Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 42, May 1947

Dead Yellow Women by Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett is branching out. True, he has not written a novel since THE THIN MAN which was published thirteen years ago (it’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that THE THIN MAN first appeared so long ago?), but the author of such fabulous detective novels as THE MALTESE FALCON and THE GLASS KEY can rest on his laurels for a long, long time — especially if his success in so-called “supplementary fields” keeps increasing with the years. For surely Mr. Hammett has performed the literary hat trick with a vengeance: his books continue to sell in reprint editions of all prices; his movie credits are still associated with Class A productions; and his radio record is reaching an all-time high — at the time of this writing there are no less than three Hammett shows on the air (The Thin Man, The Fat Man, and Sam Spade) and rumors are flying that The Continental Op will join his brothers-of-the-blood on the ether any week now. And still Dashiell Hammett is branching out. From the grapevine comes the report that Mr. Hammett is writing his first play for Broadway. That is good news indeed! Hammett has it in him to write a smash hit — remember his powerful screenplay of Lillian Hellman’s WATCH ON THE RHINE? Will Mr. Hammett write a serious play? He can do it. Or will he stick to his first love — detection-and-melodrama? Selfishly, we hope Mr. Hammett makes his debut as a dramatist in the genre to which he has already made so important a contribution...

It is many years since Mr. Hammett has written a new short story. He once told your Editor he might never go back to the short-story form. We think he will, and until that happy day we shall continue to unearth Mr. Hammett’s buried treasures of the past and bring you such “unknown” stories as the Continental Op’s early adventure titled “Dead Yellow Women.”

Copyright 1925, by Pro-Distributors Publishing Co., Inc.

She was sitting straight and stiff in one of the Old Man’s chairs when he called me into his office — a tall girl of perhaps twenty-four, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, in mannish grey clothes. That she was Oriental showed only in the black shine of her bobbed hair, in the pale yellow of her unpowdered skin, and in the fold of her upper lids at the outer eye-corners, half hidden by the dark rims of her spectacles. But there was no slant to her eyes, her nose was almost aquiline, and she had more chin than Mongolians usually have. She was modern Chinese-American from the flat heels of her tan shoes to the crown of her untrimmed felt hat.

I knew her before the Old Man introduced me. The San Francisco papers had been full of her affairs for a couple of days. They had printed photographs and diagrams, interviews, editorials, and more or less expert opinions from various sources. They had gone back to 1912 to remember the stubborn fight of the local Chinese — mostly from Fokien and Kwangtung, where democratic ideas and hatred of Manchus go together — to have her father kept out of the United States, to which he had scooted when the Manchu rule flopped. The papers had recalled the excitement in Chinatown when Shan Fang was allowed to land — insulting placards had been hung in the streets, an unpleasant reception planned. But Shan Fang had fooled the Cantonese. Chinatown had never seen him. He had taken his daughter and his gold — presumably the accumulated profits of a life-time of provincial misrule — down to San Mateo County, where he had built what the papers described as a palace on the edge of the Pacific. There he had lived and died in a manner suitable to a Ta Jen and a millionaire.

So much for the father. For the daughter — this young woman who was coolly studying me as I sat down across the table from her: she had been ten-year-old Ai Ho, a very Chinese little girl, when her father had brought her to California. All that was Oriental of her now were the features I have mentioned and the money her father had left her. Her name, translated into English, had become Water Lily, and then, by another step, Lillian. It was as Lillian Shan that she had attended an eastern university, acquired several degrees, and published a book on the nature and significance of fetishes, whatever all that is or are.

Since her father’s death, in 1921, she had lived with her four Chinese servants in the house on the shore, where she had written her first book and was now at work on another. A couple of weeks ago, she had found herself stumped, so she said — had run into a blind alley. There was, she said, a certain old cabalistic manuscript in the Arsenal Library in Paris that she believed would solve her troubles for her. So she had packed some clothes and, accompanied by her maid, a Chinese woman named Wang Ma, had taken a train for New York, leaving the three other servants to take care of the house during her absence.

On the train between Chicago and New York, the key to the problem that had puzzled her suddenly popped into her head. Without pausing even for a night’s rest in New York, she had turned around and headed back for San Francisco. At the ferry here she had tried to telephone her chauffeur to bring a car for her. No answer. A taxicab had carried her and her maid to her house. She rang the door-bell to no effect.

When her key was in the lock the door had been suddenly opened by a young Chinese man — a stranger to her. He had refused her admittance until she told him who she was. He mumbled an unintelligible explanation as she and the maid went into the hall.

Both of them were neatly bundled up in some curtains.

Two hours later Lillian Shan got herself loose — in a linen closet on the second floor. Switching on the light, she started to untie the maid. She stopped. Wang Ma was dead. The rope around her neck had been drawn too tight.

Lillian Shan went out into the empty house and telephoned the sheriff’s office in Redwood City.

Two deputy sheriffs had come to the house, had listened to her story, had poked around, and had found another Chinese body — another strangled woman — buried in the cellar. Apparently she had been dead a week or a week and a half; the dampness of the ground made more positive dating impossible. Lillian Shan identified her as another of her servants — Wan Lan, the cook.

The other servants — Hoo Lun and Yin Hung — had vanished. Of the several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furnishings old Shan Fang had put into the house during his life, not a nickel’s worth had been removed. There were no signs of a struggle. Everything was in order. The closest neighboring house was nearly half a mile away. The neighbors had seen nothing, knew nothing.

That’s the story the newspapers had hung headlines over, and that’s the story this girl, sitting very erect in her chair, speaking with businesslike briskness, told the Old Man and me.

“I am not at all satisfied with the effort the San Mateo County authorities have made to apprehend the murderer or murderers,” she wound up. “I wish to engage your agency.”

“Have you any idea of your own on the murders, Miss Shan?” I asked.

“I have not.”

“What do you know about the servants — the missing ones as well as the dead?”

“I really know little or nothing about them.” She didn’t seem very interested. “Wang Ma was the most recent of them to come to the house, and she has been with me for nearly seven years.”

“Don’t you know where they came from? Whether they have relatives? Whether they have friends?”

“No,” she said. “I did not pry into their lives.”

“The two who disappeared — what do they look like?”

“Hoo Lun is an old man, quite white-haired and thin and stooped. He did the housework. Yin Hung, who was my chauffeur and gardener, is younger, about thirty years old, I think. He is quite short, even for a Cantonese, but sturdy. His nose has been broken at some time and not set properly. It is very flat, with a pronounced bend in the bridge.”

“Do you think this pair could have killed the women?”

“I do not think they did.”

“The young Chinese — the stranger who let you in the house — what did he look like?”

“He was quite slender, and not more than twenty or twenty-one years old, with large gold fillings in his front teeth.”

“Will you tell me exactly why you are dissatisfied with what the sheriff is doing, Miss Shan?”

“In the first place, I am not sure they are competent. The ones I saw certainly did not impress me.”

“And in the second place?”

For a moment she hung fire. Then: “I don’t think they are looking in very likely places. They seem to spend the greater part of their time in the vicinity of the house. It is absurd to think the murderers are going to return.”

I turned that over in my mind.

“Miss Shan,” I asked, “don’t you think they suspect you?”

“Preposterous!”

“That isn’t the point,” I insisted. “Do they?”

“I am not able to penetrate the police mind,” she came back. “Do you?”

“I don’t know anything about this job but what I’ve read and what you’ve just told me. I need more foundation than that to suspect anybody. But I can understand why the sheriff’s office would be a little doubtful. You left in a hurry. They’ve got your word for why you went and why you came back, and your word is all. The woman found in the cellar could have been killed just before you left as well as just after. Wang Ma, who could have told things, is dead. The other servants are missing. Nothing was stolen. That’s plenty to make the sheriff think about you!”

“Do you suspect me?” she asked again.

“No,” I said truthfully. “But that proves nothing.”

She spoke to the Old Man, with a chin-tilting motion, as if she were talking over my head.

“Do you wish to undertake this work for me?”

“We shall be very glad to do what we can,” he said, and then to me, after they had talked terms and while she was writing a check, “you handle it. Use what men you need.”

“I want to go out to the house first and look the place over,” I said.

Lillian Shan was putting away her check-book.

“Very well. I am returning home now. I will drive you down.”

It was a restful ride. Neither the girl nor I wasted energy on conversation. My client and I didn’t seem to like each other very much.

The Shan house was a big brown-stone affair, set among sodded lawns. The place was hedged shoulder-high on three sides. The fourth boundary was the ocean, where it came in to make a notch in the shore-line between two small rocky points.

The house was full of hangings, rugs, pictures, and so on — a mixture of things American, European and Asiatic. I didn’t spend much time inside. After a look at the linen-closet, at the still open cellar grave, and at the pale, thick-featured Danish woman who was taking care of the house until Lillian Shan could get a new corps of servants, I went outdoors again. I poked around the lawns for a few minutes, stuck my head in the garage, where two cars, besides the one in which we had come from town, stood, and then went off to waste the rest of the afternoon talking to the girl’s neighbors. None of them knew anything.

By twilight I was back in the city, going into the apartment building in which I lived during my first year in San Francisco. I found the lad I wanted in his cubby-hole room, getting his small body into a cerise silk shirt that was something to look at. Cipriano was the bright-faced Filipino boy who looked after the building’s front door in the daytime. At night, like all the Filipinos in San Francisco, he could be found down on Kearny Street, just below Chinatown, except when he was in a Chinese gambling-house passing his money over to the yellow brothers.

I had once, half-joking, promised to give the lad a fling at gum-shoeing if the opportunity ever came. I thought I could use him now.

“Come in, sir!”

He was dragging a chair out of a corner for me, bowing and smiling.

“What’s doing in Chinatown these days?” I asked.

He gave me a white-toothed smile.

“I take eleven bucks out of bean-game last night.”

“And you’re getting ready to take it back tonight?”

“Not all of ’em, sir! Five bucks I spend for this shirt.”

“That’s the stuff,” I applauded his wisdom in investing part of his fan-tan profits. “What else is doing down there?”

“Nothing unusual, sir. You want to find something?”

“Yeah. Hear any talk about the killings down the country last week? The two Chinese women?”

“No, sir. Chinaboy don’t talk much about things like that. Not like us Americans. I read about those things in newspapers, but I have not heard.”

“Many strangers in Chinatown nowadays?”

“All the time there’s strangers, sir. But I guess maybe some new Chinaboys are there. Maybe not, though.”

“How would you like to do a little work for me?”

“Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” He said it oftener than that, but that will give you the idea.

“Here’s what I want. Two of the servants ducked out of the house down there.” I described Yin Hung and Hoo Lun. “I want to find them. I want to find what anybody in Chinatown knows about the killings. I want to find who the dead women’s friends and relatives are, where they came from, and the same thing for the two men. I want to know about those strange Chinese — where they hang out, where they sleep, what they’re up to.

“Now, don’t try to get all this in a night. You’ll be doing fine if you get any of it in a week. Here’s twenty dollars. Five of it is your night’s pay. You can use the other to carry you around. Don’t be foolish and poke your nose into a lot of grief. Take it easy and see what you can turn up for me. I’ll drop in tomorrow.”

From the Filipino’s room I went to the office. Everybody except Fiske, the night man, was gone, but Fiske thought the Old Man would drop in for a few minutes later in the night.

I smoked, pretended to listen to Fiske’s report on all the jokes that were at the Orpheum that week, and grouched over my job. I was too well known to get anything on the quiet in Chinatown. I wasn’t sure Cipriano was going to be much help. I needed somebody who was in right down there.

This line of thinking brought me around to “Dummy” Uhl. Uhl was a dummerer who had lost his store. Five years before, he had been sitting on the world. Any day on which his sad face, his package of pins, and his I am deaf and dumb sign didn’t take twenty dollars out of the office buildings along his route was a rotten day. His big card was his ability to play the statue when skeptical people yelled or made sudden noises behind him. When the Dummy was right, a gun off beside his ear wouldn’t make him twitch an eye-lid. But too much heroin broke his nerves until a whisper was enough to make him jump. He put away his pins and his sign — another man whose social life had ruined him.

Since then Dummy had become an errand boy for whoever would stake him to the price of his necessary nose-candy. He slept somewhere in Chinatown, and he didn’t care especially how he played the game. I had used him to get me some information on a window-smashing six months before. I decided to try him again.

I called “Loop” Pigatti’s place — a dive down on Pacific Street, where Chinatown fringes into the Latin Quarter. Loop is a tough citizen, who runs a tough hole, and who minds his own business, which is making his dive show a profit. Everybody looks alike to Loop. Whether you’re a yegg, stool-pigeon, detective, or settlement worker, you get an even break out of Loop and nothing else.

He answered the phone himself.

“Can you get hold of Dummy Uhl for me?” I asked after I had told him who I was. “I’d like to see him tonight.”

“You got nothin’ on him?”

“No, Loop, and I don’t expect to. I want him to get something for me.”

“All right. Where d’you want him?”

“Send him up to my joint. I’ll wait.”

“If he’ll come,” Loop promised and hung up.

I left word with Fiske to have the Old Man call me up when he came in, and then I went up to my rooms to wait for my informant.

He came in a little after ten — a short, stocky, pasty-faced man of forty or so, with mouse-colored hair streaked with yellow-white.

“Loop says y’got sumpin’ f’r me.”

“Yes,” I said, waving him to a chair, and closing the door. “I’m buying news.”

“What kind o’ news? I don’t know nothin’.”

I was puzzled. The Dummy’s yellowish eyes should have showed the pin-point pupils of the heroin addict. They didn’t. The pupils were normal. That didn’t mean he was off the stuff — he had put cocaine into them to distend them to normal. The puzzle was — why? He wasn’t usually particular enough about his appearance to go to that trouble.

“Did you hear about the Chinese killings down the shore last week?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Well,” I said, paying no attention to the denial, “I’m hunting for the pair of yellow men who ducked out — Hoo Lun and Yin Hung. It’s worth a couple of hundred dollars to you to find either of them for me. It’s worth another couple hundred to find out about the killings for me. It’s worth another to find the slim Chinese youngster with gold teeth who opened the door for the Shan girl and her maid.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about them things,” he said.

But he said it automatically while his mind was busy counting up the hundreds I had dangled before him. I suppose his dope-addled brains made the total somewhere in the thousands. He jumped up.

“I’ll see what I c’n do. S’pose you slip me a hundred now, on account.”

I didn’t see that.

“You get it when you deliver.”

We had to argue that point, but finally he went off grumbling and growling to get me my news.

I went back to the office. The Old Man hadn’t come in yet. It was nearly midnight when he arrived.

“I’m using Dummy Uhl again,” I told him, “and I’ve put a Filipino boy down there too. I’ve got another scheme, but I don’t know anybody to handle it. I think if we offered the missing chauffeur and house-man jobs in some out-of-the-way place up in the country, perhaps they’d fall for it. Do you know anybody who could pull it for us?”

“Exactly what have you in mind?”

“It must be somebody who has a house out in the country, the farther the better, the more secluded the better. They would phone one of the Chinese employment offices that they needed three servants — cook, houseman, and chauffeur. We throw in the cook for good measure, to cover the game. It’s got to be air-tight on the other end, and, if we’re going to catch our fish, we have to give ’em time to investigate. So whoever does it must have some servants, and must put up a bluff — I mean in his own neighborhood — that they are leaving, and the servants must be in on it. And we’ve got to wait a couple of days, so our friends here will have time to investigate. I think we’d better use Fong Yick’s employment agency, on Washington Street.

“Whoever does it could phone Fong Yick tomorrow morning, and say he’d be in Thursday morning to look the applicants over. This is Monday — that’ll be long enough. Our helper gets at the employment office at ten Thursday morning. Miss Shan and I arrive in a taxicab ten minutes later, when he’ll be in the middle of questioning the applicants. I’ll slide out of the taxi into Fong Yick’s, grab anybody that looks like one of our missing servants. Miss Shan will come in a minute or two behind me and check me up — so there won’t be any false-arrest mixups.”

The Old Man nodded approval.

“Very well,” he said. “I think I can arrange it.”

I went home to bed. Thus ended the first day.

At nine the next morning, Tuesday, I was talking to Cipriano in the lobby of the apartment building that employs him. His eyes were black drops of ink in white saucers. He thought he had got something.

“Yes, sir! Strange China boys are in town, some of them. They sleep in a house on Waverly Place — on the western side, four houses from the house of Jair Quon, where I sometimes play dice. And there is more — I talk to a white man who knows they are hatchet-men from Portland and Eureka and Sacramento. They are Hip Sing men — a tong war starts — pretty soon, maybe.”

“Do these birds look like gunmen?”

Cipriano scratched his head.

“No, sir, maybe not. But a fellow can shoot sometimes if he don’t look like it. This man tells me they are Hip Sing men.”

“Who was this white man?”

“I don’t know the name, but he lives there. A short man — snowbird.”

“Grey hair, yellowish eves?”

“Yes, sir.”

That, as likely as not, would be Dummy Uhl. One of my men was stringing the other. The tong stuff hadn’t sounded right to me anyhow. Once in a while they mix things, but usually they are blamed for somebody else’s crimes. Most wholesale killings in Chinatown are the result of family or clan feuds — such as the ones the “Four Brothers” used to stage.

“This house where you think the strangers are living — know anything about it?”

“No, sir. But maybe you could go through there to the house of Chang Li Ching on other street — Spofford Alley.”

“So? And who is this Chang Li Ching?”

“I don’t know, sir. But he is there. Nobody sees him, but all Chinaboys say he is great man.”

“So? And his house is in Spofford Alley?”

“Yes, sir, a house with red door and red steps. You find it easy, but better not fool with Chang Li Ching.”

“A big gun, huh?” I probed.

But my Filipino didn’t really know anything about this Chang Li Ching. He was basing his opinion of the Chinese’s greatness on the attitude of his fellow countrymen when they mentioned him.

“Learn anything about the two Chinese men?” I asked.

“No, sir, but I will — you bet!”

I praised him for what he had done, told him to try it again that night, and went back to my rooms to wait for Dummy Uhl, who had promised to come there at ten-thirty. It was not quite ten when I got there, so I used some of my spare time to call up the office. The Old Man said Dick Foley — our shadow ace — was idle, so I borrowed him. Then I fixed my gun and sat down to wait for my stool-pigeon.

He rang the bell at eleven o’clock. He came in frowning tremendously.

“I don’t know what t’hell to make of it, kid,” he spoke importantly over the cigarette he was rolling. “There’s sumpin’ makin’ down there, an’ that’s a fact. Things ain’t been anyways quiet since the Japs began buyin’ stores in the Chink streets, an’ maybe that’s got sumpin’ to do with it. But there ain’t no strange Chinks in town — not a damn one! I got a hunch your men have gone down to L. A., but I expec’t’ know f’r certain tonight. I got a Chink ribbed up t’ get the dope; ’f I was you, I’d put a watch on the boats at San Pedro. Maybe those fellas’ll swap papers wit’ a coupla Chink sailors that’d like t’ stay here.”

“And there are no strangers in town?”

“Not any.”

“Dummy,” I said bitterly, “you’re a liar, and you’re a boob, and I’ve been playing you for a sucker. You were in on that killing, and so were your friends, and I’m going to throw you in the can, and your friends on top of you!”

I put my gun in sight, close to his scared-grey face.

“Keep yourself still while I do my phoning!”

Reaching for the telephone with my free hand, I kept one eye on the Dummy.

It wasn’t enough. My gun was too close to him.

He yanked it out of my hand. I jumped for him.

The gun turned in his fingers. I grabbed it — too late. It went off, its muzzle less than a foot from where I’m thickest. Fire stung my body.

Clutching the gun with both hands I folded down to the floor. Dummy went away from there, leaving the door open behind him.

One hand on my burning belly, I crossed to the window and waved an arm at Dick Foley, stalling on a corner down the street. Then I went to the bathroom and looked to my wound. A blank cartridge does hurt if you catch it close up!

My vest and shirt and union suit were ruined, and I had a nasty scorch on my body. I greased it, taped a cushion over it, changed my clothes, loaded the gun again, and went down to the office to wait for word from Dick. The first trick in the game looked like mine. Heroin or no heroin, Dummy Uhl would not have jumped me if my guess — based on the trouble he was taking to make his eyes look right and the lie he had sprung on me about there being no strangers in Chinatown — hadn’t hit close to the mark.

Dick wasn’t long in joining me.

“Good pickings!” he said when he came in. The little Canadian talks like a thrifty man’s telegram. “Beat it for phone. Called Hotel Irvington. Booth — couldn’t get anything but number. Ought to be enough. Then Chinatown. Dived in cellar west side Waverly Place. Couldn’t stick close enough to spot place. Afraid to take chance hanging around. How do you like it?”

“I like it all right. Let’s look up ‘The Whistler’s’ record.”

A file clerk got it for us — a bulky envelope the size of a brief case, crammed with memoranda, clippings and letters. The gentleman’s biography, as we had it, ran like this:

Neil Conyers, alias The Whistler, was born in Philadelphia — out on Whiskey Hill — in 1883. In ’94, at the age of eleven, he was picked up by the Washington police. He had gone there to join Coxey’s Army. They sent him home. In ’98 he was arrested in his home town for stabbing another lad in a row over an election-night bonfire. This time he was released in his parents’ custody. In 1901 the Philadelphia police grabbed him again, charging him with being the head of the first organized automobile-stealing ring. He was released without trial, for lack of evidence. But the district attorney lost his job in the resultant scandal. In 1908 Conyers appeared on the Pacific Coast — at Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — in company with a con-man known as “Duster” Hughes. Hughes was shot and killed the following year by a man whom he’d swindled in a fake airplane manufacturing deal. Conyers was arrested on the same deal. Two juries disagreed and he was turned loose. In 1910 the Post Office Department’s famous raid on get-rich-quick promoters caught him. Again there wasn’t enough evidence against him to put him away. In 1915 the law scored on him for the first time. He went to San Quentin for buncoing some visitors to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. He stayed there for three years. In 1919 he and a Jap named Hasegawa nicked the Japanese colony of Seattle for $20,000, Conyers posing as an American who had held a commission in the Japanese army during that late war. He had a counterfeit medal of the Order of the Rising Sun which the emperor was supposed to have pinned on him. When the game fell through, Hasegawa’s family made good the $20,000 — Conyers got out of it with a good profit and not even any disagreeable publicity. The thing had been hushed. He returned to San Francisco after that, bought the Hotel Irvington, and had been living there now for five years without anybody being able to add another word to his criminal record. He was up to something, but nobody could learn what. There wasn’t a chance in the world of getting a detective into his hotel as a guest. Apparently the joint was always without vacant rooms. It was as exclusive as the Pacific-Union Club.

This, then, was the proprietor of the hotel Dummy Uhl had got on the phone before diving into his hole in Chinatown.

I had never seen Conyers. Neither had Dick. There were a couple of photographs in his envelope. One was the profile and full-face photograph of the local police, taken when he had been picked up on the charge that led him to San Quentin. The other was a group picture: all rung up in evening clothes, with the phoney Japanese medal on his chest, he stood among half a dozen of the Seattle Japs he had trimmed — a flashlight picture taken while he was leading them to the slaughter.

These pictures showed him to be a big bird, fleshy, pompous-looking, with a heavy, square chin and shrewd eyes.

“Think you could pick him up?” I asked Dick.

“Sure.”

“Suppose you go up there and see if you can get a room or apartment somewhere in the neighborhood — one you can watch the hotel from. Maybe you’ll get a chance to tail him around now and then.”

I put the pictures in my pocket, in case they’d come in handy, dumped the rest of the stuff back in its envelope, and went into the Old Man’s office.

“I arranged that employment office stratagem,” he said. “A Frank Paul, who has a ranch out beyond Martinez, will be in Fong Yick’s establishment at ten Thursday morning, carrying out his part.”

“That’s fine! I’m going calling in Chinatown now. If you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, will you ask the street-cleaners to watch what they’re sweeping up?”

He said he would.

San Francisco’s Chinatown jumps out of the shopping district at California Street and runs north to the Latin Quarter — a strip two blocks wide by six long. Before the fire nearly twenty-five thousand Chinese lived in those dozen blocks. I don’t suppose the population is a third of that now.

Grant Avenue, the main street and spine of this strip, is for most of its length a street of gaudy shops catering to the tourist trade and flashy chop-suey houses, where the racket of American jazz orchestras drowns the occasional squeak of a Chinese flute. Farther out, there isn’t so much paint and gilt, and you can catch the proper Chinese smell of spices and vinegar and dried things. If you leave the main thoroughfares and show places and start poking around in alleys and dark corners, and nothing happens to you, the chances are you’ll find some interesting things — though you won’t like some of them.

However, I wasn’t poking around as I turned off Grant Avenue at Clay Street, and went up to Spofford Alley, hunting for the house with red steps and red door, which Cipriano had said was Chang Li Ching’s. I did pause for a few seconds to look up Waverly Place when I passed it. The Filipino had told me the strange Chinese were living there, and that he thought their house might lead through to Chang Li Ching’s; and Dick Foley had shadowed Dummy Uhl there.

But I couldn’t guess which was the important house. Four doors from Jair Quon’s gambling house, Cipriano had said, but I didn’t know where fair Quon’s was. Waverly Place was a picture of peace and quiet just now. A fat Chinese was stacking crates of green vegetables in front of a grocery. Half a dozen small yellow boys were playing at marbles in the middle of the street. On the other side, a blond young man in tweeds was climbing the six steps from a cellar to the street, a painted Chinese woman’s face showing for an instant before she closed the door behind him.

I went on up to Spofford Alley and found my house with no difficulty at all. It was a shabby building with steps and door the color of dried blood, its windows solidly shuttered with thick, tight-nailed planking. What made it stand out from its neighbors was that its ground floor wasn’t a shop or place of business. Purely residential buildings are rare in Chinatown.

I went up the three steps and tapped the red door with my knuckles.

Nothing happened.

I hit it again, harder. Still nothing. I tried it again, and this time was rewarded by the sounds of scraping and clicking inside.

At least two minutes of this scraping and clicking, and the door swung open — a bare four inches.

One slanting eye and a slice of wrinkled brown face looked out of the crack at me, above the heavy chain that held the door.

“Whata wan’?”

“I want to see Chang Li Ching.”

“No savvy. Maybe closs stleet.”

“Bunk! You fix your little door and run back and tell Chang Li Ching I want to see him.”

“No can do! No savvy Chang.”

“You tell him I’m here,” I said, turning my back on the door. I sat down on the top step, and added, without looking around, “I’ll wait.”

While I got my cigarettes out there was silence behind me. Then the door closed softly and the scraping and clicking broke out behind it. I smoked a cigarette and another and let time go by, trying to look like I had all the patience there was.

An hour went to waste, and a few minutes, and then the familiar scraping and clicking disturbed the door.

The chain rattled as the door swung open. I wouldn’t turn my head.

“Go ’way! No catch ’em Chang!”

I said nothing. If he wasn’t going to let me in he would have let me sit there without further attention.

A pause.

“Whata wan’?”

“I want to see Chang Li Ching,” I said without looking around.

Another pause, ended by the banging of the chain against the door-frame.

“All light.”

I chucked my cigarette into the street, got up and stepped into the house. In the dimness I could make out a few pieces of cheap and battered furniture. I had to wait while the Chinese put four arm-thick bars across the door and padlocked them there. Then he nodded at me and scuffled across the floor, a small, bent man with hairless yellow head and a neck like a piece of rope.

Out of this room, he led me into another, darker still, into a hallway, and down a flight of rickety steps. We walked through the dark across a dirt floor for a while, turned to the left, and cement was under my feet. We turned twice more in the dark, and then climbed a flight of unplaned wooden steps into a hall that was fairly light with the glow from shaded electric lights.

In this hall my guide unlocked a door, and we crossed a room where cones of incense burned, and where, in the light of an oil lamp, little red tables with cups of tea stood in front of wooden panels, marked with Chinese characters in gold paint, which hung on the walls. A door on the opposite side of this room let us into pitch blackness, where I had to hold the tail of my guide’s loose made-to-order blue coat.

So far he hadn’t once looked back at me since our tour began, and neither of us had said anything. This running upstairs and downstairs, turning to the right and turning to the left, seemed harmless enough. If he got any fun out of confusing me, he was welcome. I was confused enough now, so far as the directions were concerned. I hadn’t the least idea where I might be. But that didn’t disturb me so much. If I was going to be cut down, a knowledge of my geographical position wouldn’t make it any more pleasant. If I was going to come out all right, one place was still as good as another.

We did a lot more of the winding around, we did some stair-climbing and some stair-descending, and the rest of the foolishness. I figured I’d been indoors nearly half an hour by now, and I had seen nobody but my guide.

Then I saw something else.

We were going down a long, narrow hall that had brown-painted doors close together on either side. All these doors were closed — secretive-looking in the dim light. Abreast of one of them, a glint of dull metal caught my eye — a dark ring in the door’s center.

I went to the floor.

Going down as if I’d been knocked, I missed the flash. But I heard the roar, smelled the powder.

My guide spun around, twisting out of one slipper. In each of his hands was an automatic as big as a coal scuttle. Even while trying to get my own gun out I wondered how so puny a man could have concealed so much machinery on him.

The big guns in the little man’s hands flamed at me. Chinese-fashion, he was emptying them — crash! crash! crash!

I thought he was missing me until I had my finger tight on my trigger. Then I woke up in time to hold my fire.

He wasn’t shooting at me. He was pouring metal into the door behind me — the door from which I had been shot at.

I rolled away from it, across the hall.

The scrawny little man stepped closer and finished his bombardment. His slugs shredded the wood as if it had been paper. His guns clicked empty.

The door swung open, pushed by the wreck of a man who was trying to hold himself up by clinging to the sliding panel in the door’s center.

Dummy Uhl — all the middle of him gone — slid down to the floor and made more of a puddle than a pile there.

The hall filled with yellow men, black guns sticking out like briars in a blackberry patch.

I got up. My guide dropped his guns to his side and sang out a guttural solo. Chinese began to disappear through various doors, except four who began gathering up what twenty bullets had left of Dummy Uhl.

The stringy old boy tucked his empty guns away and came down the hall to me, one hand held out toward my gun.

“You give ’em,” he said politely.

I gave ’em. He could have had my pants.

My gun stowed away in his shirt-bosom, he looked casually at what the four Chinese were carrying away, and then at me.

“No like ’em fella, huh?” he asked.

“Not so much,” I admitted.

“All light. I take you.”

Our two-man parade got under way again. The ring-around-the-rosy game went on for another flight of stairs and some right and left turns, and then my guide stopped before a door and scratched it with his fingernails.

The door was opened by another Chinese. But this one was none of your Cantonese runts. He was a big meat-eating wrestler — bull-throated, mountain-shouldered, gorilla-armed, leather-skinned. The god that made him had plenty of material, and gave it time to harden.

Holding back the curtain that covered the door, he stepped to one side. I went in, and found his twin standing on the other side of the door.

The room was large and cubical, its doors and windows — if any — hidden behind velvet hangings of green and blue and silver. In a big black chair, elaborately carved, behind an inlaid black table, sat an old Chinese man. His face was round and plump and shrewd, with a straggle of thin white whiskers on his chin. A dark, close-fitting cap was on his head; a purple robe, tight around his neck, showed its sable lining at the bottom, where it had fallen back in a fold over his blue satin trousers.

He did not get up from his chair, but smiled mildly over his whiskers and bent his head almost to the tea things on the table.

“It was only the inability to believe that one of your excellency’s heaven-born splendor would waste his costly rime on so mean a clod that kept the least of your slaves from running down to prostrate himself at your noble feet as soon as he heard the Father of Detectives was at his unworthy door.”

That came out smoothly in English that was a lot clearer than my own. I kept my face straight, waiting.

“If the Terror of Evildoers will honor one of my deplorable chairs by resting his divine body on it, I can assure him the chair shall be burned afterward, so no lesser being may use it. Or will the Prince of Thief-catchers permit me to send a servant to his palace for a chair worthy of him?”

I went slowly to a chair, trying to arrange words in my mind. This old joker was spoofing me with an exaggeration — a burlesque — of the well-known Chinese politeness. I’m not hard to get along with: I’ll play anybody’s game up to a certain point.

“It’s only because I’m weak-kneed with awe of the mighty Chang Li Ching that I dare to sit down,” I explained, letting myself down on the chair, and turning my head to notice that the giants who had stood beside the door were gone.

I had a hunch they had gone no farther than the other side of the velvet hangings that hid the door.

“If it were not that the King of Finders-out” — he was at it again — “knows everything, I should marvel that he had heard my lowly name.”

“Heard it? Who hasn’t?” I kidded back. “Isn’t the word change, in English, derived from Chang? Change, meaning alter, is what happens to the wisest man’s opinions after he has heard the wisdom of Chang Li Ching!” I tried to get away from this vaudeville stuff, which was a strain on my head. “Thanks for having your man save my life back there in the passage.”

He spreads his hands out over the table.

“It was only because I feared the Emperor of Hawkshaws would find the odor of such low blood distasteful to his elegant nostrils that the foul one who disturbed your excellency was struck down quickly. If I have erred, and you would have chosen that he be cut to pieces inches by inch, I can only offer to torture one of my sons in his place.”

“Let the boy live,” I said carelessly, and turned to business. “I wouldn’t have bothered you except that I am so ignorant that only the help of your great wisdom could ever bring me up to normal.”

“Does one ask the way of a blind man?” the old duffer asked, cocking his head to one side. “Can a star, however willing, help the moon? If it pleases the Grandfather of Bloodhounds to flatter Chang Li Ching into thinking he can add to the great one’s knowledge, who is Chang to thwart his master by refusing to make himself ridiculous?”

I took that to mean he was willing to listen to my questions.

“What I’d like to know is, who killed Lillian Shan’s servants, Wang Ma and Wan Lan?”

“Does the stag-hunter look at the hare?” he wanted to know. “And when so mighty a hunter pretends to concern himself with the death of servants, can Chang think anything except that it pleases the great one to conceal his real object? Yet it may be, because the dead were servants and not girdle-wearers, that the Lord of Snares thought the lowly Chang Li Ching, insignificant one of the Hundred Names, might have knowledge of them. Do not rats know the way of rats?”

He kept this stuff up for some minutes, while I sat and listened and studied his round, shrewd yellow mask of a face, and hoped that something clear would come of it all. Nothing did.

“My ignorance is even greater than I had arrogantly supposed,” he brought his speech to an end. “This simple question you put is beyond the power of my muddled mind. I do not know who killed Wang Ma and Wan Lan.”

I grinned at him, and put another question:

“Where can I find Hoo Lun and Yin Hung?”

“Again I must grovel in my ignorance,” he murmured, “only consoling myself with the thought that the Master of Mysteries knows the answers to his questions, and is pleased to conceal his infallibly accomplished purpose from Chang.”

And that was as far as I got.

There were more crazy compliments, more bowing and scraping, more assurances of eternal reverence and love, and then I was following my rope-necked guide through winding, dark halls, across dim rooms, and up and down rickety stairs again.

At the street door — after he had taken down the bars — he slid my gun out of his shirt and handed it to me. I stuck it in my pocket and stepped through the door.

“Thanks for the killing upstairs,” I said.

The Chinese grunted, bowed, and closed the door.

I went up to Stockton Street, and turned toward the office, walking along slowly, punishing my brains.

First, there was Dummy Uhl’s death to think over. Had it been arranged before-hand: to punish him for bungling that morning and, at the same time, to impress me? And how? And why? Or was it supposed to put me under obligations to the Chinese? And, if so, why? Or was it just one of those complicated tricks the Chinese like? I put the subject away and pointed my thoughts at the little plump yellow man in the purple robe.

I liked him. He had humor, brains, nerve, everything. To jam him in a cell would be a trick you’d want to write home about. He was my idea of a man worth working against.

But I didn’t kid myself into thinking I had anything on him. Dummy Uhl had given me a connection between The Whistler’s Hotel Irvington and Chang Li Ching. Dummy Uhl had gone into action when I accused him of being mixed up in the Shan killings. That much I had — and that was all, except that Chang had said nothing to show he wasn’t interested in the Shan troubles.

In this light, the chances were that Dummy’s death had not been a planned performance. It was more likely that he had seen me coming, had tried to wipe me out, and had been knocked off by my guide because he was interfering with the audience Chang had granted me.

In the office, a message from Dick Foley was waiting for me. He had rented a front apartment up the street from the Irvington and had put in a couple of hours trailing The Whistler.

The Whistler had spent half an hour in “Big Fat” Thomson’s place on Market Street, talking to the proprietor and some of the sure-thing gamblers who congregate there. Then he had taxicabbed out to an apartment house on O’Farrell Street — the Glenway — where he had rung one of the bells. Getting no answer, he had let himself into the building with a key. An hour later he had come out and returned to his hotel. Dick hadn’t been able to determine which bell he had rung, or which apartment he had visited.

I got Lillian Shan on the telephone.

“Will you be in this evening?” I asked. “I’ve something I want to go into with you, and I can’t give it to you over the wire.”

“I will be at home until seven-thirty.”

“All right, I’ll be down.”

It was seven-fifteen when the car I had hired put me down at her front door. She opened the door for me. The Danish woman who was filling in until new servants were employed stayed there only in the daytime, returning to her own home at night.

The evening gown Lillian Shan wore was severe enough, but it suggested that if she would throw away her glasses and do something for herself, she might not be so unfeminine looking after all. She took me upstairs, to the library, where a clean-cut lad of twenty-something in evening clothes got up from a chair as we came in — a well-set-up boy with fair hair and skin.

His name, I learned when we were introduced, was Garthorne. The girl seemed willing enough to hold our conference in his presence. I wasn’t. After I had done everything but insist point-blank on seeing her alone, she excused herself — calling him Jack — and took me out into another room.

By then I was a bit impatient.

“Who’s that?” I demanded.

She put her eyebrows up for me.

“Mr. John Garthorne,” she said.

“How well do you know him?”

“May I ask why you are so interested?”

“You may. Mr. John Garthorne is all wrong, I think.”

“Wrong?”

I had another idea.

“Where does he live?”

She gave me an O’Farrell Street number.

“The Glenway Apartments?”

“I think so.” She was looking at me without any affectation at all. “Will you please explain?”

“One more question and I will. Do you know a Chinese named Chang Li Ching?”

“No.”

“All right. I’ll tell you about Garthorne. So far I’ve run into two angles on this trouble of yours. One of them has to do with this Chang Li Ching in Chinatown, and one with an ex-convict named Conyers. This John Garthorne was in Chinatown today. I saw him coming out of a cellar that probably connects with Chang Li Ching’s house. The ex-convict Conyers visited the building where Garthorne lives, early this afternoon.”

Her mouth popped open and then shut.

“That is absurd!” she snapped. “I have known Mr. Garthorne for some time, and—”

“Exactly how long?”

“A long — several months.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

“Through a girl I knew at college.”

“What does he do for a living?”

She stood stiff and silent.

“Listen, Miss Shan,” I said. “Garthorne may be all right, but I’ve got to look him up. If he’s in the clear there’ll be no harm done. I want to know what you know about him.”

I got it, little by little. He was, or she thought he was, the youngest son of a prominent Richmond, Virginia, family, in disgrace just now because of some sort of boyish prank. He had come to San Francisco four months ago, to wait until his father’s anger cooled. Meanwhile his mother kept him in money, leaving him without the necessity of toiling during his exile. He had brought a letter of introduction from one of Lillian Shan’s schoolmates. Lillian Shan had, I gathered, a lot of liking for him.

“You’re going out with him tonight?” I asked when I had got this.

“Yes.”

“In his car or yours?”

“In his. We are going to drive down to Half Moon for dinner.”

“I’ll need a key, then, because I am coming back here after you have gone.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m coming back here. I’ll ask you not to say anything about my more or less unworthy suspicions to him, but my honest opinion is that he’s drawing you away for the evening. So if the engine breaks down on the way back, just pretend you see nothing unusual in it.”

That worried her, but she wouldn’t admit I might be right. I got the key, though, and then I told her of my employment agency scheme that needed her assistance, and she promised to be at the office at half past nine Thursday.

I didn’t see Garthorne again before I left the house.

In my hired car again, I had the driver take me to the nearest village, where I bought a plug of chewing tobacco, a flashlight, and a box of cartridges at the general store. My gun is a .38 Special, but I had to take the shorter, weaker cartridges, because the storekeeper didn’t keep the specials in stock.

My purchases in my pocket, we started back toward the Shan house again. Two bends in the road this side of it, I stopped the car, paid the chauffeur, and sent him on his way, finishing the trip afoot.

The house was dark all around.

Letting myself in as quietly as possible, and going easy with the flashlight, I gave the interior a combing from cellar to roof. I was the only occupant. In the kitchen, I looted the icebox for a bite or two, which I washed down with milk.

The luncheon done, I made myself comfortable on a chair in the passageway between the kitchen and the rest of the house. On one side of the passageway, steps led down to the basement. On the other, steps led upstairs. With every door in the house except the outer ones open, the passageway was the center of things so far as hearing noises was concerned.

An hour went by — quietly except for the passing of cars on the road a hundred yards away and the washing of the Pacific down in the little cove. I chewed on my plug of tobacco — a substitute for cigarettes — and tried to count up the hours of my life I’d spent like this, sitting or standing around waiting for something to happen.

Another half hour went by with a breeze springing up from the ocean, rustling trees outside.

A noise came that was neither wind nor surf nor passing car.

Something clicked somewhere.

It was at a window, but I didn’t know which. I got rid of my chew, got gun and flashlight out.

It sounded again, harshly.

Somebody was giving a window a strong play — too strong. The catch rattled, and something clicked against the pane. It was a stall. Whoever he was, he could have smashed the glass with less noise than he was making,

I stood up, but I didn’t leave the passageway. The window noise was a fake to draw the attention of anyone who might be in the house. I turned my back on it, trying to see into the kitchen.

The kitchen was too black to see anything.

I saw nothing there. I heard nothing there.

Damp air blew on me from the kitchen.

That was something to worry about. I had company, and he was slicker than I. He could open doors or windows under my nose. That wasn’t so good.

Weight on rubber heels, I backed away from my chair until the frame of the cellar door touched my shoulder. So when a thin line of light danced out of the kitchen to hit the chair in the passageway, I was three steps cellar-ward, my back flat against the stair-wall.

The light fixed itself on the chair for a couple of seconds, and then began to dart around the passageway, through it into the room beyond. I could see nothing but the light.

Fresh sounds came to me — the purr of automobile engines close to the house on the road side, the soft padding of feet on the back porch, on the kitchen linoleum, quite a few feet. An odor came to me — an unmistakable odor — the smell of unwashed Chinese.

Then I lost track of these things. I had plenty to occupy me close up.

The proprietor of the flashlight was at the head of the cellar steps.

The first thin ray he sent downstairs missed me by an inch — which gave me time to make a map there in the dark. If he was of medium size, holding the light in his left hand, a gun in his right, and exposing as little of himself as possible — his noodle should have been a foot and a half above the beginning of the light-beam, the same distance behind it, six inches to the left — my left.

The light swung sideways and hit one of my legs.

I swung the barrel of my gun at the point I had marked X in the night.

His gun-fire cooked my cheek. One of his arms tried to take me with him. I twisted away and let him dive alone into the cellar, showing me a flash of gold teeth as he went past.

The house was full of “Ah yahs” and pattering feet.

I had to move — or I’d be pushed.

Downstairs might be a trap. I went up to the passageway again.

The passageway was solid and alive with stinking bodies. Hands and teeth began to take my clothes away from me. I knew damned well I had declared myself in on something!

I was one of a struggling, tearing, grunting and groaning mob of invisibles. An eddy of them swept me toward the kitchen. Hitting, kicking, butting, I went along.

A high-pitched voice was screaming Chinese orders.

My shoulder scraped the door-frame as I was carried into the kitchen, fighting as best I could against enemies I couldn’t see, afraid to use the gun I still gripped.

I was only one part of the mad scramble. The flash of my gun might have made me the center of it. These lunatics were fighting panic now: I didn’t want to show them something tangible to tear apart.

I went along with them, cracking everything that got in my way, and being cracked back. A bucket got between my feet.

I crashed down, upsetting my neighbors, rolled over a body, felt a foot on my face, squirmed from under it, and came to rest in a corner; still tangled up with the galvanized bucket.

Thank God for that bucket!

I wanted these people to go away. I didn’t care who or what they were. If they’d depart in peace I’d forgive their sins.

I put my gun inside the bucket and squeezed the trigger. I got the worst of the racket, but there was enough to go around. It sounded like a crump going off.

I cut loose in the bucket again, and had another idea. Two fingers of my left hand in my mouth, I whistled as shrill as I could while I emptied the gun.

It was a sweet racket!

When my gun had run out of bullets and my lungs out of air, I was alone. I was glad to be alone. I knew why men go off and live in caves by themselves. And I didn’t blame them!

Sitting there alone in the dark, I reloaded my gun.

On hands and knees I found my way to the open kitchen door, and peeped out into the blackness that told me nothing. The surf made guzzling sounds in the cove. From the other side of the house came the noise of cars. I hoped it was my friends going away.

I shut the door, locked it, and turned on the kitchen light.

The place wasn’t as badly upset as I had expected. Some pans and dishes were down and a chair had been broken, and the place smelled of unwashed bodies. But that was all — except a blue cotton sleeve in the middle of the floor, a straw sandal near the passageway door, and a handful of short black hairs, a bit blood-smeared, beside the sandal.

In the cellar I did not find the man I had sent down there. An open door showed how he had left me. His flashlight was there, and my own, and some of his blood.

Upstairs again, I went through the front of the house. The front door was open. Rugs had been rumpled. A blue vase was broken on the floor. A table was pushed out of place, and a couple of chairs had been upset. I found an old and greasy brown felt hat that had neither sweat-band nor hat-band and a grimy photograph of President Coolidge — apparently cut from a Chinese newspaper.

I found nothing upstairs to show that any of my guests had gone up there.

It was half past two in the morning when I heard a car drive up to the front door. I peeped out of Lillian Shan’s bedroom window, on the second floor. She was saying good-night to Jack Garthorne.

I went back to the library to wait for her.

“Nothing happened?” were her first words, and they sounded more like a prayer than anything else.

“It did,” I told her, “and I suppose you had your breakdown.”

For a moment I thought she was going to lie to me, but she nodded, and dropped into a chair.

“I had a lot of company,” I said, “but I can’t say I found out much. The fact is, I bit off more than I could chew, and had to be satisfied with chasing them out.”

“You didn’t call the sheriff’s office?” There was something strange about the tone in which she put the question.

“No — I don’t want Garthorne arrested yet.”

That shook the dejection out of her. She was up, tall and straight in front of me, and cold.

“I’d rather not go into that again,” she said.

That was all right with me, but:

“You didn’t say anything to him, I hope.”

“Say anything to him?” She seemed amazed. “Do you think I would insult him by repeating your guesses — your absurd guesses?”

“That’s fine,” I applauded her silence if not her opinion of my theories. “Now, I’m going to stay here tonight. There isn’t a chance in a hundred of anything happening, but I’ll play it safe.”

She didn’t seem very enthusiastic about that, but she finally went off to bed.

Nothing happened between then and sun-up, of course. I left the house as soon as daylight came and gave the grounds the once over. Footprints were all over the place, from water’s edge to driveway. Along the driveway some of the sod was cut where machines had been turned carelessly.

Borrowing one of the cars from the garage, I was back in San Francisco before the morning was far gone.

In the office, I asked the Old Man to put an operative behind Jack Garthorne; to have the old hat, flashlight, sandal and the rest of my souvenirs put under the microscope and searched for fingerprints, footprints, tooth-prints or what have you; and to have our Richmond branch look up the Garthornes. Then I went up to see my Filipino assistant.

He was gloomy.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Somebody knock you over?”

“Oh, no, sir!” he protested. “But maybe I am not so good a detective. I try to follow one fella, and he turns a corner and he is gone.”

“Who was he, and what was he up to?”

“I do not know, sir. There is four automobiles with men getting out of them into that cellar of which I tell you the strange Chinese live. After they are gone in, one man comes out. He wears his hat down over bandage on his upper face, and he walks away rapidly. I try to follow him, but he turns that corner, and where is he?”

My visitors, no doubt, and the man Cipriano had tried to shadow could have been the one I swatted. The Filipino hadn’t thought to get the license numbers of the automobiles. He didn’t know whether they had been driven by white men or Chinese, or even what make cars they were.

“You’ve done fine,” I assured him. “Try it again tonight.”

From him I went to a telephone and called the Hall of Justice. Dummy Uhl’s death had not been reported, I learned.

Twenty minutes later I was skinning my knuckles on Chang Li Ching’s front door.

The little old Chinese with the rope neck didn’t open for me this time. Instead, a young Chinese with a smallpox-pitted face and a wide grin.

“You wanna see Chang Li Ching,” he said before I could speak, and stepped back for me to enter.

I went in and waited while he replaced all the bars and locks. We went to Chang by a shorter route than before, but it was still far from direct.

The velvet-hung room was empty when my guide showed me in, bowed, grinned, and left me. I sat down in a chair near the table and waited.

Chang Li Ching didn’t put on the theatricals for me by materializing silently, or anything of the sort. I heard his soft slippers on the floor before he parted the hangings and came in. He was alone, his white whiskers ruffled in a smile that was grandfatherly.

“The Scatterer of Hordes honors my poor residence again,” he greeted me, and went on at great length with the same sort of nonsense that I’d had to listen to on my first visit.

The Scatterer of Hordes part was cool enough — if it was a reference to last night’s doings.

“Not knowing who he was until too late, I beaned one of your servants last night,” I said when he had run out of flowers for the time. “I know there’s nothing I can do to square myself for such a terrible act, but I hope you’ll let me cut my throat and bleed to death in one of your garbage cans as a sort of apology.”

A little sighing noise that could have been a smothered chuckle disturbed the old man’s lips.

“The Disperser of Marauders knows all things,” he murmured blandly, “even to the value of noise in driving away demons. If he says the man he struck was Chang Li Ching’s servant, who is Chang to deny it?”

I tried him with my other barrel.

“I don’t know much — not even why the police haven’t yet heard of the death of the man who was killed here yesterday.”

One of his hands made little curls in his white beard.

“I had not heard of the death,” he said.

“You might ask the man who brought me here yesterday,” I suggested.

Chang Li Ching picked up a little padded stick from the table and struck a tasseled gong that hung at his shoulder. Across the room the hangings parted to admit the pock-marked Chinese who had brought me in.

“Did death honor our hovel yesterday?” Chang asked in English.

“No, Ta Jen.”

“It was the nobleman who guided me here yesterday,” I explained, “not this son of an emperor.”

Chang imitated surprise.

“Who welcomed the King of Spies yesterday?” he asked the man at the door.

“I bring ’em, Ta Jen.”

I grinned at the pock-marked man, he grinned back, and Chang smiled benevolently.

“An excellent jest,” he said.

It was.

The pock-marked man bowed and started to duck back through the hangings. Loose shoes rattled on the boards behind him. He spun around. One of the big wrestlers I had seen the previous day loomed above him. The wrestler’s eyes were bright with excitement, and grunted Chinese syllables poured out of his mouth. The pock-marked one talked back. Chang Li Ching silenced them with a sharp command. All this was in Chinese — out of my reach.

“Will the Grand Duke of Manhunters permit his servant to depart for a moment to attend to his distressing domestic affairs?”

“Sure.”

Chang bowed with his hands together, and spoke to the wrestler.

“You will remain here to see that the great one is not disturbed and that any wishes he expresses are gratified.”

The wrestler bowed and stood aside for Chang to pass through the door with the pock-marked man. The hangings swung over the door behind them.

I didn’t waste any language on the man at the door, but got a cigarette going and waited for Chang to come back. The cigarette was half gone when a shot sounded in the building, not far away.

The giant at the door scowled.

Another shot sounded, and running feet thumped in the hall. The pockmarked man’s face came through the hangings. He poured grunts at the wrestler. The wrestler scowled at me and protested. The other insisted.

The wrestler scowled at me again, rumbled, “You wait,” and was gone.

I finished my cigarette to the tune of muffled struggle-sounds that seemed to come from the floor below. There were two more shots, far apart. Feet ran past the door of the room I was in. Perhaps ten minutes had gone since I had been left alone.

I found I wasn’t alone.

Across the room from the door, the hangings that covered the wall were disturbed. The blue, green and silver velvet bulged out an inch and settled back in place.

The disturbance happened the second time perhaps ten feet farther along the wall. No movement for a while, and then a tremor in the far corner.

Somebody was creeping along between hangings and wall.

I let them creep, still slumping in my chair with idle hands. If the bulge meant trouble, action on my part would only bring it that much quicker.

I traced the disturbance down the length of that wall and halfway across the other, to where I knew the door was. Then I lost it for some time. I had just decided that the creeper had gone through the door when the curtains opened and the Creeper stepped out.

She wasn’t four and a half feet high — a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy around her temples. Gold earrings swung beside her smooth cheeks, a jade butterfly was in her hair. A lavender jacket, glittering with white stones, covered her from under her chin to her knees. Lavender stockings showed under her short lavender trousers, and her bound-small feet were in slippers of the same color, shaped like kittens, with yellow stones for eyes and aigrettes for whiskers.

The point of all this our-young-ladies’-fashion stuff is that she was impossibly dainty. But there she was — neither a carving nor a painting, but a living small woman with fear in her black eyes and nervous, tiny fingers worrying the silk at her bosom.

Twice as she came toward me — hurrying with the awkward, quick step of the foot-bound Chinese woman — her head twisted around for a look at the hangings over the door.

I was on my feet by now, going to meet her.

Her. English wasn’t much. Most of what she babbled at me I missed, though I thought “yung hel-lup” might have been meant for “You help?”

I nodded, catching her under the elbows as she stumbled against me.

She gave me some more language that didn’t make the situation any clearer — unless “sul-lay-vee gull” meant slave-girl and “tak-ka wah” meant take away.

“You want me to get you out of here?” I asked.

Her head, close under my chin, went up and down, and her red flower of a mouth shaped a smile that made all the other smiles I could remember look like leers.

She did some more talking. I got nothing out of it. Taking one of her elbows out of my hand, she pushed up her sleeve, baring a forearm that an artist had spent a life-time carving out of ivory. On it were five finger-shaped bruises ending in cuts where the nails had punctured the flesh.

She let the sleeve fall over it again, and gave me more words. They didn’t mean anything to me, but they tinkled prettily.

“All right,” I said, sliding my gun out. “If you want to go, we’ll go.”

Both her hands went to the gun, pushing it down, and she talked excitedly into my face, winding up with a flicking of one hand across her collar — a pantomime of a throat being cut.

I shook my head from side to side and urged her toward the door.

She balked, fright large in her eyes.

One of her hands went to my watch-pocket. I let her take the watch out.

She put the tiny tip of one pointed finger over the twelve and then circled the dial three times. I thought I got that. Thirty-six hours from noon would be midnight of the following night — Thursday.

“Yes,” I said.

She shot a look at the door and led me to the table where the tea things were. With a finger dipped in cold tea she began to draw on the table’s inlaid top. Two parallel lines I took for a street. Another pair crossed them. The third pair crossed the second and paralleled the first.

“Waverly Place?” I guessed.

Her face bobbed up and down, delightedly.

On what I took for the east side of Waverly Place she drew a square — perhaps a house. In the square she set what could have been a rose. I frowned at that. She erased the rose and in its place put a crooked circle, adding dots. I thought I had it. The rose had been a cabbage. This thing was a potato. The square represented the grocery store I had noticed on Waverly Place. I nodded.

Her, finger crossed the street and put a square on the other side, and her face turned up to mine, begging me to understand her.

“The house across the street from the grocer’s,” I said slowly, and then, as she tapped my watch-pocket, I added, “at midnight tomorrow.”

I don’t know how much of it she caught, but she nodded until her earrings were swinging like pendulums.

With a quick diving motion, she caught my right hand, kissed it, and with a tottering, hoppy run vanished behind the velvet curtains.

I used my handkerchief to wipe the map off the table and was smoking in my chair when Chang Li Ching returned some twenty minutes later.

I left shortly after that, as soon as we had traded a few dizzy compliments. The pock-marked man ushered me out.

At the office there was nothing new for me. Foley hadn’t been able to shadow The Whistler the night before.

I went home for the sleep I had not got last night.

At ten minutes after ten the next morning Lillian Shan and I arrived at the front door of Fong Yick’s employment agency.

“Give me just two minutes,” I told her as I climbed out. “Then come in.”

In Fong Yick’s, a lanky, grey-haired man whom I thought was the Old Man’s Frank Paul was talking around a chewed cigar to half a dozen Chinese. Across the battered counter a fat Chinese was watching through steel-rimmed spectacles.

I looked at the half-dozen. The third from me had a crooked nose — a short, squat man.

I pushed aside the others and reached for him.

I don’t know what the stuff he tried on me was — jiu jitsu, maybe, or its Chinese equivalent. Anyhow, he crouched and moved his stiffly open hands trickily.

I took hold of him here and there, and presently had him by the nape of his neck, with one of his arms bent up behind him.

Another Chinese piled on my back. The lean, grey-haired man did something to his face, and the Chinese went over in a corner and stayed there.

That was the situation when Lillian Shan came in.

I shook the flat-nosed boy at her.

“Yin Hung!” she exclaimed.

“Hoo Lun isn’t one of the others?” I asked, pointing to the spectators.

She shook her head emphatically, and began jabbering Chinese at my prisoner. He jabbered back, meeting her gaze.

“What are you going to do with him?” she asked me in a voice that wasn’t quite right.

“Turn him over to the police to hold for the San Mateo sheriff. Can you get anything out of him?”

“No.”

I began to push him toward the door.

There was no excitement in the street. We climbed into the taxicab and drove the block and a half to the Hall of Justice, where I yanked my prisoner out. The rancher Paul said he wouldn’t go in, that he had enjoyed the party, but now had some of his own business to look after. He went on up Kearney Street afoot.

Half-out of the taxicab, Lillian Shan changed her mind.

“Unless it’s necessary,” she said, “I’d rather not go in either. I’ll wait here for you.”

“Righto,” and I pushed my captive across the sidewalk and up the steps.

Inside, an interesting situation developed.

The San Francisco police weren’t especially interested in Yin Hung, though willing enough, of course, to hold him for the sheriff of San Mateo County.

Yin Hung pretended he didn’t know any English, and I was curious to know what sort of story he had to tell, so I hunted around in the detectives’ assembly room until I found Bill Thode of the Chinatown detail, who talks the language some.

He and Yin Hung jabbered at each other for some time.

Then Bill looked at me, laughed, bit off the end of a cigar, and leaned back in his chair.

“According to the way he tells it,” Bill said, “that Wan Lan woman and Lillian Shan had a row. The next day Wan Lan’s not anywheres around. The Shan girl and Wang Ma, her maid, say Wan Lan has left, but Hoo Lun tells this fellow he saw Wang Ma burning some of Wan Lan’s clothes.

“So Hoo Lun and this fellow think something’s wrong, and the next day they’re damned sure of it, because this fellow misses a spade from his garden tools. He finds it again that night, and it’s still wet with damp dirt, and he says no dirt was dug up anywheres around the place — not outside of the house anyways. So him and Hoo Lun put their heads together, didn’t like the result, and decided they’d better dust out before they went wherever Wan Lan had gone.”

“Where is Hoo Lun now?”

“He says he don’t know.”

“So Lillian Shan and Wang Ma were still in the house when this pair left?” I asked. “They hadn’t started for the East yet?”

“So he says.”

“Has he got any idea why Wan Lan was killed?”

“Not that I’ve been able to get out of him.”

“Thanks, Bill! You’ll notify the sheriff that you’re holding him?”

“Sure.”

Of course Lillian Shan and the taxicab were gone when I came out of the Hall of Justice door.

I went back into the lobby and used one of the booths to phone the office. A wire had come from the Richmond branch. It was to the effect that the Garthornes were a wealthy and well-known local family, that young Jack was usually in trouble, that he had slugged a Prohibition agent during a cafe raid a few months ago, that his father had taken him out of his will and chased him from the house, but that his mother was believed to be sending him money.

That fit in with what the girl had told me.

A street car carried me to the garage where I had stuck the roadster I had borrowed from the girl’s garage the previous morning.

I was a little inclined toward grouchiness as I turned the roadster west, driving out through Golden Gate Park to the Ocean Boulevard. The job wasn’t getting along as snappily as I wanted it to.

A bony-faced man with pinkish mustache opened the door when I rang Lillian Shan’s bell. I knew him — Tucker, a deputy sheriff.

“Hullo,” he said. “What d’you want?”

“I’m hunting for her too.”

“Keep on hunting,” he grinned. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Not here, huh?”

“Nope. The Swede woman that works for her says she was in and out half an hour before I got here, and I’ve been here about ten minutes now.”

“Got a warrant for her?” I asked.

“You bet. Her chauffeur squawked.”

“Yes, I heard him,” I said. “I’m the bright boy who gathered him in.”

I spent five or ten minutes more talking to Tucker and then pointed the roadster at San Francisco again.

Just outside of Daly City a taxicab passed me, going south. Jack Garthorne’s face looked through the window.

I snapped on the brakes and waved my arm. The taxicab turned and came back to me.

I got down into the road and went over to him.

“There’s a deputy sheriff waiting in Miss Shan’s house, if that’s where you’re headed.”

His blue eyes narrowed as he looked suspiciously at me.

“Let’s go over to the side of the road and have a little talk,” I invited.

He got out of the taxicab and we crossed to a couple of comfortable-looking boulders on the other side.

“Where is Lil — Miss Shan?” he asked.

“Ask The Whistler,” I suggested.

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

I hadn’t meant anything. I had just wanted to see how the remark would hit him. I kept quiet.

“Has The Whistler got her?”

“I don’t think so,” I admitted, though I hated to do it. “But the point is that she has had to go in hiding to keep from being hanged for the murders The Whistler framed.”

“Hanged?”

“Uh-huh. The deputy waiting in her house has a warrant for her — for murder.”

He made gurgling noises in his throat.

“I’ll go there I I’ll tell everything I know!”

He started for his taxicab.

“Wait!” I called. “Maybe you’d better tell me what you know first. I’m working for her, you know.”

He spun around and came back. “Yes, that’s right. You’ll know what to do.”

“Now what do you really know, if anything?” I asked when he was standing in front of me.

“I know the whole thing!” he cried. “About the deaths and the booze and—”

“Easy! There’s no use wasting all that knowledge on the chauffeur.”

He quieted down, and I began to pump him. I spent nearly an hour getting all of it.

The history of his young life, as he told it to me, began with his departure from home after falling into disgrace through slugging the Prohi. He had come to San Francisco to wait until his father cooled off. Meanwhile his mother kept him in funds, but she didn’t send him all the money a young fellow in a wild city could use.

That was the situation when he ran into The Whistler, who suggested that a chap with Garthorne’s front could pick up some easy money in the rum-running game if he did what he was told to do.

The Whistler, it seemed, had boats and booze and waiting customers, but his landing arrangements were out of whack. He had his eye on a little cove down the shore line that was an ideal spot to land hooch. It was neither too close nor too far from San Francisco. It was sheltered on either side by rocky points, and screened from the road by a large house and high hedges. Given the use of that house, his troubles would be over. He could land his hooch in the cove, run it into the house, repack it innocently there, put it through the front door into his automobiles, and shoot it to the thirsty city.

The house, he told Garthorne, belonged to a Chinese girl named Lillian Shan, who would neither sell nor rent it. Garthorne was to make her acquaintance — The Whistler was already supplied with a letter of introduction written by a former classmate of the girl’s, a classmate who had fallen a lot since university days — and try to work himself in with her to a degree of intimacy that would permit him to make her an offer for the use of the house. That is, he was to find out if she was the sort of person who could be approached with a more or less frank offer of a share in the profits of The Whistler’s game.

Garthorne had gone through with his part, or the first of it, and had become fairly intimate with the girl, when she suddenly left for the East, sending him a note saying she would be gone several months. That was fine for the rum-runners. Garthorne, calling at the house, the next day, had learned that Wang Ma had gone with her mistress, and that the three other servants had been left in charge of the house.

That was all Garthorne knew firsthand. He had not taken part in the landing of the booze, though he would have liked to. But The Whistler had ordered him to stay away, so that he could continue his original part when the girl returned.

The Whistler told Garthorne he had bought the help of the three Chinese servants, but that the woman, Wan Lan, had been killed by the two men in a fight over their shares of the money. Booze had been run through the house once during Lillian Shan’s absence. Her unexpected return gummed things. The house still held some of the booze. They had to grab her and Wang Ma and stick them in a closet until they got the stuff away. The strangling of Wang Ma had been accidental — a rope tied too tight.

The worst complication, however, was that another cargo was scheduled to land in the cove the following Tuesday night, and there was no way of getting word out to the boat that the place was closed. The Whistler sent for our hero and ordered him to get the girl out of the way and keep her out of the way until at least two o’clock Wednesday morning.

Garthorne had invited her to drive down to Half Moon with him for dinner that night. She had accepted. He had faked engine trouble, and had kept her away from the house until two-thirty, and The Whistler had told him later that everything had gone through without a hitch.

After this I had to guess at what Garthorne was driving at — he stuttered and stammered and let his ideas rattle looser than ever. I think it added up to this: he hadn’t thought much about the ethics of his play with the girl. She had no attraction for him — too severe and serious to seem really feminine. And he had not pretended — hadn’t carried on what could possibly be called a flirtation with her. Then he suddenly woke up to the fact that she wasn’t as indifferent as he. That had been a shock to him — one he couldn’t stand. He had seen things straight for the first time. He had thought of it before as simply a wit-matching game. Affection made it different — even though the affection was all on one side.

“I told The Whistler I was through this afternoon,” he finished.

“How did he like it?”

“Not a lot. In fact, I had to hit him.”

“So? And what were you planning to do next?”

“I was going to see Miss Shan, tell her the truth, and then — then I thought I’d better lay low.”

“I think you’d better. The Whistler might not like being hit.”

“I won’t hide now! I’ll go give myself up and tell the truth.”

“Forget it!” I advised him. “That’s no good. You don’t know enough to help her.”

That wasn’t exactly the truth, because he did know that the chauffeur and Hoo Lun had still been in the house the day after her departure for the East. But I didn’t want him to get out of the game yet.

“If I were you,” I went on, “I’d pick out a quiet hiding place and stay there until I can get word to you. Know a good place?”

“Yes,” slowly. “I have a — a friend who will hide me — down near — near the Latin Quarter.”

“Near the Latin Quarter?” That could be Chinatown. I did some sharp-shooting. “Waverly Place?”

He jumped.

“How did you know?”

“I’m a detective. I know everything. Ever hear of Chang Li Ching?”

“No.”

I tried to keep from laughing into his puzzled face,

The first time I had seen this cutup he was leaving a house in Waverly Place, with a Chinese woman’s face showing dimly in the doorway behind him. The house had been across the street from a grocery. The Chinese girl with whom I had talked at Chang’s had given me a slave-girl yarn and an invitation to that same house. Big-hearted Jack here had fallen for the same game, but he didn’t know that the girl had anything to do with Chang Li Ching, didn’t know that Chang existed, didn’t know Chang and The Whistler were playmates. Now Jack is in trouble, and he’s going to the girl to hide!

I didn’t dislike this angle of the game. He was walking into a trap, but that was nothing to me — or, rather, I hoped it was going to help me.

“What’s your friend’s name?” I asked.

He hesitated.

“What is the name of the tiny woman whose door is across the street from the grocery?” I made myself plain.

“Hsiu Hsiu.”

“All right,” I encouraged him in his foolishness. “You go there. That’s an excellent hiding place. Now if I want to get a Chinese boy to you with a message, how will he find you?”

“There’s a flight of steps to the left as you go in. He’ll have to skip the second and third steps, because they are fitted with some sort of alarm. So is the handrail. On the second floor you turn to the left again. The hall is dark. The second door to the right — on the right-hand side of the hall — lets you into a room. On the other side of the room is a closet, with a door hidden behind old clothes. There are usually people in the room the door opens into, so he’ll have to wait for a chance to get through it. This room has a little balcony outside, that you can get to from either of the windows. The balcony’s sides are solid, so if you crouch low you can’t be seen from the street or from other houses. At the other end of the balcony there are two loose floor boards. You slide down under them into a little room between walls. The trap-door there will let you down into another just like it where I’ll probably be. There’s another way out of the bottom room, down a flight of steps, but I’ve never been that way.”

A fine mess! It sounded like a child’s game. But even with all this frosting on the cake your young chump hadn’t tumbled. He took it seriously.

“So that’s how it’s done!” I said. “You’d better get there as soon as you can, and stay there until my messenger gets to you. The street door — is it locked?”

“No. I’ve never found it locked. There are forty or fifty Chinamen — or perhaps a hundred — living in that building, so I don’t suppose the door is ever locked.”

“Good. Beat it now.”

At 10:15 that night I was pushing open the door opposite the grocery in Waverly Place — an hour and three-quarters early for my date with Hsiu Hsiu. At 9:55 Dick Foley had phoned that The Whistler had gone into the red-painted door on Spofford Alley.

I found the interior dark, and closed the door softly, concentrating on the childish directions Garthorne had given me.

The stairs gave me some trouble, but I got over the second and third without touching the handrail, and went on up. I found the second door in the hall, the closet in the room behind it, and the door in the closet. Light came through the cracks around it. Listening, I heard nothing.

I pushed the door open — the room was empty. A smoking oil lamp stunk there. The nearest window made no sound as I raised it. That was inartistic — a squeak would have impressed Garthorne with his danger.

I crouched low on the balcony, in accordance with instructions, and found the loose floorboards that opened up a black hole. Feet first, I went down in, slanting at an angle that made descent easy. It seemed to be a sort of slot cut diagonally through the wall. I went down swiftly, coming into a small room, long and narrow, as if placed inside a thick wall.

No light was there. My flashlight showed a room perhaps eighteen feet long by four wide, furnished with table, couch and two chairs. I looked under the one rug on the floor. The trapdoor was there.

Flat on my belly, I put an ear to the trapdoor. No sound. I raised it a couple of inches. Darkness and a faint murmuring of voices. I pushed the trapdoor wide, let it down easily on the floor and stuck head and shoulders into the opening, discovering then that it was a double arrangement. Another door was below, fitting no doubt in the ceiling of the room below.

Cautiously I let myself down on it. It gave under my foot. I could have pulled myself up again, but since I had disturbed it I chose to keep going.

I put both feet on it. It swung down. I dropped into light. The door snapped up over my head. I grabbed Hsiu Hsiu and clapped a hand over her tiny mouth in time to keep her quiet.

“Hello,” I said to the startled Garthorne; “this is my boy’s evening off, so I came myself.”

“Hello,” he gasped.

This room, I saw, was a duplicate of the one from which I had dropped, another cupboard between walls, though this one had an unpainted wooden door at one end.

I handed Hsiu Hsiu to Garthorne.

“Keep her quiet,” I ordered, “while—”

The clicking of the door’s latch silenced me. I jumped to the wall on the hinged side of the door just as it swung open — the opener hidden from me by the door.

The door opened wide, but not much wider than Jack Garthorne’s blue eyes, nor than this mouth. I let the door go back against the wall and stepped out behind my balanced gun.

The queen of something stood there!

She was a tall woman, straight-bodied and proud. A butterfly-shaped headdress decked with the loot of a dozen jewelry stores exaggerated her height. Her gown was amethyst filigreed with gold above, a living rainbow below. The clothes were nothing!

She was — maybe I can make it clear this way. Hsiu Hsiu was as perfect a bit of feminine beauty as could be imagined. She was perfect! Then comes this queen of something — and Hsiu Hsiu’s beauty went away. She was a candle in the sun. She was still pretty — prettier than the woman in the doorway, if it came to that — but you didn’t pay any attention to her. Hsiu Hsiu was a pretty girl: this royal woman in the doorway was — I don’t know the words.

“My God!” Garthorne was whispering harshly. “I never knew it!”

“What are you doing here?” I challenged the woman.

She didn’t hear me. She was looking at Hsiu Hsiu as a tigress might look at an alley cat. Hsiu Hsiu was looking at her as an alley cat might look at a tigress. Sweat was on Garthorne’s face and his mouth was the mouth of a sick man.

“What are you doing here?” I repeated, stepping closer to Lillian Shan.

“I am here where I belong,” she said slowly. “I have come back to my people.”

That was a lot of bunk. I turned to the goggling Garthorne.

“Take Hsiu Hsiu to the upper room, and keep her quiet. I want to talk to Miss Shan.”

Still dazed, he pushed the table under the trapdoor, climbed up on it, hoisted himself through the ceiling, and reached down. Hsiu Hsiu kicked and scratched, but I heaved her up to him. Then I closed the door through which Lillian Shan had come, and faced her.

“How did you get here?” I demanded.

“I went home after I left you, knowing what Yin Hung would say, because he had told me in the employment office, and when I got home— When I got home I decided to come here where I belong.”

“Nonsense!” I corrected her. “When you got home you found a message there from Chang Li Ching, ordering you to come here.”

She looked at me, saying nothing.

“What did Chang want?”

“He thought perhaps he could help me,” she said, “and so I stayed here.”

More nonsense.

“Chang told you Garthorne was in danger — had split with The Whistler.”

“The Whistler?”

“You made a bargain with Chang,” I accused her, paying no attention to her question. The chances were she didn’t know The Whistler by that name.

“There was no bargain,” she said.

I didn’t believe her. I said so.

“You gave Chang your house — or the use of it — in exchange for his promise that Garthorne would be saved from The Whistler, and that you would be saved from the law.”

She drew herself up.

“I did,” she said calmly.

“You ought to be spanked!” I growled at her. “Haven’t you had enough trouble without mixing yourself now with a flock of highbinders? Did you see The Whistler?”

“There was a man up there,” she said. “I don’t know his name.”

I hunted through my pocket and found the picture of him taken when he was sent to San Quentin.

“That is he,” she told me when I showed it to her.

“A fine partner you picked,” I raged. “What do you think his word on anything is worth?”

“I did not take his word for anything. I took Chang Li Ching’s word.”

“That’s just as bad. They’re mates. What was your bargain?”

She balked again, straight, stiff-necked and level-eyed. I tried another angle of attack.

“Here, you don’t mind who you make bargains with. Make one with me. I’m still one prison sentence ahead of The Whistler, so if his word is any good at all, mine ought to be highly valuable. You tell me what the deal was. If it’s half-way decent, I’ll promise you to crawl out of here and forget it. If you don’t tell me, I’m going to empty a gun out of the first window I can find. And you’d be surprised how many cops a shot will draw in this part of town.”

The threat took some of the color out of her face. She bit her lips and let her fingers twist together, and then it came.

“Chang Li Ching is one of the leaders of the anti-Japanese movement in China. Since the death of Sun Wen — or Sun Yat-Sen, as he is called in the south of China and here — the Japanese have increased their hold on the Chinese government until it is greater than it ever was. It is Sun Wen’s work that Chang Li Ching and his friends are carrying on.

“With their own government against them, their immediate necessity is to arm enough patriots to resist Japanese aggression when the time comes. That is what my house is used for. Rifles and ammunition are loaded into boats there and sent out to ships lying far offshore. This man you call The Whistler is the owner of the ships that carry arms to China.”

“And the death of the servants?” I asked.

“Wan Lan was a spy for the Chinese government — for the Japanese. Wang Ma’s death was an accident, I think, though she, too, was suspected of being a spy. To a patriot, the death of traitors is a necessary thing, you can understand that? Your people are like that too when your country is in danger.”

“Garthorne told me a rum-running story,” I said. “How about it?”

“He believed it,” she said, smiling softly at the trapdoor through which he had gone. “They told him that, because they did not know him well enough to trust him.”

One of her hands came out to rest on my arm.

“You will go away and keep silent?” she pleaded. “These things are against the law of your country, but would you not break another country’s laws to save your own country’s life? Have not four hundred million people the right to fight an alien race that would exploit them? Since the day of Taou-kwang my country has been the plaything of more aggressive nations. Is any price too great for patriotic Chinese to pay to end that period of dishonor? You will not put yourself in the way of my people’s liberty?”

“I hope they win,” I said, “but you’ve been tricked. The only guns that have gone through your house have gone through in pockets! It would take a year to get a shipload through there. Maybe Chang is running guns to China. It’s likely. But they don’t go through your place.

“The night I was there coolies went through — coming in, not going out. They came from the beach, and they left in machines. Maybe The Whistler is running the guns over for Chang and bringing coolies back. He can get anything from a thousand dollars up for each one he lands. That’s about the how of it. He runs the guns over for Chang, and brings his own stuff — coolies and no doubt some opium — back, getting his big profit on the return trip. There wouldn’t be enough money in the guns to interest him.

“The guns would be loaded at a pier, all regular, masquerading as something else. Your house is used for the return. Chang may or may not be tied up with the coolie and opium game, but it’s a cinch he’ll let The Whistler do whatever he likes if only The Whistler will run his guns across. So, you see, you have been gypped!”

“But—”

“But nothing! You’re helping Chang by taking part in the coolie traffic. And, my guess is, your servants were killed, not because they were spies, but because they wouldn’t sell you out.”

She was white-faced and unsteady on her feet. I didn’t let her recover.

“Do you think Chang trusts The Whistler? Did they seem friendly?”

I knew he couldn’t trust him, but I wanted something specific.

“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “There was some talk about a missing boat.”

That was good.

“They still together?”

“Yes.”

“How do I get there?”

“Down these steps, across the cellar — straight across — and up two flights of steps on the other side. They were in a room to the right of the second-floor landing.”

Thank God I had a direct set of instructions for once!

I jumped up on the table and rapped on the ceiling.

“Come on down, Garthorne, and bring your chaperon.

“Don’t either of you budge out of here until I’m back,” I told the boob and Lillian Shan when we were all together again. “I’m going to take Hsiu Hsiu with me. Come on, sister, I want you to talk to any bad men I meet. We go to see Chang Li Ching, you understand?” I made faces. “One yell out of you, and—” I put my fingers around her collar and pressed them lightly.

She giggled, which spoiled the effect a little.

“To Chang,” I ordered, and, holding her by one shoulder, urged her toward the door.

We went down into the dark cellar, across it, found the other stairs, and started to climb them.

A dim light burned on the first floor, where we had to turn to go up to the second floor. We had just made the turn when footsteps sounded behind us.

I lifted the girl up two steps, out of the light, and crouched beside her, holding her still. Four Chinese in wrinkled street clothes came down the first-floor hall, passed our stairs without a glance, and started on.

Hsiu Hsiu opened her red flower of a mouth and let out a squeal that could have been heard over in Oakland.

I cursed, turned her loose, and started up the steps. The four Chinese came after me. On the landing ahead one of Chang’s big wrestlers appeared — a foot of thin steel in his paw. I looked back.

Hsiu Hsiu sat on the bottom step, her head over her shoulder, experimenting with different sorts of yells and screams, enjoyment all over her laughing doll’s face. One of the climbing yellow men was loosening an automatic.

My legs pushed me on up toward the man-eater at the head of the steps. When he crouched close above me I let him have it.

My bullet cut the gullet out of him.

I patted his face with my gun as he tumbled down past me.

A hand caught one of my ankles.

Clinging to the railing, I drove my other foot back. Something stopped my foot. Nothing stopped me.

A bullet flaked some of the ceiling down as I made the head of the stairs and jumped for the door to the right.

Pulling it open, I plunged in.

The other of the big man-eaters caught me — caught my plunging hundred and eighty-some pounds as a boy would catch a rubber ball.

Across the room, Chang Li Ching ran plump fingers through his thin whiskers and smiled at me. Beside him, a man I knew for The Whistler started up from his chair, his beefy face twitching.

“The Prince of Hunters is welcome,” Chang said, and added something in Chinese to the man-eater who held me.

The man-eater set me down on my feet, and turned to shut the door on my pursuers.

The Whistler sat down again, his red-veined eyes shifty on me, his bloated face empty of enjoyment.

I tucked my gun inside my clothes before I started across the room toward Chang. And crossing the room, I noticed something.

Behind The Whistler’s chair the velvet hangings bulged just the least bit, not enough to have been noticed by anyone who hadn’t seen them bulge before. So Chang didn’t trust his confederate at all!

“I have something I want you to see,” I told the old Chinese when I was standing in front of him.

“That eye is privileged indeed which may gaze on anything brought by the Father of Avengers.”

“I have heard,” I said, as I put my hand in my pocket, “that all that starts for China doesn’t get there.”

The Whistler jumped up from his chair again, his mouth a snarl, his face a dirty pink. Chang Li Ching looked at him, and he sat down again.

I brought out the photograph of The Whistler standing in a group of Japs, the medal of the Order of the Rising Sun on his chest. Hoping Chang had not heard of the swindle and would not know the medal for a counterfeit, I dropped the photograph on the table.

Chang Li Ching looked at it for a long moment over his clasped hands, his old eyes shrewd and kindly, his face gentle. No muscle in his face moved. Nothing changed in his eyes.

The nails of his right hand slowly cut a red gash across the back of the clasped left hand.

“It is true,” he said softly, “that one acquires wisdom in the company of the wise.”

He unclasped his hands, picked up the photograph, and held it out to the beefy man. The Whistler seized it. His face drained grey, his eyes bulged out.

“Why, that’s—” he began, and stopped, let the photograph drop to his lap, and slumped down in an attitude of defeat.

That puzzled me. I had expected to argue with him, to convince Chang that the medal was not the fake it was.

“You may have what you wish in payment for this,” Chang Li Ching was saying to me.

“I want Lillian Shan and Garthorne cleared, and I want your fat friend here, and I want anybody else who was in on the killings.”

Chang’s eyes closed for a moment — the first sign of weariness I had seen on his round face.

“You may have them,” he said.

“The bargain you made with Miss Shan is all off, of course,” I pointed out. “I may need a little evidence to make sure I can hang this baby,” nodding at The Whistler.

Chang smiled dreamily.

“That, I am regretful, is not possible.”

“Why—?” I began, and stopped.

There was no bulge in the velvet curtain behind The Whistler now, I saw. One of the chair legs glistened in the light. A red pool spread on the floor under him. I didn’t have to see his back to know he was beyond hanging.

“That’s different,” I said, kicking a chair over to the table. “Now we’ll talk business.”

I sat down and we went into conference.

Two days later everything was cleared up to the satisfaction of police, press and public. The Whistler had been found in a dark street, hours dead from a cut in his back, killed in a bootlegging war, I heard. Hoo Lun was found. The gold-toothed Chinese who had opened the door for Lillian Shan was found. Five others were found. These seven, with Yin Hung, the chauffeur, eventually drew a life sentence apiece. They were The Whistler’s men, and Chang sacrificed them without batting an eye. They had as little proof of Chang’s complicity as I had, so they couldn’t hit back, even if they knew that Chang had given me most of my evidence against them.

Nobody but the girl, Chang and I knew anything about Garthorne’s part, so he was out, with liberty to spend most of his time at the girl’s house.

I had no proof that I could tie on Chang, couldn’t get any. Regardless of his patriotism, I’d have given my right eye to put the old boy away, That would have been something to write home about. But there hadn’t been a chance of nailing him, so I had had to be content with making a bargain whereby he turned everything over to me except himself and his friends.

I don’t know what happened to Hsiu Hsiu, the squealing slave-girl. She deserved to come through all right. I might have gone back to Chang’s to ask about her, but I stayed away. Chang had learned that the medal in the photo was a trick one. I had a note from him:

You can take that any way you like. But I know the man who wrote it, and I don’t mind admitting that I’ve stopped eating in Chinese restaurants, and that if I never have to visit Chinatown again it’ll be soon enough.