Title: Fear and Other Stories
Author: Achmed Abdullah
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Fear and Other Stories

by

Achmed Abdullah

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Fear
The Incubus
Pro Patria
Pell Street Blues
Mystery of the Talking Idols
The Charmed Life
A Simple Act of Piety

FEAR

THE fact that the man whom he feared had died ten years earlier did not in the least lessen Stuart McGregor's obsession of horror, of a certain grim expectancy, every time he recalled that final scene, just before Farragut Hutchison disappeared in the African jungle that stood, spectrally motionless as if forged out of some blackish-green metal, in the haggard moonlight.

As he reconstructed it, the whole scene seemed unreal, almost oppressively, ludicrously theatrical. The pall of sodden, stygian darkness all around; the night sounds of soft-winged, obscene things flapping lazily overhead or brushing against the furry trees that held the woolly heat of the tropical day like boiler pipes in a factory; the slimy, swishy things that glided and crawled and wiggled underfoot; the vibrant growl of a hunting lioness that began in a deep basso and peaked to a shrill, high-pitched, ridiculously inadequate treble; a spotted hyena's vicious, bluffing bark; the chirp and whistle of innumerable monkeys; a warthog breaking through the undergrowth with a clumsy, clownish crash--and somewhere, very far away, the staccato thumping of a signal drum, and more faintly yet the answer from the next in line.

He had seen many such drums, made from fire-hollowed palm trees and covered with tightly stretched skin--often the skin of a human enemy.

Yes. He remembered it all. He remembered the night jungle creeping in on their camp like a sentient, malign being--and then that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison walked away between the six giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto negroes, and bringing into crass relief the tattoo mark on the man's back where the shirt had been torn to tatters by camel thorns and wait-a-bit spikes and sabre--shaped palm leaves.

He recalled the occasion when Farragut Hutchison had had himself tattooed; after a crimson, drunken spree at Madam Céleste's place in Port Said, the other side of the Red Sea traders' bazaar, to please a half-caste Swahili dancing girl who looked like a golden madonna of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. Doubtless the girl had gone shares with the Levantine craftsman who had done the work--an eagle, in bold red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design. The eagle was in profile, and its single eye had a disconcerting trick of winking sardonically whenever Farragut Hutchison moved his back muscles or twitched his shoulder blades.

Always, in his memory, Stuart McGregor saw that tattoo mark.

Always did he see the wicked, leering squint in the eagle's eye--and then he would scream, wherever he happened to be, in a theatre, a Broadway restaurant, or across some good friend's mahogany and beef.

Thinking back, he remembered that, for all their bravado, for all their showing off to each other, both he and Farragut Hutchinson had been afraid since that day, up the hinterland, when, drunk with fermented palm wine, they had insulted the fetish of the Bakotos, while the men were away hunting and none left to guard the village except the women and children and a few feeble old men whose curses and high-pitched maledictions were picturesque, but hardly effectual enough to stop him and his partner from doing a vulgar, intoxicated dance in front of the idol, from grinding burning cigar ends into its squat, repulsive features, and from generally polluting the juju hut--not to mention the thorough and profitable looting of the place.

They had got away with the plunder, gold dust and a handful of splendid canary diamonds, before the Bakoto warriors had returned. But fear had followed them, stalked them, trailed them; a fear different from any they had ever experienced before. And be it mentioned that their path of life had been crimson and twisted and fantastic, that they had followed the little squinting swarthheaded, hunchbacked djinni of adventure wherever man's primitive lawlessness rules above the law, from Nome to Timbuktu, from Peru to the black felt tents of Outer Mongolia, from the Australian bush, to the absinth-sodden apache haunts of Paris. Be it mentioned, furthermore, that thus, often, they had stared death in the face and, not being fools, had found the staring distasteful and shivery.

But what they had felt on that journey, back to the security of the coast and the ragged Union Jack flapping disconsolately above the British governor's official corrugated iron mansion, had been something worse than mere physical fear; it had been a nameless, brooding, sinister apprehension which had crept through their souls, a harshly discordant note that had pealed through the hidden recesses of their beings.

Everything had seemed to mock them--the crawling, sour-miasmic jungle; the slippery roots and timber falls; the sun of the tropics, brown, decayed, like the sun on the Day of Judgment; the very flowers, spiky, odorous, waxen, unhealthy, lascivious.

At night, when they had rested in some clearing, they had even feared their own camp fire--flaring up, twinkling, flickering, then coiling into a ruby ball. It had seemed completely isolated in the purple night.

Isolated!

And they had longed for human companionship--white companionship.

White faces. White slang, White curses. White odors. White obscenities.

Why--they would have welcomed a decent, square, honest white murder; a knife flashing in some yellow-haired Norse sailor's brawny fist; a belaying pin in the hand of some bullying Liverpool tramp-ship skipper; some Nome gambler's six-gun splattering leaden death; some apache of the Rue de Venise garroting a passerby.

But here, in the African jungle--and how Stuart McGregor remembered it--the fear of death had seemed pregnant with unmentionable horror. There had been no sounds except the buzzing of the tsetse flies and a faint rubbing of drums, whispering through the desert and jungle like the voices of disembodied souls, astray on the outer rim of creation.

And, overhead, the stars. Always, at night, three stars, glittering, leering; and Stuart McGregor, who had gone through college and had once written his college measure of limping, anæmic verse, had pointed at them.

"The three stars of Africa!" he had said. "The star of violence! The star of lust! And the little stinking star of greed!"

And he had broken into staccato laughter which had struck Farragut Hutchinson as singularly out of place and had caused him to blurt forth with a wicked curse:

"Shut your trap, you--"

For already they had begun to quarrel, those two pals of a dozen tight, riotous adventures. Already, imperceptibly, gradually, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, a mutual hatred had grown up between them.

But they had controlled themselves. The diamonds were good, could be sold at a big figure; and, even split in two, would mean a comfortable stake.

Then, quite suddenly, had come the end--the end for one of them.

And the twisting, gliding skill of Stuart McGregor's fingers had made sure that Farragut Hutchison should be that one.

Years after, when Africa as a whole had faded to a memory of coiling, unclean shadows, Stuart McGregor used to say, with that rather plaintive, monotonous drawl of his, that the end of this phantasmal African adventure had been different from what he had expected it to be.

In a way, he had found it disappointing.

Not that it had lacked in purely dramatic thrills and blood-curdling trimmings. That wasn't it. On the contrary, it had had a plethora of thrills.

But, rather, he must have been keyed up to too high a pitch; must have expected too much, feared too much during that journey from the Bakoto village back through the hinterland.

Thus when, one night, the Bakoto warriors had come from nowhere, out of the jungle, hundreds of them, silent, as if the wilderness had spewed them forth, it had seemed quite prosy.

Prosy, too, had been the expectation of death. It had even seemed a welcome relief from the straining fatigues of the jungle pull, the recurrent fits of fever, the flying and crawling pests, the gnawing moroseness which is so typically African.

"An explosion of life and hatred," Stuart McGregor used to say, "that's what I had expected, don't you see? Quick and merciless. And it wasn't. For the end came--slow and inevitable. Solid. Greek in a way. And so courtly! So polite! That was the worst of it!"

For the leader of the Bakotos, a tall, broad, frizzy, odorous warrior, with a face like a black Nero with a dash of Manchu emperor, had bowed before them with a great clanking of barbarous ornaments. There had been no marring taint of hatred in his voice as he told them that they must pay for their insults to the fetish, He had not even mentioned the theft of the gold dust and diamonds.

"My heart is heavy at the thought, white chiefs," he said. "But--you must pay!"

Stuart McGregor had stammered ineffectual, foolish apologies:

"We--we were drunk. We didn't know what--oh--what we--"

"What you were doing!" the Bakoto had finished the sentence for him, with a little melancholy sigh. "And there is forgiveness in my heart--"

"You--you mean to say--" Farragut Hutchison had jumped up, with extended hand, blurting out hectic thanks.

"Forgiveness in my heart, not the juju's," gently continued the negro. "For the juju never forgives. On the other hand, the juju is fair. He wants his just measure of blood. Not an ounce more. Therefore," the Bakoto had gone on, and his face had been as stony and as passionless as that of the Buddha who meditates in the shade of the cobra's hood, "the choice will be yours."

"Choice?" Farragut Hutchison had looked up, a gleam of hope in his eyes.

"Yes. Choice which one of you will die." The Bakoto had smiled, with the same suave courtliness which had, somehow, increased the utter horror of the scene. "Die--oh--a slow death, befitting the insult to the juju, befitting the juju's great holiness!"

Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had understood that there would be no arguing, no bargaining whatsoever; and, quickly, had come his hysterical question:

"Who? I--or--"

He had slurred and stopped, somehow ashamed, and the Bakoto had finished the interrupted question with gentle, gliding, inhuman laughter: "Your friend? White chief, that is for you two to decide: I only know that the juju has spoken to the priest, and that he is satisfied with the life of one of you two; the life--and the death. A slow death."

He had paused; then had continued gently, so very, very gently: "Yes. A slow death, depending entirely upon the vitality of the one of you two who will be sacrificed to the juju. There will be little knives. There will be the flying insects which follow the smell of blood and festering flesh. Too, there will be many, crimson-headed ants, many, ants--and a thin river of honey to show them the trail."

He had yawned. Then he had gone on: "Consider. The juju is just. He only wants the sacrifice of one of you, and you yourselves must decide which one shall go, and which one shall stay. And--remember the little, little knives. Be pleased to remember the many ants which follow the honey trail. I shall return shortly and hear your choice."

He had bowed and, with his silent warriors, had stepped back into the jungle that had closed behind them like a curtain.

Even in that moment of stark, enormous horror, horror too great to be grasped, horror that swept over and beyond the barriers of fear--even in that moment Stuart McGregor had realized that, by leaving the choice to them, the Bakoto had committed a refined cruelty worthy of a more civilized race, and had added a psychic torture fully as dreadful as the physical torture of the little knives.

Too, in that moment of ghastly, lecherous expectancy, he had known that it was Farragut Hutchison who would be sacrificed to the juju---Farragut Hutchison who sat there, staring into the camp fire, making queer little, funny noises in his throat.

Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had laughed--he remembered that laugh to his dying day--and had thrown a greasy pack of playing cards into the circle of meager, indifferent light.

"Let the cards decide, old boy," he had shouted. "One hand of poker--and no drawing to your hand. Showdown! That's square, isn't it?"

"Sure!" the other had replied, still staring straight ahead of him. "Go ahead and deal--"

His voice had drifted into a mumble while Stuart McGregor had picked up the deck, had shuffled, slowly, mechanically.

As he shuffled, it had seemed to him as if his brain was frantically telegraphing to his fingers, as if all those delicate little nerves that ran from the back of his skull down to his finger tips were throbbing a clicking little chorus:

"Do--it--Mac! Do--it--Mac! Do it--Mac!" with a maddening, cyncopated rhythm.

And he had kept on shuffling, had kept on watching the motions of his fingers--and bad seen that his thumb and second finger had shuffled the ace of hearts to the bottom of the deck.

Had he done it on purpose? He did not know then. He never found out--though, in his memory, he lived through the scene a thousand times.

But there were the little knives. There were the ants. There was the honey trail. There was his own, hard decision to live. And, years earlier, he had been a professional faro dealer at Silver City.

Another ace had joined the first at the bottom of the deck. The third. The fourth.

And then Farragut Hutchison's violent: "Deal, man, deal! You're driving me crazy. Get it over with."

The sweat had been pouring from Stuart McGregor's face. His blood had throbbed in his veins. Something like a sledge hammer had drummed at the base of his skull.

"Cut, won't you?" he had said, his voice coming as if from very far away.

The other had waved a trembling hand. "No, no! Deal 'em as they lie. You won't cheat me."

Stuart McGregor had cleared a little space on the ground with the point of his shoe.

He remembered the motion. He remembered how the dead leaves had stirred with a dry, rasping, tragic sound, how something slimy and phosphorous-green had squirmed through the tufted jungle grass, how a little furry scorpion had scurried away with a clicking tchk-tchk-tchk.

He had dealt.

Mechanically, even as he was watching, them, his fingers had given himself five cards from the bottom of the deck. Four aces--and the queen of diamonds. And, the next second, in answer to Farragut Hutchison's choked: "Show-down! I have two pair--kings--and jacks!" his own well simulated shriek of joy and triumph:

"I win! I've four aces! Every ace in the pack!"

And then Farragut Hutchison's weak, ridiculous exclamation--ridiculous considering the dreadful fate that waited him:

"Geewhittaker! You're some lucky guy, aren't you, Mac?"

At the same moment, the Bakoto chief had stepped out of the jungle, followed by half a dozen warriors.

Then the final scene--that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison had walked away between the giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto negroes, and bringing into stark relief the tattoo mark on his back where the shirt had been torn to tatters--and the leering, evil wink in the eagle's eye as Farragut Hutchison twitched his shoulder blades with absurd, nervous resignation.

Stuart McGregor remembered it every day of his life.

He spoke of it to many. But only to Father Aloysius O'Donnell, the priest who officiated, In the little Gothic church around the corner, on Ninth Avenue, did he tell the whole truth--did he confess that he had cheated.

"Of course I cheated!" he said. "Of course!" And, with a sort of mocking bravado: "What would you have done, padre?"

The priest, who was old and wise and gentle, thus not at all sure of himself, shook his head.

"I don't know," he replied. "I don't know."

"Well--I do know. You would have done what I did. Yon wouldn't have been able to help yourself." Then, in a low voice: "And you would have paid! As I pay--every day, every minute, every second of my life."

"Regret, repentance," murmured the priest, but the other cut him short.

"Repentance--nothing. I regret nothing! I repent nothing! I'd do the same to-morrow, It isn't that--oh--that--what d'ye call it--sting of conscience, that's driving me crazy. It's fear!"

"Fear of what?" asked Father O'Donnell.

"Fear of Farragut Hutchison--who is dead!"

Ten years ago!

And he knew that Farragut Hutchison had died. For not long afterward a British trader had come upon certain gruesome but unmistakable remains and had brought the tale to the coast. Yet was there fear in Stuart McGregor's soul, fear worse than the fear of the little knives. Fear of Farragut Hutchison who was dead?

No. He did not believe that the man was dead. He did not believe it, could not believe it.

"And even suppose he's dead," he used to say to the priest, "he'll get me. He'll get me as sure as you're born. I saw it in the eye of that eagle---the squinting eye of that infernal, tattooed eagle!"

Then he would turn a grayish yellow, his whole body would tremble with a terrible palsy and, in a sort of whine, which was both ridiculous and pathetic, given his size and bulk, given the crimson, twisted adventures through which he had passed, he would exclaim:

"He'll get me. He'll get me. He'll get me even from beyond the grave."

And then Father O'Donnell would cross himself rapidly, just a little guiltily.

It is said that there is a morbid curiosity which forces the murderer to view the place of his crime.

Some psychic reason of the same kind may have caused Stuart McGregor to decorate the walls and corners of his sitting room with the memories of that Africa which he feared and hated, and which, daily, he was trying to forget--with a shimmering, cruel mass of jungle curios, sjamboks and assegais, signal drums and daggers, knobkerries and rhino shields and what not.

Steadily, he added to his collection, buying in auction rooms, in little shops on the water front, from sailors and ship pursers and collectors who had duplicates for sale.

He became a well-known figure in the row of antique stores in back of Madison Square Garden, and was so liberal when it came to payment that Morris Newman, who specialized in African curios, would send the pick of all the new stuff he bought to his house.

It was on a day in August--one of those tropical New York days when the very birds gasp for air, when orange-flaming sun rays drop from the brazen sky like crackling spears and the melting asphalt picks them up again and tosses them high--that Stuart McGregor, returning from a short walk, found a large, round package in his sitting room.

"Mr. Newman sent it," his servant explained. "He said it's a rare curio, and he's sure you'll like it."

"All right."

The servant bowed, left, and closed the door, while Stuart McGregor cut the twine, unwrapped the paper, looked.

And then, suddenly, be screamed with fear; and just as suddenly, the scream of fear turned into a scream of maniacal joy.

For the thing which Newman had sent him was an African signal drum, covered with tightly stretched skin--human skin--white skin! And square in the center there was a tattoo mark--an eagle in red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design.

Here was the final proof that Farragut Hutchison was dead, that, forever, he was rid of his fear. In a paroxysm of joy, he picked lip the drum and clutched it to his heart.

And then he gave a cry of pain. His lips quivered, frothed. His hands dropped the drum and fanned the air, and he looked at the thing that had fastened itself to his right wrist.

It seemed like a short length of rope, grayish in color, spotted with dull red. Even as Stuart McGregor dropped to the floor, dying, he knew what had happened.

A little, venomous snake, an African fer-delance, that had been curled up in the inside of the drum, been numbed by the cold, and had been revived by the splintering heat of New York.

Yes--even as he died he knew what had happened. Even as he died, he saw that malign, obscene squint in the eagle's eye. Even as he died, he knew that Farragut Hutchison had killed him---from beyond the grave!

THE INCUBUS

THE darkness that is Africa is brilliantly depicted in this weird story of a white man alone in the jungle.

SPEAKING in after years about that period of his life, Lloyd Merriwether, being a New Englander and thus congenitally given to dissecting his motives and reactions and screwing them into test-tubes, used to add, by way of psychological comment, that it wasn't the big things that mattered in a crisis, but the small ones; and that, by the same token, it was not the big things one missed when one was away from that blending of hackneyed efficiency and pinchbeck mechanical process called Civilization, but the petty, negligible ones--those that have grown to become second nature, almost integrally part of one's self, like one's eyes, or ears, or nose.

Now--he would say--take, for example, a razor-strop or a box of talc powder. Take a bottle of eau de Cologne or witch hazel; or, if you prefer, a nail buffer, a pair of toilet scissors, or what not.

Silly, foolish, tinsel things, you say? Rubbish a man can do without just as well? Well--don't you believe it! Not for a single, solitary moment!

Oh, yes! You can do without all that truck when you are home, all snug and taut and comfortable---with shops around you on every street so that you know you can buy them, if the spirit moves you and you have the price. Sure.

But suppose you find yourself somewhere at the back of the beyond, where you can't buy the fool things for love or money--absolutely cannot get them. Why, at that very moment, those flummeries become vital--vital not from a pathological angle, because you always want what you can't get, but really, truly, physically vital.

It was that which meant the tragedy of the whole thing.

You bet. Tragic! Although--not--because it was so ludicrous, straight through. For, you know, I was quite out of my head when that fellow from the Angom Presbyterian Mission picked me up. What was his name? Oh, yes. Morrison. Doctor Sylvester Morrison, an Englishman, and a very decent chap.

I WAS a raving lunatic when he found me. Sat there screeching some musical-comedy song of a few years back--"Gee--but this is a lonesome town!" or something of the sort.

Say! It must have sounded funny, back yonder, in the heart of Africa, with the sun rays dropping straight down from a brazen sky to shatter themselves upon the hard-baked surface into sparkling, adamantine dust--to rise again in a dazzling vapor.

Oh, yes. Very funny, no doubt!

And then I went for Doctor Morrison with my knife. Lucky for him that I had used my last cartridge.

Well, to go back to the beginning, I felt a presentiment of coming disaster shortly after I was faced by the fact that those ochre-smeared, plum--colored Fang coons had run away during the night, as fast as their skinny legs would let them. I never did find out what made them stampede, nor cared to discover the reason why. You know what they are like--half children and half apes, and chuck--full of animistic superstitions and the inhibitions that go with them. I guess they must have heard a drum-signal boom-booming through the night---some brute of a flat-nosed, tattooed medicine-man brewing his smelly craft somewhere in the miasmic jungle to the north, and giving them the tip that I was "dam bad ju-ju." At any rate, there I found myself that morning, on the upper reaches of the Ogowe River, a day's journey below Boue, a week from the coast, and all alone.

I was rather annoyed. You know, Africa raises Cain with a white man's nerves and general amiability. And if I could have caught one of those runaway coons, I would have given him what was coming to him with my hippo-hide whip. But it was no use trailing them in the jungle. The wilderness had swallowed them, and so I contented myself with cursing them in English and Freetown pidgin.

Afraid of being alone?

Not I. You see, I wasn't a greenhorn, but an old Africander, dyed-in-the-wool, dyed-in-the-trek, and able to take care of myself. I knew that particular part of the French Congo better than I know my native Cape Cod, and I really did not need a guide; nor porter for that matter, since I was to go the rest of the way by canoe.

Nor was I afraid of any stray natives popping out of the bush. I've always been friends with them. I am not an adventurer--seeking for the rainbow, the pretty little rainbow that usually winds up in a garbage can--not an explorer, nor a soldier. I am a businessman, pure and simple, and I needed the natives to bring me rubber and ivory and gold--dust, while they needed me to get them their particular hearts', and stomachs', desires---American cloth, and beads, and pocketknives, and Worcester sauce, and Liverpool trade gin, and rifles that didn't shoot and similar truck. Of course, I did 'em brown whenever I had half a chance, and I guess they returned the compliment. So we had mutual respect for each other, and I wasn't scared of them--not the slightest bit.

As soon as I discovered that my Fangs had stampeded, I took stock of my belongings, and I saw that they had not taken much--in fact, nothing except the little waterproofed pack which contained my toilet articles, mirror and razor and shaving--brush and comb and all the rest. Struck me as funny at the time. I said to myself that those Fangs were fools--damned fools. They might have helped themselves to some of my other packs as easy as pie. Food, you know, tobacco, beads, all that. But they had not. Why? God only knows. I told you before that they're half children and half apes.

So I had a good laugh at their expense.

Well--I didn't laugh much a few days later.

THERE I was, then, in the crawling, stinking heart of Africa, all alone, and--for the moment, at least--cheerful enough. For I am a businessman, and I told myself that those fool negroes had saved me a tidy little penny by bolting, since I owed them a month's wages. Too, I was well supplied with everything a fellow needs in the wilderness, from quinine to matches, from tabloid beef to--oh, tabloid fish cakes. My health, but for occasional, woozy fever spats--they being part of Africa's eternal scenery and accepted as such--was first-rate, and my canoe a snug, comfy little affair that pulled as easy as a feather.

I decided that I would just drift along down the Ogowe River to the estuary, and no hurry--not a darned bit of hurry. The Ogowe is not a treacherous water; the channel is clearly marked most of the way, and the mangroves sit rather well back--like hair on the brow of a professional patriot, eh?

As to the pack with my toilet articles? Well, what did it matter? There weren't any women kicking around loose in that part of the Dark Continent to care or fuss if my hair was long or short, my complexion smooth or stubbly, my fingernails round or square. Blessed relief, in fact, to be independent of one's outer man, I thought.

So, I repeat, I was quite cheerful--for a few seconds, perhaps minutes.

BUT, almost immediately, I knew that my cheerfulness was faked--faked by myself, subconsciously, for my own, private, especial benefit; almost immediately, I sensed that vague, crushing presentiment of coming disaster I told you about--and my nerves began to jump sideways and backward, like a whisky-primed Highland Scot when he hears the whir of the war pipes.

Of course, being a sensible fellow, and not imaginative, I tried to crystallize my nervous presentiment. Couldn't, though. It was too subtle, too elusive--too damned African, to put it in the proverbial nutshell. All I was sure of was a sort of half-feeling--and I've had it before and since--that Africa was not a continent, but--oh, a being, a sinister, hateful, cruel, brooding monster, with a heart and soul and desires--rotten desires, mostly--and that this Africa hated me, because I was white, because I was an interloper, because I had no business there except--well, dollars and cents.

Yes. A mass of rocks and rivers and forests and jungles, this Africa, but with the physical, even the spiritual attributes of man--and I used to brood on that thought until often, in my dreams, I felt like taking Africa by the throat and throttling it as I would an enemy. Silly, too, since I needed Africa for the benefit of my bank-account and the encouragement of my creditors.

Never mind, though.

I just couldn't crystallize that damned, sneaking, ghastly presentiment, and so, knowing even at the time that it was a lie, I said to myself:

"Fever, old man! Go ahead, and do the regular thing!"

I did. I dosed myself with quinine and Warburg's and a wee nip of three-star just to top it off. Then I packed my canoe with a fairly steady hand, jumped in, balanced it and pushed off, gliding between the banks of the Ogowe River.

REMEMBER my telling you that I had intended drifting along slowly, that I was in no hurry? Well, the moment my paddle fanned the water, I reconsidered, subconsciously. I decided, again subconsciously, that I was in a devil of a hurry, that I must get away from the hinterland, from the Congo, from the whole of Africa.

I said to myself that, arrived at the coast, I would catch the first mail-boat bound for Liverpool and then on to America. No--I wouldn't even wait for the mail-boat. I would go straight aboard the first dirty tramp steamer that came wallowing up from the south, and beat it home.

Home! That's what I needed! And rest, rest---and a white man's big, crimson drink in a white man's proper surroundings--with white-aproned saloonkeepers and stolid policemen and, maybe, a night-court magistrate or two all complete. I wanted to be shut for a while from this stinking, brooding, leering Africa. I wanted America, the white man's land, the white man's blessed, saving vices and prejudices.

How I longed for it, longed for it as if it were a woman, as I paddled down the river!

Of home I thought, of foolish things--New York, and dear, garish Fifth Avenue all agleam with shop windows and the screaming brasses of passing automobiles, and the soda place around the corner on Forty-second, and the night boat to Boston--and a solid hour with the ads in back of the magazines. And then I looked about me and I saw Africa, putrid, acrid! And, gee! How I hated it--hated it!

I pulled myself together. Sure, more quinine, more Warburg's, and another nip of the stuff. Back to the paddle with all my strength--and the canoe flying along like a sentient being.

I paddled as if all the furies were after me. Just opened a tin at random, sneaked forty winks now and then, and off again, though my hands were raw and blistered, my back sore and strained till I nearly shrieked, my legs numb from the knees down, my eyes red-rimmed and smarting with watching the current.

Three days. Four. Five---

And the work! And the sweat! And the heat! Why, man, all the heat of all the universe seemed to have gathered into a tight, crimson ball poised directly above my eyes.

But I kept right on, with always the picture of home before my mind's eyes. Home, white faces, hundreds and hundreds of them, houses of stone, paved streets, a sun which did not maim and kill, then dinner, plain, clean, as dinner should be, the theater, and over it all the sweet home scent.

On the sixth day, I fell in a faint. Picked myself up again, rescued my paddle that was about to float away downstream, swallowed an opium pill, and called myself a fool. Perhaps it was the last helped the most. At all events, I was off again. But I felt weak. I felt conscious of a sickening sensation of nameless horror--and--do you know what I was afraid of?

I'll tell you. Myself. Yes, myself! I was afraid of--myself. Momentarily, I crystallized it. Myself--and you'll see the reason presently.

THAT day I did get into a mangrove swamp; a thick and oozy one, too, with the spiky orchids coming down in a waxen, odorous avalanche, and all sorts of thorny plants reaching down and out as if trying to rip the heart out of my body, as if trying to impede my progress, to keep me there. My hands and face were lacerated, my clothes torn, but I didn't care. By main force, I jerked the canoe free and was off again, whipping the water like a madman; and the fear, the horror, the vague presentiment always growing!

And my hatred of Africa, it nearly choked me! And the loneliness! The loneliness which lay across my heart, my soul, my body, like a sodden blanket, and the fear that I would never reach home.

I lost all track of time. A week to make the coast, I had figured; and here it was at the very least the tenth day, and still my paddle went, still the river slid before my eyes like a watered-silk ribbon, still Africa unrolled like an odorous, meaningless scroll, still at my back rode horror and fear.

I don't know how I missed the main channel, got lost in one of the numerous smaller rivers that empty into the Ogowe. At all events, late one afternoon, I found myself in a narrow, trickly stream, with my paddle touching ground every second stroke, and the banks to right and left like frowning, sardonic walls. It wasn't a river any more--but just a watery sort of jungle trail, hardly discernible, wiped by the poisonous breath of the tropics into a dim, smelly mire which frothed and bubbled and sucked and seemed to reach out for those who dared tread its foul solitude.

I pushed on, through an entangled, exuberant commingling of leaves and lasciviously scented, fantastic flowers that vaulted above me like an arch, cutting my way through the mangrove that opened before my canoe, with a dull, gurgling sob, then closed behind me, with a vicious, popping gulp, as if the jungle had stepped away to let me through, leisurely, contemptuously, invincibly, to bar my way should I attempt to return!

On--and then, I don't know what happened to me. I don't know if night came, or if the creepers closed above me, shutting off the light of the sun, or if, momentarily, I became blind. I only remember that although, like an automaton, my hand kept on wielding the paddle, everything turned black around me . . . and the next thing I remember is that I shivered all over as if in an ague, that cold sweat was running down my face, that I groped for the quinine--could not find it . . .

Too, I remember, a sudden glimpse of jungle natives--dwarfs, you know, the useless African tatters of a pre-Adamite breed. I saw two or three of them in the blackish-green gloom of the trees, flitting past, gliding, indistinct. They blended into the jungle, like brown splotches of moss on the brown, furry tree-trunks, and they gave no sign of life except a rolling flash of eyeballs--white, staring with that aspect of concentrated attention so typical of savages.

I recollect, vaguely, shouting at them, for help, I suppose, my voice seeming to come across illimitable distances.

Too, I recollect how they ran away, the jungle folding about them like a cloak. Then I felt a dull jar as I fell on my hands and knees in the bottom of the canoe and rolled over.

I CAME to, I don't know how many hours later. I was cold and wet and shivery, and then I noticed that rain was coming down like a cataract. And at once I knew that I was dying. Dying! Sure. Straight through my delirium, I realized it. Realized, too, that only one thing would help me to cheat death: a sound roof over my head, sound flooring under my feet, sound walls about--a house, in other words. A real, honest-to-God white man's house where I could take off my clothes and keep dry and warm, and give the quinine and the Warburg's a chance to work.

A house! In that part of Africa! Might as well have wished for the moon!

And then, suddenly, I saw it--yes, a house!

It was not a hallucination, an optical illusion, a mirage, my delirious mind playing follow-the--leader with my eyes--and my prayers. It was real. Solid stone and wood and corrugated iron and a chimney and windows and doors all complete, like a bit of suburbia dropped in the jungle. I saw it through the steaming, lashing rain, on a little knoll due north, perhaps a quarter of a mile away from the river.

I jumped out of the canoe, landed, with clutching hands, in the mangrove, pulled myself up, ran as fast as I could, stumbling, tripping, falling, plunging. I hardly felt the thorns that scratched my face and hands and tore my clothes into ribbons.

I struggled on, with the one thought in my mind: the house--warmth--life!

How had the house got there?

Weeks later, I found out. Doctor Morrison told me, sitting by my bedside in the hospital.

It seemed that some imaginative chap of a West Coast trader had come up to London on his yearly spree. He must have been as eloquent as an Arab, for he met some City bigwigs that were reeking with money, and persuaded them that the French Congo hinterland was God's own paradise, and just waiting to give them fifty percent on their investment, if they were willing to come through handsome. They were, and they did. They supplied a working capital big enough to make a Hebrew angel weep with envy. "Gaboon, Limited," they called the new company, with laconic pride, and for some reason--the usual, you know, social stuff, Mayfair and Belgravia flirting with Lombard and Threadneedle streets--they appointed some fool of a younger son as general manager, the sort of gink whose horizon is limited by Hyde Park Corner and Oxford Circus, and who knows all about the luxuries of life, which to him are synonymous with the necessities. Well, he went out to the coast, up the river, took a look at the scenery, and decided that the first thing to do would be to build a suitable residence for his festive self. He did so, and I guess the imaginative West Coast trader who was responsible for the whole thing must have helped him. Naturally--think of the commissions he must have pocketed from the Coast people: commissions for stone and wood and glass and bricks and cement and whatnot.

Yes, that was the sort of house our younger son built for himself. Darn the expense! He was stubborn if nothing else. The house was built; he moved in, and three weeks later some flying horror bit him in the thumb, and he promptly kicked the bucket. About the same time our imaginative West Coast trader disappeared with what was left of the working capital of "Gaboon, Limited," and nothing remained of that glorious African enterprise except the house, that incongruous, ludicrous, suburban house in the heart of the tropics--Westchester-in--the-Congo, eh?

I guess the natives must have considered it "bad ju-ju," for they left it severely alone.

And it was bad ju-ju. I know.

ALL right. I made for it, running, stumbling, soaked to the skin. I pushed open the door, and, at once, I became conscious of a terrible, overpowering fear. Rather, it seemed as if the vague, crushing foreboding which I had sensed all the way down the river had suddenly peaked to an apex; as if the realization of that presentiment--the physical realization, mind you!--was waiting for me somewhere within the house. Waiting to leap upon me, to kill me!

But what could I do?

Outside was the rain, and the miasmic jungle stench, and fever, and certain death--while inside?

I STUMBLED across the threshold, and, instinctively, I pulled my revolver from my waterproofed pocket.

I remember how I yelled at the empty, spooky rooms:

"I will defend myself to the last drop of my blood!"

Quite melodramatic, eh? Incredibly, garishly so, like a good old Second Avenue five-acter where the hero is tied to the stake and the villain does a war--dance around him with brandished weapons.

I couldn't help myself; I felt that ghastly, unknown, invisible enemy of mine the moment I was beyond the threshold. At first he was shrouded, ambiguous. But he was there. Hidden somewhere in the great, square entrance hall and peeping in upon my mind, my sanity.

Momentarily, I controlled myself with a tremendous, straining effort. I said to myself, quite soberly, that I had come here to get dry, to take off my clothes, and so I sat down on a rickety, heat--gangrened chair and began kicking off my waterlogged boots.

I got up again, in a hurry, yelling, trembling in every limb.

For he, my unknown, invisible enemy, had sat down by my side. I could feel him blow over my face, my neck, my hands, my chest, my legs, like a breath of icy wind. That's the only way to put it. So, as I said, I got up again in a hurry, and I ran away, shrieking at the top of my lungs, peering into every corner, revolver in my right hand, finger on trigger, ready to fight, fight to death, if my enemy would only come out into the open--if only he would fight!

"Coward! Oh, you dirty, sneaking coward!" I yelled at him. "Come out here and show your face, and fight like a man!"

And I laughed, derisively, to get his goat; and then I could hear his answering laughter, coming in staccato, high-pitched bursts:

"Ho-ho-ho!"

Too, I heard him move about, somewhere right close to me, behind me, and I decided to use a stratagem. I decided to stand quite still, then to turn with utter suddenness and take him by surprise; to pounce upon him and kill him. Surely, I said to myself, if I turned quick enough, I would be able to see him.

So I stood there, motionless, tense, waiting, my mind rigid; my heart going like a trip-hammer; my right hand gripping my revolver; my left clenched until the knuckles stretched white.

And I did turn, suddenly, my revolver leaping out and up, a shout of triumph on my lips. But--he was not there. He had disappeared. I could hear his footsteps pattering away through one of the farther rooms, and, too, his maniacal, staccato laughter.

Oh, how I hated him, hated him! And I ran after him, through room after room, shouting:

"I'll get you, you dirty coward, I'll get you! Oh, I'll get you and kill you!"

AND then, in a room on the top floor, I came face to face with him! It was quite light there, with the sun rays dropping in like crackling spears, and as he came toward me, I could make out every line in his face.

Tall he was, and gaunt and hunger-bitten and dreadfully, dreadfully pale, with yellowish-green spots on his high cheekbones, and his peaked chin covered with a week's growth of black stubbles, and a ragged mustache. His face was a mass of scars and bleeding scratches and cuts; and in his right hand he held a revolver--leveled straight at my heart.

I fired first, and there was an enormous crash, and---

Sure! I had fired into a mirror, a big mirror. At myself. Had not recognized myself. What with lack of razor and shaving-brush and looking-glass--and delirium--and fever---

Yes, yes. It's the small things, the little foolish, negligible things one misses when one is away from civilization.

Pass the bottle, will you!

PRO PATRIA

MICHAEL CRANE cut through the other's subdued buzz of bland, philosophic similes with a hairy hand, stabbing sideways through the opium-scented shadows, and words, bubbling out with the bitterness of their own utter futility:

"What are you going to do? That's what I would like to know, old man!"

"What are you going to do?" he repeated dully, after a pause.

Even as he said it, he knew that there would be, could be, no answer except the same one which the other, Tzu Po, Amban of Outer Mongolia, who sat facing him--his fabulously obese bulk squeezed into a stilted, tulip wood and marble mosaic chair, his heavy-lidded eyes bilious with too much poppy juice, and his ludicrously small, white silk--stockinged feet twitching nervously--had given him nearly every day these last six weeks or so; ever since Professor Hans Mengel had dropped serenely and sardonically out of the nowhere, atop a shaggy Bactrian camel, and, within a day of his arrival, had struck up an incongruous friendship with the abbots and monks of the Buddhist lamasery that squatted on the hogback, porphyry hill above the flat, drab city of Urga, the capital of Outer Mongolia, with all the distressing weight of ancient thaumaturgical hypocrisy and bigotry. Be it remembered that the spiritual and theological politics of all Buddhist central Asia, from Kamchatka to the burned steppes of the Buriat Cossacks, from the arctic Siberian tundras to the borders of sneering, jealous Tibet, were being shouted by thin-lipped, copper-faced, yellow--capped lama priests behind the bastioned battlements of the old convent and that these spiritual politics were frequently running counter to the dictates and desires of Peking's secular suzerainty, embodied--ironic thought!--by Mandarin Tzu Po.

The same old answer, day after day, accompanied by a shrugging of fat shoulders, a deep, apologetic intake of breath, and a melancholy gesture of pudgy hands so that the ruddy light of the charcoal ball in its openwork brass container danced fitfully on his long, gold-incased fingernails.

"Who am I to know?"--with the fatalistic, slightly supercilious modesty of all Asia.

"Who are you to know?" The American, fretting with impatience, picked up the mock-meek counter-question like a battle gage. "Why, man, you are the high-and-mighty governor of this stinking, disgusting neck o' the woods! You are the honorable amban--entitled to I don't know how many kowtows and how much graft!"

"Indeed, Mr. Crane. And you are the American consul, eh? And"--with low, gliding laughter--"you are also entrusted with the interests of your honorable allies--France, Great Britain, Italy--" "Don't I know it, though? But what can I do? I am as helpless as--"

"As I!" gently interrupted the Chinaman, kneading agilely the brown opium cube against the stem of his tasseled bamboo pipe.

Another pause, broken presently by the American's chafing. "You are supposed to have some power here, and you know just as well as I that this measly German professor--"

"I know nothing!" Tzu Po fidgeted unhappily in his chair. He half closed his bilious eyes like a man in pain. "I wish to know nothing! I insist on knowing nothing!"

"Ostrich!" Crane leaned forward in his chair and emphasized his words with a didactic finger. "You know perfectly well that Mengel is playing a lot of dirty, rotten, underhand politics, that he and the Buddhist monks--"

"Professor Mengel is the leading European authority on early Buddhism. It is natural that he should take an interest in this old lamasery--"

"I know all that, Tzu Po! The chief Lama of Urga is second only to the Dalai Lama of Tibet in holiness. He is a continuous reincarnation of some damned Buddhist saint or other, and Mengel, as you say, does know a lot more about Buddhism than the priests do themselves. But, man, this is war! Not even a single-minded German professor will cross all Russia and half of Asia, these days, simply to swap theological lies with some old yellow-capped priests! I tell you--and I needn't tell you, since you know it yourself--that that Hun is up to some deviltry!"

The Chinaman sighed. "Admitting that you are right," he replied, "there are religious reasons why I can't interfere with the monks and abbots who have befriended him."

"Religious reasons be hanged!" scoffed Michael Crane. "You are a Chinaman and, being a Chinaman, you are about as religious as the devil himself!"

"But these people here whom I--ah--rule"---Tzu Po smiled gently at the implied jest--"they are not Chinese. They are Mongols, Tibetans, Buriats, Turkis, and what not. They are devout Buddhists--"

"Subject races--all of them!"

"Exactly. We Chinese are like the English. We do not attempt to interfere with the home life, the home laws, the home religions of our subject peoples. And to all Buddhist central Asia the words of the yellow-capped abbot in the convent up there are--"

"Sure. Divine commands. Sort of--oh--direct from the Lord Gautama Buddha's deceased and sanctified bones. That's why I say it's up to you to do something," said Crane, "to assert yourself, to grease your big stick!"

"Big stick?"

"You know what I mean. You've spent years in America. Send to Peking for a company or two of roughneck soldiers. Show these stinking, sniveling, shave-tail priests who is the boss of the ranch. Call their bluff. Pop the Herr Professor into a nice, comfy jail--"

"For what reason?" inquired Tzu Po.

"Because he's up to some deviltry--as I told you--as you know yourself--if you weren't such a confounded Chinese Pharisee!"

"I can prove nothing against him!" Tzu Po filled his lungs with gray, acrid opium smoke. "Can you, my friend?"

"Prove? The devil! You don't have to prove. You can arrest him on suspicion--shoot him out of the country if you want to--"

"It would be against the law."

"Laws are rather in abeyance these days. You have some leeway in wartime."

"China is not at war--yet. China and Germany are still at peace. No, no!" Tzu Po made a gesture of finality. "I can't help you, my friend--except"---he winked elaborately at nothing in particular--"if you should--"

"What?" whispered Michael Crane. "If I should do--what?"

The other was not caught so easily. "If you should do--anything!" he countered. "Yes--if you should do anything at all, I should be deaf and dumb and blind!"

"But what can I do? Gosh! I wish I'd never seen this darned hole in the ground! I don't belong here!"

"Nor do I!" rejoined the other with a melancholy smile.

And then, as always at the end of their daily bickerings, the two men looked at each other, feeling singularly foolish, and impotent and friendly.

II.

THE one an American, lean, angular, long of limb, pink and tan as to complexion, red-haired, gray-eyed, freckled. The other a Pekingese Chinaman, yellow, silky, urbane, smooth, fat, with bluish-black hair and sloe eyes. The one of the West, Western--the other of the East, Eastern!

Yet there was a certain similarity in the fateful pendulum of their careers; the promising beginnings--the drab, flat endings--here, in Urga, at the very back of the beyond.

Michael Crane had been a brilliant young lawyer and politician in his native city, Chicago, with the Supreme Court, the Presidency itself, shining like a Holy Grail in the autumnal distance of his full life. Ward politics came first, of course, slapping people on the back, kissing little grubby babies, gossiping with their women, and--yes!---occasionally a little, sociable nip in some saloon the other side of Dexter Hall.

Yearly his thirst had increased while, proportionately, his earlier promises of great, lasting achievement had decreased. Still, he had not lost all his hold on his favorite ward. The marshaling of that curious phenomenon called public opinion had become second nature to him. His fertile eloquence, chiefly when he was in his cups, had not suffered, nor his readiness to close a tolerant eye when one of his underlings resorted to more primitive, more abysmal methods in convincing Doubting Thomases that his party was the right party when the nation was voting for president several years earlier, he had been able to swing a block of votes into the ballot boxes of the party which came out victorious. And reward had been his.

"Mike Crane has to be taken care of," a certain bigwig in Washington had said. "His ward was rather ticklish, but he turned the trick."

"Sure," another bigwig had replied, "but--you know--well--"

"Yes, yes." The first speaker had left his seat and had walked to a large map of the world that was spread on the wall. He had studied it with a saturnine twinkle in his sharp brown eyes.

"Ever hear of Urga?" he had asked over his shoulder.

"No. What is it? A new soft drink--with a kick--you're going to recommend to Mike Crane? Perhaps a new liquor cure guaranteed to--"

"Cut out the joshing. It seems to be a town in--" Again he had studied the map. "Let me see. Yes, it is the capital of Outer Mongolia, steen million miles from nowhere. Jack," he had continued, lighting a cigar, "I have a hunch that the United States of America needs a consul out yonder. What do you say?"

"I say yes. And I nominate Mike Crane for the job."

"Seconded and carried. Perhaps he won't be able to get whisky in Urga. Anyway, he won't do much harm there!"

Thus Michael Crane had become United States consul in Urga seven years earlier.

Urga! Outer Mongolia! Central Asia! Quite unimportant! It was all so very far away from Broadway and Fifth Avenue and State Street and the White House, and the salary was not much of a burden on the generous American taxpayer!

Tzu Po's career had been similar. The scion of an excellent burgess family of Peking, he had passed high in the examinations of the literati, and had received the degree of chen-shih, or Eminent Doctor, at the Palace of August and Happy Education, to the west of the Ch'ien Men Gate in the Forbidden City. Afterward, he had passed a no less brilliant examination at Harvard, had been attached as secretary to several Chinese legations and embassies, had tried to stimulate his brain with opium--until, one day, perhaps giving way to an atavistic weakness, he had surrendered, body and soul and ambition, to the curling black smoke.

Still, to him, too, was due a certain measure of gratitude on the part of those in power since. At the time when young China arose in the yellow, stinking slums of Canton and brushed away, with the lusty, impatient fist of Democracy, the gray Bourbon cobwebs of Manchu autocracy, he had been one of the younger leaders, and one of the most fearless, the most constructive.

Like Crane, he had been sent to a sort of honorable exile--to Urga.

"He cannot do much harm there," one mandarin had said.

"Indeed!" another had replied.

Thus, both men had been sent to the same laggard, dronish end of the world.

Thus, both men had promptly been forgotten by their respective, paternal governments--except by the yawning clerks, in Washington or in Peking, who made out the monthly stipend checks.

Had come seven indolent, drowsy, passive years; years which sealed a strange, though not unhappy, friendship between Michael Crane and Tzu Po, the more so since the latter felt a greater cultural kinship and, in consequence, a greater sympathy for the American than for his uncouth racial cousins who peopled Urga and the surrounding country, while Crane--the only white man, since no other country deemed Outer Mongolia important enough to keep there a consular representative--was glad of the company of a man who had a more or less intelligent, but at all events personal, acquaintance with State Street, baseball, dry martinis, and the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. Nothing, during all this time, had ever happened to disturb the even tenor of the passing, swinging years. Occasionally, of course, there had been a row or a fight between the two opposing parties--red-cap lama priests and yellow cap--who claimed the spiritual suzerainty of northern Buddhism. But the American had been an amused and slightly cynical onlooker, while Tzu Po, though he was the governor, would shut himself up in his palace with a liberal supply of opium cubes and a volume of archaic poetry or two and only leave it when the priests had settled the argument among themselves--after which, he would report to the ministry of the outer provinces in Peking that everything was serene and happy.

Three years earlier, there had been a little more excitement. For the chief lama--a yellow cap, he---had died, and the priests had set about electing another earthly representative, another incarnation of Subhuti, the disciple of the Lord Gautama Buddha, whose soul and spirit are said to migrate into the body of each successive Urga abbot. For centuries, the Lara family, who had been Tibetans originally, had monopolized the saintly dignity, including its divers and rather more worldly emoluments until, to all intents and purposes, it had become almost hereditary. Always the yellow-cap priests, to whom the Lara clan belonged, had been the decisive factor in the mazes of northern Buddhism.

But, that year, due it was said to the intrigues of a Russian Buddhist from the shores of Lake Baikal, who had acted under orders of the czar's government with the intention of undermining the Pekingese prestige in that part of the world, the red--cap lamas had for once put forward and backed a candidate of their own. However, being vastly in the minority, they had been defeated and yellow--cap Tengso Punlup of the Lara clan had been elected chief abbot.

Michael Crane, comparing the sacerdotal election with voting contests as he had seen and handled them in his favorite Chicago ward, had looked on with cynical, slightly nostalgic amusement.

Again Tzu Po had locked himself up in the innermost chamber of his palace.

The election had passed. A number of red caps and yellow caps had had their tough skulls cracked with brass inkstands and massive teakwood prayer wheels. And then there was peace once more, the bottle for Crane, and the amber-colored poppy juice for Tzu Po--until, overnight it seemed, out of the diseased brain of modern Germany rose the crimson monstrosity of lust and cruelty that threatened to drown the world in an avalanche of hissing, darkening blood.

War!

War--east, north, south, and west! War of white man and black and red and brown! War on land and on sea! War of might and of brain! War from the smiling fields of France to the miasmic jungles of west Africa!

And even here, in the sluggish, comatose heart of Asia, war was showing its fangs. A few weeks earlier, Professor Hans Mengel, suave, clean shaven, serene, had dropped out of the nowhere, riding a smelly Bactrian camel, speaking the local dialects like a native, well supplied with money, familiar with the intricate labyrinth of Buddhism. And, too, there were the thin-lipped yellow caps in the old lamasery whispering, whispering--and Tengso Punlup, the chief abbot, was on his deathbed--and it was gossiped in the bazaars and the market place that again the red caps would put a candidate of their own into the field and that more than the mere spiritual succession of northern Buddhism would be decided when the old abbot's soul had joined Buddha's greater soul in the fields of the blessed.

Crane knew it.

So did Tzu Po.

But---

"We're helpless, we two," murmured the American, turning and looking from the window.

III.

OUTSIDE, the solitary pollard willow that guarded the amban's palace like a grim sentinel of ill omen, bending under white hummocks, was draped with shimmering, glistening, gauze frost. Snow was everywhere, thudding softly in moist, flaky crystals, hurling fitfully across a sunset of somber, crushed pink that was trying to show its heart of color through the gray, drifting cloud banks, mantling the peacock blue of pagoda roof and the harsh, crass red of Buddhist wayside shrine, etching tiny points of silver on the voluminous, coarse fur coats of the Manchus, Tartars, Tibetans, and occasional Nepalese who were ambling in all directions, their stout legs encased in knee-high felt boots, enormous hats covering them to their quilted, padded shoulders, their faces glimpsing beneath with a ludicrous blue and green sheen, their noses wrinkled like rabbits' against the biting wind that came booming out of the north, their thin, drooping mustaches white-frosted into icicles.

Here and there, yellow-capped priests moved through the crowd, brutally serene in the superstitious awe with which they were regarded, clicking their prayer wheels, talking to each other in gentle, gliding undertones, and smiling, always smiling.

Michael Crane clenched his fists in impotent fury.

The others--the cattle drovers and camel men, the fur and salt traders, the peasants, hunters, trappers, and fishermen--they did not matter. They were just the incoherent, unthinking, inert mass who danced to the piping of the sneering, wrinkled abbot up there behind the bastioned walls of the lamasery.

But, Crane told himself bitterly, these yellow--capped priests were the intellectual aristocracy of this vast land that stretched its religious feelers all over central Asia. They were in the "know," every last one of them. They all belonged to the same mysterious, sinister lodge, understood the same unspoken passwords and furtive high signs--they and the German professor who was lording it in their councils--while he, Michael Crane, United States consul, once a brilliant lawyer and a skillful politician in the city of Chicago, and Tzu Po, who was supposed to be the governor--why---

He rose and stretched himself. "I guess I'll run along home," he said. "So long. See you tomorrow. Drop in for breakfast if the spirit moves you," he added hospitably.

The other did not reply. He had fallen asleep over the sizzling, bubbling opium lamp. A beatific smile wreathed his bland, yellow features, and his breath came evenly.

"You're the sensible lad all right, all right," said Crane. And he slipped into his heavy coat, rammed his fur cap down over his ears, and stepped out into the biting cold night.

He turned in the direction of his house, a short distance away. His "boy" would have made a fire by this time, prepared supper, and set out a bottle and glasses and some of the treasured home papers and magazines which he received with each mail, once every two months, and which he apportioned jealously so that they should last him until the next mail came along.

IV.

AS he walked stiffly aslant against the booming northern wind, he tried to marshal his thoughts, tried to dovetail for himself a picture of what had happened behind the grim, bastioned walls of the lamasery and of what was going to happen, viewing the whole situation instinctively through the spectacles of his former politician's experience.

There were certain outstanding facts: The main one being that Tengso Punlup, the chief abbot, was on his deathbed. Furthermore, that a successor to his saintly honors would have to be chosen, and that the yellow caps, as by ancient traditions, would advance the claims of a member of the Lara family, while it was whispered in the bazaars that again the red caps would contest the election with a candidate of their own.

There was the subsidiary fact that these latter were in the majority, either British subjects from Little Tibet, Kashmere, and the Shan states, or from southern Tibet and those independent Himalaya principalities, like Nepal and Bhopal, the inhabitants of which were under British protection and overlordship. And Michael Crane knew, from the perusal of certain papers which he received, notably from the North China Gazette of Shanghai, that in the present world war these people had been uncompromisingly loyal. It was, therefore, to be assumed, by logical juxtaposition, that the others, the yellow caps, who were in the majority, favored the cause of the Central Powers as much as they thought about such a remote matter at all.

And right here, the mysterious, suave, immaculate figure of Herr Professor Hans Mengel came into the focus.

He was a favorite with the yellow caps. He stood high in their councils. He would doubtless play a big role during the coming election, as soon as Tengso Punlup had died. Though a European, a white man, he was acknowledged to be the leading authority on northern Buddhism and, as such, looked up to by the lama priests.

But--mused Michael Crane--given the fact that the yellow caps were in the majority, that one of the Lara clan was practically certain to be chosen chief abbot, why had the Berlin government, which Mengel doubtless represented, gone to the trouble of sending him here, to Urga?

Just to make assurance doubly sure?

Or was it perhaps---

Perhaps--what?

He shook his head. His thoughts became confused, muddled. He only knew that for some vague reason, which he could not quite decipher, it was important for the cause of America and her allies, whom he represented, that the yellow caps should be defeated at the coming election to Subhuti's saintly succession.

Back in his old Chicago ward, he would have known how to handle the situation. At least, he might have made an attempt. There he knew the ropes that controlled the political machine of the ward, and they were simple enough; eloquence of tongue and, occasionally, the passive gift of seeing nothing and hearing nothing when a too--enthusiastic underling relied on clenched fist or even blackjack to lend force to his patriotic arguments.

As to eloquence, he had lived here a number of years and had learned just about enough Mongol to ask for food and drink and carry on an ordinary conversation. But right there his knowledge stopped. He knew nothing of those finer nuances and twists of language which make for power, and less of the theological undercurrents of northern Buddhism, while, on the other hand, Professor Hans Mengel spoke the local dialects like a native and was an authority in the mazes of their fantastic religion.

As to the other argument, that of brawny fist and significantly poised blackjack?

Tzu Po, the governor, had said something of the kind.

"If you should do anything at all," he had said with an elaborate wink, "I should be deaf and dumb and blind!"

But--had he meant that?

Michael Crane shook his head.

Of course, there were certain other tricks which he had learned in his earlier Chicago career, though he denied ever having used them, preferring to claim that he had become familiar with them through having watched and investigated the political tactics of the other great national party. There was for instance a clever and rather humorous method of stuffing the ballot boxes.

Ballot boxes! Here--in Outer Mongolia!

He laughed aloud at the thought, and then again, hopelessly, helplessly, despondently, he told himself that there was nothing, nothing he could do.

His lips relaxed into a melancholy smile. There was a precious bottle of French brandy he had received from Hongkong a few weeks earlier---

V.

HE could see the lighted windows of his low, warm stone house twinkling invitingly through the gathering night, and he pushed on, as fast as he could, through the crowds of priests, yellow caps and red caps, that were becoming denser with every step. They were all hurrying up the steep, slippery incline that led to the lamasery, and he knew what their hurry portended.

The chief abbot was on his deathbed, and it was the ancient rule of their faith that his successor should be chosen within half an hour of his death. For, since his spirit, which was the spirit of Subhuti, the Disciple of the Lord Gautama Buddha, migrated into the body of each successive chief abbot, it was not fitting that this same spirit should be homeless for a longer period than could be helped. Doubtless, the whisper had gone forth that Tengso Punlup might die almost any minute, and so they were hurrying, hurrying.

"Like vultures after carrion," the unpleasant simile came to Michael Crane as he pushed on.

Then, quite suddenly, the whirling limbs separated, the mass pushed on more hurriedly, more hectically than before, as, from the square tower that flanked the lamasery, a tremendous blending of sounds drifted down, a savage clash of cymbals and gongs, a hollow beating of drums, and the sobbing, intolerable, long-drawn wailing of human voices. "The abbot is dead! Tengso Punlup is dead! The spirit of Subhuti is clamoring for a home!" a gigantic yellow-capped priest chanted in a gurgling fervor of excitement.

Immediately, the cry was taken up:

"The abbot is dead--dead!"--in a mad refrain, an echoing monstrous chorus, high-pitched, quivering, swelling and decreasing in turns, dying away in thin, quavery, ludicrous tremolos, again bursting forth in thick, palpable fervency:

"Tengso Punlup is dead--dead! The spirit of Subhuti is clamoring for a home!"

And they pushed on, on, ever more of them pouring out of the little squat stone houses, from the streets and alleys, the low-roofed bazaars and the market place, regardless of the bitter cold, of the snow that thudded down moist-hissing into the flickering torches, of elbow and fist and foot, and occasionally, pricking dagger point. Only one thing mattered to them. They must reach the council hall of the lamasery as quickly as possible before the half-hour during which the spirit of Subhuti was permitted to roam in the outer ether was over, and muster there a sufficient number of priests to decide who should be the next chief abbot--yellow cap or red cap.

And the case of the latter was hopeless.

True, Crane noticed that so far they were in the majority. For they were mostly mountaineers from the Himalayas and the Shan states, fleet of foot, active and strong of arm, lean, agile, hard-bitten, while their enemies, who lived on the fat of this fertile northern land, rich in wheat and maize and cattle, were more sluggish and moved more slowly, more ponderously. But in another minute or two the yellow caps would outnumber the red caps five to one.

For a moment, the mad thought came to him to put himself squarely beneath this gate, to defend it against the yellow caps as a picked regiment, fighting a critical rearguard action, might defend a bridgehead.

Almost immediately, he gave up the idea. They would be up and at him like an avalanche. They would brush him aside like so much chaff. He would not be able to stay their progress for more than the fraction of a minute.

No!

It was hopeless, and he turned to go back to his comfortable, warm house, the open fire, the magazines and newspapers, and the brandy bottle when, twenty yards or so down the street, the brass--studded portals of one of the temples were flung wide and out stepped Professor Hans Mengel at the head of a procession of hundreds of yellow caps, his lean, highbred features sharply outlined in the flickering light of the torches.

Hard and ultra-efficient he seemed; sure of himself, his destiny, his country; serenely sure of success and achievement and triumph.

Michael Crane stifled a sob. He saw himself as he had been once: a young lawyer and politician of brilliant promises; and as he was today, in the autumn of his life: a drone, a failure, a drunkard.

Entrusted with the interests of America and her allies in this remote, half-forgotten corner of the world, utterly alone, convinced in his own heart that the election of a yellow-cap abbot would mean another German victory, he found himself helpless--and the thought, the knowledge was as bitter as gall.

On they came, the professor at the head. They were less than a dozen yards away from the marble gate through which they had to pass by ancient, unbreakable rule. Another minute, and they would be well up toward the lamasery. Five more minutes, and they would crowd the council hall, outnumbering the red caps who, somehow--and Crane never knew how--stood for the interests of America and her allies.

And he was helpless, helpless, and a great, choking rage rose in his throat.

VI.

THEN, with utter suddenness, a thought came to him. He laughed loudly, triumphantly, so that the German professor, now five or six yards away, looked up, astonished, slightly sneering.

"Drunk again, Mister American Consul?" he asked, his voice stabbing clear above the shuffling of feet and the murmuring voices of the priests.

But Michael Crane did not reply.

Quickly, he looked over his shoulder. He saw that the red caps were still in the majority--the red caps--who, somehow, were the friends of America and of her allies. Then he stepped squarely beneath the marble gate through which all priests who wished to go to the lamasery had to pass. He drew his revolver and, even as Professor Mengel, who understood too late, jumped forward, he pulled the trigger and shot himself through the heart.

At the very last moment, he had remembered the ancient Buddhist law that the body of a suicide means pollution unspeakable, that a priest may neither touch it nor step over it, and that the spot where the deed has been done must be made clean with many and lengthy ceremonies before priest or worshiper may set foot on or across it.

And so he died there--for his country---

"Pro Patria--for his country!"

That's what Tzu Po said, recollecting his Harvard Latinities, three days later, when a red-cap priest, a friend of America and her allies, was ceremoniously installed as chief abbot of Outer Mongolia amid the booming of the gongs and the braying of the conches.

PELL STREET BLUES

HATE wrote the first chapter of this tale some centuries ago, when it planted the seeds of mutual hate in two kindred Mongol races: in Chinese and in Manchu, and by the same token, in patient, earthbound peasant and in hawkish nomad, hard-galloping across the land, conquering it with the swish of the red sword, the scream and bray of the long-stemmed war-trumpets, the hollow nasal drone of the kettle-drums--and overhead, the carrion-fed vultures paralleling the marauders' progress on eager wings.

Fate wrote the second chapter sixty-odd years ago, when Foh Wong and Yang Shen-Li were boys in the cold northern town of Ninguta, where they threw stones at each other and swapped salty abuse; although it was Yang Shen-Li, the Manchu, the mandarin's son, who did most of the stonethrowing, whereas Foh Wong, whose parents were Chinese coolies tilling the barren clay, did most of the cursing--from a safe distance. For he valued his skin--which, together with his shrewd brain, was his sole possession.

Fate wrote the third chapter a little over fifty years ago, when parlous times had come to China--with Russia at the western and Japan at the eastern border, both waiting for an excuse to invade the tottering Empire and tear it to pieces--and when, one morning, Foh Wong stopped Yang Shen-Li on the street and said:

"A word with you!"

"What is it, mud-turtle?"

"Indeed," replied the other, "I am no more than a mud-turtle, while you are an aristocrat, an ironcapped prince. And yet"--slowly--"today I have the whip-hand."

"Eh?" exclaimed Yang Shen-Li.

He was startled. He wondered if Foh Wong knew, how he knew--heard him drop his voice to a purr:

"You were not alone last night. I watched from behind a tree. And should I proclaim what I saw, there would be your handsome head spiked on a tall pole in front of the Palace of August Justice."

The Manchu shrugged his shoulders. He tried to speak casually:

"I do not fear death."

"Of course not--since you are a brave fool. But being also an honorable fool, you would not wish to bring black disgrace on your father, to cause him to lose face. And--forgive the wretched pun--your father would lose a great deal of face, if you should lose your head. A murderer's head--"

"I did not murder."

"You killed."

"In self-defense. He insulted me, struck me, drew his revolver and fired--the insolent foreigner!"

"But--be pleased to remember--a most important foreigner. A high Russian official whose corpse you--ah--buried in back of Han Ma's camel stables." He stabbed out an accusing finger. "I saw you."

"Have you witnesses?"

"Not a one. I was alone."

"Then?"

"There will be witnesses, when the time comes. Three of my cousins. A dozen, if you prefer."

"Lying witnesses!"

"Lying, only, in swearing they saw the deed. Not lying as to the deed itself. And though you are a mandarin's son, the Dowager Empress, with Russia's soldiers massed at the frontier, will give an order to her red-robed executioners, will have your handsome head removed, if I should--"

"IS there a price for your silence, coolie?" interrupted Yang Shen-Li.

"Is there not a price for everything?"

"How much?"

"No money. Not a single silver tael." Foh Wong paused. "The price of my silence is--a word."

"A word?"

"Yes. A mere word from you--to Na Liu. A word telling her I desire her greatly--wish her to be my wife."

"But"--the Manchu stammered with rage---"she--"

"Loves you? I know. And I know, too, that, loving you, she will not relish the thought of your bleeding head grinning down at her from a tall pole, and will therefore marry me, the mud-turtle. . . . Hayah!" with sudden violence. "Go to her! At once! For today I command, and you will obey!"

Yang Shen-Li stared at the other.

"Yes," he said heavily. "I shall obey." He took a step nearer. "But--listen to me, coolie!" His words clicked and broke like dropping icicles. "I hate you. Ah--by the Buddha!--I shall always hate you."

"You hate me no more than I hate you," was the answer. "But"--and Foh Wong's eyes gleamed triumphantly through meager almond lids--"you are helpless, O paper tiger with paper teeth. I am not. So--keep on hating me!"

NEVER, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of these two weaken.

It stretched, hard and stark and blighting, athwart the full span of both their lives. It followed the churned steamship lane to San Francisco and Seattle. It traveled thence across the continent to New York--there to abut and peak to a grim, rather fantastic climax in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Bowery, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.

Streets of Chinatown, squatting turgid and sardonic and tremendously alien! Not caring a tinker's dam for the White Man's world roaring its up-to-date, efficient steel-and-concrete symphony on all sides.

Rickety, this Chinatown; moldy and viscous, not over-clean, smelling distressingly of sewer gas and rotting vegetables and sizzling, rancid fat. Yet a fact to be reckoned with in Gotham's kaleidoscopic pattern. A cultural and civil entity not without dignity. A thing aloof, apart, slightly supercilious--and intensely human. And being human, a fit background for a tragic tale. . . .

Not that this tale is entirely tragic. For tragedy, no less than comedy, is after all only a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and religion--two accidents whose sum-total spells prejudice.

Therefore, if your sense of humor be faintly oblique, faintly Oriental, in other words, you may derive a certain amusement from the thought of Foh Wong, no longer a coolie but a prosperous New York merchant, cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. You may also laugh at the idea of Yang Shen-Li lording it gloriously over Foh Wong's Cantonese clerks, spending Foh Wong's money with a free and reckless hand--and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club over an archaic mandarin gambling game of "Patting Green Butterflies" or "Ladies on Horseback" or "Heighoh! Flies the Kite," mounting to the second floor of the Pell Street house, there to bow courteously before Na Liu, his wrinkled old wife, once the wife of Foh Wong! She would be sitting stiffly erect, in the proper Chinese manner, on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, her tiny feet barely touching the floor and her hands demurely folded; and Yang Shen-Li would say to her:

"Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?"

She would give a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh.

"Never, O Great One!" she would reply.

"Never!" he would echo. "The same love until death--may it not be for many years! The same love that came to you and me, so long ago, when the world was young back home in Ninguta--and we were young--"

"And you the iron-capped prince--and I the gardener's daughter!"

"But all the world to me--as you are today."

"For the sake of my love," she said with a queer triumph, "--I shall marry another!"

Always, as often as he spoke the words, he made a great gesture with his strong, hairy hand. A gesture that cleaved the trooping shadows in the room with a certain brutality, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer's wand, sweeping away the dust and grime of Pell Street, the dust and grime of the dead years, and calling up the cool, scented spring sweetness of the small Manchu-Chinese border town where both had lived and loved. . . .

He remembered as clearly as if it were yesterday how, on that morning after his talk with Foh Wong, he met Na Liu where they always met, in back of the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork, in the shelter of the enameled pagoda roof that mirrored the sun a thousand-fold, like intersecting rainbows, endless zigzag flashings of rose and purple and blue and green. There he told her what had happened, told her the full bitter tale; and he said to her as he had to Foh Wong:

"I do not fear death. But there is the honor of my father to be considered--the honor of my ancestors for countless generations."

"Pah!" she cried. "And what do I care for the honor of your father, the honor of all your noble ancestors? It is you I care for. You alone. And the thought of you dead--why, I cannot bear it. Because, you see"--her voice was thin and brittle--"I love you."

He was silent.

"I love you so," she continued. "There is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do for the sake of my love. Ah"--in a tense whisper--"for the sake of my love, I would lie, I would steal, I would kill! For the sake of my love"--more loudly, with a queer triumph in her accents--"I shall marry another!"

He sighed. He spoke dully:

"The book has been read. The grape has been pressed. There is no more. This is the end of our love."

"The end? No, no! There can be no end to our love, as there was no beginning. Why--don't you see?--our love is a fact. A fact!"

He weighed the thought in his mind. Then he inclined his head.

"That is so," he replied. "A fact, like the living Buddha, eternal and unchangeable. A fact, whatever may happen to you and to me!"

HEY stood there. For long minutes they looked at each other. They did not touch hands. For was she not now betrothed to Foh Wong?

They turned and went their different ways. And a few days later Na Liu became the coolie's bride, while Yang Shen-Li traveled south, to be a captain in a Manchu banner corps and rise high in the favor of the Dowager Empress.

NA LIU was a faithful wife to Foh Wong, since it was her duty; obeying the ancient maxim that a married woman must first widen her tolerance, then control the impulses of her heart and body, then entirely correct herself.

He was a good husband to her. Nor did the notion of her loving Yang Shen-Li--he knew it, though they never spoke of it--disturb his massive Mongol equanimity. Indeed, he was conscious of a keener tang and zest to his passion when he reflected that the other was an aristocrat and he himself a despised mud-turtle; yet his the woman who might have had her luxurious ease in a mandarin's palace.

Still, there were moments when he was prey to a certain jealousy. Not jealousy of the flesh--how could that be, with Yang Shen-Li in Pekin and Na Liu so rigidly observing the conventions? Jealousy, rather, of the brain, the imagining; of the gnawing, recurrent idea that, married to his rival, Na Liu would have lived in splendor of silks and jade, while as his own wife, her life was sordid and mean and frugal.

He would reason, thereby doing her an injustice, that she compared her existence, such as it was, with what it might have been. And it was less through love of her, and more because of this jealousy--this avid longing for material achievement, for precious things to put at her feet, telling her, "Behold! I can give you whatever the Manchu could have given you!"--that ambition came to him, that he dreamed of rising from his lowly estate to power and riches.

It was about this time that a Ninguta man returned to his native town, his pockets clanking with gold and amazing tales on his lips of the fair fortune awaiting the men of China in a land beyond the Pacific. America was its fantastic and barbarous name. And it seemed that the work there was plentiful, and the wages generous and princely.

Foh Wong listened to him eagerly. He asked many astute, practical questions. Presently, he made up his mind.

He sold his meager belongings. He took Na Liu to Canton, and crowded there aboard a Yankee clipper with a gang of his countrymen. And even before the ship warped out, he received his first taste of the New World's crass realities at the hands of the Gloucester mate, who, short of help, picked decidedly involuntary and as decidedly unpaid stevedores from among his Chinese passengers---forcing them to labor all day, to shift cumbersome freight, to direct to the derricks the heavy slings of cargo, to toil for long hours with bleeding fingers and tired, aching bodies. Once Foh Wong, taking a breathing spell, said to Na Liu, who stood by the gunwale:

"Ah--hard, hard work! But it does not matter. For I shall succeed. No doubt of it." And in a whisper: "You want me to succeed?"

"Yes."

"You love me--a little bit?"

Her reply was hopeless in its honesty, hopeless in what it did not say:

"I shall be a faithful wife to you--always."

"But--"

He began to plead with her, when the Gloucester mate's bellow interrupted him:

"Cut out that Chinkie talk, yer yaller-skinned heathen--and git back to them derricks!"

And though Foh Wong did not understand the words, he had no trouble in understanding the length of knotted rope that whistled through the air.

Such was the beginning of his odyssey--which was destined to end, ironically, in a sweltering Pell Street garret, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his soul. The beginning of his odyssey---almost as bitter as this same end--with all about him, stretching east toward San Francisco, the world of the sea, enigmatic and alien.

Slimy, brutish toil. Seasickness and wretched food and brackish water. The Gloucester mate cuffing and cursing him and his countrymen with a certain austere Puritan determination. Days with the waves house-high under a puffed and desolate sky. Nights of blackness flecked with white, and running back to a yet deeper blackness. Once a gale that shivered a mast into matchwood and swept the bridges clean as with a knife.

He was conscious of fear. But paradoxically, he was not afraid of his fear. For there was his ambition. There was his passion for Na Liu. There was, stronger than his passion, his hate of Yang Shen-Li. These sustained him too through the decades of heavy labor that followed.

First in California--California of the smashing, roaring, epic era. Gold was king then. Silver-lead was viceroy. Everywhere railroads were being pushed. There was timber. There was wheat. There were cattle ranches and orchards. There was the White Man's bragging:

"Give us the dollar! To hell with the cents! Let the Yellow Men earn 'em!"

The Yellow Men did. Among them, Foh Wong--striving desperately, year after year, living close to the danger line of starvation, in California, Arizona, Colorado, Chicago, at last reaching New York. Frugally hoarding his money, climbing up the ladder of success, until his was a name for shrewdness and solid riches to conjure with in Chinatown, and stout merchants, sipping their tea or smoking their opium-pipes on an afternoon at the Azure Dragon Club, would comment admiringly:

"Gold comes to his hand unasked--like a dog or a courtesan."

ONCE in a while Foh Wong had news of Yang Shen-Li. His friends would read in Canton papers, or in the local Chinatown weekly, the Eminent Elevation, owned and edited by Yung Tang, how the Manchu also was steadily making his way--how, a favorite of the Dowager Empress, he had been appointed captain-general of the Pekin troops, commander-in-chief of the Northern army, and finally--this happened at the turn of the century, at about the same time when Foh Wong paid off the twenty-thousand-dollar mortgage on his Pell Street house--military governor of his native province.

With every rise in the other's fortunes, Foh Wong's ambition grew. His hate, expressed by his jealousy of material achievement, was not weakened by his own success, although in this thoughts of Na Liu no longer played a direct part.

He was still a good husband to her, in that he treated her with scrupulous politeness and presented her occasionally with expensive gifts. But his passion was dying. For several reasons. One--logically, inevitably--was that he had never been able to make her love him. Besides, she was getting to be an old woman. And--the gravest reason--she had borne him no children.

She, on the other hand, had not ceased to be his faithful wife: looking after his bodily comfort, making his home a thing of tidiness and beauty, cutting down household costs. Nor did she dislike him. Not at all. Indeed, it would be a hunting after lying, sentimental effect to say that she blamed him for having forced her into marriage. For she also was of Mongol race. She believed, to quote a Chinese proverb, that it was just and proper to take by the tail what one could not take by the head; and she would have acted as Foh Wong had acted--in fact, did act so several years later--had the positions been reversed.

Therefore she gave him her respect. She even gave him a measure of friendship. But no love; she could not. She had not forgotten the Manchu; could never forget him.

So Foh Wong's love died. It became indifference. And then one day his indifference changed to hate, as blighting as his hate for Yang Shen-Li. . . .

On that day, coming home for lunch, he found his wife in tears. He asked her what was the matter. She did not answer, only sobbed.

He saw a crumpled letter on the floor. He picked it up, forced her to read it aloud to him. It was from her brother.

The latter wrote--for that was the time, after the death of the Dowager Empress, when revolution all over China was no longer the pale, frightened dream of a few idealists, but a fact that seared the land like a sheet of smoldering flame, yellow, cruel, inexorable--he wrote how in Ninguta, too, several months earlier, the masses had turned against their rulers, the iron-capped Manchu princes. He wrote vividly--and Foh Wong smiled as he pictured the grim scene.

HE mob of enraged coolies--hayah! his own people--racing through the streets, splashing through the thick blue slime, yelling:

"Pao Ch'ing Mien Yong--death to the foreign oppressors!"

Running on and on, like a huge snake with innumerable bobbing heads, mouths cleft into toothy cruel grimaces, crying:

"Pao Ch'ing Mien Yong!"

Rushing on through Pewter Lane. Through the Bazaar of the Tartar Traders. Past the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork. On to the palace of the military governor. Wielding hatchets and daggers and clubs and scythes. Overpowering the Manchu banner-men who fought bravely.

"Pao Ch'ing Mien Yong!"

Heads then--heads rolling on the ground like over-ripe pumpkins. Heads of Manchus, of foreign oppressors; and among them--doubtless, wrote Na Liu's brother, though it had not been found in the crimson shambles--the head of Yang Shen-Li.

Yang Shen-Li's head, thought Foh Wong--his handsome, arrogant head!

He laughed. Then suddenly his laughter broke off--and staring at Na Liu, so wrinkled and faded and old, he said:

"I wish he had lost his head years ago, when I gave him the choice between losing it, and losing you. For had he chosen death, I would not have married you, O turtle-spawn!"

She did not reply. She kept on weeping. And then he beat her--partly because he hated her, and partly because her tears told him that she still loved the Manchu, loved his memory even after death. . . .

He left the room, the house.

He thought, with self-pity:

"Here I am, wealthy and powerful, and my loins still strong--and saddled with this ancient gnarled crone! Hai! Hai!"--as he saw three young Chinese girls crossing Pell Street arm in arm, with swaying hips and tiny mincing steps. "When there are so many soft, pretty buds waiting to be picked!"

He turned and looked. He knew one of them: Si--Si, the daughter of Yung Tang, editor of the Eminent Elevation.

Foh Wong did not care for the latter. The man, New York born and bred, was a conservative, an adherent of the former imperial regime, and had recently returned from China, whence he had sent articles, to his own and American papers, praising the Manchus and denouncing the revolutionaries as tools of the Bolshevists.

Still, considered Foh Wong, his daughter was lovely. What an exquisite wife she would make! And he smacked his lips like a man sipping warm rice wine of rich bouquet. . . .

So time passed.

WHENEVER he thought of Si-Si, which was often, he beat his wife. And one day, at the Azure Dragon Club, stretched out on a mat, between them a table with opium-lamps, pipes and needles and ivory and horn boxes neatly arranged, he complained of his fate to Yung Tang, who inclined his head and spoke sententiously:

"Women are useless unless they be the mothers of our children."

"That is so."

"My own wife drinks--too much. She talks---too much. She spends--too much. But she has given birth to a daughter and three sons. Ah"---while with agile fingers he kneaded the brown poppy cube which the flame gradually changed to amber and gold--"better a drunken, nagging, extravagant wife who is fertile, than a virtuous one who is as barren as a mule."

"Yes," agreed Foh Wong. "Better a fat, dirty pig than a cracked jade cup."

"Better," the editor wound up the pleasant round of Mongol metaphor, "a fleet donkey than a hamstrung horse."

For a while they smoked in silence. The fragrant, opalescent fumes rolled in sluggish clouds over the mats. Then Foh Wong asked:

"Your daughter Si-Si is, I understand, of marriageable age?"

"Indeed."

"She is betrothed?"

"Not yet, O wise and older brother." Faint amusement lit up Yung Tang's purple-black eyes. "She is waiting for a proper man, a wealthy man."

"I am wealthy."

"I know." Yung Tang pushed the warm bamboo pipe aside and substituted for it one of carved tortoise-shell with a turquoise tip and three yellow tassels. "She is devoted to her parents. She has given solemn oath to the Buddha the Adored, that she will not marry unless her husband invests---ah--twenty thousand dollars in my enterprise."

Foh Wong stared at the other. He knew that---thanks to the weekly's freely expressed pro--Manchu attitude, contrary to that of Pell Street which, being coolie, was mostly revolutionary--its circulation and advertising had dropped; that therefore the editor was in awkward financial straits.

"Or, perhaps, fifteen thousand dollars?" he suggested.

"Or rather--nineteen?"

Foh Wong kowtowed deeply before the Buddha who looks after the souls of those about to die--for he was sorry for the destiny in store for his faded old wife, Na Liu.

"Sixteen and a half thousand is a goodly sum, the more so as I--should I give it--would be going counter to my political principles. It would mean a loss of face to me."

"While, to me, it would mean a loss of face to accept money from a man who does not see eye to eye with me when it comes to China's future. Thus--eighteen thousand dollars. Personally I dislike bargaining."

HE editor smoked two pipes one after the other. He continued:

"It is wretched manners to praise your own, I know. But it has been remarked by certain people--truthful people, I believe--that Si-Si is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry, that when she washes her hands she scents the water, that her seventeen summers have only increased her charms seventeen times, and that"--calmly---"her hips are wide enough to bear many men children."

Foh Wong sighed.

"My own wife," he replied, "is a fallow field. There is none of my seed in the world to pray for me after death. Not that I blame her. Still--it is written in the Book of Meng Tzeu that she who cannot fulfill her charge must resign it."

"You mean divorce?"

"No."

"No?" echoed the editor, looking up sharply. "But a second wife is not permitted in this country."

Foh Wong turned on his mat. He glanced through the window, up at the sky where the sun was gaping in the west like a great red door.

"Divorce," was his answer, "is a custom of coarse-haired barbarians. Besides--a law of these same barbarians--alimony would have to be paid. Expensive--eh?"

"Very expensive."

"Not that I am stingy." Foh Wong spoke with sincerity. "For my wife, should her soul jump the dragon gate, would have a splendid funeral. She would be buried in a large and comfortable redlacquer coffin, on the side of a hill facing running water, and with an elegant view over the rice paddies."

"Her spirit," commented Yung Tang, "would doubtless enjoy itself."

"Doubtless."

BOTH men were silent. The editor was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his highly polished fingernails. He thought of a man whom he had talked to, and who had given his confidence, a few months back, during his visit to China; thought of the queer mission with which this man had entrusted him; thought how, fantastically, sardonically, fate can work its will--fate that ambles out of the dark like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells.

He smiled at the other, who, having emptied his pipe at one long-drawn inhalation, looked up and asked a casually worded question:

"I believe you have a cousin who is a hatchetman?"

"Yes. But--" The editor hesitated.

"His prices are exorbitant?"

"They would not be--to me. Only, I have discovered that it is one's relatives whom one must trust least."

"Just so."

"I have a friend in Seattle. I shall communicate with him. I shall act slowly, discreetly. I shall think right and think left. There is no especial hurry."

"Except"--courteously--"my desire for Si-Si."

"Another summer will increase her charms eighteen times." Yung Tang pointed at the table. "Will you smoke?"

"No more. I have a duty to attend to. You will write to Seattle?"

"Immediately."

But the editor did not write to Seattle. He wrote, instead, to Hongkong; and he began his letter with a quotation from Confucius which said:

"The man who is departing on a sad journey often leaves his heart under the door--to find it on his return."

He smiled as he dipped his brush into the inkpot; and it is worthwhile remembering that the Chinese ideographs sin (heart) and Menn (door), when placed one above the other and read together, make a third word, "Melancholy"--which latter, by a peculiar Mongol twist, is considered an equivalent of "eternal love." And he wrote on while Foh Wong, having left the Azure Dragon Club, entered the joss temple around the corner.

There, without the slightest hypocrisy, he kowtowed deeply before the Buddha of the Paradise of the West--the Buddha who looks after the souls of those about to die--and burned three sweet-smelling hun-shuh incense sticks in honor of his wife. For once he had loved her. And he was sorry for the destiny in store for her. So, from this day on, he stopped beating her. On the contrary, he was kind to her--brought her presents of flowers and fruit, treated her--with no irony intended--as if she were an invalid not long for this world. And almost every evening he visited the joss temple; always he made kowtow before the Buddha and burned incense sticks--until Yu Ch'ang, the priest, declared that few men on Pell Street could compare to him in piety and rectitude.

EAR the end of the year, Yung Tang reported to him that the matter was progressing satisfactorily. His friend in Seattle had secured the services of a hatchetman.

His name, said the editor, was Kang Kee. He had been a warlord fallen upon evil days. Therefore, thanks to his former profession, there was no doubt of his being a skilled and efficient killer; and given the fact that he was a stranger with no local tong affiliations, there was no doubt of his discretion.

"When will he be here?" asked Foh Wong eagerly.

Yung Tang shrugged his shoulders.

Kang Kee, he explained, was still in Hongkong; and surely, Foh Wong knew that times had changed since he himself had come to America. For there was now the law called the Asiatic Exclusion Act, to circumvent which the Chinese aspirant after Yankee coin had to travel many thorny roundabout roads and spend exorbitant "squeezes" right and left. Would Foh Wong, therefore, pay fifteen hundred dollars on account, to be deducted, later on, from Kang Kee's price of five thousand?

The merchant grumbled, protested, finally went to the safe and counted out the money.

"I would like a receipt," he said curtly. After all, he went on, he was a businessman. Here was a job for which he was paying. "Not that"--with grim humor--"I want you to particularize the--ah---nature of the job."

WUNG TANG smiled. His smile, had Foh Wong noticed it, was queerly triumphant.

"I understand," he said. "Just a few words acknowledging the money for--well, services to be rendered. . . . How's that? I shall make it out in duplicate."

"In duplicate?"--rather astonished.

"Yes. One for you, and one for me, as agent for Kang Kee." With quick brushstrokes he wrote paper and copy, handed both to the other. "Will you look it over?"

"No, no!" exclaimed Foh Wong. "It is not necessary."

The editor's smile deepened. He knew that the merchant, in spite of his wealth, had never learned to read, that he carried the intricate details of his business transactions in his shrewd old brain, that he could just barely scrawl his name, but that for fear of losing face, he had never owned up to it. Besides--and here too Yung Tang saw through him--Foh Wong figured that the editor had no reason to cheat him. For though Si-Si was young and beautiful and desirable, there were few men in Chinatown willing and able to pay the eighteen thousand dollars which her father demanded and in fact--Foh Wong knew, having made inquiries here and there--needed desperately; and he had made assurance doubly sure by buying up, at a generous discount, a number of Yung Tang's overdue notes.

He lit a cigarette, while the other signed the original and said:

"Will you countersign the copy?"

"What for? You received the money, not I."

"I know. But--it would make the deal more binding."

Foh Wong was puzzled. Make the deal more binding? He did not understand. Still, doubtless Yung Tang knew what he was talking about. He was a literatus, a learned gentleman; and the merchant, for all his success, was at heart the coolie who had never lost his respect for educated people. And--again the thought--the man needed him, could have no reason to cheat him.

"Very well." He dipped brush in inkpot, and clumsily painted his signature. "Here you are."

Even so, he felt relieved when, in the course of the afternoon, he dropped in on Ng Fat, the banker, and found out, by discreet questioning, that Yung Tang had bought a draft for fifteen hundred dollars made out to one Kang Kee, a former warlord residing in Hongkong.

INDEED the latter--whose American odyssey was destined to be quite as hard as that of Foh Wong, decades earlier--needed every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars. To enumerate all those whom he had to bribe would be to give an ethnographical survey of many of the Far East's more gaudy rogues.

But let us pick out a few.

There was, in Shanghai, a Kansuh ruffian on whose shaven poll had been a blood-price ever since the Boxer affair, and who met the former warlord and thirty other prospective emigrants in a first-chop chandoo place west of the To Kao Tien Temple. There was, furthermore, a squint-eyed Lithuanian skipper, wanted for murder in Riga and for piracy in Pernambuco, who took them to Vladivostok and into the tranquil presence of a Nanking compradore with gold-encased fingernails and a charming taste in early Ming porcelain. This gentleman passed the adventurers through yet two more middlemen to a Japanese captain who flaunted British naturalization papers and called himself O'Duffy Ichiban.

He was supposed to clear directly for Seattle. But he managed to cruise off the British Columbia coast--"contrary head winds, half a gale," he wrote in his log, and lied--until a narrow-flanked clipper shot out from the fogs of Queen Charlotte Sound and took away the living freight, drowning no more than seven. The remainder had an interview, next morning, with a government inspector who--hating himself for it--drowned his conscience in his greed.

Then a stormy night. A motorboat chugging recklessly across the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. A dumping overboard into the swirling, greasy sea half a mile from land. A screaming wave that swallowed all the merry band of Mongol rovers with the exception of the former warlord. . . . His swim ashore. And at last, his strong hand reaching out from the water and gripping the slippery piles at the foot of Yeslerway, in the city of Seattle. . . .

Seattle in spring.

Spring, too, in New York.

Spring brushing into Pell Street on gauzy pinions. Hovering birdlike over sordid, tarred rooftops. Dropping liquid silver over the toil of the streets, adding music to the strident calls of pavement and gutter.

Spring in the heart of Foh Wong--to whom, that morning, the editor had said that he had received a telegram from the hatchetman. The latter would be here on Saturday--would seek out the merchant immediately upon his arrival, at nine in the evening.

So, on Saturday afternoon, Foh Wong entered the joss temple. There he attended to his religious duties more thoroughly and unctuously than usual. Not only did he make kowtow to the Buddha of the Paradise of the West. He also kowtowed seven times to the Buddha of the Light Without Measure, and nine times to the purple-faced Goddess of Mercy. He heaped the bowls in front of the idols with dry rice. He burned twenty-seven incense sticks. He made the rounds of the temple, bowing right and left, beating gongs, ringing a small silver bell. He paid the priest a handsome sum to exorcise whatever evil spirits might be about.

FINALLY, his soul at rest, he went home. He presented his wife with gifts, thinking shrewdly that Si-Si would enjoy them after Na Liu's demise--an expensive radio set, a robe of purple satin embroidered with tiny butterflies, a pair of coral-and-jade earrings and a precious Suen-tih vase.

Na Liu smiled. She said:

"You have made me very happy these last few months."

"Have I?"

"Yes," she agreed; "by forgetting your anger against me, your just and righteous anger. For, you see, I have been a bad wife. I have never loved you. I have grown old and ugly. And I have borne you no children."

"Three things which only fate can help," he replied quite gently.

"Fate is bitter."

"Fate, at times"--as he thought of Si-Si--"is sweet. Let us not blame fate." He interrupted himself as there was a loud knocking at the street door below. "A friend whom I expect," he explained, and hurried out.

He reached the shop, crossed it, threw open the door. A man stood there--tall, broad, a black handkerchief concealing all his features but the hard, staring eyes.

"Upstairs," whispered Foh Wong. "The first room to the left."

The stranger inclined his head without speaking. Noiselessly he mounted. He disappeared.

There was a pall of heavy, oppressive silence---suddenly broken by a sob that quickly gurgled out. And Foh Wong trembled a little, felt a cold shiver along his spine--saw, a minute or two later, the man return.

He asked:

"Is it--finished, O hatchetman?"

"Yes. It is finished, O mud-turtle."

"Is it--finished, O hatchetman?" Foh Wong asked; and the stranger replied: "It is finished, O mudturtle." Then the merchant gave a shriek of fear.

THEN the merchant gave a shriek of surprise and fear. Why--that nasal, metallic voice so well remembered! The voice of Yang Shen-Li! And as the other tore off the black handkerchief---the face of Yang Shen-Li! Older, much older. But still the bold, aquiline nose, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the pressure of the leathery, copper-red skin, the compressed, sardonic lips brushed by the drooping mandarin mustache, the combative chin. . . .

"But you," Foh Wong stammered ludicrously, "--you died--in Ninguta!"

"And I came to life again," was the drawling answer, "as Kang Kee, the warlord. Kang Kee, who last year forged a chain of strong and exquisite friendship with one Yung Tang, who was visiting China. Kang Kee--no longer a warlord, but a hatchetman come here for the sake of a small killing."

"A killing," cried Foh Wong, rapidly collecting his wits, "for which you will lose your head."

He had decided what he was going to do. Outside somewhere, on Pell Street or Mott, his friend Bill, detective of Second Branch, would be walking his beat. He would call him, would tell him that his wife had been murdered. He was about to run out--stopped as he heard the other's drawling words:

"Not so fast, mud-turtle! You spoke of my losing my head. And what of your own head?"

"You killed, not I."

"You hired me."

"Prove it!"

LEISURELY, from his loose sleeve, the Manchu drew a paper--the paper which a few months earlier, Foh Wong had signed on the editor's request--and which Yang Shen-Li now read aloud:

"Herewith, for the sum of five thousand dollars, I employ Kang Kee to kill my wife--"

Foh Wong grew pale. He stared at the Manchu, who stared back. There was in their eyes the old hate that had never weakened. Alone they were with this searing, choking hate. The outer world and its noises seemed very far away. There was just a memory of street cries lifting their lean, starved arms; just a memory of river wind chasing the night clouds that clawed at the moon with cool, slim fingers of silver and white.

Then the Manchu spoke:

"If I lose my head, you lose yours. Only--I am not afraid of losing mine, being a brave man, an iron-capped prince; whereas you, O coolie, are--"

"A coward," the other said dully.

"Precisely. But brave man and coward shall be united in death. Together our souls shall jump the dragon gate." Yang Shen-Li turned toward the door. "I shall now go to the police of the coarsehaired barbarians, and--"

"Wait!"

"Yes?"

Unconsciously, Foh Wong used the words which, decades ago, in Ninguta, the Manchu had used:

"Is there a price for your silence?"

"There is."

"How much?"

"Everything," announced the Manchu, sitting down, slipping a little fan from his sleeve and opening it slowly. . . .

He had not arrived tonight, he related, but twenty-four hours earlier. He had spent the time with Yung Tang, talking over the whole matter with him, and making certain arrangements. For instance, bribing a Chinese doctor who would certify that Foh Wong had died--of heart failure.

"You," the merchant whispered, "you mean to--"

"Kill you? Not at all. Did I not tell you there is a price for my silence? And would your life be the price? No, no! Your life is sacred to me."

"Then?"

"Listen!" Yang Shen-Li went on to explain that, with the help of the physician's certificate, Na Liu would be buried as Foh Wong, while it would be given out that she had gone to China on a lengthy visit. "Clever--don't you think?" he smiled.

"But what will happen to me? How, if I'm supposed to be dead and buried, can I show my face?"

"You can't," said the Manchu grimly. "You will live in the garret of your house until death--may it not be for many years! You will see nobody---except me. You will speak to nobody--except to me. Nobody will know that you are among the living--nobody except me and Yung Tang. This shall be a bond between you and me. The moment you break it, I shall go to the police and--"

"But my business--my money--"

"I shall look after it. For before--shall I say?--your death, you shall have made a will--you are going to sign it presently--making me trustee of your estate for your absent wife. You will leave her your whole fortune--all, that is, save eighteen thousand dollars--make it thirty-eight thousand--which you will leave to Yung Tang. . . . Hayah!"--as the other began to plead and argue. "Be quiet, coolie! For today I command--and you will obey!"

AND thus it is Foh Wong is cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. It is thus that Yang Shen-Li is lording it gloriously over Foh Wong's clerks, spending Foh Wong's money recklessly; and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club, mounting to the second floor, bowing courteously to his wrinkled old wife and asking her:

"Moonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?"

Always she gives a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh. And at times, hearing the echo of it, Foh Wong wonders--then forgets his wonder in his fear.

THE MYSTERY OF THE TALKING IDOLS

"Thrice did I hear the gods call me by name," said the Arab. "A lie!" shrieked the medicine man. "Kill him! Kill--"

AFRICA was about them: a black, fetid hand giving riotously of gold and treasure, maiming and squeezing even while it gave.

They loathed and feared it. Yet they loved it with that love which is stronger than the love of woman, more grimly compelling than the love of gold. They loved it as the opium-smoker loves the sticky poppy-juice which soothes him--and kills him.

For it was Africa.

And also in this was it Africa that it had thrown these two men together: strange bedfellows; Gerald Donachie, whose dour Scots blood had been but imperfectly tempered by the fact that he had been born and bred in Chicago, and Mahmoud Ali Daud, the grave, dark Arab from Damascus.

Arab he was in everything. For he was greedy, and yet generous; well-mannered, and yet overbearing; sincere, and yet sneering; sympathetic, and yet coldly cruel; austere, and yet passionate; simple, and yet complex.

"Donachie & Daud"--the firm was well known from the Cape to the Congo, and up through the brooding hinterland, the length of the great, sluggish river, even as far as the black tents of the Touaregs. It had made history in African commerce. It was respected in Paris and London, feared in Brussels, envied in Berlin.

They traded in ivory and ostrich feathers, in rubber and gold, in beads, calico, gum-copral, orchilla roots, quinine, and--if the truth be told--in grinning West Coast idols made in Birmingham, cases of cheap Liverpool gin, and rifles guaranteed to explode at the third discharge.

All the way up the river their factories and wharves, their stations and warehouses proclaimed their insolent wealth. They ran their own line of paddle-steamers as far as the Falls; twice a year they chartered fast, expensive turbine boats to carry precious cargoes to Bremen and Liverpool. They had their fingers in every pie, to the South as far as Matabele-land, to the North as far as the newest French-Moroccan concessions.

They could have sold out at practically their own figure to the big Continental Chartered company which they had fought for ten years, and which they had beaten in the end to a not inglorious standstill. They could have returned with bloated bank accounts: Donachie to a brick-and-stone realization of the Chicago palace about which his imagination wove nostalgic dreams when the river was high and the fever higher; and Mahmoud Ali Daud to his pleasant Damascan villa and the flaunting garden with the ten varieties of date trees, of which he talked so much.

"All the date trees of Arabistan are in that garden," he used to say to his partner, and make a smacking noise with his tongue. "Al-Shelebi dates, yellow and small-stoned and aromatic; Ajwah dates, especially blessed by the Prophet--on whom be Peace; also the date Al-Birni, of which it is said: 'It causeth sickness to depart from it, and there is no sickness in it'."

And they spoke of selling out, of going home.

They spoke of it in the hot season when the great, silent sun was brooding down like a hateful, implacable force and when all the wealth of Africa was but an accurst inheritance, to be gained at a cost of pain and anguish more than man could bear; and during the "wet," when from morning till night a steaming, drenching, thudding rain flooded the land as far as the foothills, when the fields were rotting into mud, when the water of the lake thickened into evil brown slime, and when the great river smelled like the carcass of some impossible, obscene animal.

They spoke of it with longing in their voices. They quarreled, they cursed each other--year after year. And they remained--year after year.

For it was Africa. The sweet poison of it had entered their souls, and they could not do without it.

Donachie sighed. He looked at his partner.

"Look here, Mahmoud," he said querulously. "Granger is the third who's disappeared up there in the last four months. The third, damn it all! And we can't afford to give up the station. Why, man, it's the best station in the whole confounded upland! The company would jump at it. They've been trying to get a foothold there for the longest time. We get as much ivory from there as from half the other river stations put together--fossil ivory, I grant you, but what difference does that make, once it reaches the market? Ivory is ivory."

The Arab had been counting the carved wooden beads of his huge rosary. Now he looked up.

"We can send Watkins. Watkins is a good man. He did well at the coast station. He speaks the language. Or we can send Palmier--a shrewd Belgian. He knows the Congo."

Donachie hit the gangrened, heat-cracked table with his hairy fist.

"It would be murder, Mahmoud, rank murder! They'll disappear--they'll disappear like the others."

The Arab inclined his head.

"Fate is bound about our necks. Perhaps the bush will eat them up."

Donachie interrupted savagely.

"The bush? The bush? You mean the--"

The other raised a thin brown hand.

"Hush, my friend. There is no proof. Also is it bad luck to give a name to the thing which is not." And he snapped his fingers rapidly to ward off misfortune.

Donachie's voice came loud and angry.

"There's the proof that the three agents have disappeared, one after the other."

The Arab smiled.

"What is that to you and to me, my friend? We pay? We pay well. If fools make a bargain for their souls with the devil, then fools may make a bargain with us for their bodies. They know the evil name which the station bears. Yet it appears that they are willing to go. Many of them." He pointed at a heap of letters on the table. "Did you read what they write? They want to go. Let them go. There are even company men among the applicants. We can pick and choose. We can send whom we please."

Donachie glared at his partner.

"We'd be murderers none the less."

"How do you know the others have been murdered?"

"Good Lord! How do I know? Why, man, people don't walk into the bush and disappear without sound or word or trace just to amuse themselves, do they?"

The other smiled.

"Allah kureem!" he said piously. Then he counted his beads again and was silent.

DONACHIE rose. He moved his chair. But the sun found its way through the holes and cracks of the attle-and-daub house, and there was not a spot in the big, square room which was not barred and splashed by narrow strips of sunlight.

It was just like a dazzling sheet of light piercing the tin roof with a yellowness that pained the eye, puckered the face, and wearied and maddened the brain.

There was beauty in the landscape beyond the fly-specked windows. For under the tropical sun the sloping roofs of the warehouses, the steeple of the mission church, and the beehive huts of the natives burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock in every mysterious blend of purple and green and blue. The sky was like an enameled cup, spotless but for a few clouds which were gnarled, fantastic, like arabesques written in vivid cerise ink on some page of forgotten Byzantine gold.

And in the distance, beyond the glitter and glimmer of the river, the forest stood forth in a somber black line.

But Gerald Donachie did not see the beauty of it. He only felt the squeezing,