Late last night the body of a middle-aged man was discovered in the
Rue Pechili by an officer of the French municipal police. The place
was only a few yards from one of the gate-ways of the native city
wall in a quarter which is largely populated by Chinese who have
overflowed into the French quarter. The man had been dead only a
short time. He is supposed to have been an American or Englishman,
although his identity was unknown at the hour of going to press. He
was clothed in gray tweeds badly worn and had the appearance of one
who had suffered from dissipation. He had been stabbed from behind,
in addition to which his body was savagely gashed and mutilated.
The British police were notified and Inspector Burke immediately
took charge of the case.
Captain O’Shea’s second cup of coffee stood cold and neglected while
he continued to gaze abstractedly at the front page of _The Shanghai
Mercury_. He was reading between the printed lines. His sun-browned
face had paled a trifle. He was not afraid, but he was conscious of
that same feeling of physical abhorrence which had taken hold of him
when he first beheld the scarred and branded back of the man dubbed
Bill Maguire.
He was absolutely certain that he could identify the “unknown European”
found dead near a gate-way of the native city. It was McDougal, and
he had been slain because in some manner, as yet unrevealed, he had
played a part in the tragic mystery of the red-haired sailor. Intuition
welded the circumstances together. With this premise O’Shea framed one
swift conclusion after another. McDougal had suddenly veered from his
purpose of going to sea with Captain Spreckels. With the morbid impulse
of a man whose nerves were shattered by drink, he had been afraid lest
the German skipper might find him and carry him off whether or no.
Therefore he had fled to cover, making for the native city where he
doubtless had Chinese friends. Perhaps he had been watched and followed
by hostile agents from the moment he landed in Shanghai.
“I have seen others like him,” said O’Shea to himself. “They will run
from their own shadows, and their friends can do nothing with them. And
I must be getting a bit flighty meself or I would not sit here and take
for granted things that are no more than guesswork. How do I know that
the dead man is McDougal? The answer is this: ’Tis one of me strong
hunches, and they seldom go wrong.”
He passed out of the dining-room and delayed in the office of the
hotel to ask a question of the clerk. The atmosphere of the place was
so wholly European that the China, with which O’Shea had come darkly,
gropingly in touch, seemed almost as far away as when he had been on
the farm in Maine. The clerk went to the porch and gave instructions to
a ’rickshaw cooly, and Captain O’Shea rattled off to the headquarters
buildings of the English police. A Sikh orderly conducted him into
the small room where Inspector Burke sat at a desk scanning a file
of reports. He was a tall, dark, soldierly man of about forty. The
slim-waisted khaki tunic, the riding-breeches, and the polished brown
puttees gave him the air of a dashing trooper of light-horse. Glancing
at O’Shea’s card, he nodded pleasantly and said with a singularly
winning smile:
“And what can I do for Captain Michael O’Shea, of New York? I am very
much at your service.”
“’Tis about the man that was found murdered close by the native city
last night,” was the reply.
“Ah, by Jove!” exclaimed the inspector, and his pencil tapped the desk
with a quick tattoo. “An odd case, that! Most unusual. I was potterin’
about on it a good part of the night. My men report that he was in
Paddy Blake’s place during the evening, but the old rip denies knowing
him, of course. He wants to steer clear of the case. I’m rather
stumped so far. You are at the Astor House? I fancy I saw you there at
dinner last night.”
“Right you are, sir. I am more than a little interested in this dead
man,” pursued O’Shea in a straightforward manner. “And I will first
describe him to ye,” which he proceeded to do with the detail of an
observer whose eye was keen and memory retentive.
“That’s the Johnny, to a dot,” cried Inspector Burke, alertly
interested. “And when did you last see him?”
“I talked with him last night, but before we go further I will prove an
alibi,” hastily answered O’Shea, suddenly realizing that his position
in the matter might look compromising.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” was the easy assurance. “You are jolly well
out of it and satisfactorily accounted for. This was a native job, not
a bit of doubt of it. Suppose we take a look at the body. It is packed
in ice in the go-down just back of this building. Your identification
must go on the records, you know. Then we can have a chin-chin, and I
hope you’ll be good enough to stay for tiffin with me.”
O’Shea took from an inside pocket of his coat a leather bill-case and
drew therefrom a sheet of heavy paper folded several times. Spread
out, it covered half the desk. Upon it he had drawn with a brush and
stencilling ink a life-size reproduction of the great Chinese character
that scarred and discolored the back of the red-haired sailor.
Inspector Burke flung his cigarette aside with a quick gesture and
stared first at the desk and then at O’Shea. His pleasant composure was
evidently disturbed, and he spoke abruptly.
“My word! You know a lot more about this job than I do. Where the deuce
did you get that? The poor beggar that was butchered last night had the
mark on him.”
“I know he did, Inspector Burke. I was sure of it when I read about the
thing in the newspaper this morning.”
They went into the shed and viewed what was left of the ill-fated
McDougal, who had tried, too late, to throw all regrets away and make
a new start at the difficult business of existence. O’Shea was keenly
distressed. The man had won his sympathy. He would have liked to
befriend him. Inspector Burke said kindly:
“Did you know him at all well? He must have amounted to something once.
Was he ever a chum of yours?”
“I never laid eyes on him till last evening in Paddy Blake’s,” answered
O’Shea. “And now I will sit down with ye and spin the yarn of the
sailorman that I called Bill Maguire for convenience.”
The inspector listened gravely, nodding comprehendingly now and then as
if his own experience might have crossed the trail of the same story.
When O’Shea ceased talking, his comment was as follows:
“Most extraordinary! I fancy we can help each other a bit. But, mind
you, I don’t pretend to know much about this mysterious murder society
that goes about choppin’ people up. I have heard of it, of course, but
until now its activities have been confined to the Chinese. We don’t
pretend to police the native city. The Chinese governor runs his own
show. There are native detectives on my staff, but their work is mostly
in the foreign municipality. The case of this McDougal is the first of
its kind. And I rather think you have supplied the motive. He knew too
much.”
“But what did he know?” demanded O’Shea. “There was this sailor by the
right name of Jim Eldridge, ye understand. He got his in the same way.
They were mixed up together at one time or another.”
Inspector Burke withdrew from a drawer of his desk a large envelope
and emptied out several torn sheets and fragments of paper which
looked as though they had been trampled underfoot. Some were covered
with handwriting in English, while others held columns of Chinese
characters. They were so mud-stained and crumpled, however, that only
a few lines here and there were at all legible. O’Shea gazed at them
eagerly, surmising what they were before the inspector explained:
“My men picked them up in the street where McDougal’s body was found.”
“Yes. He must have had a bundle of books and papers under his arm,
for I heard mention of the same,” cried O’Shea. “Like enough, it was
ripped apart in the scrimmage and the blood-thirsty heathen made off
with whatever they could lay their hands on in a hurry. If they spied
any Chinese writing they would grab at it. What do ye say, Inspector
Burke?”
“There are bits of some sort of a diary here, Captain O’Shea, and
odds and ends that only a native could make head or tail of. I looked
them over early this morning, and one of my Chinese did what he could
to help. It is impossible to arrange the fragments in any sequence,
but the story you tell me dovetails rather curiously with some of the
sentences.”
“There was many queer things stowed away in that noddle of his,” said
O’Shea, “and he was an educated man, so he would be apt to make notes
of them. And does he make any mention at all of this Jim Eldridge,
alias Bill Maguire?”
Inspector Burke carefully smoothed a torn sheet of paper and laid a
finger on a few lines scrawled in a shaky hand. They held no reference
to the sailor, but several phrases were startlingly familiar to Captain
O’Shea. The mutilated passage ran thus:
_Very horrid dreams last night--brandy failed to drive them away.
Was in a steamer on the Stinking River--the Painted Joss came
through the cabin port-hole, squeezing itself small as if made
of rubber, and then expanding to gigantic size. It strangled me
slowly, making hideous faces. This is a warning--When I dream of
the Painted Joss, I am on the edge of seeing things while awake.
The fear of violent death is...._
Captain O’Shea was vividly reminded of the disjointed monologue of Bill
Maguire, who had shown symptoms of a similar antipathy to the “Painted
Joss.”
“McDougal wrote down the Stinking River as if it was a real name,” he
said to Inspector Burke. “I thought Maguire called it that because it
smelled bad. If it is on the map, can ye locate it, and is there by any
chance a town with the title of Wang-Li-Fu on the banks of the same?”
Inspector Burke summoned a fat, drowsy-looking interpreter and put
several questions to him. After poring over an atlas for some time,
this owlish Chinese gentleman vouchsafed the information that a
navigable stream known as the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells did
indeed flow through a coastwise part of Kiangsu province, emptying into
the wide estuary of the old mouth of the Yellow River. There was a city
in that region which had been great and flourishing until the Tai-Ping
Rebellion laid it in ruins. It was now no more than a wretched hamlet,
although in local usage it had retained the name of Wang-Li-Fu, the
last syllable of which signified a chief city of a province.
“I say, this is interesting,” exclaimed Inspector Burke. “I am inclined
to think that you and I have picked up a warm scent, Captain O’Shea.
And here’s another bit of paper we can manage to read.”
They pored over a muddy page of McDougal’s diary and discovered, alas!
that it was no more than a fragment of a little Chinese farce called
“The Mender of Broken China-ware.” McDougal had picked it up from some
troupe of strolling players and jotted down a rough translation of his
own, beginning:
“Seeking a livelihood by the work of my hands,
Daily do I traverse the streets of the city.
Well, here I am, a mender of broken jars,
An unfortunate victim of ever-changing plans.
To repair fractured jars is my sole occupation.
’Tis even so. Disconsolate am I, Niu-Chau.”
The two investigators laid this page aside and scanned the remaining
scraps of paper. The Chinese writing consisted almost wholly of
quotations, lines from the classics, racy proverbs of the common
people, and so on. They contained nothing whatever that might throw
more light on the mystery of McDougal. In much the same way, what he
had written in English concerned itself with his wanderings from port
to port and his pitiful failures to hold a position.
“What we want most was lost in the scuffle,” said O’Shea. “The earlier
part of this diary may have told the story that you and I are anxious
to know.”
“I fancy we know more than any other two white men in China,” drawled
Inspector Burke. “If a chap is really keen to find out something
about this blackguardly organization, he will make a voyage to the
River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells and go pokin’ about the ruined town
of Wang-Li-Fu. It’s out of my bailiwick. Now, whether I ought to
lay this information before the Chinese officials of the provincial
government----”
“Excuse me for meddling,” O’Shea broke in with a boyish, eager smile,
“but I have come a long way to go rummagin’ about in this mess on me
own hook. And do ye think the Chinese government could be trusted to go
ahead and accomplish anything at all? This evidence of ours is no more
than guesswork.”
“I have thought of that, Captain O’Shea. And the thing would not be
done quietly. There would be a lot of chin-chin and clumsy preparation,
and a gun-boat and pig-tailed soldiers, and Shanghai getting wind of
the expedition. It would be better to do the trick off one’s own bat.”
“My friend, the sailorman with the cracked top, remarked most emphatic
about the ‘Head Devil’ when he was spillin’ disconnected language,”
thoughtfully observed O’Shea. “’Tis me strong opinion that he tangled
himself with the main works of this busy fraternity of man-killers.”
“What are your plans, may I ask? You are welcome to all the information
my men may pick up in the native city. What a lark! I wish I might get
a leave of absence and go with you.”
“I would ask no better partner,” warmly returned O’Shea. “Well, I will
buy charts and study the coast of this Kiangsu province and learn what
I can about the inland waters. And then I will find a few good men that
will go to hell for wages, and fight for the love of it. And I will
charter a steamer that is fit to navigate rivers and we will be what
you might call an expedition.”
Inspector Burke gripped the hard hand of Captain O’Shea and exclaimed
with a laugh:
“Here’s luck to you! My word, but you’re the most refreshin’ man
I’ve met since I came off frontier service in India! I will help you
find your men. Nothing easier. Shanghai can furnish you gentlemanly
remittance men from England, stranded American soldiers from Manila,
time-expired bluejackets from Hong-Kong, broken shipmasters from God
knows where, and assorted scamps who will follow any one that will buy
the drinks.”
“’Tis cheerful news, Inspector Burke. I will have a council of war
with you to-morrow at this time. I wish that you would see that poor
McDougal is buried decent in a Christian church-yard and I will be glad
to pay the bills. He was a good man once.”