<h2 id="c9">IX</h2>
<p>Blake stood regarding the door. Then
he lifted his revolver from his breast
pocket and dropped it into his side pocket,
with his hand on the butt. Then with his left
hand he quietly opened the door, pushed it
back, and as quietly stepped into the room.</p>
<p>On the floor, in the center of a square of
orange-colored matting, he saw a white
woman sitting. She was drinking tea out of
an egg-shell of a cup, and after putting down
the cup she would carefully massage her lips
with the point of her little finger. This movement
puzzled the newcomer until he suddenly
realized that it was merely to redistribute the
rouge on them.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_115">[115]</div>
<p>She was dressed in a silk petticoat of almost
lemon yellow and an azure-colored silk bodice
that left her arms and shoulders bare to the
light that played on them from three small
oil lamps above her. Her feet and ankles
were also bare, except for the matting sandals
into which her toes were thrust. On one thin
arm glimmered an extraordinarily heavy
bracelet of gold. Her skin, which was very
white, was further albificated by a coat of rice
powder. She was startlingly slight. Blake,
as he watched her, could see the oval shadows
under her collar bones and the almost girlish
meagerness of breast half-covered by the azure
silk bodice.</p>
<p>She looked up slowly as Blake stepped into
the room. Her eyes widened, and she continued
to look, with parted lips, as she
contemplated the intruder’s heavy figure.
There was no touch of fear on her face. It
was more curiosity, the wilful, wide-eyed
curiosity of the child. She even laughed a
little as she stared at the intruder. Her
rouged lips were tinted a carmine so bright
that they looked like a wound across her white
face. That gash of color became almost
clown-like as it crescented upward with its
wayward mirth. Her eyebrows were heavily
penciled and the lids of the eyes elongated by
a widening point of blue paint. Her bare
heel, which she caressed from time to time with
fingers whereon the nails were stained pink
with henna, was small and clean cut, as clean
cut, Blake noticed, as the heel of a razor, while
the white calf above it was as thin and flat as
a boy’s.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_116">[116]</div>
<p>“Hello, New York,” she said with her
foolish and inconsequential little laugh. Her
voice took on an oddly exotic intonation, as
she spoke. Her teeth were small and white;
they reminded Blake of rice, while she repeated
the “New York,” bubblingly, as though
she were a child with a newly learned word.</p>
<p>“Hello!” responded the detective, wondering
how or where to begin. She made him
think of a painted marionette, so maintained
were her poses, so unreal was her make up.</p>
<p>“You’re the party who’s on the man hunt,”
she announced.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_117">[117]</div>
<p>“Am I?” equivocated Blake. She had risen
to her feet by this time, with monkey-like
agility, and showed herself to be much taller
than he had imagined. He noticed a knife
scar on her forearm.</p>
<p>“You’re after this man called Binhart,” she
declared.</p>
<p>“Oh, no, I’m not,” was Blake’s sagacious
response. “I don’t want Binhart!”</p>
<p>“Then what do you want?”</p>
<p>“I want the money he’s got.”</p>
<p>The little painted face grew serious; then
it became veiled.</p>
<p>“How much money has he?”</p>
<p>“That’s what I want to find out!”</p>
<p>She squatted ruminatively down on the edge
of her divan. It was low and wide and covered
with orange-colored silk.</p>
<p>“Then you’ll have to find Binhart!” was
her next announcement.</p>
<p>“Maybe!” acknowledged Blake.</p>
<p>“I can show you where he is!”</p>
<p>“All right,” was the unperturbed response.
The blue-painted eyes were studying him.</p>
<p>“It will be worth four thousand pounds, in
English gold,” she announced.</p>
<p>Blake took a step or two nearer her.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_118">[118]</div>
<p>“Is that the message Ottenheim told you to
give me?” he demanded. His face was red
with anger.</p>
<p>“Then three thousand pounds,” she calmly
suggested, wriggling her toes into a fallen
sandal.</p>
<p>Blake did not deign to speak. His inarticulate
grunt was one of disgust.</p>
<p>“Then a thousand, in gold,” she coyly intimated.
She twisted about to pull the strap
of her bodice up over her white shoulder-blades.
“Or I will kill him for you for two
thousand pounds in gold!”</p>
<p>Her eyes were as tranquil as a child’s.
Blake remembered that he was in a world not
his own.</p>
<p>“Why should I want him killed?” he inquired.
He looked about for some place to
sit. There was not a chair in the room.</p>
<p>“Because he intends to kill <i>you</i>,” answered
the woman, squatting on the orange-covered
divan.</p>
<p>“I wish he’d come and try,” Blake devoutly
retorted.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_119">[119]</div>
<p>“He will not come,” she told him. “It will
be done from the dark. <i>I</i> could have done it.
But Ottenheim said no.”</p>
<p>“And Ottenheim said you were to work with
me in this,” declared Blake, putting two and
two together.</p>
<p>The woman shrugged a white shoulder.</p>
<p>“Have you any money?” she asked. She
put the question with the artlessness of a child.</p>
<p>“Mighty little,” retorted Blake, still studying
the woman from where he stood. He was
wondering if Ottenheim had the same hold on
her that the authorities had on Ottenheim, the
ex-forger who enjoyed his parole only on condition
that he remain a stool-pigeon of the
high seas. He pondered what force he could
bring to bear on her, what power could squeeze
from those carmine and childish lips the information
he must have.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_120">[120]</div>
<p>He knew that he could break that slim body
of hers across his knee. But he also knew
that he had no way of crushing out of it the
truth he sought, the truth he must in some way
obtain. The woman still squatted on the
divan, peering down at the knife scar on her
arm from time to time, studying it, as though
it were an inscription.</p>
<p>Blake was still watching the woman when
the door behind him was slowly opened; a head
was thrust in, and as quietly withdrawn again.
Blake dropped his right hand to his coat
pocket and moved further along the wall,
facing the woman. There was nothing of
which he stood afraid: he merely wished to be
on the safe side.</p>
<p>“Well, what word’ll I take back to Ottenheim?”
he demanded.</p>
<p>The woman grew serious. Then she
showed her rice-like row of teeth as she
laughed.</p>
<p>“That means there’s nothing in it for me,”
she complained with pouting-lipped moroseness.
Her venality, he began to see, was
merely the instinctive acquisitiveness of the
savage, the greed of the petted child.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_121">[121]</div>
<p>“No more than there is for me,” Blake
acknowledged. She turned and caught up a
heavily flowered mandarin coat of plaited
cream and gold. She was thrusting one arm
into it when a figure drifted into the room
from the matting-hung doorway on Blake’s
left. As she saw this figure she suddenly
flung off the coat and stooped to the tea tray
in the middle of the floor.</p>
<p>Blake saw that the newcomer was a Chinaman.
This newcomer, he also saw, ignored
him as though he were a door post, confronting
the woman and assailing her with a quick
volley of words, of incomprehensible words in
the native tongue. She answered with the
same clutter and clack of unknown syllables,
growing more and more excited as the dialogue
continued. Her thin face darkened and
changed, her white arms gyrated, the fires of
anger burned in the baby-like eyes. She
seemed expostulating, arguing, denouncing,
and each wordy sally was met by an equally
wordy sally from the Chinaman. She challenged
and rebuked with her passionately
pointed finger; she threatened with angry
eyes; she stormed after the newcomer as he
passed like a shadow out of the room; she met
him with a renewed storm when he returned a
moment later.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_122">[122]</div>
<p>The Chinaman now stood watching her, impassive
and immobile, as though he had taken
his stand and intended to stick to it. Blake
studied him with calm and patient eyes. That
huge-limbed detective in his day had
“pounded” too many Christy Street Chinks
to be in any way intimidated by a queue and
a yellow face. He was not disturbed. He
was merely puzzled.</p>
<p>Then the woman turned to the mandarin
coat, and caught it up, shook it out, and for
one brief moment stood thoughtfully regarding
it. Then she suddenly turned about on
the Chinaman.</p>
<p>Blake, as he stood watching that renewed
angry onslaught, paid little attention to the
actual words that she was calling out. But as
he stood there he began to realize that she was
not speaking in Chinese, but in English.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_123">[123]</div>
<p>“Do you hear me, white man? Do you hear
me?” she cried out, over and over again. Yet
the words seemed foolish, for all the time as
she uttered them, she was facing the placid-eyed
Chinaman and gesticulating in his face.</p>
<p>“Don’t you see,” Blake at last heard her
crying, “he doesn’t know what I’m saying!
He doesn’t understand a word of English!”
And then, and then only, it dawned on Blake
that every word the woman was uttering
was intended for his own ears. She was
warning him, and all the while pretending
that her words were the impetuous words of
anger.</p>
<p>“Watch this man!” he heard her cry.
“Don’t let him know you’re listening. But
remember what I say, remember it. And God
help you if you haven’t got a gun.”</p>
<p>Blake could see her, as in a dream, assailing
the Chinaman with her gestures, advancing on
him, threatening him, expostulating with him,
but all in pantomime. There was something
absurd about it, as absurd as a moving-picture
film which carries the wrong text.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_124">[124]</div>
<p>“He’ll pretend to take you to the man you
want,” the woman was panting. “That’s
what he will say. But it’s a lie. He’ll take
you out to a sampan, to put you aboard Binhart’s
boat. But the three of them will cut
your throat, cut your throat, and then drop
you overboard. He’s to get so much in gold.
Get out of here with him. Let him think
you’re going. But drop away, somewhere,
before you get to the beach. And watch
them all the way.”</p>
<p>Blake stared at the immobile Chinaman, as
though to make sure that the other man had
not understood. He was still staring at that
impassive yellow face, he was still absorbing
the shock of his news, when the outer door
opened and a second Chinaman stepped into
the room. The newcomer cluttered a quick
sentence or two to his countryman, and was
still talking when a third figure sidled in.</p>
<p>Those spoken words, whatever they were,
seemed to have little effect on any one in the
room except the woman. She suddenly
sprang about and exploded into an angry
shower of denials.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_125">[125]</div>
<p>“It’s a lie!” she cried in English, storming
about the impassive trio. “You never heard
me peach! You never heard me say a word!
It’s a lie!”</p>
<p>Blake strode to the middle of the room,
towering above the other figures, dwarfing
them by his great bulk, as assured of his mastery
as he would have been in a Chatham
Square gang fight.</p>
<p>“What’s the row here?” he thundered,
knowing from the past that power promptly
won its own respect. “What’re you talking
about, you two?” He turned from one intruder
to another. “And you? And you?
What do you want, anyway?”</p>
<p>The three contending figures, however, ignored
him as though he were a tobacconist’s
dummy. They went on with their exotic
cackle, as though he was no longer in their
midst. They did not so much as turn an eye
in his direction. And still Blake felt reasonably
sure of his position.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_126">[126]</div>
<p>It was not until the woman squeaked, like a
frightened mouse, and ran whimpering into
the corner of the room, that he realized what
was happening. He was not familiar with
the wrist movement by which the smallest
bodied of the three men was producing a knife
from his sleeve. The woman, however, had
understood from the first.</p>
<p>“White man, look out!” she half sobbed
from her corner. “Oh, white man!” she repeated
in a shriller note as the Chinaman,
bending low, scuttled across the room to the
corner where she cowered.</p>
<p>Blake saw the knife by this time. It was
thin and long, for all the world like an icicle,
a shaft of cutting steel ground incredibly thin,
so thin, in fact, that at first sight it looked
more like a point for stabbing than a blade for
cutting.</p>
<p>The mere glitter of that knife electrified the
staring white man into sudden action. He
swung about and tried to catch at the arm that
held the steel icicle. He was too late for that,
but his fingers closed on the braided queue.
By means of this queue he brought the Chinaman
up short, swinging him sharply about so
that he collided flat faced with the room
wall.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_127">[127]</div>
<p>Then, for the first time, Blake grew into a
comprehension of what surrounded him. He
wheeled about, stooped and caught up the
papier-mâché tea-tray from the floor and once
more stood with his back to the wall. He
stood there, on guard, for a second figure with
a second steel icicle was sidling up to him. He
swung viciously out and brought the tea-tray
down on the hand that held this knife, crippling
the fingers and sending the steel spinning
across the room. Then with his free hand
he tugged the revolver from his coat pocket,
holding it by the barrel and bringing the metal
butt down on the queue-wound head of the
third man, who had no knife, but was struggling
with the woman for the metal icicle she
had caught up from the floor.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_128">[128]</div>
<p>Then the five seemed to close in together,
and the fight became general. It became a
mêlée. With his swinging right arm Blake
battered and pounded with his revolver butt.
With his left hand he made cutting strokes
with the heavy papier-mâché tea-tray, keeping
their steel, by those fierce sweeps, away
from his body. One Chinaman he sent
sprawling, leaving him huddled and motionless
against the orange-covered divan. The
second, stunned by a blow of the tea-tray
across the eyes, could offer no resistance when
Blake’s smashing right dealt its blow, the
metal gun butt falling like a trip hammer on
the shaved and polished skull.</p>
<p>As the white man swung about he saw the
third Chinaman with his hand on the woman’s
throat, holding her flat against the wall, placing
her there as a butcher might place a fowl
on his block ready for the blow of his carver.
Blake stared at the movement, panting for
breath, overcome by that momentary indifference
wherein a winded athlete permits without
protest an adversary to gain his momentary
advantage. Then will triumphed over the
weakness of the body. But before Blake
could get to the woman’s side he saw the Chinaman’s
loose-sleeved right hand slowly and deliberately
ascend. As it reached the meridian
of its circular upsweep he could see the woman
rise on her toes, rise as though with some quick
effort, yet some effort which Blake could not
understand.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_129">[129]</div>
<p>At the same moment that she did so a look
of pained expostulation crept into the staring
slant eyes on a level with her own. The yellow
jaw gaped, filled with blood, and the
poised knife fell at his side, sticking point
down in the flooring. The azure and lemon-yellow
that covered the woman’s body flamed
into sudden scarlet. It was only as the figure
with the expostulating yellow face sank to the
ground, crumpling up on itself as it fell, that
Blake comprehended. That quick sweep of
scarlet, effacing the azure and lemon, had
come from the sudden deluge of blood that
burst over the woman’s body. She had made
use of the upstroke, Mexican style. Her
knife had cut the full length of the man’s abdominal
cavity, clean and straight to the
breastbone. He had been ripped up like a
herring.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_130">[130]</div>
<p>Blake panted and wheezed, not at the sight
of the blood, but at the exertion to which his
flabby muscles had been put. His body was
moist with sweat. His asthmatic throat
seemed stifling his lungs. A faint nausea
crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the
thought that such things could take place so
easily, and with so little warning.</p>
<p>His breast still heaved and panted and he
was still fighting for breath when he saw the
woman stoop and wipe the knife on one of the
fallen Chinaman’s sleeves.</p>
<p>“We’ve got to get out of here!” she whimpered,
as she caught up the mandarin coat and
flung it over her shoulders, for in the struggle
her body had been bared almost to the waist.
Blake saw the crimson that dripped on her
matting slippers and maculated the cream
white of the mandarin coat.</p>
<p>“But where’s Binhart?” he demanded, as
he looked stolidly about for his black boulder.</p>
<p>“Never mind Binhart,” she cried, touching
the eviscerated body at her feet with one slipper
toe, “or we’ll get what <i>he</i> got!”</p>
<p>“I want that man Binhart!” persisted the
detective.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_131">[131]</div>
<p>“Not here! Not here!” she cried, folding
the loose folds of the cloak closer about her
body.</p>
<p>She ran to the matting curtain, looked out,
and called back, “Quick! Come quick!”
Then she ran back, slipped the bolt in the
outer door and rejoined the waiting detective.</p>
<p>“Oh, white man!” she gasped, as the matting
fell between them and the room incarnadined
by their struggle. Blake was not sure,
but he thought he heard her giggle, hysterically,
in the darkness. They were groping
their way along a narrow passage. They
slipped through a second door, closed and
locked it after them, and once more groped
on through the darkness.</p>
<p>How many turns they took, Blake could
not remember. She stopped and whispered
to him to go softly, as they came to a stairway,
as steep and dark as a cistern. Blake, at the
top, could smell opium smoke, and once or
twice he thought he heard voices. The woman
stopped him, with outstretched arms, at the
stair head, and together they stood and
listened.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_132">[132]</div>
<p>Blake, with nerves taut, waited for some
sign from her to go on again. He thought she
was giving it, when he felt a hand caress his
side. He felt it move upward, exploringly.
At the same time that he heard her little groan
of alarm he knew that the hand was not hers.</p>
<p>He could not tell what the darkness held,
but his movement was almost instinctive. He
swung out with his great arm, countered on
the crouching form in front of him, caught at
a writhing shoulder, and tightening his grip,
sent the body catapulting down the stairway
at his side. He could hear a revolver go off
as the body went tumbling and rolling down—Blake
knew that it was a gun not his own.</p>
<p>“Come on, white man!” the girl in front of
him was crying, as she tugged at his coat.
And they went on, now at a run, taking a turn
to the right, making a second descent, and
then another to the left. They came to still
another door, which they locked behind them.
Then they scrambled up a ladder, and he could
hear her quick hands padding about in the
dark. A moment later she had thrust up a
hatch. He saw it led to the open air, for the
stars were above them.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_133">[133]</div>
<p>He felt grateful for that open air, for the
coolness, for the sense of deliverance which
came with even that comparative freedom.</p>
<p>“Don’t stop!” she whispered. And he followed
her across the slant of the uneven roof.
He was weak for want of breath. The girl
had to catch him and hold him for a moment.</p>
<p>“On the next roof you must take off your
shoes,” she warned him. “You can rest then.
But hurry—hurry!”</p>
<p>He gulped down the fresh air as he tore at
his shoe laces, thrusting each shoe in a side
pocket as he started after her. For by this
time she was scrambling across the broken
sloping roofs, as quick and agile as a cat, dropping
over ledges, climbing up barriers and
across coping tiles. Where she was leading
him he had no remotest idea. She reminded
him of a cream-tinted monkey in the maddest
of steeplechases. He was glad when she came
to a stop.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_134">[134]</div>
<p>The town seemed to lay to their right. Before
them were the scattered lights of the harbor
and the mild crescent of the outer bay.
They could see the white wheeling finger of
some foreign gunboat as its searchlight played
back and forth in the darkness.</p>
<p>She sighed with weariness and dropped
cross-legged down on the coping tiles against
which he leaned, regaining his breath. She
squatted there, cooingly, like a child exhausted
with its evening games.</p>
<p>“I’m dished!” she murmured, as she sat
there breathing audibly through the darkness.
“I’m dished for this coast!”</p>
<p>He sat down beside her, staring at the searchlight.
There seemed something reassuring,
something authoritative and comforting, in the
thought of it watching there in the darkness.</p>
<p>The girl touched him on the knee and then
shifted her position on the coping tiles, without
rising to her feet.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_135">[135]</div>
<p>“Come here!” she commanded. And when
he was close beside her she pointed with her
thin white arm. “That’s Saint Poalo there—you
can just make it out, up high, see. And
those lights are the Boundary Gate. And this
sweep of lights below here is the <i>Praya</i>. Now
look where I’m pointing. That’s the Luiz
Camoes lodging-house. You see the second
window with the light in it?”</p>
<p>“Yes, I see it.”</p>
<p>“Well, Binhart’s inside that window.”</p>
<p>“You know it?”</p>
<p>“I know it.”</p>
<p>“So he’s there?” said Blake, staring at the
vague square of light.</p>
<p>“Yes, he’s there, all right. He’s posing
as a buyer for a tea house, and calls himself
Bradley. Lee Fu told me; and Lee Fu is always
right.”</p>
<p>She stood up and pulled the mandarin coat
closer about her thin body. The coolness of
the night air had already chilled her. Then
she squinted carefully about in the darkness.</p>
<p>“What are you going to do?” she asked.</p>
<p>“I’m going to get Binhart,” was Blake’s answer.</p>
<p>He could hear her little childlike murmur of
laughter.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_136">[136]</div>
<p>“You’re brave, white man,” she said, with
a hand on his arm. She was silent for a moment,
before she added: “And I think you’ll
get him.”</p>
<p>“Of course I’ll get him,” retorted Blake,
buttoning his coat. The fires had been relighted
on the cold hearth of his resolution.
It came to him only as an accidental afterthought
that he had met an unknown woman
and had passed through strange adventures
with her and was now about to pass out of her
life again, forever.</p>
<p>“What’ll you do?” he asked.</p>
<p>Again he heard the careless little laugh.</p>
<p>“Oh, I’ll slip down through the Quarter and
cop some clothes somewhere. Then I’ll have
a sampan take me out to the German boat.
It’ll start for Canton at daylight.”</p>
<p>“And then?” asked Blake, watching the window
of the Luiz Camoes lodging-house below
him.</p>
<p>“Then I’ll work my way up to Port Arthur,
I suppose. There’s a navy man there who’ll
help me!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_137">[137]</div>
<p>“Haven’t you any money?” Blake put the
question a little uneasily.</p>
<p>Again he felt the careless coo of laughter.</p>
<p>“Feel!” she said. She caught his huge hand
between hers and pressed it against her waist
line. She rubbed his fingers along what he
accepted as a tightly packed coin-belt. He
was relieved to think that he would not have
to offer her money. Then he peered over the
coping tiles to make sure of his means of descent.</p>
<p>“You had better go first,” she said, as she
leaned out and looked down at his side. “Crawl
down this next roof to the end there. At the
corner, see, is the end of the ladder.”</p>
<p>He stooped and slipped his feet into his
shoes. Then he let himself cautiously down to
the adjoining roof, steeper even than the
one on which they had stood. She bent
low over the tiles, so that her face was very
close to his as he found his footing and stood
there.</p>
<p>“Good-by, white man,” she whispered.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_138">[138]</div>
<p>“Good-by!” he whispered back, as he worked
his way cautiously and ponderously along that
perilous slope.</p>
<p>She leaned there, watching him as he gained
the ladder-end. He did not look back as he
lowered himself, rung by rung. All thought
of her, in fact, had passed from his preoccupied
mind. He was once more intent on his own
grim ends. He was debating with himself just
how he was to get in through that lodging-house
window and what his final move would be
for the round up of his enemy. He had made
use of too many “molls” in his time to waste
useless thought on what they might say or do or
desire. When he had got Binhart, he remembered,
he would have to look about for something
to eat, for he was as hungry as a wolf.
And he did not even hear the girl’s second soft
whisper of “Good-by.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_139">[139]</div>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />