stared out toward the open sea, that this Chinaman was a novel sort
of employer. During the six months or better that Jerry had worked for
him, pulling the oars in the skiff while Lee Hin fished with variously
baited hooks at the end of his long, sea-green line, the Chinaman had
never given him a curt word or an uncivil order. He had treated Jerry
as an equal, discounting the white man’s early dislike of Orientals and
his later uneasy recognition of Lee Hin’s intellectual superiority. From
that first moment to the present, there had been an impersonal gentleness
about the Chinaman that had reduced Jerry to a position of almost
worshiping obedience.
Only on one matter had there been any disagreement between them: Lee Hin
felt strongly on the subject of opium smuggling. He would not positively
forbid the young fellow to mix in this illegal traffic, but he was
gradually bending him to his way of thinking, as much by his silent will
force as by his occasional incisive criticism.
* * * * *
Night had fallen, and with it a fog shifted over the rocky shore and out
upon the broad channel. Yellow lights flashed here and there, and the
mournful voice of the fog signal kept up its doleful iteration.
Jerry shook himself and peered down toward the little cove. His skiff lay
there on its side, well above the reach of the rising tide.
Through the mists there came a low, resonant, deep-throated whistle.
Jerry stood up abruptly and entered the front room of the shack. From
one corner he took a lantern with a strip of red bunting tied over the
chimney. This he lighted and carried down to where the skiff lay. On the
end of a six foot stake, with a forked end, Jerry hung the lantern. Then
he took from his pocket an electric flashlight, snapped it a few times to
be sure bulb and battery were in good condition, and finally returned the
flashlight to his pocket and pulled the skiff down into the water.
Five minutes after he had pulled away from the shore, he would have been
invisible to anyone standing at his point of departure. The skiff was
painted a slate gray; and, save for the whitish blotch of the man’s face
in the darkness, there might have been nothing there but a partially
submerged log floating out to sea.
The whistle came again, much nearer. Between the skiff and the shore
the cough of a motor boat sounded. Jerry let his oars rest, with their
dripping blades an inch above the water. The launch passed on, and he
resumed his rowing.
The fog lifted. He could see it hanging over the distant city, a lurid,
angry glow where the illumination of the streets struck against it.
Now the lights of the steamer showed in the darkness, high above the
water, moving silently and majestically down upon the man floating there
like a chip——
Jerry threw his weight against the oars. The steamer was almost upon
him. He sent the boat back its own length, measured with one keen glance
the distance he had allowed for clearance, and took from his pocket
the flashlight. The _Shanghai_ was opposite the spark of red that
indicated the position of the lantern on the shore when Jerry flashed his
signal—three short flashes and a longer one.
Next moment he had caught up his oars. From a port hole high above
there shot a dark object which swooped down and struck the water with a
smashing impact; two other bundles followed it.
The ship continued on its way, but at three points on the dark water
a tiny glow showed where the cork-buoyed packages of smoking opium
were floating. To each had been attached a small glass tube containing
phosphorus, invisible at any great distance, but easily distinguished by
the man in the boat.
Jerry pushed the skiff forward with sturdy breast strokes. He reached
over the side for the first of the packages and hauled it in. Another
stroke carried him within reach of the second bundle.
He was just about to seize it when a warning sound reached him—the cough
of a gas engine. In a flash he remembered the launch which had passed
seaward close to shore. They had taken advantage of the same darkness
that had protected him.
A light blazed out—the search light of the revenue boat.
In that instant the young man thought of his mother, old, placid,
credulous, to whom he had told fairy stories to account for the money
he gave her so prodigally at times. And he saw the dark eyes and the
oval face of a girl—his girl, Irene—and the face of Lee Hin, serene
and impassive as if carved of ivory. It was Lee Hin who had warned him
this very evening; and warned him of the business itself, and of Burke,
Jerry’s associate in it.
As if it had been a spectre, summoned by this racing thought, a face
stood out of the darkness ahead: the red, threatening face of Burke,
standing at the shoulder of another man in the prow of the launch.
“That’s him!” Burke was saying, in his hoarse, growling voice. “Look out
for the dope—”
Jerry gripped an oar and swung himself to his feet. He cast a burning
look upon the informer.
“You dirty dog—”
The nose of the launch rose on the swell. As it came down it caught the
forward end of the skiff under its sharp keel.
In the same instant there was the _crack_ of a pistol, and Jerry pitched
from his skiff into the water. Burke, the gun still quivering in his
hand, stared over, searching the glistening surface of the tide.
“Take that gun away from him!” a voice from the rear of the launch
commanded. “He had no business to shoot—”
“I did it in self-defense!” Burke growled. “In another moment he would
have got me with that oar! Get a move on, you fellows! Grab that package!
We’ve got to get ashore before Lee Hin makes his getaway!”
But when they came to the shack of Lee Hin, ten minutes later, the lights
were out and the place was deserted.
The Chinaman was gone.
* * * * *
On the money he had saved from his profits in opium running Burke was
able to travel north in first-class style. He sojourned for a time in
Canada, then went east and visited New York.
He told himself he was through with dope. Every man’s hand was against
the drug-runner, while the vender of good moonshine or smuggled liquor
was looked upon as a public benefactor. No more opium for him—he would
become a bootlegger.
He stayed in New York ten days, and discovered that the business he had
contemplated entering was organized like a trust or a shipping pool, and
that to enter it he must have “real money.” His little roll, which he had
looked upon with considerable complacency, was reduced to microscopic
size by comparison with the financial resources of these eastern
operators.
Burke cut his New York visit short. Memories were stirring uneasily
within him—the face of a dark-eyed girl, which flashed upon him sometimes
out of the dusk, and the smell of fog blowing gustily down Market Street.
There was nothing like that in the East. He went to Chicago.
In Chicago he stayed two days. He had purposed to remain at least a week,
but on that second day a feeling, which had come to him before, returned
with increased energy. It was what Burke called a “hunch.”
“That little dame is thinking about me,” he growled down in his burly
throat. “She’s forgetting that scut, and I’m going back! I got a hunch
she’ll treat me right, now that she’s forgotten him!”
Three nights later Burke was standing on the upper deck of the Oakland
ferry, looking with ferocious tenderness at the lights of his native
city. The clock in the tower of the Ferry Building showed that it was
still early; but a powdery fog was blowing down street, making it seem
late.
Burke secured a room at a waterfront hotel. He scrubbed and groomed
himself, anointed his hair with perfume, and presently sallied forth. He
was going to test that hunch of his.
He journeyed to an outlying residential district. Down a side street he
tramped stolidly. He turned a corner—and hesitated.
There, a few doors away, was the apartment house. He slipped along to the
tradesmen’s entrance and stepped into its sheltering gloom. He didn’t
feel exactly comfortable. He had pictured himself going boldly up to the
door and ringing the bell. Now he decided to wait a while—to reconnoiter.
People came and went—elderly people; children; occasionally a girl whose
half perceived figure brought him forward, tense and breathless. Then
as he was starting toward the entrance of the apartment, the girl he
was hoping yet fearing to see came down the street from the opposite
direction, passed within five feet of him, and went into the house. She
had not seen him, but he had seen her.
Burke realized that the impression of that pale, sorrowful face would be
with him till he died.
He left his retreat a few minutes later and walked slowly away. He could
feel the perspiration trickling down his forehead into his eyes. His
heart pounded steadily at his ribs.
Burke decided, without thinking much about the matter, to walk the
two miles back to his hotel. He struck off down a street lit with
old-fashioned gas lamps, whose straw-colored flames gleamed green and
witchlike in the eddying fog. He had steadied down to his habitual pace,
and had no premonition to look behind him. If he had only had one of his
hunches now....
But he didn’t. Perhaps it would have made little difference, in any case;
for the lithe figure, which had detached itself from the shadows of a
vacant lot across from the apartment house as Burke departed, blended
easily with the gloom of the late evening.
He returned to his hotel, somewhat reassured by his walk. His blood
tingled and he felt thoroughly alive. He even grinned to himself as he
took his key from the night clerk and went up to his room on the second
floor. He had had a case of “nerves,” that was all.
“Damned if I don’t think I’ve got kind of out of the habit of breathing
this fishy night air,” he told himself, with heavy jocularity. “Well,
something give me the creeps, for sure!”
He closed his window and latched it securely. He had already locked his
door, and now he braced a chair under the knob. There was no transom—no
other opening through which a breath of night air could come, except a
rather wide crack beneath the door.
He ignored this.
* * * * *
Fifteen minutes after Burke had locked himself into his room, the figure
of a young Chinaman might have been seen journeying up Clay Street.
The face of this Chinaman was not an ordinary one. The lips were
thin and passionless. The eyes were inscrutable. There was something
imposing—something of impersonal power—in the serene and almost pitying
expression of that yellow, mask-like face.
The Chinaman wore a loose-fitting silk blouse and silk trousers, and
thick-soled felt slippers and a black silk cap. His arms were crossed
over his chest, and his hands were concealed in the wide sleeves. He
walked with his head bowed, evidently in deep thought.
Instinctively, he followed his rather devious way until it brought him to
a basement door, opening off from an obscure alley. Here he let himself
in with a great brass key.
Once inside the room, he paused to shut and lock and finally to bar the
door before turning on a light. It was a low-ceiled apartment of unusual
extent, so that its farther walls were lost in obscurity. It was warm,
almost steamy; and there was a pungent smell as of seaweed, and the salt
wind from the ocean.
A bench with a white-enameled top was built against one wall. This bench
was covered with racks for test tubes and culture bottles, and with
bell-jars, reagents, stains, a compound microscope with a revolving stand
and other apparatus of various sorts.
The newcomer crossed over to this bench and selected a wide-mouthed vial,
into whose neck he fitted loosely a pledget of absorbent cotton. He
placed the bottle on the bench, convenient to a high stool on which he
evidently intended to seat himself.
Next he selected a surgeon’s forceps with long, thin points, and, with
this in his hand he crossed over to a keg placed on a wooden bench in a
corner of the room. The light, though dim here, sufficed to enable him
to peer down through the netting that covered the keg and to perceive a
myriad of filmy creatures which clung to the under side of the netting.
Deftly he raised the netting at one side, thrust his hand, armed with the
forceps, underneath, and clipped one of the captives by its black-veined
wings. Replacing the netting, he crossed over to the bench and seated
himself on the stool.
With the precision of one accustomed to the handling of minute objects,
he selected from a rack in front of him a tube, plugged with cotton and
partly filled with a milky, clouded fluid. Still holding the little
creature he had taken from the keg by its captured wings, he removed the
cotton stopper from this culture tube, dipped a tiny glass rod into the
turbid fluid within, and applied the rod to the head of the captive. He
then placed the latter in the wide-mouthed vial, replaced the cotton
stopper, and returned to the miniature rain-barrel for a new specimen.
It was slow work, but the man at the bench performed every action with
a machinelike regularity and an unrelaxing attention that showed the
importance he attached to it. At the end of half an hour he had two dozen
prisoners in the vial. He held them up toward the light and crooned
gently to them:
“Little friends—little angels of justice! Justice? But how may I be sure—”
He laid the vial gently down and stood looking at it. His lips moved.
Then his eyes lighted, and hastily he turned and selected another vial,
the exact counterpart of the one he had filled with the “little friends.”
Equipped with this second vial and the forceps, he returned to the keg
and presently he had placed in it a score or so of untreated insects.
He placed the two vials side by side, arranged the cotton which filled
the necks so that it furnished no clew to the identity of the bottle
containing the original captives, and finally he closed his eyes and
shuffled the vials swiftly about.
When he had finished this queer juggling of the bottles, the Chinaman
betook himself to a distant part of the basement, and from behind a
piece of striped ticking, hanging against the wall he took a bundle of
clothing. Quickly divesting himself of the garb he wore, he changed into
this new costume. It was a dilapidated suit, such as might have been
worn by a Chinese laundryman in indigent circumstances.
Next he secured some newspapers, which he folded in such a way as to
approximate the size of laundered shirts. He placed six of these dummy
shirts on a sheet of wrapping paper, folded the latter neatly, and tied
it. Returning with this package to the bench, he wrote the name “Burke”
clumsily on it with a soft leaded pencil, and, after it, some Chinese
characters.
All this time he had resolutely refrained from glancing at the two
vials, but when the package was ready he moved backward along the bench,
fumbling behind him till his slim hand encountered one of the bottles.
Without glancing at it, he placed it carefully in an inner pocket of his
ragged blouse, tucked the bundle under his arm, crossed to the door, and
turned off the light and went out.
* * * * *
The night clerk of the Great Eastern Hotel, many of whose patrons were
sea-faring men, was accustomed to seeing Chinese laundrymen delivering
special orders of shirts and underwear at all hours of the day and night.
He therefore glanced negligently over his shoulder when a meek voice
hailed him from the counter:
“I say, Bossy Man—you sabe Captain Buck? Him come all same today?”
“Captain Burke? All right, John—you’ll find him up in two-one-seven,
street side, back of the hall. He’s in his room now.”
The Chinaman shuffled away, went padding up the stairs and down the long
hall, and found the door of two-one-seven. Here he paused and considered.
He must make no mistake.
He tried the door softly. It was locked, of course. Then he knocked and
raised his voice, speaking English in a way that would have startled the
night clerk:
“Is this Mr. Peter Fitzgerald’s room?”
A rumbling growl ended in a curse.
“No, damn your silly eyes, it ain’t! Get away from that door!”
The Chinaman muttered an apology and retreated audibly. Half way down
the hall he stopped, took the vial from his pocket, and returned to
two-one-seven.
Noiselessly he approached the door and knelt down. He removed the pledget
of cotton from the neck of the bottle and by the light of the hall lamp
gently blew each tiny insect under the door as it was shaken clear of its
glass prison.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, Lee Hin undressed and climbed into bed in the little
chamber adjoining the basement laboratory.
Just before he snapped off the light, he took a pledget of cotton out of
the neck of a wide-mouthed bottle and shook from the latter a score or so
of buzzing insects.
“Little friends!” he said gently. “May the spirit of justice which rules
all things—which holds the suns in their appointed orbits as they swing
through infinite space, and which guides the destinies of the tiniest
insect—may the God of all good men, of Moses and Confucius, decide—and
strike through you!”
Then he turned out the light and went placidly to bed.
* * * * *
Burke slept but poorly that first night after his return.
He was just dropping into a doze when some blundering fool knocked at
his door by mistake; and after Burke recovered from the rage which this
incident occasioned, a mosquito buzzed down out of the ceiling and bit
him on the neck. He killed the insect with the first slap; but a few
minutes later, just as he was again becoming drowsy, another bit him
under the eye.
After that it seemed to him that the room was full of mosquitoes. He made
up his mind that his nerves were playing him tricks. There couldn’t be so
many of the tormenting insects in one room! He had seen none during the
evening. He must be imagining half of it—but there were the bites!
It was nearly three o’clock before he finally fell asleep. And he slept
like a drugged man till late in the morning.
When he got up and looked at himself in the glass, he was furious to find
his face disfigured by three great purple bites. There were at least a
dozen others on his body, but those he didn’t mind. He was thinking of
the effect of these disfigurements on the girl, whom he had resolved to
see tonight.
He killed half a dozen blood filled mosquitoes, perched heavily in the
window, and tramped downstairs to berate the clerk.
The clerk listened to him with gathering wrath.
“Mosquitoes your grandmother!” he snarled. “We never have no mosquitoes
in this house! I shouldn’t wonder if you had the itch. You better find a
room somewhere else!”
Burke looked ferociously at him, but the clerk returned the glare with
interest. Not for nothing had he run a water-side hotel for ten years. He
knew how to meet threat with threat. Burke went out and ate breakfast,
for which he discovered he had little appetite.
He put in most of the day walking the streets, thinking of his
grievances, and treating his mosquito bites. He bought a bottle of lotion
from a druggist. The latter eyed the bites dubiously.
“Those mosquitoes must have been some snapping turtles, friend!” he
commented. “They look more like tick bites. You’d better take something
for your blood—some of this compound—”
Burke seized the lotion he had paid for and dashed from the store. His
head ached. Plainly, everyone was mad—everyone but himself.
For a time, during the middle of the day, the mosquito bites seemed to be
getting better; but Burke continued to apply the lotion, and to inspect
himself in the glass.
He would be fairly presentable by night, at this rate.
It was about four o’clock when he became aware of a shooting pain
radiating from the bite he had first received—the one on his neck. He
jumped up and ran to the looking-glass. The thing had puffed up like a
walnut, and had turned an angry purplish color.
Feverishly, Burke applied more lotion. He made a compress with a wet
towel and wrapped it around his neck. Hardly had he accomplished this
when he perceived that another of the bites was swelling and growing
painful. Within an hour and a half, he had a dozen of these inflamed
places.
Burke realized that he would have to put off his visit to the girl until
next day. Probably the druggist was right—his blood was too thick. He
must buy a bottle of that stuff—that compound. He had been drinking too
much bootleg whisky.
He went to bed early. The thought of food nauseated him. He sank into a
heavy slumber, from which he was aroused by a voice in the room.
It was a thick voice, repeating long, meaningless strings of words. Burke
tried to sit up to listen, and the voice ceased. He was not able to raise
himself, however. Something was wrong inside his head....
It was some time later that Burke discovered that the flat, babbling
voice was his own! It rose to a scream, then shifted into a screechy
laugh....
Strange faces were bending over him. There was a man with a pointed
beard, who looked at him with pursed lips. This man was speaking:
“I never encountered a case of the kind before. I would call it anthrax,
but for the number of the primary lesions. The interest is purely
academic, of course. He’ll be dead within twelve hours. Has he had any
visitors? Any way you can find out if he has any relatives or friends?”
With a strange detachment, as if he were already a spirit, Burke
listened. The night clerk was speaking:
“There has been no mail for him, and no visitors—except a Chinaman, who
brought him a package of laundry. I guess he’s a stranger—”
Burke’s face became purple, and his body drew itself into a great knot.
_A Chinaman to see him!_ Laundry—he had had no laundry!
Suddenly he understood. Perception shone through him like a searchlight.
_A Chinaman never forgets! Lee Hin_—