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TAO  TALES

 

 

By

HENRY  MILNER  RIDEOUT

 

 

DUFFIELD  AND  COMPANY
New York	:	:	1927

To the friend

 

PON KWAI

 

 

who told the greater part

of the stories

Yi Tao’s kitchen was a good harbor and refuge, in the rains when darkness filled the house and a noise of splashing surrounded it; in a January north wind that chilled the bones and made the nostrils raw; in any weather, green spring or burnt brown summer, even at noon on the most lovely days while charming ladies came to eat in a party and talk of their—Who knows what they talked of? Not Yi Tao; for though his table near his cook stove became at such times the only convenient place for man or boy, he was too busy to think of any but that spiritual thing, the honor of the house, embodied in food borne quietly through a swing-door into the dining-room. What they talked of, does not signify; without being rude we may dismiss them here; for the point is, that what did signify was Yi Tao’s own conversation.

Always a good refuge, his kitchen seemed therefore best without ladies behind the swing-door. Alone at dish-washing hour on a rainy night, so wet that neither friend nor neighbor was coming, how pleasant it could be to sit at Tao’s table and give ear.

“He wan’ chin-chee da govmin.” Yi Tao, suffering a cold which would put anyone of us to bed with pneumonia, stayed hard at work. In white jacket unbuttoned round the throat, black trousers, and black cloth shoes with padded soles, he moved like a neat ghost, flipping his towel round the plates and laying them away dry and clean. A brew of thoroughwort tea wafted strong medicine about the room, and this with Chinese potatoes and plenty of good spring water taken before sleeping, would cure his malady. “He wan’ chin-chee da govmin. He say: ‘Tear ’em all down.’ ”

This might be a comment on Dr. Sun Yat Sen or some other politician desiring new things and a change in government.

“He say: ‘Tear govmin down.’ All lite, dey b’lief him, dey tear ’em down, all same olo house. Nen dey come say: ‘How we built ’em up ’gain? Pleasse you tell to us.’ He say: ‘Ho, pleasse you ixcusse me, I nev’ carpinter, I not know how to do any mo’.’—That is fool, that is damn fool. Befo’ he take Jap money, now take Looshian money for spoilum. Lob de joss house all same Looshia. That lotten. Ha, if I can see him, I kill him, shu’!”

This prayer, pious because filled with love of country, being ejaculated with a fierceness quite alien to his character, Tao went on working placidly.

“Nev’ min’. He not las’ long. Some t’ing kill him bym-by.”

“You think so?”

“Shu’. Heap foolish.”

Leaving that matter comfortable on the knees of the Fool-Killer, we might discuss the breaking of gold images and confiscation of property in municipal temples, then religion by and large, then the problem why a certain city had no joss houses left.

“You see, nat city, eart’-quak’ he shakee down many kine of builting, joss house all same too. Yong men say—‘Look, joss house gone, finish, no good. What fo’ built him up? If de Got live there, how can shakee himse’f down? Joss house too foolish, no can do.’ ”

“Were the young men right or wrong?”

“Hart to say. Joss house, what is fo’? S’pose you going there, all same go you’ chu’ch for askee de Got to do somet’ing welly nice. Is de Got in he’s house? You walkee inside, you look, you hear: not’ing to see, no one to speak, house empty, awfu’ dark. Where is de Got can be? He no bed in he’s house, not sleep there, not’ing to eat. Maybe no one stay there. Maybe he stay there. You listen, you think too moch, maybe make you clazy. But this true, this the troof. S’pose you walkee inside, you thinking—‘I go to chu’ch, so I am welly goot man.’ That is lotten. S’pose you thinking—‘Ho, I am welly bat man, poo’, no can do, I welly bat man, help, help!’ That is all lite, no harm, mos’ bes’ way.”

From such a home-made version of Pharisee and publican, it would be but a step to metaphysics, likewise home-made, based on the principle of yin and yang; to those three brass men who stand in the mud holding hands at the bottom of the Pearl River; to the giant horses of stone that once galloped over hill and field eating the rice crop in a blind thunderstorm; to the deeds of devils and foxes. Being a South China man, Yi Tao knew little of foxes but by hearsay, for foxes are northern, and besides any fox magician can pass unheeded in a crowd if his tail be carried well down inside his trousers’ leg and the slyness of the eye be moderately veiled.

“Plenty man look allo same fox. You no can tell.”

Devils, however, Tao knew more about, having personally met a few. Not seven miles from his kitchen, in this very year, a devil disturbs one whole quarter of a town by making noises like a baby dog in the sky, and these not only at night, but by day when the sun is shining. “Ai-yow-wa!” he says, and—“Ai-yow-wow!” What he intends, we have not yet learned. Moreover Tao knew very well indeed the New York highbinder who murdered thirty or forty Chinese men, and died the other day in California of nothing but faces—faces of thirty or forty devils round his bed late one afternoon. An honest man has little to fear from this kind. Easier to detect than foxes, they appear only at dusk, are of an old-bone color, and lack the chin. To halt their approach, you need only turn your back, stoop, lower your head, and look at them upside down from between your legs. No devil can bear the sight of you then. On your loneliest path, if you strike the attitude quickly and often, above all if you are short and fat, he will walk away from you backward into the gloaming.

“Largee deffil in my town, you see, my willitch where I am born,” said Yi Tao. “My fadder, and he’s fadder, and he’s fadder, they meet plenty deffil befo’ me. They not lie. I not lie. You think I am lie? What fo’? Was’e time.”

His hearer knew that he did not and would not. It was while in the vein, swapping views, beliefs, guesses at the unseen, that one who is not a liar told a tale. He had lumbago at the time, and was limping badly; but he had cooked for his guest in the kitchen a great bowl of soup, containing fat peanuts, beans, diced pork, and sweet lotus root, very good. He himself took nothing but his doctor’s prescription, the powdered horn of a unicorn, costly because rare, hard to get now. Any Westerner who likes may smile, but not too broadly. During Queen Anne’s reign good English doctors had powdered horn of unicorn in their pharmacopoeia, and there are some laymen who do not yet know that Queen Anne is dead. George Washington, the other day in a young country, wore a pigtail.

“When you know what is happin, then you b’lief.”

We were discussing this world and the next, the thinness of the partition between them, and the power of the dead in the land of the living.

“Jixy lek the star by day-tam, jixy lek so thick—”

Here Yi Tao grew so mired in the bog of language that it is only fair to haul him out on a paraphrase.

Just as we can forget the stars by day, and never care that they are still in the sky, not gone but present, so we can forget all things unseen, which nevertheless are with us, underfoot, overhead, alongside, far away, near by, exchanging influence like every star and every grain of dust. Nothing is gone or wasted, for there was only so much to begin with, and it is being used for ever.

“Near my willitch, not long ’go, odda day, one man he sell littoo feeze-ekk—”

It was little fish-eggs that the man dealt in. His name was Chan Man Nen, Mr. Thousand-Years Chan, and he lived near Yi Tao’s village, or not many miles distant. A handsome young man, learned, a graduate with the first or bachelor’s degree, he had a wife about fifteen years old, who was as lovely as a fruit tree in blossom seen through river mist at sunrise. What is more, she was good all through, gentle, brave, and full of fun.

“He loving to her, she loving to him, allo same dok.”

“What? Dog?”

“Naw!” cried Yi Tao in disgust. “Allo same Dok Bird. Jixy lek Dok Welly Loff!”

This young man and his wife, then, were like the mated birds, duck and drake, that for ages have been a symbol of true love. But here the fortune of Chan Man Nen stopped. No one may have more, in quantity or quality, than his nature can absorb.

Extremely poor, they held life together from day to day, owning a hut, almost empty, on the outskirts of Kow Kong, the village of the Nine Streams, where fishermen dwell. The girl, of her own beauty, was adornment enough for their house, and she laughed at poverty; but Mr. Chan himself, when he went out to work and left her indoors with nothing but her own shadow, endured remorse.

“Some tam he plenty cly. What he doing, if she no can eat to-mollow? Some tam he’s heart almos’ bloke-im fo’ her, almos’ bus’. He wukking lek a deffil.”

So Chan carried his nets or his delicate plaited scoops of basketware, out from Kow Kong, its huddle of old brick and weather-darkened stucco, faded rose tiles, gray-brown masonry blotched with age and the greenness of creeping damp. Everyone there knew and liked him. It was part of his destiny to have many friends, none so learned as he, none so ill-starred, but all as poor. Had they been rich and great, they would have delighted to honor him. But the rich and great, being shut up, never hear of such neighbors or begin to play with them until the time has gone by, so Yi Tao says: it is part of their destiny. Mr. Chan, the scholar without advancement, had what a man of science, a writer not long ago, called the Blessing of the New Testament. In all weather he trudged off, a lean spidery bronze figure of youth, wearing some faded blue rag round his loins, for hat against rain or sun a golden shield of rattan and oiled paper. He walked across flat country to one of the Nine Streams, took passage in a fishing-boat and, after slow voyage for many miles, gained the East River, where an old family who eyed every man with suspicion but knew Chan for one sure if late in payment, allowed him to gather spawn, “littoo feeze-ekk,” from their hereditary cove of mud.

“Not ease to ketchem. Welly few man knowing how. Hart to do.”

At the right season and the favorable hour, he waded craftily in the proper shallows, plying a net as fine as cheese-cloth, keeping the mesh flat while he made it glide underneath a scum of spawn to be lifted from the water unbroken, carrying this gluey sheet of lives up the mud-bank, and transferring them to a plane surface of wood or wicker skilfully prepared. The nature of the preparation is a trade secret. If Chan’s fishing prospered, then two or three weeks later came the weary trot home from the boat-landing toward Kow Kong, with his perishable catch to be nursed, guarded at every sway of his piculan, the carrying-pole balanced on one shoulder like scales of justice.

“Some day he ketchem not’ing. Some day almos’ worse.”

If so, if he carried back his gear well-nigh empty after a fortnight’s absence, the girl nevertheless had her welcome for him, with bright eyes and laughter and jokes, and their evening rice made ready. Even the best of catches meant work and care. When he brought home plenty of eggs, he toiled far into the night, by the dim glow of his paper lantern, with infinite pains laying out the spawn on water and covering it under green grass just so thick, just so thin, all fingered as tenderly as a game of jack-straws, not too much here, not too little there. It was back-breaking labor in the wet. Next day with sore muscles and red eyes Chan returned before dawn to his hatchery,—a pond that he hired, a checkerboard of puddles marked off by narrow dams, each dam a path as well, patted smooth on its top by his bare feet trotting back and forth.

“I wonder,” his thought meanwhile continually ran, “I wonder how she makes our food go so far?”

The puzzle harried him. They came so near starvation, yet always had a bite to eat, a handful more in the cupboard. How did she manage? Whenever he asked, her lovely face grew demure, her black slant eyes darted mischief.

“Do not fear.” She laughed. “I am neither a fox girl, nor Miss Lü the Rat-Wife. You have only married a good housekeeper, no more.”

In laughing heartily she made an adorable set of tiny wrinkles curl and chase along her nose, playing upward.

“Oh, sly as many mice!” cried Chan, and felt younger at the sight of her.

His question was not answered, however, for it often rose in his mind. How could their food last always? While freshening the water in his checkerboard pools, with muddy feet climbing the paddles of his treadmill pump, Chan thought and thought. No, she could not be a Rat-Wife who prowled out to steal for him after dark, or while he travelled from home. All that, he believed to be nonsense,—a child’s tale from the Liao Chai, the Chinese Nights’ Entertainment. This was a day-time affair of cold cash, the greasy round cash with the square hole: of how much rice a Mexican dollar will buy, how many pounds; and of how many ounces go to a meal. Chan worked, sweated, and pondered.

“Something bad fights against us. This is a miracle contrary to Nature.”

Here lay the hatchery pond, brown on the mud, blue under the reflected sky, with rent to be paid for all; off by the East River, there was rent to be paid for the cove whence the spawn came; sometimes it did not come or, when it did, failed to live and grow in this costly, ever-to-be-paddled water. Money flew before alighting, yet he had food in his house. But yet again, his wife grew thin, pale, the oval of her face too sharp, refined like the face of a spirit. It was not right.

“What is not right? We are happy. Why does my Blossom fade?”

Something evil fought against him. Chan did not lose courage, but carefully tended the eggs, watching every change in them till the great change, till their surface like swollen grains of rice melted away, crumbled, became a helter-skelter of black sparks that wriggled and flew asunder for dear life while the fish were born. Meantime every day he pumped his treadmill. When the sparks, the living midges, had grown each as long as a finger-joint, he caught them again with another kind of net, sorted them handful after handful of baby fish, and divided them by families to be reared apart. Many died. If the rest became longer than his thumb, Chan took them to market. The pole bent over his shoulder like a bow, sagging with the weight of terracotta jars, one before, one behind, that splashed water through their broad mouths of netted rattan as through a cane-bottom chair.

“He not know how sell ’em. He too gen’ilman.”

To be a gentleman: that, if it is possible, was Chan’s failing. Every peddler of young fish knows that when you dip them from the jar, you must dip out five at a time, and count aloud by fives; but that a sleight of hand will make four, or even three, silvery flipping bodies cheat the eye as your scoop tosses them into the buyer’s pond. Once there, the fish are his to count if he can. This handling is Lesson I of the Salesman’s Primer, the first trick in the trade. A gentleman and a scholar, Chan could not learn it. The Nine Streams people to this day tell funny stories of him, and laugh at many a standing joke or by-word taken from his awkward career. At the outset, he could not find a buyer till wandering helpless, at his wit’s end, he met a man and asked him:—

“Sir, if it please you, how does one go about to sell these?”

The man stared at a figure of innocence bowed between two slopping jars.

“Those? Here?” The stranger chuckled. “It cannot be done, for here all are fishers.”

“Then I am lost,” quoth Chan.

His chance friend—the cook and porter of a street kitchen—was a good-natured fellow, who took pity.

“Go out,” said he. “Go out anywhere from town. Look abroad for smoke. Where smoke rises, there men live. Travel thither, and you will sell your fish—I hope. Walk safely, sir.”

Chan thanked him, and went on. Outside the village was nothing but flat green country, cloudless blue air, and a millionfold trill from little frogs, like the ringing of dollars told and tested by all the bankers of fairyland hidden in the reeds. Chan was lost again. Then he saw, far away, on the violet haze of hills, a dark thread twining toward the sky. All day he plodded to reach this, the only smoke, for which he blessed heaven and the kind cook’s wisdom. It was a hot day, very long. At dusk as he climbed the smoke became a glow, a fire, which led him up and up, till he came to the men who lived beside its redness. They were poor, wild, blackened fellows, charcoal burners, who had no money. Chan going home down hill in the dark, stubbed his toe, broke both jars, and spilled his fishes to die all along the rocky path. A Nine Streams man to-day can hardly tell this anecdote for laughing.

In time Chan learned his way about, and had his own circuit as a peddler. Though honest, he was no fool. A wide ring of villages came to know him, at first as a humorous character, then as a plain dealer who drove bargains with moderation and sold healthy young fry.

“He is a man of books,” people said indulgently. “He will never grow rich.”

He had grown so far from rich, and the sole ornament of his house now so pallid and frail, that he could not bear to see her smile. At last one day, when they sat down to their evening rice, Chan lost heart altogether, and refused to eat. He was well, strong, hungry; he saw both bowls heaping full, as always, and heard her pleasant voice telling him some trifle, gaily; but, with chopsticks idle in his hand, he neither answered nor looked up. She was too like a spirit.

He stared at the food. Both bowls heaping: that was impossible, for he knew how much rice he had bought, and when. It should have been eaten three days ago. He had gained no money since.

“Why do you not eat?” she coaxed.

Chan continued to stare downward. He thought and thought. A new suspicion was mingled in his grief. It had become her habit to talk during meals, and eat nothing until he was gone back to work. Why, then—

“I am ill,” he growled, and jumped up. “I must breathe air.”

Rushing outdoors, he went noisily away as though to the pool, then halted, watched the house, listened, and crept back like a thief. In a corner of their crazy old hut, he knew, there was a chink. To this he drew near, crouched, and put one eye.

The reflection of sunset, through the open door, cast a dim glow upon her. Chan was prepared to see her get on foot, carry off her bowl, and hide it. She did nothing of the kind, but sat weeping, quietly, and from time to time with a feeble, tired hand lifting a few grains of rice to her mouth.

“Ah!” Suddenly Chan guessed. He fell back as if a spear darted through the chink, and ran. “O fool!”

Into the house he came storming. She looked up, and leaned away, frightened. Chan, who had carried his chopsticks all this while without knowing he held them, bent down and plunged their ends into her bowl. The little black rods brought up with a click, in rice not deeper than his finger-nail.

Chan dropped them, turned her bowl upside down, and lifted. Out fell clattering a shallow saucer. Her poor miracle had a false bottom, and the bowl itself was empty.

“Beloved,” said Chan.

Their eyes met. They could not speak another word.

That night before dark he left the village to try fortune again, taking his hardwood yoke and pair of jars, with the last few dozen fish. He might sell them and buy a little more food. There was nothing left in the house to pawn.

“You go out after money, hart to ketchem,” runs a maxim of Yi Tao’s. “Money come fin’ you sitting down in chair, some tam welly ease.”

Chan caught none. He lugged his jars, day after day from one market to the next, counted a week slipping by, ate scraps given in charity, and reached a town where nine days ago he had sold the best and most promising lot ever hatched. Their buyer hailed him in the street.

“Come here.”

Chan followed the man home, like a sleep-walker, and saw him point down at his fish pond, a muddy fallow corner in the rice fields.

“Look,” said the man. “Gone. See their white bellies uppermost. They all died.”

According to peddler’s rule, Chan always guaranteed his fish to live ten days.

“It is fate,” he answered, peering at the muddy water. “You speak true. Exactly. I have just enough here to make good.”

He emptied his jars into the pond, letting the buyer count, and turned away with a laugh and a stagger. He went home fasting, while wet gravel cut through his ragged shoes, and the yoke galled his neck. A waning moon hung over him, behind, like a curse, when he came to her door.

“She had better go on sleeping,” he thought. “I will not knock till to-morrow.”

Laying his pole and crockery against the wall of the house, he sat down to rest; but as he leaned back on it, the door would not let him remain there, and swung heavily in.

“She has not barred it?”

Chan rose, and entered. Sickly moonlight painted a ghost of his thin legs on the floor. He stopped them, waiting, frightened.

“It is only Chan,” he called. “I have come home.”

Nothing breathed in the dark, or came near the green wedge of moonshine. If awake, she would have jumped up and spoken, laughing. She did not, and the air of the room told his nostrils that here was death.

“I have come home!”

Loud voice would not help. Chan went shuffling to the place where they kept a tumbler of oil and a wick, which he lighted, praying as well as he could remember to do by heart. The wick burned blue, crackled, and with its point of flame cast a shuddering glow that by and by swam steady, like a little votive lamp on an altar. He turned.

In one corner of the room she lay dead. She had been there for some days, alone, so that Chan, as soon as he could move, drew a cloth over her eyes and face.

When he was able to see or think, Chan did all he knew how to do in her honor. For lack of a costly tomb or any memorial, he got out his old writing-brush and cake of dried ink with a hole worn through it.

In the palm of her left hand, summoning all his forgotten skill, he wrote:—

“The Happiness of Chan Man Nen.”

Upon this he shut her cold fingers. Whether it was the same night or another day, he did not afterward recall, for sun, moon, darkness, candle-shine were all one, all black now.

Later a man sat with him under a bamboo while the heat of sunset faded into cool dusk, the evening breeze came, and stars winked like fireflies through the shadowy whisper and sway of pointed leaves.

“For we were sorry,” concluded the stranger, “that we did not know.”

“Thank you,” said Chan. “You were patient, sir, to listen so kindly to my grief. She was buried yesterday. How long have I been talking?”

The man stared. It was he who had talked all the while, without a sound for reply, without yes or no, shake or nod of head from this companion. A distant cousin of Chan’s, he had come to the funeral more than a fortnight ago.

“I will return,” said he, and rose.

“You are kind.”

“Will you then go where we ask you to go, and try?”

“I will go anywhere, sir. It does not matter at all.”

The cousin wondered, left him sitting a graven image under the bamboo, and carried home an ill report. The head of the family, calling the elders into council, had urged and by their vote carried a resolution that Chan Man Nen the unlucky should be given a fund from the tribal coffer and sent up to take, if he could, his master’s degree. He could not. The cousin, a worldly wise young merchant, said so in brief.

“Too late now. The man did not grasp our offer. He is worn out and stunned. His head has grown old.”

Fortune, says Yi Tao, if she is once on the track, will come whether or no, especially to a man who does not want her and does not care. This, like our western proverb that heaven sends chestnuts to those who have no teeth, may be true or false. But what next happened, is well known.

The head of the clan, a venerable shape in a claret-colored robe, heard his messenger’s report without blinking. Throned on a black-wood chair against the wall, his feet resting prominent on a stool of camagon, he smoothed his gray grandfather’s moustache, and remarked:—

“To bear sorrow properly, a man’s heart must be good. Our vote therefore stands. It is not a deep investment, and it may bring honor to the family.”

Up for his master’s degree Chan went, not like a person alive, but as a man cut out of green paper, a sending, goes when bidden by a magician to perform dreams. He would go or stay at a breath. Nothing mattered. Locked in a cubby-hole for three days and three nights, he painted long essays with his brush and cared no more for what his memory supplied than a dictionary cares for its knowledge. Again he sat in this jail, then once more—nine days and nights to all the examination—painting delicately by bad light, and toward the end smiling, because here alone with a lamp the movement of his hand and the words growing under it came to resemble a talk with her, a long, silent game. Jokes popping up, allusions that her quick spirit might have caught, he wrote them boldly or twined them with a laugh among the characters of a most antique, solemn history.

He came out at the top of the bulletin, first, above all other candidates.

Then as if the tide of his life turned to flood, began a stream of people, some known, most unknown, bringing felicitation or desiring a favor. One among these, a jolly gross fat man, waited to have Chan’s ear in privacy. He carried a bag which he dumped on the floor, sighing with humor.

“Sir, I have come to pay my respects,” he laughed, “and my debts.”

Chan replied to him as to all, politely, but could not remember this tun of flesh in its grand silk robe. The fellow was a rich man, his nickname Chubby Little Plum: a loose liver, much too fond of wine and comforts, a tremendous, hair-raising joker, yet one who during famine placed jars of thick gruel in the streets, bought rice at wholesale, and let the poor have it for half what he had paid. He gambled at everything from a fight between crickets to the depth of rainfall in a shower.

“I bet on you,” he chuckled, “and you did not fail me. Here is a trifle to keep our luck even.”

Lifting his bag, he emptied on the table a clump of silver ingots.

“We do not know each other,” Chan protested.

“All men of wit are friends,” puffed the notorious Little Plum. “I have heard you talk, cracking jokes with the heart-ache, holding your own in a bad market. The bet was therefore no risk.”

He waddled from the room, leaving more than a hundred ounces of good sycee behind, and a dazed man who did not want them.

Once turned, the tide came in rising week by week, month by month. Chan took another first with his doctor’s degree. Fifteen years passed, while Fortune walked humbly after him, courting him with gifts which he never looked round for. He prospered, won friends everywhere, might have been wealthy but for his extravagance in giving away, and even refused to be an academician of the Han-lin.

Thus, when about thirty-five years old, famous, and powerful, he happened to be the chief examiner at Nan-king. The second period of three days and three nights had closed, and a multitude of pale, worn youngsters gone scuffing wearily out from the stone-flagged courtyard to take recess. Chan watched them go. He smiled, for the procession of youth, with slim backs bent under their long gowns, and queues languidly swaying, made him pity the ambition of men. He thought he understood how life in this world is repeated, over and over. He did not know.

The day had been hot. When the crowd was gone, and evening began to cool the city, Chan prepared for work; but finding that he should need paper, new brushes, and ink, he too went forth from the courtyard. It was a pleasant hour. He strolled, enjoying, for want of company, the talk and movement of traffickers up or down one street after another.

He had walked a long way roundabout, meditated, forgotten the errand, and passing among his fellows like a kindly ghost, wandered all through Nan-king till checked by the city wall. Here an alley squeezed itself like a cat along the old masonry, in gloom, overhung by lattice awnings of oiled paper. The shops, little and obscure, had not yet lighted their lanterns.

“I have gone astray,” thought Chan, with amusement, for he was always going so. “I came out to buy something.”

Just ahead in the dusk, on his left hand, a door glimmered. Chan felt his way toward it.

“Ah! This will do as well as a better.”

By the dim light, it was the door of a stationer’s, a narrow shop elbowed and pinched by poverty. Chan stumbled in.

A weak lamp burning low reddened the room and made things tremble, half seen,—a few plain wares neatly in order, watched by a young girl standing behind a table.

Chan greeted her.

The girl smiled, but did not speak.

“I wish to buy paper,” he said, “and brushes, and ink, if you please.”

Gliding quickly without a word she collected and brought him what he wanted. Perhaps it was a trick of the lamp, but her motion, her slant downcast look, a gleam as if roguery played under her shyness, made Chan’s heart leap; for though he had never before seen this young beauty, he remembered even her finger-tips resting on the parcel, and was frightened by something long ago.

“How much?” he asked.

The girl shook her head, and made a sigh to tell him that she could not answer, being dumb.

“Ah,” said he, “that is great pity.”

He bowed, and turned to go without his purchase. Memory haunted this room which he had found by chance. He could not bear it.

“I wish you good evening.”

As he turned, the girl ran away into the darkness at the back of the shop.

“Father!” she cried aloud. “Here is a gentleman to see you!”

A chair overturned crashing.

“What?” shouted a man’s voice. “Who called? You?”

From some inner room the man came headlong,—a sober merchant pale with alarm, thrown into consternation, as if the shop were on fire.

“You called? What is here? Do the dumb speak?”

He ran forward past her, babbling.

“What have you done to my daughter?”

Chan, with all the dignity of a Provincial Examiner, drew the strings of his purse open. He was not one to be bawled at so rudely.

“I have done nothing, sir, but ask her how much these goods are worth.”

The merchant remained staring. He named his price and took his money like a figure in a vision.

“Your pardon, sir,” he stammered. “I—You have—My daughter was born dumb. In all the fifteen years of her life she has never spoken, till now.”

The three gazed on one another. Chan felt his knees quake.

“It is plain,” said her father, “that you possess the gift of healing.”

“I? No,” replied Chan, hoarsely. “If your daughter has been healed to-night, it was by chance. I have no gift.”

“Who can tell? Try it,” begged the shopman. “Try it again, sir. Look!” He turned, and seizing his daughter by the wrist, drew her left hand forward under the lamp. “See. That hand is tight shut. Never since her birth, never, has it been able to open. Heal that also. Who knows his own power?”

Chan looked in silence at the closed hand, with its finger-nails in a row, like four pink jade ovals, pressed to the ball of the thumb.

“Who knows?”

At first he could not utter a syllable. His throat was dry and aching, his pulse hammered so that he shook.

“Oh sir, put forth again, in kindness!”

Chan lifted his fan and struck her lightly across the knuckles.

“Open your hand!”

The girl glanced at him and laughed. An adorable set of tiny wrinkles curled and chased along her nose, playing upward. Her hand opened.

The rosy palm of it had a birthmark, faint, intricate, like written characters almost rubbed out:—

“The Happiness of Chan Man Nen.”

Yi Tao shut his own hand, laughed, then scuffing across the floor removed his kettle to the back of the stove, and clanked an iron lid over the fire-hole. It was time to put the kitchen to bed.

“Do you believe that, Tao?”

The question expected the old formula—“Hart to say.” Instead, came an emphatic:

“Shu’.”

Swallowing his powdered unicorn, Tao drove the dose home with a gulp of thoroughwort tea. He drank from the spout, lowered the brown pot, wiped his mouth on the back of one fist, and blew a great contented sigh.

“Shu’. Happin not long ’go. All my farminy they know him, that man. Ewelly botty know him. He happin not long ’go. One hunder’ sissty year, maybe. Jixy odda day.”

Before Christmas a neighbor and his wife rejoiced in their first born, who entered this breathing world just as the sunrise gun thumped into fog on a black morning. By the time he had eaten breakfast and got outdoors, the neighbor, a young husband who felt that he must either sound the glad tidings or explode, yearned for a fellow creature, anything alive, to hail.

At the very moment, there was one. Down past his hedge went flitting the crown of a straw hat.

“Hallo, Tao! What you think, old highbinder? We got one baby, born to-day.”

Yi Tao paused in his trot down the lane. With a marketing basket linked to one arm, both hands pocketed in his trousers, each frog of an outdoor tunic buttoned well over his chest, and ears drawn as far inside the collar as they would go, he seemed a very frozen little figure, a Poor Robin from China endeavoring to keep head under wing. His felt shoes had made stubby oval prints on a rime of white frost. The straw hat, an heirloom discarded by a friend many summers ago and weathered to old gold, the color of Tao’s face, was a most jaunty anachronism flouting the winter air.

“Ho. So.”

Black eyes aged with wisdom twinkled aslant, up at youth, elation, and the brightness of Christmas come true, in a face that beamed over the hedge where two or three last roses hung dying.

“You catchem?”

Yi Tao, it is quite safe to believe, felt no surprise. He knew all that had happened in the town, all that was happening, and all those paulo-post-future things which were about to be going to have happened. Yet he politely made a countenance of great astonishment and glee, by popping his eyes, running out a round tip of tongue, and drawing back other features in a concave goblin spasm no more to be described than imitated.

“Good Lock fo’ you. I t’ink-so. Welly good forjn. What kine iss?”

“Kind? A very nice little girl.”

“Ha. Boy mo better.”

The sage trotted away down to market, leaving a progenitor to chew upon that.

Nevertheless, when five months later the hedge had became a bank of roses again, the same old saffron hat and wrinkled saffron face were more than once poked in among leaf, thorn, and flower, to exchange a grunt, or squeak, or gurgle with something which kicked very tiny bare brown feet, heels uppermost, treadling at the sun.

“He’s baby.” Tao confided to a hearer in the kitchen, afterward. “He’s baby she go be Welly Lich Ooman.”

Why this fate—another seer has declared a rich woman, of all things on earth, to be the most unbearable—why this doom should be over-hanging a child’s cradle, it was not easy to guess.

“How so? You can tell now?”

Hugging a yellow bowl in which he paddled a mass of dough round and round, Yi Tao snorted.

“Shu. Can tell.” In his youth he had been a fortune-teller’s apprentice, and read his master’s book deeply. “Shu. You not see she’s ear? Som tam you looking that baby. She’s bofe ear welly tight, welly stuck to, near she’s head bofe-side. Alloways go be lich. You neffer see Misto Hossabin he’s ear? All same kine, awfu’ close, tight on he’s head, welly nice.”

Mr. Osborne’s ears, a pair belonging to the richest man in town, never before seemed remarkable; they are not as King Midas’s, to demand attention; and it may be a saddening thought, that except a mother perhaps fifty years ago, no one but Yi Tao has cared to observe their nicety, their snug fit.

“You walkee behine to him, som tam, you can look-see.”

The dough spun round, creamy, pale, and slab. A neat forefinger wiped the edge of the bowl, whisking. The talk flew as fast, and revolved about the point of prophecy in general, human foreknowledge.

“Oh, many tam ferjn-tell he know ewellyt’ing pooty goot, if he got plenty sense likee you or me, can see, can sabee what iss. Befo’, in Kwangtung, was officer in costom house, firs’ name Misto Fong, he allo same jotchee, but he playing forjn-tell for he’s own fon alloso.”

In other words, Mr. Fong of the old imperial customs, a respectable man and shrewd as a judge, was an amateur practising the art of divination. Before his customs house, a compound wall fronted the street,—a crumbling wall, its lower half brown with damp and green with moss in blotches that climbed to the limit of capillary attraction, its upper half gray, its coping of tiles faded by a century or two beneath rain and sun. Midway, the chief gate yawned, where merchant and shipman waddled through; north of this entrance, coolies, fish-wives, peddlers lined the wall, squatting beneath flame-colored paper strips all written down with column after column of black symbols; but to the south, because a gutter flowed there, nobody kept shop or found room except one man, who had taken the only dry spot. This fellow, day after day, rain or shine, sat behind a bare folding-table and waited. Over his head on the wall there hung, as large and gaudy as a painted cloth outside a circus, the portrait, mustard-yellow upon sky-blue, of a countenance dotted freely with blackheads.

“Misto Fong som tam speaking to him, littoo-bit, not moch. He catchee few bissoniss.”

In our skin-deep western world, blackheads are a sebaceous defect (we are told) to be carried to a beauty parlor, whatever that is, and removed; but men of South China regard them a great deal more profoundly, for by their number and their distribution on the cheek or jowl you may read your destiny as clear as in the stars. A man at an outdoor table, therefore, with a chart behind him of a dotted moonface, can be nothing but fortune-teller. This one was called by the public Wan Gōk Jü, his private name resting unknown.

Mr. Fong dropped him now and then a word at the gate, because even a street failure, calmly waiting, starving in his profession, may merit the glance of a scholar-amateur. Wan Gōk Jü always replied with courtesy.

One morning Mr. Fong at his desk, where he sat painting a report, looked up, fidgeted, put his brush into his mouth, sucked the ink thoughtfully, and then with a downward wave of the hand beckoned a clerk.

“Go make my compliments,” he ordered, “to the fellow south of our gate who reveals the future for pay, and tell him he’d better move off. My art informs me that the wall is about to come down on his head.”

The clerk bustled away. His master bent again, worked hard, and forgot the message.

There, next day, placid as ever between table and map, waited the hireling prophet.

“You have not moved?”

“No, sir.” Wan Gōk Jü smiled. “I returned thanks at the time for your warning, but clerks are not to be trusted.”

“You do not move?”

“Not yet, sir, though I am obliged to you and bow down before prescience.”

It was blandly uttered. Mr. Fong frowned, however, and with more than official dignity swung into the courtyard. On his way he observed that all the peddlers, coolies, cooks, fishwomen, and loungers had gone from their station, left the north wall bare. He went in to think of more important matters. Work pressed, rain fell, the day was dark, and some wrangle of tariff involved him. About noon came a crash as of thunder; the building rocked; he, like all his staff jumped up, crying “Earthquake!” and ran out.

The north wall had fallen flat, choking the street with rubbish and a cloud of lime dust already being laid by rain. Under the south wall a varnished yellow umbrella kept the downpour off Wan Gōk Jü and his table, both solitary.

Being a good old chap and a sportsman, Mr. Fong walked right up to ask his rival:—

“Who sent those people out of danger?”

“I did.”

“How could you know it was to be the north wall, not the south?”

“That, sir,” replied the lonely one, “is a trade secret.”

Should there be, as Yi Tao thinks there are, dull persons who go round explaining wonder away, reducing it to common sense, they cannot spoil all. Who has yet ruined the wonder of common sense? If they pretend how Wan Gōk Jü when a youth may have studied brick-laying, and so had a better mason’s eye than Mr. Fong, what then? A knight errant, said Don Quixote, must know everything; but a fortune-teller must know that much to begin with, and continually peer forward into more.

“Anybotty laughing to him, iss fool. Plenty man allo tam can see aftu happin, welly ease,—norf side, souf side, why fo’, what day, welly ease aftu come down. Befo’, hart to say, pleassee ixcusse, they no talkee ’bout.”

The crash of the old north wall at the customs house reverberated long, and from its dust rose, like the phoenix, one man’s name. That night the fortune-teller, humping homeward with stool, map, and table on his back, was halted at every turn by some passer who locked umbrellas with him to put a question. He strung together more cash than he had handled for many a week. One among these ambulatory clients, a gross fat fellow, drew him toward the window of a shop where light wavered because within a man bent double cutting soapstone seals.

“What number wins the lottery this evening, sir? I will give you half of it.”

From the darkness a crowd swarmed in, thick as rats on rice, to hear the answer for nothing.

“Do not buy a ticket. This night you would lose.”

The fat skeptic laughed. He was a jolly rascal, smoother and rounder than a jar, his nickname Chubby Little Plum being known wherever gamblers met.

“O wisdom!” he jeered. “O wise and prim and wary! Another charlatan. I see you will earn much, advising little milk-tooth boys how not to . . .”

The rest of his joke we need not catch, although it raised high laughter. The street here had a ceiling of lattice and oiled cotton, so that rain leaked only a few gouts, umbrellas in the crowd were furled, snuggled under arm; the tongue of flame by which the seal-cutter wore out his eyesight, colored all the laughing faces orange, made them tremble, but let every man see his neighbor; and therefore the notorious Little Plum saw two slant orbs pierce clear through him, then withdraw friendly, brimful of humor extracted from a depth.

“My advice to you is free. If you put no more water in your toddy, you will die from swollen blood.”

Having spoken, the charlatan smiled and heaved his burden forward so gently that they did not know he had broken through the ring till he was gone.

A coolie in the shadows piped up.

“He saved my life, if that’s any good, and a hundred others.”

Thus fame flew about the city and buzzed in the ears of men. Early next morning a crowd blocked the thoroughfare who not only gaped at the wreck of the north wall, but elbowed for room along the south, and craned on tiptoe to see the greater wonder there. His looks had not altered since yesterday. Outfaced by the public in a hubbub that swayed his table, he remained as calm as when alone,—pale, thoughtful, with bright eyes downcast, all sobriety but for a quirk of humor about the lips.

His noisiest client, who kept all others waiting, was Chubby Little Plum. It speaks well for the obese gamester and wine-bibber that, after last night’s rebuke, he had come first and come smiling, to occupy the breadth of three in the front row. From that time on, every other day, he heaved into view with the same greeting.

“Venerable elder brother, I am in a mess again, like a fool. Read out the future for me to follow.”

The pair became friends. Whatever was read out, no one else knew. Little Plum, always lucky before, continued thenceforward neither more so nor less, drank rice-gin hot and strong as ever, cracked as many hair-uplifting jokes, but grew funnier both in his cups and out, with a kindlier wit, gossip said. Loud, coarse, incorrigible, he had gained at least a warmer heart and a hand quicker to open when fellows were in distress.

“Where,” cried one of a tableful who sat laughing their heads off, “where do you pick up all your stories?”

“From my fortune-teller.”

“That solemn owl?”

“Solemn? He’s a wag! He knows all in the world, laughter and tears, and everything between. As for wisdom, ho!” Little Plum fanned his gleaming after-dinner cheeks, mused, then quoted unawares from a great sorcerer of whom he never heard. “The man, I tell you, can look into the seeds of time and say which will grow, which not.”

It was the murder of Ho Kwai the cassia merchant, and certain odd things following, that heightened our friend’s renown. Ho Kwai, on foot, alone, set forth one day to buy cassia buds and twigs in Lo-ting, but never came there, for soon afterward boys found his body lying in a rice field, near the road, some ten miles from town. At the outset of his journey, he had been beaten to death. Few travelled by this road. No one had seen him passing. The owner of the field, a poor man, declared his horror and surprise, could tell nothing more, wept before the judge, called Heaven to keep his wife from starving, dragged back on his chains fiercely, but was hauled away. The dark, slimy inferno of the jail swallowed him.

About a year later, on a hot noonday, workmen resting in the shade of the wall by the customs house, woke, and grumbled, and found something curious to watch. The fortune-teller sat drinking tea, between sips waved a palm-leaf fan, and with his head sleepily canted, gave ear to whatever it was that a fat imp of a boy, leaning against him, whispered. The loungers knew this imp to be his only child, a young pest always underfoot, quick as a lizard, uncanny. They roused to look, not at him of course, but at a sight more novel, a new-comer: the strangest little old bent woman, a mere hank of dirty blue rags tied round the waist, who drew near, halted as though lost, fumbled on again, halted, then stared with vague, wild eyes toward father and son. A farmer’s yellow shield hat weighed her down like an extinguisher clapped on to snuff out misery. Here in broad day might be a devil’s grandam stealing up, hooking her claws on the table of chance.

Everybody saw her poke among rags, undo a knot, screw out one after another four cash, and lay them timidly down.

“That,” said a man, laughing, “would not buy the flea’s fortune.”

“But look,” someone else grunted. “See!”

An extraordinary thing happened. Putting away in one sweep his fan, his tea, and his boy, the dreamer at the table came bolt upright, awake, eager, with eyes that suddenly flamed. He greeted the crone as if she had been a princess.

“I know! Yes!” he cried. “It will happen. Your husband will come home!”

She had not spoken a word. Bystanders who jumped up to throng in, looked more closely at her and murmured to one another while they jostled. She was not old, not even of middle age, but worn to the bone with toil, hunger, and despair.

“The answer is Yes. It will happen. Fate, at this moment—Believe, rejoice, and do as I bid you, quickly.”

It was the wife of that prisoner who had not confessed, and who lay rotting in darkness.

“Take these.” The fortune-teller swept back into her hand the pitiful cash, dropped a broad silver piece on them, and from his pocket gave her a clasp-knife of good foreign make. “Lose no time. Run to the city gate, the nearest, go through, follow the river path. Three miles upstream a very old tree, a bastard-banyan, grows leaning over the water’s edge. A rope is tied to it. Cut that rope. Do not stay to see what happens there, but turn home. Obey: on your husband’s life, obey exactly. Cut the rope, make from the tree at once, go home faster than you came, and wait in confidence.”

The speaker wheeled, to beckon his grinning son.

“And you, Ink-Eater,” he commanded, “wipe that smirk off your snout. Guard my table.” He raised one arm, to lay a solemn ban upon the crowd. “Let no person follow. Whoso moves a foot after her, walks to destroy a guiltless man and to meet evil from the other world.”

So saying, the diviner bounded off and raced away down the length of the wall, round the corner, alone, but swift as though chased by a mob. The ragged woman was already hurrying in the opposite direction.

Of those who remained to gape and argue, most were coolies without spare time for gadding farther; some few might have gone, but misliked the hint from another world; only one busy-body moved on toward the gate of the river path, and he was that rough daredevil, that glutton for all things curious, Chubby Little Plum. Through hamlets, across fields, under branches where cicadas rasped the heat, among marsh reeds and steamy pools, he waddled at his roundest gait, keeping in view the point of a yellow shield hat which bobbed and gleamed on its way.

“Alas, the woman is far too thin and spry!” he panted. “Oho, the tree! None too soon, for I melt. Now we shall behold. Hai ji’, but she has faith!”

A huge old tree slanted from the river bank, and let green boughs droop close to its own shadow on whirling clay-colored water. Looped round the trunk and hitched below, a taut rope vibrated to the pull of something. The prisoner’s wife, bending, knife in hand, cut.

“She obeys!”

Without a glance behind, the little dingy-blue rag-bag rose, clicked her knife to, sighed, and went bravely trudging on. As soon as leaves hid her, the gambler darted from hiding.

A rush and gurgle of muddy water beneath shadow: that was all, at first. Then downstream, out in the burning sunlight, he spied three boats, their painters caught together,—empty brown sampans that joggled and thumped and revolved in a snarl as the current whipped them round a bend.

“Three boats? And empty? What do they mean?”

Little Plum drew back from the tree, and hesitated, for the chuckle of the river warned him, it was better not to meddle with such lonely work. But how if a marvel descended, even while he sneaked away? No, he could not miss that, not for the ill-will of twenty dead men. He retired behind bamboo once more, and curled his fatness uncomfortably down to wait.

For a long time, nothing happened. Sultry heat, monotonous flowing water, cicadas gritting everywhere, oppressed him into a doze. Men shouted once or twice, far off. At last there broke out a faint drumming which grew louder: many feet pounded the earth, harsh voices cried, and along the river path came flying a rabble of wild fellows, ten or more, straight to the bastard-banyan. There panic seized them, as the foremost jerked up the rope, saw its end cut, shook it, and yelled, foaming at the mouth. All were scrubby rascals, hard-featured, sunburnt to a Malay brown.

“Bandits,” thought Little Plum, and shrank deep into his bamboo. “Pirates from across the river.”

While they gabbled in rage and fright, suddenly out of the earth, out of trees, bushes, mud, banyan roots, jumped other men who surrounded them,—police by the dozen, villagers armed with clubs, boatmen with poles, and among them all, quietly active, our friend the fortune-teller.

“You,” Little Plum said to him next day, at evening, “carry a large brain, also a great heart. You shall be rich as Earth, or else happy as Heaven.”

Wan Gōk Jü laughed.

“Thank you, not either,” he replied, bowing. “Only two quick ears, friend, which the fogs of Earth and Heaven have not yet clouded; so what were you going on to say?”

It was being said everywhere, all over town. Before the magistrate those river bandits, without so much as kneeling on chain-mats to have their ankles bashed, gave up and spoke truth: among other vile deeds, they had crouched under a balk, heard Ho Kwai the cassia trader go jingling by with silver in his clothes, run after, killed, and thrown him into the farmer’s field. The farmer, that woman’s husband, came home to her, free, jail-delivered, lying sick but happy in a litter. No one guessed who paid the bearers of his conveyance or the coolie trotting behind it with bags of rice which bent a piculan; for Little Plum, though noisy often, could often keep his mouth shut.

Afterward there was no counting of the multitude who flocked to Wan Gōk Jü and his table that bestrode the gutter; he took down his mustard-and-azure chart of the Face with Blackheads, a vain symbol now, beneath dignity, when all the world knew him; and yet he remained even to his friends a riddle, for if he throve as Little Plum was not alone in predicting, he gave never a sign of affluence but kept the same bare, frugal habits.

Once, condoling with his fat gossip who had suffered mischance again, he declared:—

“It will pass. It knocks at every door. I have a sorrow coming to mine.”

His house, the plainest in a poor quarter, had before it a small weatherworn stone lion bearing the charm of the holy mountain—“Tai-Shan dares to outface evil”—and behind it a walled garden plot just large enough to hold one mandarin orange tree, one carambola bush. Indoors the house was bare of ornament, but well kept. Husband, wife, and son had always lived there in comfort enough, lacked neither food nor clothing, and given the neighborhood an example of serenity.

“We are blest,” the boy’s mother often told him, “in your father’s wisdom.”

It was a by-word how the stone lion guarded their door, stopping, breaking every arrow of misfortune. And then one day a shaft flew in.

“We are blest. You will follow him, you will be as great.”

The evening was rainy, the room so dark that mother and son had become shadows talking. To the eyes rather of her spirit than of her body, it seemed that he gave her a pert look, hard, unyouthful, unkind, which frightened her as though a devil had run past between them.

“You do not answer. I said you will follow him and know all things.”

Her boy laughed in the dusk, but it was not her boy’s laugh.

“And stay poor as a rat? Never! I will learn some better way than his of cheating fools.”

“What?” she cried. “His? Your father? You say—”

The impiety, the horror of unfilial sin, left her dumb.

“Know all things?” mocked this new voice in their dwelling. “Much! Last year I told him where the pirates tied their sampans, barely in time; no one thanked me or called me wonderful; and last week, every week I tell him . . . .”

Another voice broke in.

“Do you, Ink-Eater? Even so, why talk loudly at home?”

His father had joined them, a third shadow, that opened the door and beckoned.

“Come here, where I can see you.”

The boy cringed, then swaggered to the door, the twilight and splashing shower. Plump as a rice-fed quail, saucy, moonfaced, he looked up with all the boldness of young conceit.

“Am I then a lie?” The fortune-teller’s eyes were very tired, very sad. “No, Belly-Wings, not altogether.”

The rebel shrank, and for a moment would have collapsed. His rightful name was the school-name, Ink-Eater, of good omen, promising industry; but here his father spoke out a deep secret and a danger. No one except a few chosen companions ever called him Belly-Wings, the Lucky Bat. He recovered himself with a gasp.

“Ho! You know that too? Another marvel, I suppose! Your gambler friend has told you some nonsense.”

“Yes, Little Plum knows many ill courses without adopting them.”

Caught, discovered on his own doorstep, the precocious Belly-Wings drew himself together, and gave back threat for threat.

“I will run away!”

“You need not run,” said his father, quietly. “Walk, should you find it in your heart to walk from us who gave you life. You no longer believe, but I can foretell your way: sickness, hunger like a knife, wandering like a dream, the empty world without love,—yes, you may go beyond Kokonor where the wild tribes come to trade, you may sail Tung-ting Lake and after a magic storm see General Mao the Iron Cat swimming on its waves, but what will profit you far or near, with nothing but death ahead, dry memories behind, and dry self, self, self roundabout to sicken you at every footfall? Stay, trust me, and do not fear!”

The lad wavered, groaned, then suddenly jumped into the rain, bareheaded. His mother ran out calling, but fell by the stump of the lion, clung to it, and wept.

“Come.” Her husband lifted and carried her. “Our baby’s a thief, a leader of thieves. Better in the rain than in the police hell. They may never know. It was my fault. Manners of the street.”

For a year life in the house dragged on, for a second year, a third, a fourth, if it were life to wait, hearken, be silent, or chatter falsely at random avoiding any word that might echo the sense of blame. Their child had gone, and though never away from thought, would not bear mention. Sometimes when rain fell toward evening his mother forgot, and talked to herself:—

“They called him so quick in school.”

It was his father who broke at last, who came home one night without folding-table or book or hour-glass wicker stool, and threw himself down like a worthless burden.

“I have sold everything to a pupil,” said he. “The sorrows of other men, I can carry them no more, for the mind stumbles under a load of its own.”

Soon after he took to his bed and lay there motionless, pale, thoughtful, with eyes that looked away into some deep matter beyond the ceiling. His wife grew afraid: always before he had been gentle with her, but whenever he spoke now, the tone of his voice conveyed a lightness, a tranquility, a slow wisdom that ran her to the heart.

“How this world brightens toward the close. Tongue cannot tell.” He seemed to read her face without turning, though she stood across the room behind him. “No, no, my dear, you should smile. There will be peace for you and me.”

That night in her sleep the woman heard, or dreamed, a sound as of a door closing, a bolt drawn, cloth pulled or smoothed with a rustle. It was no more than a confused hint waking her anxiety. She sat up, but found the room quiet. Their small water-lamp burned with the same quavering of shadows on the floor, her husband lay breathing, and the only other stir came from without, along the eaves where a hollow night wind went droning from lip to lip of tiles.

Next day the sun rose clear.

“It may do him good,” she thought, “to let in the early warmth.”

She swung their back door open. As if all on earth were right, all restored, healed, and transfigured, glory flooded the room. The top of the garden wall shone with dew, leaves of orange tree and carambola sparkled, and even the sick-bed caught a long overspreading ray as from a golden lamp.

“Ah!” she cried. “What is here?”

On the damp stone of the outer threshold lay a single mark of a bare foot. The toes were printed at the very edge where the door had been shut.

“Who has walked in? Who tried to enter?”

From this alarm a greater suddenly drew her back.

“It is not his.”

Like one risen from the dead and about to fall again, her husband wavered beside her. He too was peering down at the stone, but smiling.

“Not his foot. And yet it was—it was a—a night-walker, a bringer of good luck . . . .”

He slid through her arms while she got him to bed.

“So do not look frightened.” With eyes closed, he lay whispering. “You will live to bless that foot. I shall know. It was a deed, not a dream. Then I am happy.”

The journey across the room had taken the last of his power. Through morning and afternoon he remained silent in a doze; but about the hour of evening rice, when after each breath the woman listened for the next and doubted, he roused to beckon her with a feeble motion of his head.

“So weak. As tired as though I had been working all night.” His eyes opened clear and seemed to laugh, bright with their old familiar gleam of roguery. “Now, quick: the last fortunes I ever shall tell—my own, and yours.”

The laughter faded from his glance, but not the brightness, which yearned and implored.

“Mine is very short. In a moment I am going. Not lost. Not lost, for all’s well. The two worlds are but one.” He nodded slowly. “Believe. Though in everything there must be deception, I was not a fraud. So here is your fortune. Do not forget a word of it.”

Something like a mist drew over his features, then passed, and left them too distinct, sharp as a new ivory carving.

“For three years you must live sparely. I have saved enough. In the fourth year comes hunger. When you cannot see how to go on, do as I now command you. Early in the morning, leave this house, take the road west of the lion, and walk till you have passed through a village. Under a tree by the road, presently, there will be a shrine of mud and brick, no higher than a child. Sit there. Wait. At mid-day a man will pass, a man in black, about thirty years old. Stop him. Ask him for help. If the first day fails, go again, and again. But halt the man in black.”

By a visible effort of will, the seer, fighting for breath, conquered.

“Our son. The poor little Ink-Eater. He will come home, I believe. It is not clear. I wonder if the boy did see General Mao. That would be curious . . . . to know . . . . the truth . . . .”

His eyes inquired of the ceiling, as before. For some little time his wife continued to watch, and did not understand that she was alone.

Full understanding came later, with passage of days in the house, and long, baffling thoughts for ghostly companionship. Once a year, in the spring, when the memorial season of Hill Worship came round again, she climbed the green slope to his tomb, a half-oval mound on a lucky site, overlooking from the flank of Wild-Tea Ravine a sunshine prospect of tree-tops below, distant fields like a patchwork in apple-green velvet, and a pond of silvery blue. Here at his barrow she mowed the grass, made all trim, and with fresh-cut sods building carefully the form of an urn or inverted bell, placed under it her paper ribbons, orange the first year, white afterward, to flutter in the spring breeze. Voices of children came to her,—neighbors’ children visiting other graves across the ravine or down the hill. She waited there alone, and returned home at sunset, feeling that perhaps he had spoken, at no moment but throughout the silences of the day.

“Here comes the fortune-teller’s widow,” called the children. “She is always the last one down.”

“It is very strange,” said their mothers, “that he left her poor. And their son, who went away to gather more learning, where is he now? Look, she goes in alone and shuts her door. That house has covered mystery.”

She never thought so. It was all quite natural. Her husband had not been miserly or sharp in trading, but free to give, slow to gain. Though she knew little or nothing of other men, her pride when he lived and now her comfort rested upon the certainty that no other man was like him, who always belonged but half to this world.

“If his vision of our boy,” she thought, “had only cleared at the last!”

There, in that regret, lurked all the doubt which would not cease aching. Whenever street and garden dripped in twilight, or under the eaves a night wind sang hollow, she could no longer beat off the phantoms of unbelief that came winging in a horde to overthrow and smother her. A man who foretold everything, who knew the seeds of time, why had he not looked then if ever, not strained his power, broken it in a surpassing triumph, to discern above all earthly forms the one, the one,—a child bareheaded in the rain?

She wept, for his words came back to her, obscure, fleeting, hollow as the wind. He had not seen, but given a vague promise. How if it were the babbling of delirium, or worse, how if he through all their life together had deceived himself and her?

“A wicked question. Put that away.”

One thing defended him, proved him right. Here came the fourth year, bringing poverty, with nothing in the house to sell, and by her longest account no more than eight days’ food.

“The end. Very soon, the end!” clamored those disloyal phantoms before dawn. “Three years gone by, and all spent. Of course he knew so much. But is it likely, that he dying or man alive could predict who shall pass long after, in what color of cloth? Halt a stranger at noonday? Babble. Fever. Here is the end.”

Nevertheless by daylight she rose to prepare for a journey, brushed and arranged her best garment, did her hair tightly though its gold ornaments were long ago in pawn, and with a wet shaving of the Slippery Evergreen dressed it down till each curve behind the ear shone like black silk.

“I will not fail you,” she whispered to his tablet in the wall of the room. “No, not even if you fail me.”

Westward from their door-keeper the gray lion, she followed a road which in half a mile became unknown to her, wandering among fields, ditches, bamboo, fish-ponds, rice, and fallow. As he had promised her, it narrowed between houses in a village, where dark faces turned from their trafficking, eyes judged her down the length of muddy pavement. Then a low green hill undulated above some water that ran twinkling, flaked with sun, like a school of heavenly minnows. On the hill-top, when she had climbed there, a bo-tree welcomed her beneath shade. A wayfarer’s temple no higher than a doll’s house contained on its mud floor a handful of gilt paper chopped into small squares, and darkly enthroned against its crumbling brickwork a tiny image of a white-bearded man sat clothed in red, blue, and gold,—the Genius of the River guarding the road.

“He saw thus far. It was not delirium. The very place.”

All was coming so exactly true as to frighten her. Even when rested, in the coolness and quiet under the tree, she heard her heart beating. It was the place, but not yet the hour.

“I walked fast. Ah, the long, long waiting before I shall know.”

Except for the river godling in his toy hut beside her, she was alone. To right and left down the slope of this hillock the road, quite vacant, and blurring with heat, meandered into the plain, from which a barmy smell of bean paste drying soured the air. No creature moved.

“But footsteps come.”

The sun had not mounted half-way toward noon. Beyond tree and shrine from a path hidden till now, suddenly but without haste appeared a young man, a slender man who wore horn-rimmed spectacles and a black gown hanging almost to his feet. He walked slowly, and thought.

“Oh, sir! If you please, one moment.”

All her courage went into the act of rising.

“My husband. Three years ago. He told me to stop you at noonday. But you come too early.”

Though surprised, the young man gave her a polite bow.

“It is true, madam,” said he, “that I left home to-day earlier than usual. How can I serve you?”

Mild amusement looked from behind the scholarly horn rims.

“And who is—pardon: pardon—who was your husband, to know my habit of life so thoroughly?”

The widow, lifting her head, named a name with pride.

“He?” shouted the man in black, then humbled himself before her, and spoke low. “My master, who knew all, who taught me what little I am learning. He, who delivered my father from prison. Madam, do me so much honor as to walk with me toward the town, if that be your way. In the mornings, it is true, I help my father on his farm; in the afternoons I go sit at the master’s table and try to pierce the cloud of the future, like him. Return with me. You need not ask another word.”

Their journey home resounded with praise of his name, until they parted under the city wall.

“I must go round to another gate,” said his disciple, the young man in black. “Remember. In your garden grows a carambola. Dig in that corner, as he swore me to command you. If you had not come to-day, I would have sought you before the Feast of the Moon-Cake. Remember, in your garden, two foot deep. For you, no one else. No one. He trusted me.”

By starlight that evening she dug, with a borrowed hoe, behind the carambola. Iron—the wooden tool was iron-shod—clinked upon pottery down a hole. She brought from the house a candle, saw among clods a great brown water-jar, and pried off the lid, tearing a seal of oiled cloth round its rim. Gray silver glistened in the jar, a layer of bullion “shoes,” ingot packed and wedged to little ingot of silver, all wave-marked with the joggle of pure casting. On them lay a paper. This and this only she took, for the written characters were his. The cover of the jar she refitted, the damp earth she hoed into place again, but with paper and candle she ran back indoors.

“For my wife. All,” said his writing. “Let no man touch this, or wheedle it from her, not even our beloved son. I write in bed with pain, while she sleeps. To-morrow I die. Other earnings my good friend—” here followed a name illegible—“whom the streets call Little Plum will hold for her in honor and trust.”

At the left of the few columns he had signed, and imprinted a red stamp. Morning, through chequered windowpanes of shellfish plates, whitened the room and caught her still reading. She could not read enough. He had stolen out from his death-bed to bury this in the garden, then made a joke of it. Why?

“Mother.”

A child was calling somewhere, a child of the neighborhood, a boy, she thought, who might have scampered from home and found the dawn too fearsome. It kept on calling.

“Mother. Mother.”

She dropped her own affair.

“What a wench, not to answer it!”

Opening the front door, she leaned out.

“What are you there, who cry?” she scolded. “Boy, or girl-baby?”

It was neither. In the pink mist drifting down a lane of wet masonry, there crouched a man, bare to his waist, thin as wicker, all a-tremble with cold, who hugged the stump of the lion. She had never seen this wretch in her life, till he got his chin off the ground, and stared at her with his father’s eyes.

“Mother,” he repeated. “I have been at his grave on Wild-Tea Hill. He knows. If you had been rich, I could not come here for shame. But poor—well, I am not strong any more, my arms are like sand, yet I will work them for you.”

She carried him in to face the tablet.

“There! Look on the memory,” she cried, “of the wise!—What will you have to eat, that you like best?”

Her son gave her a smile, heart-broken, deep with knowledge drawn from far away.

“Yes, it all happened,” said he. “Almost. I never saw the Iron Cat.”

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

Through a cone of wrapping-paper Yi Tao squeezed yellow daubs, one by one, oozily into a greased pan. He was preparing “Finger-ladies” to be baked.

“What happen then?”

“Oh,” sighed Tao, grinning, “den de boy he welly solly, chin-chee manner, say Modda ixcussee me. Go to wuk. Pehafe. Alloso he scare he’s Fadda see ewellyt’ing aftu die, allo same deffil, maybe do som’ t’ing badt fo’ him.”

The pan went sliding into the oven.

“So all lite.”

It is hard to be certain even of the past, but if neighbors do hear correctly, five or six finger-ladies may have gone through a hedge of thorns and roses; for afterward a young woman with ears tight on her head who no doubt will be fortunate, sang that song of gallant Wales for ay, which, being interpreted, is All Through the Night.

There was a young man whose father and mother wished him to marry. Of course, being ready for anything that would please them, he bowed, and consented. Without loss of time the affair, in proper hands, began to move. The mui p’o came and reported—

“Heh, heh!” So far Yi Tao, in the back garden, had been talking earnestly with his head under gray-green, many-pointed sprays; but now he bounced up, an artichoke in each hand, and began to cackle, then to laugh. “You askee what iss! I long tam fo’get. Iss fonny! Mui yan, mui p’o—ho, ho!”

His hearer, an ignorant fellow, had expected the term mei jin, and so got lost.

“Iss fonny!” Tao’s face, old gold in color, became wrinkled with mirth, and between their heavy lids his eyes were like black sparks. The humor of something far away and long forgotten, convulsed him. “That kine of ooman, plenty China man laughing to her. You see, mui, one way meaning, she go talk to mally; odda way, jixy lek olo tame-birt sing in birt-cage to ketchem yong wile-birt alloso.”

In short, mui may have a dozen meanings, varied by the tone of the speaker’s voice. Let schoolmasters puzzle their brains, as Tony Lumpkin well sang, with grammar and nonsense and learning. It is enough that one kind of mui signifies a decoy in a trap, or cage, with three compartments, the two outermost having their doors open—but set very ticklish—the inner containing a bird that sings the joy of prison life. Other birds, free, winging the air, come down to balance on a twig, cock their heads, admire the siren’s music, and hop nearer.

“She sit inside, plenty sing, talk, talk, talk, lartchee ting to eat. Wile-birt com, littoo-bit, littoo-bit, wantchee look-see, welly nice, mo’ better. Walkee inside. Quick, do’ shot, bofe end. Ketchem two.”

Even so a wilier songstress, the professional woman go-between, the mui p’o, decoys her pair of little victims into matrimony. Tao laughed once more, and stooping ran his head under the gray-green jagged sprays, where as he peered between shadow and sunlight, he muttered something unfavorable to our western method.

“But in China mos’ bes’ way. Dis contry mo’ worse. De girl on a street bom-bom-bom allo tam, spoilum fo’ wife. No good.”

Thus it was not until after the artichokes had been picked and cleaned, cooked and eaten, that he got his tale of the pawnbroker’s clerk fairly going.

“See, da, one yong man he’s fadda pooty off.” So, at dish-wiping time in the kitchen, Tao started anew. “He man likee olo ting. He’s fadda-modda die, leaf de monney. He go roun’ see olo ting, what he buy. Nen, aftu, he spen’ allo monney, can’t makee liffing. He’s name Chun Yu.”

Before his parents died, long before, even as a boy, Chun Yu had shown himself a great lover of the curious, the antique. Indeed, when the matchmaker found a most charming girl in a family no less honored than old, and brought back word, she made it a reproach and an obstacle that men everywhere knew him for an idler who went day-dreaming from window to street window, hanging about peddlers, mooning in old alleys, and haunting the pawnshops. Throughout the City of Genii, which lies between the Pearl River and the White Cloud Mountains, not a lazier fellow breathed this air of life than Master Chun Yu. The girl’s father said so; or if not, the mui said it for him in her report, knowing that a case without difficulty brings less renown to a practitioner. She had the wisdom, perhaps not of Solomon, but of Solomon Pell. Negotiation proved long, therefore, and wordy; but in the end, her art being persuasive and Yu’s father “pretty off,” she triumphed, and like the singing bird when both doors tip with a click, had caught two. The young man learned that he would marry an unseen creature whose name was Jasmine.

“Well, the old folks are happy,” he reflected. “It is right. Why do you not feel more glad? You must behave toward them as though you did.”

Their happiness began in the spring, at the Dragon Boat Festival time. Then all fell to ruin. Within a month his father died of a seven-day fever; before the New Year, his mother, of something slow that appeared to have no name. They had pampered their only child, but not spoiled him. Overthrown, stunned, lost in a world gone black, Yu rose after a time to go on as best he could without them, and to bear his grief like a man. By the old rule which the family had always kept, his outward mourning would continue for three years.

“There can be no talk of marrying till then,” said the orphan. “Much may happen to prevent—” Suddenly his heart rebuked him. “What is this? For shame!”

He had caught himself dallying with a base hope.

“Let the girl be as crook-back and withered,” he thought, “as a dried sea-horse at the apothecary’s, in three years you shall have her brought home! Stand by your word, and theirs.”

It was all very well to say so. In time, however, as his mind grew more tranquil and a solitary life became habit, Yu recalled the family promise with anything but joy, shoved it into the background, the future, and being no hypocrite acknowledged a sense of reprieve. He took to his former way, in which little by little he found not only a day-dream content as before, but increasing delight.

“Man likee olo ting,” says Tao, “he neffer stopping.”

That dry passion, the longing for the antique, had thrown its charm over him, its pinch of catacomb dust in the eyes. Through town on the longest hot summer day when every corridor sweltered like soapstone and reeked like a charnel vault, he would gladly go meandering from cock-crow till dark without a bite to eat, if at the end he could purchase, or even handle, some trinket long forgotten behind cobwebs. An old cup, a handsbreadth of embroidery, a carved knob, a silver ink-box, a gem, the snout or the bail from a teapot, a dull ivory-colored porcelain with two lines of poetry in sea-blue, anything aged that spoke to him with meaning, was reward enough. Out of a thousand such he might buy one, a hideous yellow jar that made bystanding beggars grin; then perhaps nothing more for a week or a month, perhaps in the next minute a white scroll wondrous with perfect writing never beheld since the time when written words were sacred and it hung on the wall of a true emperor.

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars.” Chun Yu had his own silly notion of trading. “A half, no, a quarter of what it may be worth. But I am not rich.”

The vendor, prepared to ask five dollars and take a beating down, often jumped at this bargain; more often he refused, waited, ran his legs off tendering dross round the market, became a laughing-stock, and made the jump after all in bewilderment.

“That young man is either great scholar or great fool,” said many a merchant, looking cornerwise and haggard after a sale. “The same thing, no doubt. But one of us got the better, and I cannot tell which. Ready money, though! What a price! No, no, of us two he was the lunatic.”

Chun Yu did not look at all deranged. A slight, well made youth, he wore the plainest of bluish-white cotton garments but kept them neat, and strolled with the jaunty indolence of one who could move quicker than a dart if there were anything on earth to repay effort. His face was clear, though pale from late hours of study; his eyes, habitually downcast, met you with sudden humor, direct, limpid, very black, and preoccupied by some tag-end of thought from far away. He smiled, as he did everything else, without hurry.

“An innocent? Perhaps,” ran the doubtful verdict of his townsmen. “He considers too deep, and acts too simple. He would fish for a star in the gutter.”

One certainty appeared as time went by. The family fortune dwindled with amazing speed, Yu’s well of ready money ran dry, and to show for it he had nothing more than a battered cabinet which hardly filled the breadth of the smallest room in his house, and which contained a few shelves, a few drawers, crammed like a jackdaw’s nest with whole or broken curios.

“It was a fair start.” He shook his head ruefully at them, one evening. “All good. But I went too fast.”

On the wall hung the pride of his collection: a painting undoubtedly by the Ma brothers, of cypresses that clung to a crag; and another which if genuine far outvalued to him anything in the room,—a picture, scabbed with waxy dirt, of a horse upside down.

“Incredible,” said Yu. “Incredible, that paint should survive twelve hundred years, with color so fresh. And if it were Han Kan’s . . .”

He sighed, returning to his book, which to-night seemed thornier and drier than before. Its charm had failed. A moment later he sighed again, threw it from him, and frowned at the lamp.

“If the horse were, in all the city not a man lives who would know enough to buy it.”

He spoke aloud, gloomily, but spoke to drive away a gloomier thought. It refused to go. His time of reprieve was run out. For twenty-nine months he had worn the blue-white cotton, that dusty miller hue like the leaves of centaurea, which to the many-colored crowd flooding the street proclaims a man who has lost both father and mother. For seven months he had worn black cotton. Yesterday he had changed into silk, and so ended his three years of mourning.

“Now I must marry her, whatever she is.”

He brought the girl no oftener to mind than he could help, never but with repugnance. At best he had only forgotten her like toothache. What was her name again, something feeble: a flower, a vine, or a perfume?

“Probably it is Onion.” He grinned without much mirth. “You have kept a monster waiting in your back room, in the dark, and now she will burst forth to claim you.”

Chun rose, took his cap and quilted jacket, then fanned out the light. He would go tramp this mood away.

“In honor, as a truthful son, you have no choice. Get it over with. To-morrow, take up their promise and fulfil the arrangement. Their spirits look to you for decent behavior.”

Thus he meditated, walking briskly in cold night air. Slush that lay wet on the granite flags began to freeze, the early winter stars to burn overhead; a few shadows of mankind, tight-wrapped, crouching, passed him without a look; and therefore it may have been chill and loneliness that drew his wandering toward the heart of town where thoroughfares had lamps hung out, a warmer dimness on frosty vapor above the roofs.

“Why so bright?”

Entering a street where the lanterns from door to door made a row of moons, he halted, and wondered.

“Ah, yes. The season.”

People were up late, running about, collecting debts, paying money, borrowing from pawnbrokers, redeeming pledges of jewelry or fine holiday raiment, dodging into shops, out again; for it was only three nights before the New Year, and every man had his book to balance, his private slate to clean.

“I was forgetting,” thought Chun Yu.

A woman who rounded the corner brushed against him. Her face, though collared above the ears and drawn down, had a familiar look. Yu might never have heeded it as he gave room, if her black eyes had not been too sly, beginning a glance of recognition, then checking and withholding.

“Ah!” he cried. “Excuse me. Wait one moment.”

It was the mui woman, the go-between employed by his mother. He called to her loud enough, but she went flitting through the night-walkers, in and out like a cat.

“Pardon.” Chun Yu overtook her between a pair of moon-lanterns and blocked the way. “I know you are at all times busy. I was coming to see you to-morrow—”

The mui p’o, round and glossy in dark clothing, refused to lift a countenance yellower than citron and smooth as cream. She buried her chin, hugged both elbows tight up the sleeves, and shivered at him.

“We are all busy toward the end of the year,” she whined. “I do not remember you, sir. The night is too cold for gossip.”

Chun Yu stared.

“Gossip? Indeed you do not remember. It is business. I am bound to marry a girl of the Koh family, what was her name, you know. Not Onion, of course. Something. Jasmine, that was it. Su Hing. Jasmine. Her father ought to be reminded that I’m out of mourning, and ready.”

The matchmaker hid her elbows more deeply.

“You? Ready for what?” She frowned as at a riddle. “Oh, yes!” The laugh, the sudden air of enlightenment, confusion, deference were so natural that any man, unless he had spent three years in learning to tell the true from the false, might have been deceived. “How stupid of me, not to catch the joke at once! But your affair, among so many, so long over and done with! I remember now, I was extremely sorry that it fell through, that we failed. You have a right to laugh at me, sir, though I did my best for you. And will again, another time, with better luck to us both.—Walk slowly!”

The dismissal, however bland and smiling, did not make Chun move.

“Joke?” he cried. “What joke?”

“Surely you were not serious?”

“Do you mean to tell me,” said the youngster, “that an honorable man like Mr. Koh would break his word?”

She gave him a fat little ogle, coy and superannuated.

“I am not the guardian,” she chirped, sweetly, “of Mr. Koh’s word. Nor do I discuss what is beyond me. But no doubt everyone felt pleased that our mistake appeared in time. The thing lapsed, fortunately, without giving him offence. Long ago, so long that he has forgotten any slight if there was one. A person of broad mind is Mr. Koh, I assure you. Of course, like any merchant, he prefers a man to be solvent—you do yourself, don’t you?—and pay his debts for example at this time of year?”

Still chattering, she ducked her way round Yu’s elbow and hurried off in the crowd.

“They have!”

Yu stood in his tracks, dumbfounded, as though heaven and earth had crashed. The street, which he knew like his pocket, had gone strange, heartless, colder than the night fog dimming its lamps; the very signs, red, black, gold, white lettering on vertical narrow boards, thickened by their number the air they hung in, multiplied, swam before his eyes, then grew distinct but alien, a forest of labels without any meaning unless bad; while past him went the same old fellow creatures in black or dingy-blue, pale-green or claret, but all suddenly foreigners pouring down some nightmare alley into nowhere. A devil playing tricks had changed the world.

“They have broken it. Liars!”

Chun Yu ran after the woman, who disappeared round a turn in the labyrinth of corridors. As he caught sight of her again, she went dodging into a shop.

“Why follow? You cannot make a scene there.”

The fit of astonishment passed. Things turned real once more. He came to his proper senses, read the lantern—a yellow globe cross-barred with vermilion writing—and knew it for that of a dealer in fireworks. Let her go, let her stay hiding, the old cheat. Yu flung away, and stalked through the crowd in a rage.

“Liars! They get rid of me, throw me aside! False-hearted litter of foxes!”

Then the humor of it striking him, he paused, in a dark corner, to laugh. Why, here was nothing but what he had secretly hoped for.

“You’re free!”

Yet being so, and having laughed at his wounded vanity, he came home with a sense of wrong to brood over. What had the bold-faced mui fraud thrown at him, as a parting injury?

“Pay debts at the New Year? She meant I couldn’t? A rather coarse jibe.”

True, he had of late neglected his accounts. This night, here and now, he would sit down to them, put all in order. Yu lighted his lamp, drew forth books and papers, ground fresh ink, sucked a brush to its finest point, and began reckoning. Alone with his shadow, quiet as a mouse, he worked on and on past midnight far into the morning, till his feet and hands were numb with cold, his head burned like fire.

“She hit the mark!” he whispered, jerking upright aghast from a column of figures. “That poisoned tongue spoke the truth. I have spent money like a child throwing sand!”

It was a poor breakfast he made after his vigil, and a long countenance he took outdoors when the winter sun rose gray behind fog. So began three days of hurry and heartsickness. They ended worse, for with only half his debts paid and a few hours remaining, he stood after dark at a pawnshop counter and wrangled with the head clerk of Kee Cheong.

“You are joking!”

“I could not lend more on those, no, not to my grandfather.”

Between them lay a handful of precious objects, from Chun Yu’s collection the best that he could bring himself to sacrifice.

“Nothing more.” The chief clerk, a little pale wiseacre, had features like a monkey carved in old bone, hard, polished, all knobs and hollows of cunning. “Take or leave.”

The handful was of great value, the offer derision.

“Fit for an emperor they may be,” squeaked the old man, “as you say, sir; but I am not an emperor.”

Chun Yu, despairing, snatched them from the board.

“As soon would I throw every piece into the river!” said he. “And for half as much—”

For less, he would jump in with them; but he left the words unspoken because another person happened to be in the room. Against the wall, overspreading a high-legged chair sat the grossest round body of a man, with fat pad shoes comfortably squared apart on the foot-ledge, heel to heel, toes winging east and west. He wore a quilted jacket of Nile-green silk, dreamed upward at the roof, and as if without a care in this world smoked a gigantic Manila cigar with a gilt band.

“Good night, then,” said the clerk, suavely.

“Good night, sir.”

Yu rammed the treasures down his leather pouch, and made for the door. He was hardly gone through it, when a voice murmured in his ear.

“Stay.”

Very nimbly the fat lounger must have hopped from the chair, to be so close at heel, grinning.

“I would not do it, brother.”

“What?” said Yu; sharply, for the advice made his hair creep. It came in reply to what he had left unspoken. “Do what?”

The fat man chuckled, and with easy extravagance threw his length of Manila tobacco into the dark, where a passing beggar caught, extinguished, and carried it off.

“Never mind what. The river’s cold. Let me lend you the cash.”

Faint, leg-weary, unable to deal with eavesdropping jokers, Yu leaned against the front of the shop and groaned.

“Here it is.” His tormentor’s face in the half-light shone as if oiled,—a face marred by too much grand living, puffy like the quilt of his jacket, but full of reckless good humor. “Here you are. I counted while you were talking, inside.”

Yu remembered this tun of flesh, now. It was a figure notorious about the city, a rich man, his nickname Chubby Little Plum, who seemed to do nothing but play the wag all day and the gamester all night.

“Give me your pouch. Take the money. There. We can exchange memoranda, if you like, afterward. But go first and eat, for you look hollow.”

The youngster found his hand stuffed with paper, a lump of tallowy bank notes, moist and warm.

“On the fourth night from now,” said Little Plum, “at about this hour, come to the shop of the Divine Fecundity. It will be closed, of course, but knock at the door. Now, don’t fail. You may see—some new thing for a change.”

The fat man laughed and moved away.

“Oh, yes!” He turned, to bawl an afterthought. “Wear your best clothes, for luck!”

With that he was gone down the gloom of the street, waving Yu’s pouch airily by the cord. To a critic his behavior might have seemed rough, loud, not wholly sober; but at the end of so much barren formalism, so much niggling and haggling, it had one great virtue, warmth of heart.

“I’ll be there!”

The wad of paper in hand, the sweaty loan, was more than enough. Before the first child scampered with a gloaming lantern, or the earliest bad debtor, cheating his clock, began to shout “Kung hei!” and explode firecrackers on a threshold here and there for the ridicule of neighbors, Yu had paid everything he owed.

“Clean. Wiped out. Not a dollar in pocket, but mother and father will approve so much of a bad job.”

From all the wreck he had saved, in their camphor box, his father’s and grandfather’s best lavender brocade. This, three nights later, he put on. As all men of the Chun family were slender, of good height and carriage, the gorgeous heirloom fitted; but his own shabby outdoor jacket, when cast over, made it laughable.

“Silk and tatters. The rag-bag king,” he thought. “An omen? Well, you can do no more. Show respect, or try to.”

Noise, a holiday uproar, filled the air. Gongs crashed and rang, drums beat a tight clack-clack in rapid rhythm, squibs flew banging like musketry. The street was a rift choking with burnt gunpowder, lights, hidden music from above, people who hurried, talk, and laughter. Chun Yu had hard work to discover the shop of the Divine Fecundity.

It was nothing but blank shutters and door.

In duty bound, humble, frightened, yet curious to know, he raised his knuckles and tapped.

No one answered. He tapped again.

“Come!” sang a voice, louder than all the hubbub. “Come!”

Obeying, he stepped into gloom and silence,—a cavern-like obscurity walled with tier on tier of parcels, neat gray squares labelled in red, above which from the topmost shelf high into the dark glimmered a rampage of gilt scrollwork, flowers, pointed leaves, and birds. Burning incense gave the air a faint sweetness, and in the haze of this across the room a low, shaded lamp hung its cone of bluish light over a table, where two men sat playing chess.

“A Happy New Year, Abounding Prosperity,” murmured Yu; and as one of them, a stranger, had white moustaches over his mouth, it was but polite to add: “Happy New Year, bringing you a grandchild, sir.”

They greeted him, then bent to their game in silence. By his globular body, wide comic face, and twinkling eyes, the younger of the pair was Little Plum. After long study among the pieces he moved a “cannon” up to the “river,” leaned away, sighed, and beckoned their caller to draw near.

“Upstairs, out in the balcony,” he whispered. “Then on your left, take a peep next door, through the spikes.”

This nonsense being a queer kind of welcome, Chun Yu did not budge.

“There, there!” Reading the thought, replying by a grin of astute intelligence, extracting himself from between table and chair, Plum bounded up as light and easy, for all his flesh, as a kitten. “There, never mind. Pardon our lack of ceremony.” He buzzed in Yu’s ear, with a gesture down that implored silence for play. “My uncle, who is very old, loves nothing but chess now. Let us talk afterward, therefore. Come quickly.”

Under an arch of more gilded scrolls, he led the way to a far corner at the bottom of a stair.

“Leave me your jacket,” he begged, “for you are at home here, you do not need it.” And with great courtesy taking from the youngster that threadbare garment, he wagged his head in admiration of the lavender brocade. “Superb color! They cannot make such dye any more. Up with you, my friend, look through the spikes, and bring me word of what you see there.”

Without a sound his dumpy form rolled back to the table and slid into its chair. The aged lover of chess had not lifted an eye or felt his nephew’s absence.

Yu, mystified, went climbing in the dark. Twice the narrow stair crooked about; on the landing a thread of light shone under a door, which yielded to his groping; and the draught as this door swung behind him fluttered a night-watch lamp, an oily drop of fire imprisoned where a tumbler sat cocking in a brass bowl full of sand. Yu halted over it, and looked. He saw nothing but a great cold room or warehouse loft heaped high with bales, rattan chairs, green crockery lions, pigskin boxes daubed scarlet and gold—new junk all for the exporting trade—and through them a lane of passage. He followed the lane, met another door, unbarred it, and stepped into carnival roar on a balcony.

“Not a soul. What wild errand is this,” thought Yu, “to come spy on nothing?”

The place, dim, forlorn, held only a pair of lanterns overhead, and these not lighted. Other balconies almost within reach across the way, though bright with lamps, were vacant. Yu stepped to the rail, and looking down saw the crowd pour thickly under the haze of fog and smoke which glowed with illumination and throbbed with noise like rapid fire in battle.

“The fat man has played me a trick.”

He was leaving the rail, when he caught sight of two faces below, upturned, motionless in all the current. One face was that of a man, elderly, broad, and impassive; the other, of a woman who seemed to be grinning; both stared not at his dark balcony but somewhere toward the left; and both suddenly became known faces.

“Aha!”

Chun Yu moved back a step into hiding, but continued on the watch.

“No, no! This trick is none of Little Plum’s.”

The woman was his old enemy the mui p’o, her companion a merchant better known than liked, a glutton every way, who had made a glutton’s fortune in fireworks. What could be the object of their staring aloft here?

“Follow orders, and see. Look through the spikes.”

This upper verandah of the Divine Fecundity, like all the others perched along the street, had a blank wall at either end to keep its cubicle of room private, and where wall joined railing a bristle of sharp stakes that jutted fanwise into the air, a guard against thieves climbing round.

“On your left, he said.”

Yu stole to the nearest fan, craned out, and peered between the spikes. They were green with gilded points, and so close together as to stripe the view. Having adjusted one eye to a gap, he saw indeed, but saw only backs of heads in the next verandah, where men, women, and children crowded the rail. An explosion of light from beyond threw them all into silhouette.

“Neighbors watching the fireworks.”

One glance told him that much. He would not have taken another—for family parties were no concern of his—had not a voice bawled above the racket:—

“Come! Indoors, all. It is time we started for the theatre. Come along.”

The voice was Mr. Koh’s. With reluctance, chattering, scolding, lingering to admire, the holiday-makers obeyed, under a soft glow of lanterns crossed the balcony toward some fainter light within a doorway, and mingled their gay colors to confuse and dissolve like a rainbow as they trooped off. The hindmost figure to be gone seemed a girl in orange or yellow.

“The Koh family!” Surprise kept Yu motionless, holding to his green fan of spikes. “Koh. And that she-devil down in the street dogging them?”

The door of their balcony, which had closed, flew suddenly open again.

“Go out!” cried a woman. “Go out, I say, and wait!”

“But, mother, it’s cold—”

“Wait there till I call you!”

The door slammed. A girl in pale orange or yellow stood under the lanterns, and then drew slowly, as if unwilling, near the front of the deserted balcony. Brightness arrived with her; for at a street-corner where firecrackers hung from house-top to ground bursting into scarlet-and-gold flower like chains of magic laburnum, suddenly a grim painted box or cubical chest that dangled above them blew apart in thunder, and became a grove of swinging lamps, ducks, phoenixes, mandarin dolls riding toy ponies, brilliant through smoky glare.

It was a climax of pyrotechnic, a masterpiece. The girl did not so much as look toward it, but gazed into nothing straight before her. Young, slender, she had an air of drooping indifference if not of melancholy, a delicate grace that somehow recalled to Chun a New Year lily with faint threads of incense twining up it. Or so he fancied afterward: at the moment, he lost his head.

“They exhibit her,” he raged, “to those brutes below!” A madness fell upon him. He rattled the bars, and cried:— “Is jasmine a flower for swine?”

The musing figure woke in alarm, drew back, turned, and ran. Her feet though not bound were tiny as a child’s, and as light.

“You need not fear!” he called out, bitterly. “It is nothing but Chun Yu, to whom they break words!”

Half-way in her verandah the girl stopped, wavered, turned again, and wrung her hands. No one perhaps can measure what courage drew her toward an unknown voice full of reproach. She came slowly, quaking as with cold,—but she came, even to the green sticks of the burglar-fan. Through them she saw no doubt a young demon or tiger in heliotrope silk.

What Yu beheld was enchantment. The rain of golden sparks, the dying effulgence poured from a box of fire in mid-air to show him that her clothes were not orange but melon, edged with blue petal embroidery; that her hair coiled close above the ears had a little tremulous bead fringe ornament, like snow-berries among weeping-willow; and that her eyes contained the only darkness of night, the one thing real, the one thing true.

His body shook like a fisherman’s line in deep water.

“You are Jasmine?” he whispered. “I did not know . . . .”

The eyes left him.

“A word,” she said, “is not to be broken.”

With that, all was gone, a whisk of melon color into a doorway.

As for Yu, presently, he barred a warehouse loft against thieves, heard a banging of firecrackers and gongs diminish, tumbled among crockery lions and rattan furniture, saw a night-lamp gutter on sand in its brass bowl, then went downstairs like a blind man.

“And I called her,” he began telling someone, “I called her the Apothecary’s Dried Sea-Horse! When she is beauty alive. Curses on all dead beauty, curses on me—for I followed it—curses on the mui p’o who sold her—”

The someone before whom he stood raving, laughed.

“Sit down, boy.” It was a good, fat laugh, comforting. “Sit down and rest your bones. Why blame the poor silly mui yan, who has her living to make, like all of us? Come, join me, excellent younger brother.”

Beneath his cone of lamp-light, by the table, from which his uncle and the chessmen had vanished, Little Plum sat broadly in repose, chewing dried melon seeds and pouring warm gin into a thumb-cap vessel of brown cocoanut lined with silver. This when full he began to reach across toward Yu, but checked himself, pulled it back, and kept it.

“On second thought, no,” said he, grinning. “Not in your present exaltation, for it would make you drunk.—Well, you saw something, I can perceive.”

Yu dropped into the uncle’s chair.

“Thank you for your correction, sir. Indeed the poor woman is not to be railed at, when my own just punishment has broken me, for coldness toward the family duty.”

“That is a better beginning.” Little Plum drained his diminutive shell of liquor. “Now, before we continue, grant me one favor: will you have the goodness to look me through and through, then say what kind of man you judge me to be?”

An unforeseen question, it woke Yu with a start, prodded him out of his day-dreaming remorse.

“Look well. Speak with your utmost candor.”

Across their table the pair, as if out-guessing each other at some new game, remained eye to eye. Echoes from the clangor of the street hummed through the darkness. Chun Yu felt a growing embarrassment, for he could not hit upon an answer which might be candid without offence, his host’s great, flat, oily visage so twinkled with contradiction,—drowsy, alert, coarse-grained, benign, changeable, stolid, sly, open, comic, everything but dull. The youth took refuge at last in a bit of time-honored symbolism.

“You are like that, sir.” Chun drew from his pocket and laid between them a coin, a greasy cash with the quadrate hole for centre. “You are square in character, round by disposition.”

The fat man expanded, quaked with laughter, beamed approval.

“My dear young friend,” said he, “you have a gift of refinement and perspicacity. Now let us be quite serious. Your father was often kind to me. Will you tell some part of your trouble?”

A moment later Yu was telling him, not part, but all. He munched melon seeds behind his thick lips, drank steaming toddy, chuckled now and again, blinked with comprehension, but spoke never a word until the end.

“You are right,” he then declared. “Mr. Koh brought his household into town this evening for the fireworks and the theatre, chiefly that the King of Fireworks (I bear him no grudge, but the fellow’s impossible, a gullet without a heart) might see your Jasmine up above and lick his chops. Hence my invitation. A word’s not to be broken, hey? Good for her! A brave child as well as a beauty.—On the other hand, you’re wrong: It’s no crime to tie up your capital if you judge neatly. I back your judgment, brother; for did you not tickle my ribs a moment ago with an accurate specimen of it, off hand? You did. He who is able to value men, can value any object dead or alive in this world. Come, courage! There’s nothing to do now but find a job after the New Year, work for her, and confound your enemies. I, who have gone through it, drink to you. Eat of my uncle’s comfits. Ginger, or a Dragon’s Eye?”

Their talk, with refection, went on till past midnight. Chun took home a heart warmed with gratitude, a mind full of exhilarating projects. Later, when the holiday season had flown by, his gratitude not only remained but grew; for Little Plum, who carried weight in more than one sense, brought it so to bear that he found work. The exhilaration, however, like an effect of those cocoanut-and-silver thimbles, passed rapidly off as Yu found himself drudging long hours in the pawnshop called Wo’ Yun.

His first fortnight there closed badly.

It was a little shop, this Wo’ Yun, very old and dark. Opposite the counter one lone article of display, a vast black cloth hanging, silk embroidered with golden text, covered the whole wall.

A man came in who desired to borrow ten dollars.

“Very well, sir,” replied Yu. “On what security?”

“This.”

Turning, in profile, the man reached out his hands, one below, one above, as if to measure or balance a vertical object. Whatever it was, it remained invisible. The hands carefully held nothing.

“This what? I do not understand your sign.”

The man drew near, and as he did so made a thing which the background of dark cloth had hidden take form between his palms. He set on the counter a black vase.

“That.”

About a span high and rather ill-shaped, the vase had a dull, inky surface without ornament.

“Genuine. Ancient,” urged the borrower. “It has magic virtue.”

“Indeed, sir?” Chun handled it, rapped it with his finger-nail, and eyed it from top to bottom, inside and out. “Magic of what kind?”

“I cannot tell. So old is the masterpiece, men have forgotten its history.”

Chun laughed.

“We all know the words and music to that song,” quoth he. “It’s an ugly pot.” Nevertheless he could not lay it down, for somehow this plain black body spoke to his eyesight, his touch, his memory, and half recalled vague wonders which he had read, or heard. Virtue dwelt here, of whatever kind, like a spell from the past. In the act of rejection he looked again, mused, and yielded. “As you say, then. Agreed. Ten dollars.”

Within the hour his chief attacked him with a roar.

“So! Ten dollars? Thus my property whiffs away!” A large old man, whose hard countenance indoor living had bleached like a woman’s coated with rice powder, the head of Wo’ Yun glared in rage. His voice had a wiry whine, and once raised for lashing, could cut like wire. “How long, young sir, do you think idiots prosper? Crockery! Earthenware! The owner walks off laughing; he will never claim it. Crockery! You lend for trash, and give us, before all this town, the face of a fool soon bankrupt!”

Much more and much worse language rent the air. Chun took it, quivering as though it were indeed a whip. Nothing but a promise given Little Plum, to stick at work through good and evil, kept him from smiting this pale money-cellar worm and walking out.

“Very good, sir.” White-sick with anger, he spoke evenly. “I will stand the loss, and keep the vase.”

His chief went on yowling.

“So you will. True enough. But for how many weeks can your pay support these losses?”

Yu turned his back and let the storm die out. From that day forward, life in the shop went on more and more drearily; not so much because the firm docked by ten his month’s wage of fifteen dollars Mexican, as that he lost confidence and grew mechanical. One day at noon outdoors when a procession of dead pigs on squealing wheelbarrows forced him into the gutter, he ran against Little Plum there.

“How are you doing, brother?”

“Ill,” said Chun, and told why. “Poorly, as you see.”

Even the jovial Chubby One looked somewhat grave, and pursed his thick mouth.

“At your old pastime? Beware.” He turned the subject. “By the by, she is a brave girl. The King of Fireworks, I hear, still pines a widower.”

For the moment the news made our pawnbroker’s clerk rejoice; yet when he sat cooped in the shop again, it went bitter. A selfish misery, he thought, to welcome her into its company. That this Jasmine, whom he had beheld once, dark-eyed, lovely, frightened in a golden dream, now for the sake of honor suffered on his account because a word must not be broken, was to him plain torment. In fancy he heard her mother day after day wearing the girl down.

“They will beat us,” he concluded. “It’s better forgotten.”

Work, wrangles in the gloom here with greedy or needy liars, haggling over other people’s money, should make him forget. He worked hard and well. At odd times the black silk covering the opposite wall taught him how there was nothing new in misfortune, for its embroidered names and flowery gratulation told of a man rich, happy, renowned, whose friends by the hundred wished him joy on a sixtieth birthday; and now the man was long dead, the cloth hung awaiting some buyer of curios,—a rag left from another great family wrecked.

“Like mine,” said Yu. “Sunk by folly. Gone. Like my own.”

Still he neither forgot nor surrendered. The year lagged by. He had then to show, beyond wages, only a funereal earthen vase which the owner had not redeemed.

“Quick head, excellent manner.” The staff of Wo’ Yun gossipped about him. “But strange, that young man. He grows more so.”

It became a joke that he was carrying the black vase round everywhere, hugging it under his elbow, dandling it like a baby.

“He talks to it,” they agreed. “He sleeps with it. Cracked, the pair of them.”

On a warm spring night Chubby Little Plum in his uncle’s verandah waited to hear the winning number of the lottery, when a man came to him breathless.

“I have found out.” The man was Chun Yu. “It has virtue. No, I am not mad.”

On the table where lantern-light streamed down, he put the black vase, and waved his hand toward it with a gesture of introduction.

“Ah?” Little Plum, who never betrayed surprise at anything, lay dormant and grunted over his tobacco pipe. “What virtue?”

“More than a thousand years old. Before the Sung family,” stuttered Yu. “It foretells weather, by changing color. The lost art. An adept, a master, created this thing at Chai Heu. Ten thousand dollars could not buy one like it. Observe! It is turning sick to-night, the blackness mottled, a gray pallor on the skin. To-morrow rain shall fall in a curtain, with lightning and thunder of all devils. The virtue spoke to me! I watched, and watched . . .”

Little Plum bounced up so violently as to knock his gorgeous bright-metal pipe end-over-end.

“Teach me its tricks!” he cried. His fat face came alive, and appeared to sparkle mischief. “Unfold all, unfold! There is a Pink-Tail from Calcutta who believes—ho, ho! Lend me this your vase for one month, and instruct me, and—Never mind history. The trick, the trick of it!”

Before they had ceased talking, their lantern guttered out, the dawn arrived murky brown, devils grumbled, with a flash of heat-lightning far off against which the roof-tiles across the way leaped into view all notched and nicked like the rump of a dragon. Chun Yu ran home through cloud-bursts. His friend kept the black vase meantime.

“I do not see why,” thought Yu. “But he is welcome to it.”

Summer came. Heat and drowse crammed the little bank of Wo’ Yun, where the staff sat drooping along the wall, fanning themselves, too inert for talk. Flies droned. Upstairs an exacting client murmured about his wife’s winter furs, brushed them, and made the afternoon seem hotter.

A ball of darkness in the doorway suddenly cut off the glare.

“Ah, gentlemen? You look as cosy as a mouse-hole full of spiders! How do you do? The cobweb is not catching many to-day?”

Loud-mouthed, vulgar, offensively cool, the great Little Plum rolled his globe of a body in among them.

“Hola, my friend! Take that!” Down before Chun Yu he plumped a money-bag tighter than a pudding. “You would not earn so much in three years, if you stayed at a place like this? Wake up, all, gather round!” He laughed, and swaggered. “A foreign-born, a Pink-Tail from Calcutta, agent there for our King of Fireworks, brought home from India the most ingenious rarefied method of betting on rainfall, with Hollandish implements in his house to advise him. I do no harm by telling, now; for the game is dead, my Calcutta baby will not play with me any more. That is your half share, brother, in the winnings of the Vase of Chai Heu!”

From the round bag Chun Yu stared to its round giver. Outcry in the shop bewildered him further, as everyone jumped afoot and gabbled.

“As for this young scholar who buys crockery,” Plum continued, handing him the black vase with a magnificent sweep, then bowing to the head man, whose face had whitened more powdery than ever, “as for this paragon, he is about to leave you with much regret, sir. Ignorance—not here, of course, no, no—but ignorance all round town is for ever competing to hire wisdom. Do you not find it so?”

The gambler spoke as a true prophet. Within a week the story had flown through town, over the walls, a wild-fire legend across country. Hard-headed citizens came outbidding one another to hire the Young Man of the Black Vase. Within a month it was that great firm, Kee Cheong, who proudly installed him behind their counter, to lend with authority where once he had failed to borrow.

The cashier of Wo’ Yun felt anger and self-reproach darken his face. Therefore, soon afterward, when an airy gentleman walked in and required eighty thousand dollars for a mere handful of jewelry, the old chap lost his temper.

“Absurd!” he cried. “We have had enough miracles here of late. I offer you thirty thousand dollars, which is a risk. We are not dispensers of charity.”

“Nor of politeness?” murmured the gentleman. “But I observe a larger establishment across the way.”

With a sweet smile, he picked up his belongings and walked out again. He had an upright but swaying gait, an air of detachment, clear smooth cheeks, heavy eyelids delicately sharp along the edge, and a keen, humorous, lazy glance. Over the way he strolled into the door of Kee Cheong.

“You see one who is rather pressed for both money and time,” he there announced, without appearing so at all. “A word of explanation may be needed.”

It was not, for Chun Yu the idler, in his happier days of wandering the streets, had come to know everybody. This calm person was an official, a Mr. Jit of the salt gabelle.

“Government has transferred me from your charming precincts of the cheerful day,” said he, “to outer darkness in a far province. I have sent home for funds, but my successor in office may arrive before them, and so, to balance my books now, I seek eighty thousand dollars in ready cash.”

His long, slender fingers laid on the board three trinkets, and toyed with them: a woman’s ornament in precious stone, a small green bottle, and a necklace of pearl.

“They are worth more.” He looked upon Yu kindly, but with doubt. “If you wish to call one of your older colleagues?”

Chun shook his head. The green bottle was all that he picked up or even cast eye on. He scrutinized, tapped it, raised it to his ear for the sound, to his forehead for the coldness, held it flat in the light, held it slanting, and dropped into one of his reveries.

“Northern.” He woke, smiling. “All right, sir. I will draw you the ticket for eighty thousand.”

The gentleman regarded this young clerk with affable surprise.

“And these?” He indicated the woman’s jewel and the pearls. “You have overlooked?”

“Superfluous. Keep them, sir. Your bottle is more than enough. We do not chop off a pullet’s head with a battle-axe, or shoot sparrows with cannon.”

Four weeks later, on a bright forenoon, Mr. Jit of the salt gabelle came strolling in to redeem his pledge. This time he had leisure for talk.

“How did you lend me a large sum so quickly?”

Chun Yu laughed.

“There are not many herb-snuff bottles, even among the Tsaili,” he answered, “of perfect blue-green jade, rightly sonorous, very cold, from the New Dominion.”

Mr. Jit laughed also.

“Correct! And what do you think that piece of jade cost?”

“I’m not sure,” said Yu, diffidently. “But I guess, about three hundred and thirty thousand dollars.”

The other bounded where he stood, as with alarm.

“In the name of both worlds, how do you know? Is this a magic?”

“Not at all, sir. I heard a story. I think your piece of jade must be the same. A northern story, from Khotan way, of a governor who—”

“Right!” cried Mr. Jit. “Yes. My father was the governor. He paid a wild Russian three hundred thousand dollars for it. The cutting of the snuff bottle from the lump afterward, cost him thirty thousand. Young man, you have a good eye, a good head. Pardon, but are you by any chance a collector like me?”

His fatal word, a spark to dry powder, touched off the incomprehensible passion. Yu did no more work that morning. The manager of Kee Cheong, with his hollow, bone-monkey face, came and blinked at the pair, hearkened to them, grinned, and gave Chun a holiday.

“Walk it off,” said he. “Hot brains do no business.”

They walked together, happily raving, to Chun’s house and the small room, his jackdaw’s nest cabinet of curios. There silence fell upon them, a silence broken only by Mr. Jit as he poked his nose along shelves, into drawers, into boxes, and chanted little ejaculations to himself.

“Hai! A marvel. Mm-ho! No. Yes. And here. Tssst!”

He bent on the youngster a frown of envious admiration.

“Do you know, young turtle, what you have snapped up out of the mud by this river bank? I bow to you.” And he did so. “Here in your room is a great fortune, an exposition of learning, a sight into the past, a picture to . . . to . . .” He drew back, and paused. “To bring the tears. Yes. In the province whither government has ordered me, there is a foreigner with green eyes and fox hair, but honest, who would come pay you forty times over your outlay in this pious work. I shall tell him, who is a mine of hoary knowledge, to come as a milk-name babe and learn of you.”

The speaker paused again, and remained like an image, staring at the wall, on which in darkness hung that picture, scabbed with waxy dirt, of a quadruped upside down.

“Impossible! No! Where did you get—It is the Black Horse Rolling, by Han Kan. You young wretch, we’ve all been hunting our eyes out for twelve hundred years, while you . . . Wonderful! It is mentioned only once in the whole range of polite letters.”

“Twice,” objected Yu.

“Once!”

“Twice, if you please.”

“I tell you, only once!”

They had forgotten decorum, grown loud, come almost to blows, when luckily a visitor broke the quarrel short.

It was Little Plum who entered.

“Ah?” puffed this fat one, after exchange of compliment. “I arrive in good time. Discussion is hungry labor. Will you not come to the Tien Yin with me and nibble a crumb or so? There is news to tell, which may season my poor food waiting there.”

In the uppermost room of a great restaurant, he led them to a table heaped for banqueting. There was profusion of good cheer and of lively talk. But the argument of the Rolling Horse, though long withheld, burst out again.

“Once only.”

“No, sir. Twice.”

“Once!” repeated Mr. Jit. “Once, and no more!”

“Twice, for it is written—”

Little Plum, who had eaten eight pounds of chicken almond and five bowls of rice, beamed with fatherly indulgence.

“One moment,” he sighed. “I forgot. Downstairs a woman is waiting to see our young companion. A professional singing-bird, who has a new song about—what was it again? Ah, yes. About a flower called Jasmine.”

One of the chairs fell with a whack. Chun Yu was gone, running.

“Forgive the boy,” said Plum, who shook all over. “Youth is impetuous. I’ll explain to you. However it may be with dead horses, painted right side up or wrong, there’s a living flower that blooms only once.—But first, let us have something really to eat.”

I.

Rain splashed round the house, dripped white as tallow from the eaves, and darkened all outdoors but a mist of acacia flowering like green-gold fire through smoke, all indoors but the brass that Yi Tao bent over, to polish, near a window.

Rain, darkness, untimely twilight beneath garden trees, and their sallow murk reflected through the kitchen, may have been what brought his talk round to mystery. Though afternoon, it was a good hour for a winter’s tale of midnight murder and dreary ghosts wandering in storm to no purpose.

“Wedder jixy lek deffil.” Yi Tao smeared an old Chinese bowl with some new Yankee liquid, vile-smelling, that became at once a coat of sage-gray powder. He rubbed it hard with a frizzed calfskin rag. “Lartchee deffil com’ out on black day allo same now. Hart to say what they meaning. One tam, near my willitch where I am born, one man farmer he going home in dark befo’ efening lek now, badt wedder, awfu’ wet—”

The brass bowl grew clear, shone like gold, and on its rotund curve mirrored a little convex warping network of windowpanes, with a little human face bulging to the same curve among their bars. Yi Tao’s own face, kindly, patient, bright with good sense and good humor, looked for a moment down toward its caricature as if gazing into a yellow crystal ball. Perhaps he did look deep into years, boyhood, the family, the village, and the past.

“Littoo while ’go,” said he, “one man wuk fo’ de jotches, in Kwangtung.”.

This man, a man of law named King, had so great knowledge and ability as counsellor that a much more famous person, a prefect, could not have got on without him. Yet he worked in silence like a shadow. Two or three close friends, nobody else, knew how large a portion of the world wagged exactly as King’s forefinger bade it. These two or three, who enjoyed the keeping of their secret, unwrapped a corner of his greatness now and again at some warm convivial table, when they called him by nicknames demurely,—Wisdom Unseen, or the Golden Back-Scratcher, Curtained One, Decapitator of Nonsense, or Power-in-a-Box.

“You are witty,” was King’s answer. As time went on, he made this retort with a sigh, they remembered afterward. “You are foolish as boys. It is no joke to live and die as the hollow behind a mask.”

Yet they had good ground for their wit, because King’s forefinger wagged the world in a peculiar mode, after all. Thus, for example, his work might go.

The prefect sat and rendered judgment, a burly magistrate with wattled jaw, upright, severe, smooth, behind a dull brown plateau of teak wood. Behind him a fourfold screen rose, exhibiting four pictures, the only bright color—except red hats, like fluted candleshades, on the court officers—in his gloomy stone room. Behind the screen, again, there was nothing but shadow and damp mason work, a bare wall.

“My opinion,” declared the prefect roundly, “is that no reasonable man can doubt the truth of the complaint, the truth which I have now elicited . . . ha . . . expiscated . . . hmm . . . However. . .”

Something checked the tide of eloquence. He leaned back, coughed, leaned forward, ruffled the pages of a book, scowled hard at no one, and cried peevishly:—

“However, I am not quite convinced. The court will adjourn till to-morrow.”

Or else, with a face like yellow flint and a voice even harder, the prefect might be upbraiding some poor devil who moaned from the rack below him, unconscious of all but agony on the bamboo see-saw tilting up and down.

“Your guilt is plainer than my thumb. Confess. You did it. I hear you saying so.—That is, however, I mean, let us not hurry a few minutes of life or death. Remove the prisoner. Bring him back to-morrow morning.”

In this way the prefect won his title of Judge However, or Justice To-morrow. Afterthought, patience, careful weighing of things until the next day and blunt contradiction of himself in mid career of sentence, made the man famous, honorable, well-nigh beloved. To-morrow’s justice, the afterthought which turned a smiling plaintiff into a defendant with the goose-flesh of terror where it belonged, or freed a wretch from torture with encomium, rolled sounding bravely over the teak plateau and fell pat, right as inspiration.

“Wonderful! Yet out of court,” his acquaintance agreed, “we call him stupid and pompous. The workings of Heaven are unknown.”

What worked, what made this change behind the good prefect’s back, was a faint scratch or tap no louder than the pricking of a hornet on paper, the love song of a beetle by night in rotten wainscot. It was King’s forefingernail rubbing the back of the painted screen.

“Hold on, judge,” said King’s nail, to the orator alone. “Out of your depth. Come home. I know this case better. You’re going wrong.”

The prefect did not so much as cock an ear.

“But however,” he would cry to his throng in the sombre hall, “court is adjourned till to-morrow!”

Now you may sit darkling behind a picture many years, rule the ruler, judge the judge, redress wrong, with a crook of your knuckle exchange life for death or death for life, confound victorious evil and despatch it to Execution Yard where its head will be snicked off, or lift a good man right up from despair to the arms of a wife crying with joy like a sun-shower: you may do all that and more, yet never be suspected. Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil. The prefect, a worthy old chap, got all the broad rumor and praise. He shone with the rainbow surface of bubble reputation. As for Mr. King, he got pale cheeks, rheumatism off the wet wall behind him, stiff joints in youth, a limping gait, and from cronies the nickname of Power-in-a-Box.

“It is better thus,” he told them. “If known, I could not go about hunting peculiar information, gathering truth from gossip.”

At odd hours he limped hither and yon. Everywhere men found him a lazy, vague, harmless wanderer who could listen better than talk and had the most engaging sympathy with a neighbor’s grief.

“An outlander,” people observed. “He belongs to no family here. Some government clerk, born far off with an ink-brush in his mouth. A kindly fellow, and lonesome.”

Meantime he might be sitting late, brooding, extracting from their neighborhood words one tiny point which, to-morrow, being rubbed on the back of the screen at a right moment, would alter the course of their destiny like a match in gunpowder.

“I cannot afford,” he said once, “to be too well known.”

At the gate of the prefect’s courtyard there began to sit, daily, a small hard-bitten rogue with countenance wrinkled like the skin of a baked yam, whose eyes never missed one movement, look, or feature in the passing crowd. He kept before him on his table a handful of gear—bamboo slivers upright in a dirty half-joint of bamboo, paper, two divining-blocks like a wooden banana halved lengthwise, a cake of ink, a brush, and a book—the ordinary tools of a fortune-teller. He remained on watch, nodding, bowing, dodging, and if he caught half a glance from anyone, calling aloud with greedy politeness:—

“Good morning, sir? How is your health?”

One day he contrived to hail King so, and delay him in the gate.

“Well enough, thank you,” replied King. “And your own?”

“My heart is heavy, heavy,” sighed the peddler of fortune. “Heavy with your future.”

“You take too benevolent a burden on you, sir.” The counsellor paused for a moment, smiling. “I find the past quite impossible enough to uncoil.”

The weatherworn prophet’s eyes were gleaming up at him as points of fire gleam reflected in jet.

“Nothing is impossible to be unwound, sir.—For example. You live in a mystery: you shall die in one.”

King laughed.

“That is true of us all. What then? Do we pay a duck for quacking?”

The eyes did not change at his retort. Steady fire, true or false, they held him.

“No. The voice of Nature in any kind is free. You pay me nothing, never a cash. But hearken. Sir, you were not born in this our City of Rams, but westward. Thirty-five years ago, far away from here, you saw the light. Ten days before your mother heard your first cry, what happened?”

Mr. King said nothing, but waited.

“Do you know what? I do. Ten days before you came into the world, your father nearly met death on the point of the horn of a unicorn.”

It was true. In a western swamp of Yünnan thirty-five years before, King’s father while journeying had been charged, knocked from a sedan chair into mud, gored at, missed, but trampled and lamed for life by that monster of fable the unicorn, rhinoceros, or Sword-Nosed Cow.

“So you were born lucky. No disease will ever breed in you or do you harm which the powder of unicorn’s horn may cure. True?—Your mother had the girl-name Salah. True?—You were but a child with the hives when for an exercise upon the Eight-Legged Essay you wrote a perfect work that made old scholars marvel. Did they not call you the Penetrating Babe? You wrote near a sunny bowl where gold fish were swimming till a white cat leaped and broke it, but you never lifted your head at the crash. Am I wrong?”

The counsellor stared. No mortal in this province could have drawn such a picture of his boyhood, or overheard such family tattle.

“What are you, priest of Tao or fox? You cajole men with a broken end from west-country tales, when your speech is Broad East. It would not fool a child.”

The fortune-teller wagged his head as though desponding. He had a foxy visage, too sly, too acute round the nose and mouth; yet otherwise he looked quite humdrum, an everyday figure of the street, respectable in his dull blue cotton gown.

“Sir, you force me to draw proof of my art more deeply,” he groaned, “like water from a secret well. Pardon me, but the bucket comes up.” He stared on the table, and whispered, as if conjuring a vision through the board. “Your wife, who is young, who is plump, who looks down and laughs when she ends a saying in talk, has her eyes rimmed black on white clear as the edge of coin. Yet, when coaxing you, they will shine almost orange, like the eyes of a bass newly caught and frightened; so that in play once you called her Sunset Fish by the Willow Pool of . . .”

“Enough!” shouted King, with horror. “Impudent, unholy one!”

He silenced the magician by a wave of his arm, and hurried into the courtyard. A lazy fat man who happened at the moment to pass and to see King’s back wrathfully switching beyond the gate, saw likewise and remembered afterward how the fortune-teller glanced up, smirked, and threw a nod across the way.

“Right!” said the nod.

He who returned it and strolled on, was an elegant young silken creature, a rich man’s pet son, of polished face and raiment, called by local slang Hwa-Hwa, or Fa-Fa Gūng Ju, the Flower-Sniffing Waster.

In court that day, men remarked how the prefect made an ass of himself, gaping and boggling and waiting as for help from on high or from roundabout, when there was none. His guardian angel, the Beheader of Nonsense, gave not so much as a tap to their screen.

“That vile wizard at the gate”—King thought of nothing else—“can hear and see through a wall. Through my wall, into my house, the very chamber of my wife. A name I never called her but once, once only. He is preposterous. He is damnable.”

The judge floundered, and blustered, and hacked the day’s work somehow to pieces. At last King, slipping away from his reproach, could hurry through the courtyard, back to the table by the gate. There sat the fortune-teller, as plausible and cringing as before.

“You, who lay bare the past so well, give me a few trifles of the present.”

“Yes, sir. Anything. But it must concern you, your own affairs. For example?”

“How many, then,” said King, “are all my children, and how old?”

The man gave a discreet laugh.

“That is too easy, plain as the Toad in the Moon.—You have one child, sir, a baby boy, who has now lived a year, two months, five days, and about—let me see: by the sun on those tiles, over the way,—about fourteen hours.”

Reckoning in his head, King found the computation right.

“Is my child well or sickly?”

“Quite well, though of a timid nature; very well, round and opulent of stomach, for he weighs nineteen catties and a half. Nineteen and a half gun, I mean to say.”

Again the answer had come glib and correct. For his third question, King bent low to murmur:—

“You propounded that I live in a mystery. Of what kind, pray?”

The fortune-teller squinted right and left, to see that none of those who passed might be watching. He did not speak out, but grinned, every wrinkle in the sunburnt face tightening like the mesh of a net, as he lifted from the table his book, set it on end, open, and scratched its cover with a long blue finger-nail.

“However,” he whispered, “to-morrow . . .”

Mr. King came upright with a bounce, angry and awestruck. Glaring at this human fox whose eyes could pierce darkness too deeply, he began some incoherent threat, but stopped, held his tongue, waited, then tossed a coin toward the mimic, and with an air as if no longer in the vein for foolery, walked limping on.

At home, that night, his wife marked a change in him.

“Is anything wrong? Are you ill?”

“No. Yes,” he replied. “A thing which rankles in the bosom like an arrow.” And with that, he told her every syllable. “A portent, an evil. Some hanger-on, some river-mud rascal mouthing such a half-breed hong word as ‘catty’ when he meant kin, and calling it gun at that! His very speech betrayed him for a Broad East man, yet he saw clear into the West, a generation ago. It is not canny. He saw too far; but what is worse, he saw too near, inside our privacy of this room, yours and mine, which nobody on earth has the right to guess at.”

A girlish little woman with hair like black glass, cheeks delicately round as egg-shell, and wide pointed eyes that when laughing drooped with elfin humor askance, King’s wife was prettier than most pictures, and therefore seldom grew animated. But now she turned pale.

“How could the wretch dare? How could he know?” she cried. “This is devil work!”

“Yes,” grunted her husband. Then he woke out of his own trouble to pity hers. “What, you are frightened? There, there, my child, it’s nothing: a bit of rubbish from the gutter that I ought not to bring home. A joke, I daresay.”

Her face was cold, her body trembling.

“Did you,” she stammered, “did you ask him of the future?”

King wondered; for a chill, a vague sleep-walking terror, crept between them.

“No,” said he. “I never thought of it.”

He crossed the room, to hang his black silk robe on one of the pegs lining the corner.

From that time forward his little ring of cronies began to perceive alteration in the man: at first he appeared silent, glum, touchy as though offended, putting a sly word here and there like a trap to catch his nearest friend in some disloyalty, some back-biting, or broken promise, or mysterious bad faith; later, at the point of estrangement, he dropped this vile habit.

“Why do you act so? Why stick an eyebrow at us round the corner of a doubt? Have we sold one of your long hairs to the rope-walk, or what?”

His oldest friend, a corpulent creature known as Chubby Little Plum, was also the bluntest. A man without a nickname, says the proverb, will never thrive. Little Plum, with his, rolled through life like a pudding-bag, a hogshead, a man-mountain of coarse good luck; his only affliction being, he said, that his skin was made too short, so if he winked an eye his mouth flew open and let noises out. An uproarious talker he was indeed, a reckless, tongue-protruding laugher; but not everyone guessed how tight that mouth could remain, how still the tongue, and how open the eyes drowsing in fatness.

“Why,” said Plum, “do you enter a room as if you were going to steal somebody’s pet flea? Speak out. What have we done?”

This gruff attack, like thunder, cleared the air.

“Nothing at all.” King sighed. “A morbid suspicion. It has gone. But all my ways are morbid now.”

He sighed again. The two sat parallel, exchanging never a glance, their backs against the wall and one forearm of each on the table between them. Little Plum inhaled tobacco smoke dreamily from a pipe of the white copper that resembled a thin, high, burnished silver teapot, hung with green and lilac tassels. He looked far away, and pretended to leave the subject.

“Our friend the judge’s ears,” he began, “are swelling bigger than conch-shells and curling out backward with the effort to hear your wisdom behind. From what he says in court, their funnels must be clogged by—”

“No, no,” King broke in, pettishly. “I have no mind for affairs any more. A prophet has foretold my death.”

Little Plum drank another mouthful of smoke.

“Indeed?” said he, mild and affable. “What prophet?”

“A true one, who knows all.” The lawyer swung round, leaned toward his companion a twitching, haggard face, and gave him the story of many consultations by the courtyard gate. “He knows all, past, present, every word true. And to come—well, I die before the next year of my age.”

Little Plum slid his gorgeous tobacco pot out of their way, across the mottled pink stone of the table.

“That Weasel-Nose Fraud?” He laughed. “My dear brother, you if any man ought to remember how secret information may be gathered. Let your mind reject him, spit him aside. Forget the liar and the lies.”

With a groan, Mr. King left his chair.

“Thank you, thank you for hearing, but they are no lies. Even to you I could not explain more, my own, sacred . . . Oh, it is devilish!”

And without good-bye the poor fellow ran limping from the room, hounded by furies.

“Ah.”

Little Plum the Chubby reached for his pipe, drew one interminable whiff, and sat like a graven image of obesity.

Not long after this meeting, within a fortnight, he and other friends received invitations. Mr. King bade them to dine with him, not at a public restaurant, but in his own house. About four o’clock of a wretched evening supernaturally dark in a mizzle of rain, the chairs that bore the guests arrived, some two dozen mysterious hooded boxes, their long yellow poles creaking, swaying, glistening wet, their lanterns bobbing already lighted, and of these more than one pair muffled to a glow-worm radiance which hinted of an official person with name covered up travelling the streets incognito. For chair-coolies, for lantern-carriers, and for any little tail of footmen trudging silently after the great, it was a dismal nightfall, chill to the bone.

Indoors, however, the company met gorgeous welcome, an air of festival, the brightness of many lamps, flowers, tables dressed fanwise each in scarlet hanging embroidered with gold lions or birds or blossoms. Four to a table, when every man-servant had handed in the red card and taken station behind his master, down sat the guests for tea and talk. Dinner, as it came on, proved an amazing banquet. The melon soup had not only mushrooms in it, ham, giblets of pigeon, scallops, waterlily seeds, but things more subtle and rare; while the melons containing it were whole, not halved, their tops ingeniously cut off as lids or covers, and their stems adorned with gilt paper leaves.

“Beautiful!” sighed the prefect. “Delicious!”

He sat at the chief table with Mr. King and two more, of whom one was Little Plum, the other a serene, elderly gentleman with bright eyes in a face distinguished by humor, sadness, and authority.

“Delicious!” repeated the prefect. “These melons alone, now, are ten years old if a day. One dollar for every year on the shelf is, I believe, the mode of reckoning.” He glanced about the room, in appraisement. “Four and twenty melons, at ten years each, make a total of two hundred and forty dollars!”

The elderly gentleman with the bright eyes appeared to enjoy his vegetable cask of soup extremely.

“Your visual organ,” said Little Plum, “is no less infallible, sir, than your judgment. We are indeed quaffing pearl broth from golden urns.”

The next course outdid this wonder, and was outdone by the next, and so on: the glory of the feast mounted with great drinking of health and loosening of tongue. All turned hilarious. Jokes flew.

Then as flowers and wit seemed to multiply, the room to swell, grow warm, and ring with conviviality, came a shock. It lost no force by coming as it were gradually through the noise, an accident.

“. . . and say farewell. So that I thank you . . .”

Half risen, leaning across flowers while he drank toward some friend at another table, their host King was heard to speak. Before his face the lifted cup wavered, like his eyes, like his whole aspect. A flush upon him, an uncertain look, a reeling motion, gave the effect of some influence graver and more powerful than wine.

“. . . so that I thank you, my friend.” He became aware of listeners, put down his cup, and stared before him. Over a thin glossy black silk gown he wore a sleeveless jacket of black brocade, on which his fingers went distressfully plucking the floral design. “I thank you, friends all, who have come to bid me good-bye. This is my last night on earth.”

There was a rustle of other black silks as the men stirred.

“To-morrow is my birthday, but I shall not live to see it. A true prophecy has warned me, this is the evening of my supreme day, when I must die.”

Consternation, doubt, embarrassment ran peeping from neighbor to neighbor, until some one forced a laugh; then all broke out as though relieved, exclaiming, talking at once, demanding the point of this waggery, or protesting. Under cover of their confusion, Little Plum bent quickly toward the senior with the bright eyes.

“Excellency,” he whispered. “Quick, and drink his health! Start it round. This is delusion. Make him forget till midnight.” The fat joker, deadly serious, touched with great meaning the edge of his china cup. “Whimsies in the brain have killed men before now. Start it round and round. Fuddle him. Humor him till midnight!”

The other voices contended in a storm.

“Nonsense! Why, what folly! Come, tell us the whole jest! Your birthday? Congratulations! The happy hour! May you outlive us all! What? Who ever heard . . .”

Meanwhile King lay back drooping in his chair, eyed them with profound melancholy, and shook his head. The elder gentleman beside him, turning, spoke.

“My dear sir, my good friend—”

The room grew silent, for this gentleman was the Governor.

“We all acknowledge,” said he, with bland voice and charming smile, “two motives that after a dinner like yours might well persuade any man to leave the earth:—bliss of perfect satiety, or despair of tasting such viands again; yet we all hope you will yield to neither. We all drink to your prosperity in both worlds, of course, but first, now, to your health and long life in this.”

So ending, the Governor lifted his china thimble. Though dazed and forlorn, King could not choose but lift his own, which he had no sooner drunk out than a second cup challenged him.

“Your good health,” said Little Plum, gruffly, “and go or stay, good luck!”

Our prefect, to whom the fat man’s elbow gave a nudge, followed his example; and thus with due time, words, and ceremony, King’s health went round. The awkward moment was well slurred over, the festivity begun as from a new start. Once more the Governor drank with his host. Once more King found the obligation flying in a circle.

Few men may drink more than two score cups, however small, of good warm toddy without undergoing change; and King was not one of those few. His dejection passed. He became gay, loquacious, then mellow, then dignified as an owl. In trying at last to chirp a line of poetry and fill the bosom of his coat with flowers, he dropped his chin on them, hung forward, and snored.

“Ah?” The Governor smiled. “Somebody’s bed-time.”

A pair of serving-men raised the sleeper and took him away through a dark passage. When presently they returned without him and had closed the door, talk was livelier than ever, the company laughing.

“Admirable!” said the Governor. “An admirable thought of yours, a quick device. He will open one eye very late to-morrow, quite cured of his imaginings. But what a singular delusion!”

Chubby Little Plum did not laugh with them. He had perhaps taken a jarful more than anyone else, but that iron head of his remained cold sober.

“Good enough thus far,” he grumbled. “Not midnight yet.”

“Why, the poor fellow can’t do himself harm now, asleep?”

“No,” admitted Plum, not raising the cloud on his big round face. “No, he can’t do that.”

The prefect, who like many pompous men grew doleful in his cups, almost gave a secret away.

“How terrible, had it been true,” he moaned. “King? I could not get along if I lost King.”

Half an hour had flown by, they sat drinking, laughing, gossiping, when a sound froze every man to his chair.

Within, from one of the closed rooms, a scream pierced the house. It rang with mortal fear, mortal agony. Then came a rush of garments, the door which the two servants had closed burst open, and in the shadow of its frame stood a thing that yelled, the likeness of a fiend with a scarlet face gnashing at them.

“Death!” Whatever words the choked voice might seem to rave, their meaning was hideous. “Death!”

Forward into lamp-light the thing darted, brandishing a knife, howling. As the banqueters all sprang up, the dread of it parted them asunder. This apparition had no face, only a mask of running blood from forehead to throat; but while it slashed the air and whirled by, they saw bedabbled flowers hang and drop from a short jacket of brocade. It was no midnight devil but something worse, their friend King, who leaped through the room, out of his house, into the dark.

“Stop him! Catch him!”

The front door stood wide open. His choking yell sounded more and more distant.

“Catch him!”

It was Chubby Little Plum who first found breath and got outdoors.

Cold air, a transitory mist of frightened yellow faces above lanterns, people crying out as they jumped aside, then pitch blackness down a street, were the dream-like elements through which Plum began his pursuit, following by ear a thud of feet and a diabolic voice. When his eyesight recovered from the plunge, he saw again; for no more rain fell, the murk had brightened, and clouds drenched by a lost moon spread gray wilderness of light above house-tops. Below, a gap shone where the street ended at the river. Toward the gap a lonely shadow flitted, wailing.

On this night of wonders, it may be the greatest wonder was a fat man’s pace. Plum ran like a ball down hill. Behind him galloped a crowd, but no one overtook him.

“Stop!”

He gained on the shadow, could see it plainly, reached out a hand to grasp, when it bounded up on the stone embankment, flung its knife away, and itself headforemost into the river.

While the crowd came, Little Plum sat on the stone bank and heaved like a lizard or a dying frog. Beyond him the water swept, gurgled, faded in a breadth of sallow moonlight, which turned black as the lanterns arrived.

“No use,” he wheezed. “All over now. Drowned, jumped in. But hurry, search. Woe, I am burst in three!”

II.

Great shouting down the river bank, argument without end, and some futile poking of bamboo poles into water, brought no one to the surface either alive or dead. Besides, the river god already seemed angry enough: let him alone, let his mud-swollen current roll away the victim appointed by fate: so reasoning, men left off their search and turned homeward.

Among the first went Little Plum, staggering and blowing red-hot. He hired a fellow with a lantern, which he ordered to be swung carefully back and forth over the flagstones of the way.

“I dropped something,” he explained, “while we ran.”

Whatever it was, he did not find.

“Let be,” he grunted at last. “Gone. A trifle.”

Even when cooled off and able to breathe without whistling, Plum kept a silence remarkable in one so loud, for ever talkative. He met the Governor and the prefect with an air of gloom, and only shook his head.

“This is a dreadful blow to me,” sighed the prefect. “A tremendous loss. To-morrow we must arrest that fortune-teller. Our poor friend, my good and able counsellor! There was devil work here, a dark agency. It preyed upon him, destroying his mind until the devil’s whisper prevailed to cut his throat and drown. That is the one credible explanation.”

The Governor said nothing. Little Plum growled a rude answer.

“Credible to the credulous.—And first,” he added, “overtake your dark agent. Find a raindrop on the sea!”

Next morning indeed there was no fortune-teller by the gate, nor any on the second morning, the third, nor ever again. A stranger, his name unknown, he had vanished table and all.

“Quite natural,” said the Governor one day to Little Plum, “that he should disappear. Any man might, who has terrified another into killing himself. But yet—”

In the speaker’s bright old eyes waited a question.

“I feel that, Excellency. But yet. And moreover.”

“Yes. We look into a deep, where powers of darkness may lie at bottom. If we begin to see a little, by and by, shall we exchange views?”

“With all my heart,” agreed Plum. “You honor me.”

“It may be an idle playing with doubt. But I am not satisfied.”

“Nor I.”

“It is—ah—intangible.”

“True.” The fat stoic suddenly grimaced with anger. “It is, Excellency, very hard to grasp, as the dog said when he bit the turtle.”

They dropped the subject there, and for a while chatted of things indifferent. After Plum had gone, the Governor sat smiling; for he liked this globe, this oil-jar person, and liked him now the more having seen spirit flash through a puffy mask of discretion.

Weeks went by before they met again, a month, another month. Out in the country on a farm there lived a young woman who as a girl, being generously plump and bright in face, had borne the name of Summer Cloud. Though a farmer’s wife, she was town born and town bred. Her father, poorest of the poor, had no choice but to let her go when eight years old as a maid-servant, and to take for her wage a lump sum in advance. Thirteen years, housekeeping, she worked out her father’s debt. The house had been that of Mr. King, who treated her with perfect kindness and when time was up, saw her well married to an honest man.

This man walked home one evening. Rain had fallen, but now hung only as a threat, one vast blue-black oppression overhead. Rice fields chequered the flat earth, pool after pool of ink stuffed with green bristles. The farmer had been weeding his own rice all day, bending into muddy water, groping, uprooting, till his hands grew parboiled and his eyesight drifted in a dance of colorless motes.

He was not a visionary, but a hard worker whose mind revolved more than one fact while his body kept on plodding.

“It seemed very dark,” he told his wife, later. “I squinted on the path, for the rain made it slippery. No. I never expected him or any man. I was considering our other little field off yonder, how it would do to plant string beans there at the lucky season.”

Of what followed, many persons believe all, many believe a part, many believe not a word, according to their nature; but what Summer Cloud’s husband saw or thought he saw on the gloom before him, was her old master, a form in black silk, the counsellor King.

“Not clearly. It was no more than a look up, and those gray dots after stooping floated all between. I said at once:—

“ ‘Well met, Your Honor! Why do you not come to see us, this long time?’ ”

There was no answer, nobody within miles, nothing but a blur and a pang of sorrow dispersed on air. The sun darting momentary under a slit, poured from the horizon a low ray that fired land and water with purple. A rainbow curved above rice ponds, the moon translucent like a slice of pearl beneath its arch. Night closed again, showering.

“That was all,” said the farmer. “I have dreamed, awake.”

His wife, who had strong character, gave him a bowl of thoroughwort tea, piping hot, and wrapped him in bed.

“I do not like your dream,” she observed next morning. “You are well again? Good, then let me go. My dear master was an angel. He gave us my dowry, my wedding clothes, and all our kitchen furniture. Let me go to the city.”

She had her will, trudging through rain and mire came that afternoon to King’s house, looked in, and called aloud. The door-keeper, a woman who sat among shadows, knew her voice and got up quickly.

“Summer Cloud! Why, people grow thinner on farms! How is your health, my child? Excellent, I perceive. Your cheeks are browner than a dried duck.”

The caller greeted this friend with courtesy, then went straight to the point.

“How is our master?”

“What? You do not know? Bad news, a black evil, gone so tardy through the land? He is dead.”

“Ah!—Yes, I came fearing so.”

The women looked on each other in dusk. White hairs lined the smoothness of the door-keeper’s head; white hairs which the farmer’s wife, even as her eyes brimmed, saw through a blur and felt were new. Change had met her on the threshold.

“But how?”

“By steel, then by water. He killed himself. A devil enticed him into frenzy.”

At that, Summer Cloud lifted her hand in anger and dashed the tears away.

“Nonsense! Never!”

“I wish it were,” said her old fellow-servant, bitterly, “and could be proved so. Roar at me if you like, but do not roar at our mistress. Come in.”

“Will she see me? I would pay respect.”

“Yes, why not? Have done, come in. What matters now?”

As they went farther into the dusk, Summer Cloud could only think:—

“The heart is gone from this house.”

The mistress of it, King’s widow, sat in a twilight room with rich things about her, alone, beautiful as ever, as ever sweet-spoken, a figure of melancholy grace. But here, too, Summer Cloud felt an absence, while her own words of pity and sorrow that left her trembling were chilled as by an echo among bare walls. What she could say—badly enough, in a manner grown awkward, no doubt, and countrified—she said with all the honest love in her being. It seemed to go wrong and fail.

“You are a good creature,” sighed her mistress. “A good girl. You always were.—Yes, it is true. I could not hold him that night. He screamed, and hurt himself with a knife. I could not hold him. He ran out. I tried to hold him. I was frightened. I could not, I tried, I could not—”

A parrot might speak so, without warning, by rote, and stop thus. The farmer’s wife drew back, wishing that she had never taken her journey.

“You must not heed me.” The face before her grew calm again, white as a phantom of young loveliness, with drooping eyes. “Grief knows not what it tells. You were very kind to come. How is your husband? You will spend the night here, of course.”

Though spent in her familiar bed, it was to Summer Cloud a dreadful night of dreams and wakings all broken yet snarled together, a confusion in which the darkness or the rain whispered:—

“Not sorrow under this roof; not mourning, but fear.”

She rose early, to find little comfort even by day. Nothing was right. Her master’s baby, whom she had never seen and longed to welcome, shrank from her, hiding his face, crying.

“Poor mite!” said the nurse who held him. “Always afraid of strangers.”

With a heavy heart Summer Cloud went from room to room, looking about the house, taking farewell. She would never come into it again. The old known things keeping their old places, the permanence of the lifeless, mocked her. On a row of pegs in a dark corner where King had been used to hang up his garments, there still remained his cap, an umbrella, and a black silk hair ribbon. As the farmer’s wife paused near them, considering times gone by, she became aware of a discovery. The unseen leaped into form before her eyes. It was a horror.

“Not . . .”

She turned quickly, and found her mistress there, saying:—

“Yes. I never had courage to take them down.”

The pale girlish face, delicately smooth as egg-shell, betrayed nothing new or different under a sad composure. Only the eyes were changed, their wide-pointed lustre hardening, glancing with doubt or alarm.

“That is but natural.” Summer Cloud spoke evenly, for thirteen years of service had made her quick to regain control. Her own face, broad and sunburnt, could no more be read than a slab of teak. “The good heart, Sü Nai, clings to what is left.”

Soon afterward, in due form of words and behavior, she took her leave; but outdoors, going alone through rain, she could no longer act a part.

“Not his! Oh, my poor master!” She leaned against a wall, covered her face, and wept. “Not his! Not his!”

A man suddenly called her by name.

“What is the destination of your umbrella, that you don’t hoist it?” he said. “You have slept in your old house again, I hear. Let us hope you found all well?”

She looked. Before her swam the gross, kindly features of one who was no stranger.

“I did not sleep, nor was anything well there.”

“The compassionate suffer,” quoth Chubby Little Plum. “Be consoled. Unburden all to an old friend of his.”

“I dare not.” The woman shook her head. “I dare neither tell nor keep it.”

The astucious Plum gave ground, appearing not to urge her.

“Well, we soak here in a drip,” said he. “Let us walk. Up with your umbrella. So. How is the best of husbands, and how the farm?” He moved on with her, wagging a loud yet persuasive tongue, and at the right moment added:—“You have known me since your childhood, but a man won’t do, all the same. If any dangerous matter stifles your heart, the cure is a talk between women.—Oh, by the by, right here in your way! At hand lives a good and wise woman who will comfort you like a mother.”

In her daze, before she knew how it happened, Summer Cloud passed with him through a magnificent colored gateway, a courtyard, and a vast door. Little Plum buzzed in the ear of a man-servant, who nodded, beckoning her. After many corridors and much bewilderment, she found herself in a room where a lady sat, alone. It was the Governor’s wife, so great a lady as to frighten her, but so gentle of word, so winning, so perfect in humanity, that speech became a consolation.

“My husband had a dream, or met a devil,” said Summer Cloud, and told all. “But worse remains, Tai-tai; for this morning under her roof, on the pegs where he hung his clothing when alive, I beheld the Awe, the Corruption, the Bane of the House. Always my master braided in his queue a threefold black cord no longer than my arm, each strand about half the thickness of a chopstick, and at the end frayed like a tiny tassel or whiplash. Never any other kind. But the hair ribbon hanging there to-day was longer, thicker; and it broadened into three flat tails, of the width of a man’s thumb. That is what I saw. It was not his, Tai-tai. Not his!”

The Governor’s wife reflected.

“You have done well,” she said. “Come within and rest you.”

Before noon Little Plum and the Governor, with papers on a table between them, sat closeted.

“We look now farther down the pit?”

“To bottom, Excellency.”

“May I have your view?”

The fat man took a little fresh ink, painted another column on a sheet of characters, and handed it across to his friend.

In the left-hand column stood the new entry.

The Governor’s bright eyes looked up from reading. They were for a moment sad.

“A dreadful document,” he observed. “But your view enlarges my own.” He sighed, then gave a chuckle of admiration. “O Pinguid One, you are never so far asleep as you act!—Come, tell me, how shall we catch him?”

“Him? There is no name written. Who?”

“The subtle thing at bottom of this.”

Little Plum heaved himself in a chair that twisted groaning while he looked with immense calm roundabout through all quarters of the room. Then he bent forward and spoke.

“What?” The Governor, listening hard, opened his mouth to gasp. “Why, no, I should become the Grand Old Fool of ten thousand years!”

“If it failed,” said Chubby Little Plum. “It will not fail. Your wisdom is part of our annals now. Consider the nature of man.”

They considered it with a vengeance. Late afternoon saw placards flaming on every blank wall about the town: placards that filled street after street with uproar.

“Have you heard?” Men shouted to one another, laughing. “Have you read it? Our Governor has lost his mind!”

The flame-colored strips declared that, on the third day following, a high court would inquire into the death of the counsellor King, and try his bed for murder.

“His bed? A bed on trial? Your eyes are bleary. No. Yes. Read for yourself, my friend. See, there. His bed, for murder. Why, it’s mid-summer moonshine! They will put his bed on trial? How can it speak?”

Not since the day, a century and more ago, when the three men of brass were found holding hands in mud under the river, had such a marvel rocked the city. Here came a new event, cried the populace—ignorant orientals, who had never heard of Zadig and the stone of Horeb; but let us not be too hard on them, brethren, as the curate said of the twelve apostles—here was coming into the world a folly brand new, its like unknown.

“Let business go hang,” agreed mankind. “I shall be in court to hear what the bed says.”

On the third morning, rain sprinkled a multitude who jammed one way together, packed an acre with animal heat smoking, and crushed all early comers to the door, where guards, already worn out, admitted them five at a time. No one could hear himself, for talk. Yet among the first fifteen or so, Little Plum bawled in his next neighbor’s ear:—

“Our chance. Go ahead. Let me in with you.”

The neighbor was a youth who, nobly attired and supercilious, gave a shrug when the door closed after them. A rich man’s son, he bore the nickname of Hwa-Hwa, or Fa-Fa Gūng Ju, the Flower-Sniffing Waster, and had a flat nose in a too polished face.

“You also?” he laughed, as the noise died without. “You coming to hear this unreason, this gallimaufry? How curious people are, sir. We all have grown childish to-day.”

“Very,” agreed Little Plum, out of breath. “Human nature. Alike.”

A street barber, a ragged cripple, and the shroff of a bank, completed their five. They waited in a vestibule where an ebony screen glittered with mother-of-pearl inlay. Feet slowly departing scuffed on stone. A child whimpered.

“Come.” A lictor peered round one edge of the screen, to call the nearest man. “Your turn.”

The barber grinned, and obeying him, dodged from sight. A murmur drifted back. Then, shrill and high, rose the wail of a frightened baby.

“Next!” Again the lictor’s head popped into view. “Come.”

The shroff stepped forward with dignity, and was gone. The wailing burst out afresh.

“Now, next man.”

When the cripple had stumped off on his bamboo stick, the baby’s cry came louder and more piercing.

“You, sir, next.”

Fa-Fa Gūng Ju rounded the screen; but not alone, for Little Plum without waiting to be summoned came at the young man’s heels.

The vestibule, deep and gloomy, contained midway down its length a bed, on which sat crying a poor mite, King’s baby son, all forlorn. The Governor stood against the wall near by with his attendants, like a group of dark figures painted there.

“To gain admission beyond,” said the lictor, “you must take up the child and hold him for a moment.”

The youth gave a notable start. Then, smiling as to humor the day’s game, he jauntily advanced, leaned over the couch, and lifted the babe in his arms.

It clung round his neck, and sobbed with relief.

“He knows you.” The Governor quietly stepped forward and plucked Fa-Fa Gūng Ju by the sleeve. “Set him down again. He knows you too well. You, his playmate in secret, you who sip every flower, tell me.” The speaker’s voice broke out, hard as the crack of doom. “Tell me, you who destroyed his mother’s soul, where did you hide his father’s body?”

The Flowery Waster dropped upon his knees.

“No torture!” he whined. “No torture?”

The Governor turned away.

“Carry him off. Give the child to its nurse.”

With that, the great man began pacing up and down the hall. He made a sign for Little Plum to join him.

“Your prudence has been wonderful,” said he. “It is not right that I should take the credit.”

“You ran the risk,” Plum answered. “Yours be the fame. Prudence, no. I feared an error of prejudice, having always loathed the fellow. Pah! He showed the nostrils in front, like a roast pig’s ready for the paper blossoms at New Year.”

They continued walking back and forth together.

“Powers of Darkness. That pair, they remind me, Excellency, of Miss Li’s profound saying in the Liao Chai: ‘the companionship of two devils gives joy to neither.’ ”

“True.” The Governor’s bright eyes had a weary look, though smiling. “Do you know, in my work I often think of it?”

Noon of a clear autumn day glowed above the street, but the lamps of the theatre made evening as our throng poured in and quietly found chairs. It was a most good-humored crowd, all Chinese men, peace-loving sons of Han or of T’ong, their wives, their friends, and their children who overhung the balcony like a row of impish dolls or cherubs goggling down upon solemnity.

“Firs’ tam, you look-see.” Yi Tao bent across three or four intervening laps to murmur. “Firs’ tam, they playing ‘Can You Fight?’ Welly nice, I t’ink-so, you likee.”

Beyond the footlights gleamed a rack of weapons, their steel burnished like silver, their heads or hafts gay with tassels of red and blue silk. Battle-axe, pike, sword, spear, partizan, curved bill that had the inner edge of its hook sharpened keener than a draw-shave, all stood mated in pairs right and left, ready for use. Two men in loose black garments made their bow and fell to work,—slight, sinewy, quick as a pair of leopards. They began gently enough. The Drunkard and his Full Glass to show the nine and forty ways of falling, the Monkey on a Pole frolicking through the marvels which underlie quarterstaff play, the Man with the Heart who holds it shaped invisibly between his finger-tips and by graceful undulation of body and limb performs each guard for each vital organ: these pantomimes, and more, Jao Kai Ming and his pupil enacted all in the way of theory, with deliberate ease.

Then, swift and furious, came practice. They boxed with hands and feet,—a lightning interchange of eightfold blows that never came home while bone and muscle, fist and shoe meeting, smacked like hardwood. They wrestled, one throwing another headlong, high off the floor, only to have the other in going down trip him, upset him with a foot-lock tighter than tongs, magically neat, so that both fell, somersaulted, and rose in a bounce together. Choosing weapons from the rack, they fought on,—sword against bare hands, two knives against bare hands, a long partizan to a kind of triple flail, a ten-foot lance to the deadly shining chain that can fly supple as a snake or rigid as a bar. There was no pretence or trickery, no hitting to one side, or mere acrobatics, or combat of the stage. Nothing but the unearthly skill of master and man prevented bloodshed again and again by a hairsbreadth, while for ninety minutes gone like five, this pair of agile black demons contended in a whirl of flashing steel. When for the last time they towelled their heads, nodded, and smiled Good Afternoon, a great sigh rose from all who had watched.

“How you likee? Pooty nice, mos’ olo kine.” Yi Tao beamed with joy, hospitality, and vicarious pride. “You see, Gi Söt, hart to do, begin welly yong, lartchee study long tam. Yeah, I tink-so, you likee him.”

No man, having viewed such a wonder, could fail to praise. Argument indeed began, as we shuffled out through an alley, whether one mode of fighting ought rather to be called “Lion Behind Gold Mountain” than “Two Tigers Come to Szechuan.” This fine point—fine, because every mode bore a name of classic tradition—was comfortably waived by an old gentleman who turned his benevolent face to remark that in English it all nowadays would mean the same thing. As for that other conflict, named “Three Sworn Brethren,” after the celebrated Red Face, Black Face, and White Face the emperor’s uncle whose long arms reached below his knees, why, there you had history to guide you, seventeen hundred years or more.

“Yeah, shu,” agreed Tao. “Pooty olo.”

By night in the kitchen, therefore, his talk ran upon this ancient art of fighting, and modern masters. Does not he who taught Jao Kai Ming still live, an honorable gentleman about seventy-five years of age, active as a youth? Did not he, this grand old champion, Lao Chun Nam, not so long ago slay Iron Head, a ferocious brawler who had no right ever to have learned the mystery? It is well known. The surly Iron Head picked a quarrel, ran at Mr. Lao to deal him that butt over the heart which had never failed to kill,—and was met by a quiet reply swifter than the snap of a thumb. He flew twenty feet backward, stone dead.

“He’s neck blokem,” said Tao. “He’s blains bus’ out. Dissee way, so! One-two-th’ee, kick! Callem, ‘Tigu Wash Face.’ ”

The trick is not imparted to children, fools, or persons of bad character. For reasons general, nothing personal, it will be enough here to say that Tiger Wash Face is executed in three counts, three nearly simultaneous motions of knee, hands, and foot. The brotherhood of the Shansi Heung Ma used it, but only in dire need.

“Who?”

“Shansi Heung Ma. You neffer hear ’bout?” cried Tao, in surprise. “Ho! I tole you. One tam, norf part, one olo man he welly good fighting—No, I fo’get. Stoly begin diffun, mo far back firs’, nodda way. One man farmu he all tam wuk outsi’ de field, nen one day he woss diggee hole, he catch one piecee waze . . . .”

The farmer had been digging with a wooden hoe, which could not harm anything it struck. Metal rang hollow, earth cracked away in shards like pattern mould from casting, and down the hole poured sunlight on a black pot belly. The farmer wiped his eyes. After a breathing, he took the dark lump out carefully, to scrub in the nearest water. It then showed not black but smooth black-green, a jar of encrusted bronze with two ear-shaped handles and two colored zones of cloisonné where the enamel, faint blue, white, summer leaf, iron red, was pitted here and there as if worm-eaten through mystical design.

“Old.” The farmer hid it beneath his coat on the ground, and went back to digging. “A wine jar of ceremony. Perhaps our great-great-grandfather, when we had substance, poured libation to our family in the temple. Who knows? Not I. Only the man who buried it.”

Before bed-time he showed the jar to a few neighbors in the village, elderly cousins whom he could trust.

“It is of high value,” they decided. “You are lucky, Siu Ching. But who will buy it? We are all poor hereabout. Of course there is Wong Tai Kwong.”

“Then,” said the farmer, “to him I will go.”

The oldest cousin wagged his gray head in doubt.

“I would not if it were mine.”

Early next morning, however, Siu Ching wrapped his jar in a mat, and trudged off across the country to the rich man’s, a great house of which the old rose tiles glimmered under branches in a walled garden. Mr. Wong welcomed him with sleek habitual courtesy. A powerful creature, active in body, broad, sly, and genial in face, Wong Tai Kwong just then sat taking his ease, enjoying the coolness of a room or hall where shadow fell pleasantly among rare things. Wainscot and beam-sheathing were of sandalwood.

“You found this, did you?” A hard light woke in the merchant’s eyes, but swiftly died. Placing the jar on his table, he viewed it with apathy. “Where?”

“In my own field, sir.”

“How much are you asking?”

The farmer summoned all his courage.

“Three hundred dollars.”

Mr. Wong smiled, not because the jar might sell for ten times as much, but because he had another plan.

“Half that, perhaps, would be nearer.” He yawned. “I rather like it. Leave the thing here while I make up my mind, won’t you, and come back to-morrow?”

This began well, thought the farmer, who returned to his digging and moiled away like a new man. Here perhaps came the start, the rebirth of the family fortune. Hope kept him awake half that night, and roused him cheerfully next day to complete the bargain.

“Remember, take no brow-beating!” cried his wife, a game little woman who had struggled with him through better and worse. “You are too gentle, too good. Stand by your price, don’t weaken; for it may mean that our son will become a scholar and a famous man.”

They parted happily, scolding and laughing and nodding. The day seemed of good omen, bright in their lives. An hour later Siu Ching, warm with walking, entered the great country-house and made his bow.

“Ah, well?” sighed Mr. Wong, after exchange of formality. “What can I do for you?”

The table near him stood empty. Otherwise no more change appeared in the long room than if he had sat there unmoved since yesterday.

“About the jar, sir. You wish to buy?”

Wong Tai Kwong frowned as at a puzzle.

“What jar? You have brought something for sale?”

It was the farmer’s turn to look puzzled.

“My old wine jar of sacrifice, which I hope has found favor with one, sir, who knows the value of good work.”

Siu paused, and waited. This rich man, he considered, must have a short memory.

“According to your kind wish, I left it here on the table. Over-night, at your leisure . . .”

Wong shook his massive head gravely.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said he. “You left nothing here.”

The farmer grew rigid, opened his mouth, remained for a moment dumb, then cried aloud.

“Why, here on this table! Yesterday morning! I saw it! You saw it!”

“Lower your voice,” commanded the master of the house. “Have you been smoking opium? What you may have seen on my table, your own half-wits may know. Look about you. This room is glutted with curios. If you left one, you will have a receipt, or a witness?”

Mild though his wife called him, the poor Ching was neither fool nor coward. He looked right through a genial smiling mask, saw baseness hidden within, and attacked.

“You—you dishonorable person! Give me my wine jar, or my three hundred dollars! Where is it? You—you—give it back!”

The merchant turned his head with a lazy air, and called aloud. Half a dozen men came running in.

“Remove this brawler,” said Wong Tai Kwong. “He grows noisy and threatens. I believe he came to rob my collection.”

It is true the farmer was being noisy, but not for long. The men-servants fell upon him, threw him out of doors, and there in sunlight fell upon him again with hand, foot, and bamboo. He crawled home on all-fours about nightfall to his bed, where after a week of clutching broken pieces of life together with torment, he let them go in a breath, and died.

His wife went round like a mad woman. She drove the clan to their wits end before they could quiet her.

“True, we are many,” argued the chief cousin, whenever she would hear him. “Yes, yes, I know. In and round this village we are a large old family, but how poor! He is rich, the power of wealth surrounds him like a fort. What can we do? Hush! If the twigs are brittle, a thousand of them together do not make a log. Oh, peace, woman! It is a great danger to talk so of Wong Tai Kwong!”

At last, worn out, she surrendered.

“You are all alike. Men have no spirit. Why drag further, why go on?”

Two months afterward the widow lay dying. Her son, their only child, a brown work-hardened youth, took care of her though she refused all care. What they said together at the end, is not known; but Siu Leong Yook, who had always been as meek and boyish as his father, came out from that room with a stern face and his mother’s look in his eyes.

“Uncle,” said he, “I am going to kill him.”

The eldest cousin groaned. Here came all this perilous chatter again, to be silenced.

“Young child, we can do nothing for you.”

“Of course not. I do for myself.”

“Hear words of reason,” begged his uncle. “Can the duck’s egg break the stone pillar? You are fifteen years old. He’s a grown man, with a houseful more at his back to help him. A devil, yes, who has murdered two. Will you give him a third to eat up? Why, what know you about fighting? To fight against odds and win—or no, even to come out alive—a man must practice the art for years, learn, perfect himself, train his body. Who in our village can teach you, where we are all men of peace? My grandfather knew a master of the art, who had to begin younger than you, by running and leaping in great iron shoes, month after month, till he could jump like a fly, jump from the ground to the roof and land without moving a tile . . .”

The orphan heard him out, bowed gravely, and turned away.

“Good. Our cousin Lai is a blacksmith.”

Outside the village, beyond the dreary dun fields, past the grave mounds, above terraces of aged rock-work that climbed like infinitely serpentine stairways, rose the barren hills. A road, or ledge of rubble disappeared high among them. Elsewhere along their crest nothing, not even a ruinous temple, marked any place whither for any reason man should go. Yet farmers who worked under the morning star, who followed the end of daylight home, began to see more than once by the early dusk or the late a small human figure move against a background, far aloft, of crag, ridge, or boulder. It might be a fox, they reported, who had clawed up an old skull, and so, balancing a dead man’s head upon his own while praying northerly toward the Seven Stars, had taken this form of mankind.

“A portent,” said the neighborhood, “of change and uneasiness.”

Meantime Wong the merchant lived well, drove hard bargains, and flourished like a willow tree by a brook. Only one thing annoyed him, which was, that of late his trading in furs had come to a stand. Over the hills, over the mountains, and beyond even to the borders of wild Russia, he went or had men go yearly to traffic with the barbarians. This part of his many affairs had brought in profit. Now it brought none, for thieves had sprung up, a tribe of bandits lurking in the higher wilderness, who stopped carts, murdered carters, and looted the silver going or the furs coming down. So long as they despoiled his rivals, it was fair and well.

“But last time they carried off my silver,” complained Wong. “Mine. These Earth-born Evil Ones, they grow continually worse.”

“Your foot will stamp them back into the ground,” declared a sycophant. “Yet why endanger your precious person? Why not hire fighting men?”

“I have hired them by the dozen. They are no good.”

“How if you applied to the Shansi Heung Ma? There is a great master of the art, Chin Fong by name, a champion.”

At the moment, Wong Tai Kwong belittled this wisdom; but afterward slyly adopting it as a portion of his own, acted, and sent a message to the fighter. In those days not long ago, before Western fire-arms corrupted the country, Shansi Heung Ma, or Shang Ma—the brotherhood of the horse guards, the guild of the pony tax that made a road safe anywhere for merchandise—was a name to conjure with. Ill doers, mountain thieves, outlaws, highwaymen all feared it. Mr. Wong, therefore, expecting a brawny ruffian whiskered like the tiger, almost thought himself cheated when one day there called at his house an elderly gentleman with perfect manner, sedate garb, and a clever, candid, youthful face. Except for good humor, and for bodily movement rippling free as liquid, tougher than silk, the champion was quite commonplace.

“You are Chin Fong? The best, I believe, in your profession?”

Smiling politely, Chin Fong shook his head.

“I am of the Mystery. But no, sir, there are three better now, with eight, nine, eleven perhaps coming on as good.”

“Your modesty is charming.”

“Not at all, sir. A matter of fact. We keep our score, and know when a brother is passing his prime, or learning still.”

Their talk ran at length to an end. Outside of knavery, Wong was no fool. To himself he grudged and growled at the rate of insurance, but knew, if he did not envy, a capable honest man when he saw one. His language, his demeanor, could not have been more winning.

“Agreed, then.”

Autumn sky, a fortnight later, spread over mountain rim and peak its yearning blue without a cloud. Up the hottest of the passes bumped a two-wheeled cart drawn by a little shaggy white horse that panted, while his driver climbing before kicked stones away to rattle down a ravine. With feet on the nigh shaft, back set against the round-topped hood, a passenger kept himself more or less upright and read a book. Feeble, short-sighted, bent with age, the passenger seemed. His book was that flower of genius, pearl of romance and history, the San Kuo. It is hard to believe that a reader could keep his eyes, not on the enchanted page, but craftily over the top of the volume, watching, watching, as a hawk watches a landscape for any bird.

“One old gaby who reads, or nods to sleep. One driver. Nobody else. Come on. Kill and take.”

So, high behind a crag, voices muttered. Then down over rock, brown earth, and gravel poured like trap-door spiders from their holes a mob of sunburnt wild men, half gray rags, half naked muscle. Armed with heavy tridents, yelling in glee, they surrounded horse and cart. The driver flew down to join the stones he had been kicking. His passenger did not even close the book, but lowered it, and smiled.

“Aha!”

The chief robber, poising in both hands his trident, lunged. Straight for that old gentleman’s midriff darted the steel razor prongs. But that old gentleman lifted one finger in a curious motion, and parried. The trident glanced up over the cart hood. It fell clanging in the road behind.

“Silly fellow.”

Overturned by his own force, the spearman grovelled under the cart, then dragged himself out, and rose, but only to his knees.

“Pardon, O Excellent Aged Greatness!” he implored, with voice and look of terror. “I did not know! The sun dazzled my mud-like eyes!”

Our bookworm traveller drew from his cart a small flag, which he unfurled, and stepped in the whip-socket of bamboo,—a yellow flag, inscribed with black:—

“CHIN FONG ESCORTS.”

At sight of it, the kneeling marauder howled.

“Pardon, Reverence, pardon! Spare, and forgive!”

Smiling, Chin Fong leaned toward him over the shaft of the cart.

“Your life I spare. But for correction of error, here is a lesson—”

Where the knife came from, nobody saw; perhaps from heaven, from the air through its blade suddenly flashed. What had been the tip of the robber’s left ear became a spout of blood.

“—to remember.”

That was all. The road lay clear; the white pony tossed his head, free; up hill ran the Earth-born Rubbish helter-skelter for their holes again. A little yellow-and-black flag triumphed in the hot breeze, dominated mountains, and beckoned the driver to fear nothing but return.

Thus Wong Tai Kwong’s remittance of silver went northward, his bales of furs came down intact and paid for. He gave the old champion a jovial welcome, expressing great delight.

“Your art, sir,” he went on, “is the most practical of them all. Nothing short of a wonder. If I had your skill, now, I might guard my own goods.” While they sat at supper, he fell to thinking. “Could you teach a man of my age?”

“In gaining width and wisdom,” replied Chin Fong, “your body may have learned to dispense with certain flexibilities of youth, trivial in themselves, no doubt. You are strong and agile, however, and quick-witted. Yes. On the whole, yes. In two or three years a grown man might acquire the rudiments.”

Wong caught at the chance.

“Then stay with me. Let us try,” he begged. “Consider this house as your own, and me as your pupil.”

Not one lesson would Chin Fong have given for all the man’s wealth, had he suspected what other people knew. He took time, of course, to inquire. On the surface everything favored his cordial host. The farmer’s widow being dead, none of her neighbors whom Fong met cared to circulate rash truth. He therefore lived at the merchant’s, and trained him. All went happily.

“You are an immortal teacher,” exclaimed Wong. “You have let my strength loose from bondage. My heart sings.”

“A gift of Nature, when restored,” said the veteran, “is doubled.—You are a very apt learner.”

They were walking, after cudgel play, in the garden. Deep greenery of old trees with fruit among foliage, toy hills and temples of intricate gray stonework knee high, moss, flowers, a pool half light half darkness where waterlilies dreamed, began to fade in that evening hour when gardens breathe full sweetness. Fong wondered a little that his rich man should rather go along booming of health, extolling effort, than be still and enjoy that rarity, peace. They turned a corner where willow branches hung down. The old fighter woke from his musing.

“What is that?” he whispered. “How lovely!”

By twilight near the willow danced a spirit of evening. No, it was human. A young girl in apricot color swayed and spun, flinging overhead two swords that revolved as dizzily but as true as wheels, then catching them each by its hilt. The grace and accuracy, rhythm and joy of movement, were supernatural.

“That?” Mr. Wong laughed. “That is only my daughter.”

His voice ruined the charm, for the garden sprite threw down her blades quivering deep into earth, and ran like a rabbit.

“Come back here, child.”

Under the willow her apricot silk dodged into view again. She returned slowly, with gradual obedience.

“My daughter. Fifteen years old, but a tom-boy. I am a widower. Come. Come here, Butterfly Glory, and speak to my friend, my great master of art.”

The girl bowed. A delicate red tinge underlay the gold of her cheeks.

“You play,” said Fong, “prettily.”

This child, he thought, had eyes darker and deeper than the element of truth. Strangely, they were not her father’s. They met something, he never knew what, in the eyes of a childless man hardened by long practice.

“Thank you.” She touched him on the sleeve. “Dear old gentleman.”

He did not wish to be a fool, so turning, bent and examined her playthings, which were real swords, a double-edged pair extremely sharp.

“Who gave you them?” he scolded. “Your hands are too flower-like to be gashed by ugly tools.”

Again the child bowed.

“The luck of the ignorant, sir, has kept each grubby paw entire.”

Fong clasped his elbows before him, to remain for a long time still and admire her.

“But do you like it? Do you like playing with swords?”

“I love it! I play every day, every night. Will you teach me how, truly?”

He smiled, and looked toward her father.

“It would be a joy,” said he, “could I instruct her for nothing in spare moments, for an old man’s whim?”

The merchant, fanning his breast, waved all trifles into air.

“If you like, of course. A tom-boy. Run along, Butterfly Glory.”

He fanned her away. She plucked up the blades and danced off, whirling them under the garden twilight.

So began with Chin Fong, late in life and against all habit, a new felicity. He taught the girl’s father for pay, earned it, found him an exacting if not a trying pupil who grasped every dollar’s worth of the art that a middle-aged man could get by quickness, cunning, and bull strength. The girl he taught for pastime, then for love. It amazed him. Never had he thought of wasting lessons on a girl; yet here was one gifted by nature, born to the mystery, who promised perfection. She moved light as a leaf, as a blossom on a wind-blown stalk, but with swift power underlying that grace. Not a hint could he give by word, look, dodge, or turn of weapon, but she caught and improved it. In three years, when he had no more to give, the child was become a young woman and the light of his eyes.

“To go from her is painful,” mused the old fighter one morning at daybreak. “But it is wrong to live on here and take wages if you have ended your work.”

He rose, packed his clothing in a wicker basket, his knives and swords and spears in a long coffer of black pigskin with a ringing lock, then called a man-servant and inquired for the master of the house.

Wong Tai Kwong, said the man, had already gone out, an affair of trade summoning him.

“But the young lady is in the garden.”

Mist hung there drifting from bough to bough; sunrise drew it overhead into smoky peachblow colors; nothing else moved, the waterlilies were not yet open, and all the garden remained so quiet that Chin Fong thought himself alone till under the drooping tresses of the willow he discovered her. A small bundle in pink silk trousers and blue sleeveless jacket, she lay curled on the ground with her head against a china drum-stool.

“Risen too early. I will not wake her.”

That famous painting, the Lady Fallen Asleep at Embroidery, was never half so beautiful. He turned with reluctance to move away, when he saw that a gold ornament in her hair trembled, and that she was crying.

“What is wrong, my child?”

She looked up at him quickly, her face pale and woe-begone, her eyes brilliant with tears.

“Everything.”

He sat on the ground beside her and waited.

“Everything but you.”

The reply so moved him that he spoke from the bottom of his heart.

“Let me help, then; for you, my dear—you always I have loved as a daughter.”

“Oh, why was I not?” Butterfly Glory covered her face and wept again. “Why was I not yours? It may be wicked to say, wicked even to think, but it is true. And you cannot help me. This thing goes far down beyond help.”

She crooked one arm over the china stool, raised her head, and with a passionate effort to be calm, sat erect.

“Infamy. Grant me your pardon.” What she brushed away was not her tears but the cause of them, unbearable knowledge. “Can you grant it now, while I commit the sin? My father is—is no more; a devil borrowed his body and dwells inside.—No, no, wait, a lie.—My father, he himself, my father alive is that which may not be told,—false, cruel, bloody. Oh, forgive, master, of your loving kindness forgive my truth which those who hearken from the other world never will. I disgrace my father to you. He has wronged widow and orphan, has hired murder, is not to trust. A few hours ago I learned all this. How can I sleep any more? What shall I do? Run from him?”

Her teacher’s look was grave, keen, but steadying.

“Are you sure?”

“Too sure.” The girl combed apart the willow screen behind them, glanced through, searching the garden, and lowered her voice. “In a box hidden away he keeps medicine of death, a subtle poison. Last night I caught him vial in hand, preparing drink—for you! Can you believe? At first my own eyes could not; then I snatched and threw it on the floor. Oh, shame of our house! He learned all from you; and now in his greed would have all for himself, destroy you, and be without a rival!”

Chin Fong accepted her news like one who had known it for an age.

“My daughter,” said he, “here has come a great sorrow, yours and mine. The world is crowded with sorrow, nor can we do anything but go to meet it, sharpen the courage, and fight it out. Is he unkind to you?—No, not yet, I supposed not. Careless only, and hard. To leave him, to run from him: how can I advise you? In my village and my house you would be welcome, safe, at peace. If I say come, now, I do wrong. He’s your father, he gave you life. You may turn his heart from—”

“That,” said Butterfly Glory, “that is hopeless. He would laugh, joke, and tell me to go play.—But no. I will stay in the fight, dear master.”

Sunshine climbing garden wall and trees poured in upon them before they rose from talk.

“You have comforted me. Again, even in this! You are holy and wise.”

“I’m an ignorant, battered old fool.” Fong smiled at her. “Well, if worse comes, remember my village and house.”

Though he could smile then, he could not as they said good-bye; nor when, having hired bearers to call for his basket and chest of arms, he started off homeward, afoot and alone. Beyond the last field, he chose for short-cut over the hills a rough narrow path, a hidden track known to him and to salt smugglers, up which he went hurrying as if to out-climb his thoughts. They were bad company, burdensome. He had not told them all to that poor child below.

“She bears enough already. But what of me? Blindworm, tortoise-egg, moth-brain, you have squandered our art on a man without character! You have bargained our dread skill away to a wretch who will eat the people, devour them by your aid quicker than ever. It is time you went home, folded your silly hands, died!”

In this and like reproach, Fong clambered up the narrow way. It became steeper, wilder, burrowing among thin bushes in a ravine, zigzagging on sharp ledges, and mounting the dry bed of a watercourse or a cleft like a ruined chimney. He met no one, saw no moving thing. The forenoon grew hot. On a high place above a glen he paused for breath, and looking down, saw valley and plain chequered with the misty green of crops, the brindle yellow of barren earth, all a-quiver beneath haze. Roundabout, up here where stillness burned, a mournful desolation hemmed him in: ridges and boulders and jumbled rock everywhere as unwholesome a gray-brown as the color of rats. A shrub or two by the handful here and there withered in a crevice. Not so much as an ant crawling, or a fly humming, disturbed the hills with life.

Suddenly, near by, metal clinked on stone. The old man turned, gave ear, and watched. Again came the clink as of a trowel or a hammer.

“No one,” he thought, “can be working here.”

The sound rose from below. A few paces down the glen there shot into sight, as though disgorged by the rocks, a human figure that sailing through air landed upright on a flat stone. It had the likeness of man or boy. Naked but for a blue rag round his loins, and for enormously awkward shoes, he bounded away down hill, poising, leaping, poising, leaping, each time with that hammer-blow of metal. Then he turned, gathered himself, and came doggedly jumping up again from boulder to boulder.

This might be a mad savage or a fox. Having an open mind always ready to learn, Mr. Chin did not care which.

“A good jumper. Extraordinarily good.” And as the creature drew near, he hailed it. “Boy, what are you doing?”

Loud and abrupt, his challenge might have daunted anyone. The hermit-acrobat gave a start, indeed, but rather of vexation than of alarm, and continuing to approach, bowed.

“Venerable sir, if you must know, I practise jumping.”

A slender young man, admirably knit, with muscle playing free beneath a skin as brown and smooth as copper, he looked Fong straight in the face and appeared not only to judge but to like whatever he saw there. Bending, he unlatched and took off his shoes, a queer dark pair larger than gourds. They were of iron, their soles worn silver-bright.

“So I observed, with great content,” quoth Fong. “Why do you jump in iron clogs?”

The boy gave a smile of embarrassment, apology.

“To learn to fight, sir. They’re the best I could do. As a means toward that end. Cousin Lai the blacksmith made them.”

“Fight?” The veteran pricked up his ears. “You unfold matter of peculiar interest to me. Pray go on. Why learn fighting?”

Every way this brown youth pleased him; in manner, in body, and yet more in countenance, where native ease and wildness of humor were tempered like steel by a clear, direct, unquenchable spirit glancing from the eyes.

“That, sir, I cannot tell you.”

“What? You do not know your own motive?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the jumper. His tawny face grew stern. “I know.” He gave Chin Fong a piercing look, and suddenly with the back of one fist wiped his forehead. “Why not? You seem a kind old gentleman, different from those mockers. Do you care to hear?”

Fong nodded.

“Sit down, boy. If your heart is heavy this morning, so’s mine. Talk. Out with it.”

They squatted on rock together.

“I’m a clown, sir, a joke, whose name happens to be Siu Leong Yook, but whom the village calls Tin Hoof, Iron Heel, and grins at. A man coveted a wine jar, so he killed my father and my mother. I promised her, because our neighborhood dared not help by law, that when strong enough I would slay their murderer in open fight.—Well, that’s all. A promise. Climb up here and jump, go home and be laughed at. No progress, nothing done. You were so good as not to laugh.”

True, Chin Fong gave no sign of merriment, but lifted an iron brogue, weighed it on his palm, and considered the wearer.

“You speak bitterly.”

“The thing, sir, is bitter.”

“Need you cover yourself with blame?” said Fong. “Your quarrel is fair.”

His companion sat like a statue of bronze in a denim-blue loin-rag, and frowned.

“Quarrel? What said the Ancient Wise Man East of the Mountain?—‘With him who murdered your parent you may not breathe one air, nor sleep under one sky but on your knife-blade for pillow.’—I tell you, sir, these hands of mine do nothing. Both parents eaten by a fat devil, and I have become a by-word, lying to my mother!”

Fong put the shoe down, and meditated.

“Can we be certain,” he propounded, “that the Wise Man was right? I’m not. But then, you see, I fear I know more of knife-blades than of ancient wisdom or conduct. We brethren of the Heung Ma are no philosophers.”

With a cry, the statue beside him came to life, sprang up, held both arms rigidly toward heaven, then dropped on its knees, imploring.

“O Venerable One! Of the brotherhood! I have dreamed this our meeting, often. Help me. Take and teach! In return I can give you nothing, my bare body and soul!”

For the second time that day our friend saw tears running down a young face. He never knew just why they conquered him, now.

“Come, it’s too hot here,” he replied. “Walk home with me, and we’ll think it over.”

The naked suppliant would have spoken, but could not. He rose, leaped away down the gorge, vanished behind a boulder, and came lightly up again with a scant pile of clothing in a farmer’s hat, as on a tray.

“Ready, master.”

Joy transfigured him. Fong, remembering a golden age when he too envied an apprentice, chuckled.

“A fox of the hill you are, boy, to bewitch lone travellers. On, then. We shall see.”

They climbed as for a bet. Neither spoke again. After a blazing day, they came by starlight to a village high on a crest, where a hundred shadows of men murmuring the name of Chin Fong crowded about and followed them respectfully to his door. The house they entered was dark and smelled of herbs.

“Your cot,” said the old man gruffly, “is any corner of the back room, Iron Heel.”

His habit at home was to wake before the second cock-crow. He followed it next morning, opened his eyes to the familiar bare chamber in the dusk, but saw a new and wonderful arrangement there. On the floor near his bed lay a wooden platter with tea, millet, and dumplings, over which a bent figure waited as in dream or prayer.

“What’s all that?”

“Your breakfast. Your disciple.”

Fong lay back and tried not to laugh.

“Good breeding,” he growled. “Good breeding. Put your food away, though, for in my house we begin work empty.”

To work they went in a barn-like outhouse, where the mournful daybreak showed nothing but a tall table, a chair, hardwood staves in a corner, and a hedge-row stand of arms gleaming along one wall.

“Now jump,” ordered the old man. “From here, jump on that table, Tin Hoof, and as far off again.”

It looked an impossible distance and height. The boy gathered himself, sprang, touched the table in passing, and landed as neatly as a cat half-way down the length of chunam floor.

“Heavy,” scolded the professional. “Bad. Weight and noise. I heard your feet. All wrong, for you knotted your body before-hand like a coolie with cramps. It must go without warning. Your preparation shouted to the world—‘What ho, look out, here I start!’ A fatal error. Now, gently does it.”

At ease while talking, Fong suddenly went high in air. He flew like a bubble carried on a gale. With no sound but the whisk of his black garments, he skimmed the table-top and stood across the room.

“We therefore,” he continued as though nothing had happened, “must begin at the very bottom.—Don’t gape, stand erect! Put your feet together. Watch, hearken, be prompt!”

For an hour the farmer’s son repeated movements at command, childish movements, that left him aching worse than if he had hoed many a mou of dry clay. The old man, who did them all six or eight times to his once, grew fresher, more lively, loose-darting, eel-jointed, but as a critic more and more glum.

“Enough, O Bones of Lead! You cannot. Go eat, stuff, stupefy, imbody and imbrute. Then return here, wipe the grease off those arms”—Fong pointed to the bristling hedge of lances, glaives, halberds—“and burnish them. Porters are bringing home another chest full, my travelling kit. Clean everything in that, likewise. One flake of rust, one scratch on the metal, one cut in your ten thumbs, and out you go. Look to it, cub.”

Harsh orders, poor fare, scorn, silence, tyranny, ground the youngster from morning till night. They were alone in the house. He kept it, ran the errands, cooked, waited at meal-time, brewed herbs for medicine, tried out oil for liniment, crawled to bed in the dark, rose in the dark to brush, button, and make worn cloth appear neat for a day longer. Three months went by.

“Stop.”

When he had jumbled another lesson beyond hope, he raised his head to see the tyrant grinning.

“Stop, my boy.” Mr. Chin Fong threw down a spear, and beckoned. “Come, rest you. Sit. I’ve treated you like a dog, you know, cuffing you about with my tongue, calling you Iron Heel and so on. That’s over, done with. Gold fears no fire. Of all my pupils, you are the first who ever jumped on that table—a trick table made to upset—without upsetting it. For praise I have given curses. You take them, neither sulk nor wince, but drudge ahead tending me better than a true son. Outdoors, my cousins and neighbors like you, for a strange reason: because, they tell me, because you’re always playing jokes on them! What kind of joke, boy, wins your victim into friendship? Eh?”

The drudge gave him a timid smile.

“Old pranks that father taught me, sir. Maybe one or two of my own.”

Fong laughed heartily.

“I thought so,” he replied. “Well, after this, don’t smuggle all your fun outdoors. Keep a remainder in our house. You are accepted, my apprentice. And with Heaven’s aid, a new star is going to shine. Its name will be a rude mockery polished into honor,—the name of Iron Heel.”

From that day, their house abounded in fun. Their work, an endless exacting drive, became play. A year sped thus.

“Lie down,” came the order one morning. “Flat, and view the rafters while we hold a test.”

Iron Heel stretched out, naked, to balance on his abdomen a cool, smooth, brook-rounded stone larger than a man’s head. Fong, heaving a sledge-hammer in air, dealt one blow that cracked the stone into flinders. Iron Heel jumped up laughing.

“You pass. A good anvil.” His master sighed with relief. “I was anxious; but you are hardened.”

Many a long walk they took in sunshine, rain, or wind on lonely hillsides, gathering herbs from which Fong taught his novice to compound their hidden medicine, lubricants, makers of bone and muscle, the Heung Ma balm for cudgel bruises, and the salve to heal sword-cuts in a week. One hill, however, they climbed not often, and only to retire above earshot. Men called it the Ripe Gourd, for its dome was bald and yellow. A cricket could not hide there. At the end of the second twelve-month, Chin Fong said:—

“Now, the last time, we go up on our Gourd.”

Another ceremony withdrawn from the world, a final secret where no one might overhear, the young man expected; but when they had gained the high ledge, warm in clear sunset, the old man tucked his knees under him and grew still, remote. The land beneath shining like a yellow sea with fantastic reefs and islands of black, wavered far off toward a mountain range no denser but a little darker than the sky.

“Nothing is left me to teach,” began Fong, quietly. “The jug is poured out. You are my best, or my best but one. To-day crowns all. You enter the brotherhood.”

In their bouts of fighting, their talk, their pastime, they had lately become as boys together; the disciple had forgotten to stand in awe; but now a sudden reverence and humility frightened him. Without answering, he bowed his head.

“You did not speak again of your quarrel. That, I hope, is put away? Revenge only claws open an itching wound.”

Iron Heel studied the yellow earth, in pain.

“Father!”

“Son?—It is a good hour when you call me so.—What, my son?”

The boy groaned.

“For you . . . if you think right . . . I will break my word, my promise to her.”

They regarded each other silently, with emotion.

“Right or wrong,” said the master, “no. I can’t accept your gift. A broken word—no, no. We’re not subtle men, we two, but plain. And I thought”—he exulted, calling the sunbright air to witness—“a moment ago I wondered how I could be prouder of you!”

Their hill cast a lengthening shadow, the countryside beneath faded from orange to brown.

“You may have observed,” Fong went on, “that I never asked the name of your enemy.”

“A rich and evil oppressor, his name is Wong Tai Kwong.”

“Ah!” The veteran shivered, and folded his hands. “That then was our destiny, her house and garden? We feel the Power brooding over mortals, knowing how we shall move and act. Say no more, bow to its will.”

Sunset failed, earth became a dark cloud under the stars, night breeze passing the hill-top died away, and eastward, in time, a sallow radiance crept aloft before moonrise. The two men saw each other as vague hints of bodily form.

“If it must be,” one murmured, “then let it be soon.”

“To-morrow.”

“You will not catch him readily; for by day Wong Tai Kwong surrounds himself with creatures, by night locks up his house like a prison. He never would hear an honest challenge to come forward.”

“We shall meet.”

“No doubt.” The shadow that was Fong reared its head. “Part of your fortune I can tell. Him, the liar and murderer, you will overcome. But he has a daughter there—”

“A girl? Who fights with girls?”

“Scorn is no weapon,” rejoined the old man, very sadly. “When I called you my best but one, she was the one, or may be. Oh, sorrow! There lies the danger, and we are blind. Whatever else, avoid her! The soul is rent apart between you.—Up, my poor son, let us go home. This moon, I daresay, has often shone on a tired, confused old noddy.”

Before it shone again, through dark of the next evening, Iron Heel came to his enemy’s house. Bareheaded, barefoot, he wore black clothes with a girdle in which, right and left, a pair of knives hung ready. High above him loomed the garden wall. He sprang, touched the coping, and whirled over like a wreath of smoke. Boughs thickened the gloom, honeysuckle drenched it with sweetness, a star lay in a pool and trembled. He went moving through enchantment with a cold, unearthly dread not of any person or thing alive, but of his errand.

“My mother.” He drew the girdle tight, worked each knife up and down the scabbard. “It is hard to think. Now, when wanted, I cannot see her within.”

A sound perturbed the garden: tsic-tsic it went, irregular, like bubbles breaking or the slow falling of water drop by drop. He waited, stock-still, and gradually remembered it,—the sound of goldfish that rise to prick the surface at night.

Leaving this behind, he entered a maze of walls, pillars, balustrades, juts and corners. The great house was not one building, but many in a grove, all obscure and dumb. He found the largest of them, crept along its front, and saw a thread or upright line gleaming, a chink between shutters on a window. His eye, held there, could perceive no more than depth in a room, lamp-light, and the shadow of a man’s head thrown back, drinking; but the panel on which the shadow flickered was view enough.

“Sandalwood. The sandalwood room that mother talked of. She traced a plan on her bed-quilt. Now you know your way.”

Retreating by a stride or two, Iron Heel ran, flew from ground to eaves, and was on the roof, tiptoe, soft as the descent of an owl. Then came noise; for suddenly tearing the tiles off, he made a breach and dropped through.

Wong Tai Kwong, the comfortable drinker, spilled a cup of wine as he bounced from his chair.

“Robbers!—Who are you?”

Shot down from heaven, there waited a young man in black, with hands behind him.

“Who are you?”

“The son of Siu Ching. Your hired hands killed him for you in this room. I bid you to a fair fight. Shall we go outdoors together? It will be clear, for a moon is rising.”

The young bronze face appeared so calm that Mr. Wong summoned his wit, his courage, even a contortion for a smile.

“Why, why, very fair!” Gorgeous in silk, he preened a broad bosom. “Let us go out, if you like. But, but we misunderstand. I can’t fancy what is wrong. Do you know, you resemble your father?”

While parleying, he tried it: the legerdemain of the knife born in air to sting home quicker than its flash.

“No. Father was untaught.”

The knife flew to meet a shield born also in air,—a broken tile, on which it clinked harmless, and which for one instant Iron Heel remained holding up like a tablet of doom.

“His son learned the Mystery.”

A lightning swoop caught the knife on the floor and returned it. Wong Tai Kwong dug both hands into silk, backed over his chair, flung round an arm, failed to encounter support or anything but a dark wine jar that went down with him and rolled spilling from his embrace.

“Dead.—It may be the same jar.”

Thought, feeling, wonder, there was no time for. Men ran in, servants who crowded the room yelling and spearing at him.

“Enough blood.”

He swept their points away as a runner goes through tall grass. They had left a door open. He raced under the black branches, vaulted the garden wall, and dropped into a dream of citron-colored moonrise pouring level across the earth.

“Enough of blood. Avoid your cousins. Carry none home.”

Not fear, but instinct, warned him thus to keep from the village, hurry by an opposite path, and make for the hills.

“Back to your master.”

The path, nibbled away by the hoes and trodden smooth by the feet of hungry generations, ran cranking zig-zag, a moonshine thread continually broken where crops grew higher to confuse the labyrinth in shadow. He heard a rustling sound that seemed to follow him.

“What? Never!” He laughed. “Never a man of them can hold this pace.”

He quickened it, however, sped clear of the fields, beyond the outlying hummocks where tombs clustered, up a hillside tawny in the full moon.

“But there is! How now? A devil abroad?”

The rustle of garments, a light patter of feet, drew close behind. He wheeled hardly in time to fend off a thing which flew upon him, pounced like a young tiger, and left a scratch of its claw. Next moment he was fighting for life, barehanded against a pair of knives. At great peril, dodging, retreating, straining all he knew of defence, Iron Heel managed one after the other to whip his own knives into play.

“Be off! I have no reason to kill you!”

Without a word, his enemy feinted and struck nearer than before.

“If you will take it!” he shouted. “There!”

The blow he delivered, subtle and swift, was an end-all. Even his master called it so,—when rightly dealt, the Old Inevitable. It failed. A new parry that wriggled into a counter-stroke sliced his jacket down from collar to waist. He gave ground; then while they danced apart and clashed together, saw, with a start which nearly became his undoing, that the adversary who fought him was a girl. In this mortal combat her face, lighted now and then as by the flicker of their blades, appeared calm, pale, unearthly. She wore gray silk that shone like frost.

“Win or lose, you’re beaten.” Humiliated, confused, he went on struggling by rote, awkward as a beginner. “How can you strike anything so lovely? And if you would, you could not, for we are equal. You can’t even run. She is too quick.”

Up and down the slope they raged, bounding, panting, interlocked, thrown asunder, till the moon rode high and white. He saw the girl clearly; and as with desperation he played for time to wear her out, marvelled because time grew an age in which he had known the toss of her head, the long oval eyes, the childlike grace and liberty even of her most furious attack. She had now driven him to a flat space of barren ground, where for the moment they circled each other, bending low and watching.

“Stop!” roared a voice. “Hold off!”

Between them, with a high fantastic leap, darted a black goblin. He carried a sword, and made it whistle in a ring of moonlight steel.

“Hold off!”

They knew him for their old master.

“Children! Children!” He let the sword go spinning far above the rocks, and lowered his arm. “No more!”

Discipline, habit, and something yet more inwardly awakening, held them to stillness.

“Put up your knives, Butterfly Glory. And you, my son, yours.”

“No!” cried the girl. “He has killed my father.”

“What then?” replied Chin Fong, sadly. “Your father killed his, and by grief his mother too. Come, sorrow not for ourselves, but for all. Children, be quiet, be gentle, be generous, look into a poor patched-up soul you are tearing. I have lived rough years, fought for this and that, wasted much, gained little, yet as a fool continue hoping to gain—what?—your love in my old age? Come, give me that prize to-night, for the good of all. Self, self: when our world is bursting with it like an idiot’s bubble under the moon, will you two swell its vanity? Son, your hand. You two are even. Kill, and the score begins fresh, another dead body to her account, another on his, one more, one again, and so to the ruin of house, neighborhood, country.—My daughter, put up your playthings. Quick, your hand!”

They obeyed. Leaning on him, Butterfly Glory wept.

“You are even,” said Fong. “By nature both are true. My bones feel a current of kindness flow among us. Daughter and son, let me make you happy for ever. Pardon all things, join, and live.”

The moon made a threefold shadow of them, dumpy and grotesque.

“Never.” Butterfly Glory snatched her hand free. “Never—unless he beat me. To-night he could not.”

Hanging his head, the farmer’s son drew away. He saw only barren dust, gilded, colored like ripe grain.

“Then I go about the world,” said he. “You two are all I care for.—Walk safely.”

He climbed westward, on the hill-top raised an arm, and sank.

A year later fable drifted back. From the country where all earth is emperor’s yellow, from the land of Ginger Stones where men dwell underground, from the Western Defiles, from Fu Hi’s birthplace and Kansuh and regions unknown, travellers meeting like ants passed home the touch of a name. Rumor spread it into magnificence. If we never know truth while men say one thing or another, what remains fairly certain is, that he who did slay the Loathesome Beast in the Stinking Pond, was a wanderer called Iron Heel; and that looking up from his job he saw a grandfather with white moustache and white hair, who smiled at him and beckoned. All these were happenings far away, if ever.

One day Chin Fong the champion rested under a willow in a garden where he was welcome, and argued the fable. Afternoon loitered here, drowsy and bright. Near by, on a china drum his favorite Butterfly Glory sat and stitched, embroidering a panel.

“It may be the same man,” he sighed. “It may not.”

A servant fretted them by announcing a caller, who gave no name.

“Who would speak to Mr. Chin Fong, on a professional matter.”

“Professional? My affairs, in your garden?” said Fong. “Is it allowed?”

“Send him here,” ordered the young mistress, “if he be respectable.”

Her servant grinned like one who knows more than he utters.

“This being cannot judge, Tai-tai. You may.”

Down the path walked a ragged young man dark as Luzon tobacco, who gave them greeting.

“I come to fight,” said he, “for a wife. Iron Heel by name, I have studied under the Ancient of the Western Heaven. Who says me no?”

Chin Fong sprang up and bowed in a transport of submission.

“What, Him, the Head?—Not I, then, my son. You are my living master.”

“And you, madam?”

The girl peeped over her embroidery frame, said nothing, but ducked behind it with a smile.

Wind swayed the willow tails. They hid an old fighter who ran off toward the house.

“Clean!” He paused in a room of sandalwood, and made obeisance, alone. “Wiped. Years are very strong, stronger than art, than the Heung Ma.—Whoof! Yes. Well. To the aged and beaten, a cup of hot tea is refreshing.”

“No, no, no, Mho! Nodda kine. He’s name mui fa. No fluit. You see, I tole you!”

Controversy raged on a high bank in the garden. Yi Tao, with a tin watering-pot hooked over one arm, waved a nasturtium leaf as round as his face, and laid the law down from above. He barked, a little watch-dog of wisdom buttoned in a white tunic. From beneath, Oto the Japanese gardener made reply.

“No frower?”

“Ho! Plenty flowlah!”

The argument could turn serious. A grand hotel once got no dinner and a cook was nearly carved to death, because China and Japan, behind a swinging-door, could not agree how to spell the word “box.”

“Mmm?” Oto, among plants thigh-deep, only shrugged his flat khaki back, then went on trimming geraniums with a pair of enormous clippers, and tearing out groundsel. But his whine, like a mosquito’s, infuriated. “Mmm? I don’ tink-so.”

Tao gathered breath, second wind, for louder barking.

“Shu! You clazy! Mui fa, hung fa, plenty flowlah, no fluit!”

Oto erected that military back, and shears in hand, looked upward to begin a hot answer. Men fight chiefly—if some pundit was not wrong—about religion and spelling; yet here it grew possible that botany might do, and they find quarrel in a straw.

“You look-see!” cried Tao. Against his middle he hugged the watering-pot, on the front of which his finger traced a cross-hatching, then another: two Chinese characters.

“Jixy lek!”

The finger left no mark. Oto followed its movement, however, and gaping up the bank, read an idea.

“So? Aaah! Iss-yiss-yes!”

For once the written word held a little victory, defeating the spoken, while both men cackled and enjoyed their mistake. Yi Tao laughed until he rolled at the hips, his eyebrows went up slant-wise, and his hands waved in short jerks.

It was all about some kind of flowering apricot, almond, or quince. At night in the kitchen he explained.

“Oh, lartchee offin see-em, olo gardin, welly nice.” Tao bore off a remainder of apple betty with hard sauce, put it to bed in the outer dark, clanged a door shut, returned grinning, caught up what might have been the stump of a shuttlecock but was a frayed whisk of bamboo splint, and began to wash dishes like a juggler. “Welly beauty. Shu. Many stoly ’bout, song alloso. Lek de girl hang she-se’f, nen see de yong fella he’s face down de water, de waze, fis’-tob. Mui fa in he’s gardin too . . . .”

The words came faster than the revolution of the bamboo whisk.

“You see, som’ tam ’go, befo’ olo contry; Empelo’ in Sim-si, Chang-An, woss one man woss ’bout aitch ’bout forty year ol’—”

In Shensi, when the Emperor held court at Sian, lived this man of forty, a brilliant scholar and a gentleman who brought his family up well. Their days passed in great content, so tranquil and happy that men going by their door admired it, and notified strangers:—“Behold, the House of the Evening Sun.” They could not bear to be apart, the man and his wife, nor to walk anywhere without the children,—a girl thirteen years old who could beat her father at chess, and even read any book as well as her brother, a thoughtful comic imp of seven. You never saw this man but he had his daughter and his boy clinging to him, right and left.

“You do them injustice,” complained his elders, who meant well. “You live at ease, and bury your name. It ought to shine abroad, growing effulgent, a brightness across the nation, a pride to your darlings here when at last they are gray folk, like us.”

The man laughed. He knew, among other things, all the history in the Grove of Tablets, but knowledge had given him humor, not ambition.

“These effulgences!” he replied. “The glimmer of rotten wood! One flower, one petal mashed in a hot little hand bringing it with love, means more than the word Viceroy. Let’s not begin to cant.”

“Be a viceroy and have your flowers too.”

“Incompatible.”

Friends hauled and pried and levered under the base of his happiness, until one day over they toppled him, rejoicing. In Sian the Emperor’s learned men were to hold another great examination.

“Well, you pestering uplifters—” The victim yielded with a smile—“if a buffalo cannot enjoy his native pond, but must go drip and bellow in the courts of heaven, so be it. For your sake I will play the fool.”

Up they went to Sian, father, mother, and children as for a holiday. The chief of the servants who came after, an old man, Level Heart by name, turned to look back at their house, and gave a sigh. The girl caught him in the act.

“Are you tired already?”

“No,” said Level Heart. “Thank you. No.”

The children’s journey went merrily, for the Wei River and the white plain were new to them, full of enchantment; when they reached the moat before Sian, the bridge, the walls, and the many-windowed gate rearing so vast, so high, they hugged their father to make sure that all this grandeur was not a dream.

“It must be the workshop where people are made,” whispered the boy, as their cart jolted through crowds within. “Too many, too many. Sister is frightened, and so am I, almost.”

The house where they went to sleep, and woke next morning bewildered, had a cage of linnets; other children who lived next door owned a live turtle and could play not only Butcher’s Bill but the Water Demon Seeking his Den; once Level Heart took them to see the Drum Tower; so that every day brought fresh marvels and would have seemed a golden time, had father been there to partake. He was gone.

“When will the Dragon Throne let father out of his box?”

“Pretty soon. He writes by a lamp,” said Level Heart, “all day and all night. He will come from his box a great man.”

“How great?” asked the boy. “Will he go by us without speaking? And have cymbals ahead?”

Their mother explained.

“We shall be very, very proud of him.”

It was a relief when he sauntered home quite unspoiled, rather pale and tired, but as always full of fun.

“How now, Toadlings?” he cried. “Let us hear all the mischief you’ve done. To-morrow we shall,—Wait. What says Mother? Oh, that. Passed, I believe.—To-morrow shall we go to the Mountain Pool of Lintung, and pic-nic?”

Outings together, walks, talks, visits in quiet gardens, brave sights, flashes of imperial splendor marching through a city gray with legend, made the summer fly. Then one day as autumn turned sharp, the girl saw her father come in wagging his head, and heard him speak after a new fashion, playful, but cross.

“Well, wife, is the divine craving fulfilled, and history made glorious? Our Dragon Throne orders me to Pu Chau, as a judge of life and death, a prefect.”

“O husband! O my children! Is it true? Now grandeur opens, the world praising you as I have wanted.”

“All that,” said father. “Buy the wardrobe. Do any of you fortune-tellers know if we shall see home again?”

The girl, whose name was Bright Honor, so adored him that—although his face, the handsomest of lively faces with great sparkling eyes, drolled upon her while he joined hands and laughed—she felt a pain as of doubt.

“Is my father to be unhappy?”

Three days afterward they were climbing over the gunwale of a boat. Down the Wei meanders it would carry them, among barbarous hill gorges, and up the Yellow River toward unknown Pu Chau. A floating hovel, greasy, dark, with roof of plaited bamboo swollen round like the belly of an upturned monster, it waited to engulf them. Coolies and boatmen scrambled upon it, yelling. Family and servants crept down from sunlight under the arch of its maw.

“Is my father unlucky?”

She hung back, putting her question to Level Heart, the dearest creature left in view. When a baby, she had gone holding his forefinger.

“Would you make him so?” Level Heart frowned, and swung her angrily on board. “Hush. No. Never.”

“Then why are you sad, too, if he becomes great?”

The man gave her an answer both hurried and vague.

“It is not the same thing. Go below.”

The cabin, a dark vault of wood and bulging wicker, had room for their family with a box or two. Old barley, old millet, droppings of former cargo, reeked from the bilge and tainted all the gloom like yeast gone sour; a tiny god blue and gilt perching aloft on a bulkhead, enjoyed his elfin meditation; and under him a bead of flame threw light that quavered. The first act of Level Heart, down here, was to walk roughly over master and mistress, ignite a sandalwood splinter, and leave it burning gray coils before the god.

“So prompt?” said father, indulgently. “What is your vow?”

The second act of Level Heart, without reply, was to bound up through the hatch. A squawk rose to high heaven. Down into their cabin he jumped again, carrying by one leg a white fowl that kicked its other, and poured blood from a headless neck. He caught the blood like gravy in his palm, smeared the hatch, top, edges, and threshold, threw out the feathered bundle of sacrifice, and after it pack on pack of firecrackers lighted at the god’s lamp, till everybody sat coughing in gunpowder drift.

“Why,” asked father, “all this blood and racket?”

“I have set up the Color of Life,” growled the steward. “For our voyage.”

The captain of the boat leaned his face down the hatchway,—a hard brown face, bony and smiling.

“All well,” he inquired, “with Your Excellency?”

The face having drawn up from smoke to sunlight, and away, Level Heart growled again.

“For luck on our voyage. It’s needed.”

“Wherefore?”

“I like neither Captain Hooknose nor his crew.”

“They are not silk flower maidens.” Father laughed. “Sailors very seldom are.”

“My part’s done, then. I say not a word.”

This flurry at their departure; noise without end of servants and boatman talking on deck; a causeless fear which kept mother trembling at first, then weeping, though father lay close by to comfort her: so much, nothing more, could Bright Honor afterward recall of their voyage down the Wei. How many days it lasted, or in what weather, she forgot. Late one afternoon they floated past the dark surly crag and gray fortress of T’ung Kuan, veered away north, and with sunset like a flame on the port hand, began toiling up the wide, muddy current of the Yellow River.

“To-night,” sighed Level Heart, “there will be frost.”

He stood guard beside her. The western glow faded, the river turned from bright saffron to oily black, on the surface of which faint upcurling mist gathered and drifted like steam from tea.

“Water-devils breathe: men who were drowned, for hundreds and hundreds of years. When you see their breath smoke so early after sundown, there will come frost.”

The girl may have shivered. Her old friend at once dropped nimbly down into the cabin, brought a fur cloak, and wrapped her warm. Then, while the night deepened with stars innumerable, keen and sparkling, he told her in more cheerful vein the long, long tale of an ancient hero who mounted this Great River—“just as we now sail, toward the Seven”—who found the head of it, the fountain-source in the Milky Way, and whom an astrologer spied on his track as a new star erring near the Blue One, straight overhead.

“Therefore,” Level Heart reasoned, “we know it is true.”

Meantime their boat, having glided under the shadow of a sand-bar, lay moored for the night. Her bow contained a fire-pot burning, shifting red gleams across a hint of men—bronze faces, bronze elbow or knee where the crew huddled at supper—now flaring into life, now extinguishing them, wild as a picture of goblin market.

Smoke, smells from cookery, and voices flitted aft.

“Many, many.”

“Many boxes, the fool must be rich.”

“When did our skipper intend—”

“Clap your mouth shut, Frog. You want them to hear?”

It was only the crew at supper, gabbling.

“Are you cold again, young mistress?”

“No, frightened,” said the girl. “This world is too big.”

Her servant laughed.

“It need be, nowadays, to hold us all. Fear nothing, child. I sleep athwart the hatch.”

Her own bed lay in a dark corner of the cabin, against the forward bulkhead. Tremulous but deep, a band of shadow covered her, the shadow of the bracket where the godling sat throned above his lamp. On that night she was the last of the family awake, for in the open air voices chattered, while underneath her as if the boat were moving lapped and gurgled the Yellow River. Shadow and sound intermingled ran dimly to an end.

A scream woke her.

“Devils! Come, oh come! Dev—”

It was choked off. The lamp-light reeled in a gust. Her father lay upon torn bedding, face upward; her mother, face down, a jumbled heap across his knees. Never before had the girl seen death; but now in one glance of nightmare, she knew it. Near them her little brother, with chubby arms and legs fighting it off, wrestled in the grip of a horror, a man, who suddenly drove down at him a long knife, wrenched it out, and threw him on the pile.

The horror laughed or panted.

“That all of ’em? No, another.”

It stood peering. The glimmer from the shrine gave it features, a likeness, hook nose and crafty eyes, the face of the captain of the boat. He saw her in her dark corner, frozen to the bulkhead.

“Aha! Yes, you!”

He bent and dragged her forth with a wet hand, the knife as it whirled up sprinkling her forehead.

“You’re the lot.”

“Save!” With all her power she cried on gods and men, were any left, to annihilate this present dream, restore the past, their waking world. “Save, save!”

The wet hand caught her under the chin roughly, and jerked her face toward the lamp. Hot, swimming, drunk with blood, his eyes held her in mockery.

“No. I do not kill you, no,” he grunted. “Too pretty for that. You shall be my second wife, young lady.”

Then, as another voice bawled something down the hatchway, he flung the girl back toward her corner, and leaped into a white smoke of dawn. She knew how and with what his bare feet were mottled as they whipped from sight, recognized pain far away as her head crashed on planking, and felt the bottom of the dark yawn round a giddiness like a falling feather.

It was day when they hauled her—past one who, grinning, mopped the cabin floor—up and out on deck. Sunshine blinded her. Men laughed. Bright as mustard and lofty over the gunwale curved a sand-bar that hid all upon her right, but sky; on her left ran vacant river, mud boiling into motion, chipped with waves.

“Good morning, my own!”

By the steering-oar sat the captain. He glittered, for he had on her father’s new robe, the silk of a judge. It made him both handsome and terrific. Behind him stood the crew, gorgeous in her father’s livery.

“Why not speak? You are rude. Tell me. If I bring you alive to Pu Chau, who are your father’s friends there?”

The men gripping each arm crushed her down to kneel on deck.

“What friends in Pu Chau?”

Despair, not fear, compelled her groan of truth.

“None.”

Everybody cackled in jubilation.

“I thought so. Very good. None,” said the captain. “Hearken well, therefore. Last night my name was Jeong Hsu. Your father last night had the name J’o Peng. The world goes changeable now. This morning my name is J’o Peng, with a robe of office that you behold; the new prefect, with a letter of authority signed by the Emperor. You are a girl from nowhere whom I take along, my second wife. Second or third, no matter, you are lucky.”

The glittering murderer turned, spat, and looked for approval. His gang laughed as they gave it. A bilge-rat fellow crept up toward him and suggested:—

“Here’s a dead one we forgot.”

“Chuck him over,” commanded Jeong Hsu. “Tie a bag of sand to him like the others, and heave away.”

From an autumn sky of brilliant blue, the sun flooded this cove where their boat lay hidden. Morning stillness, warmth, and purity drenched the world in a golden calm. Something heavy, near by, went “pomph!” into the water; drops flew on board; out of muddy waves a face, a whitened caricature of Level Heart’s face, regarded heaven patiently for a moment and sank.

“So then, after all,” continued the captain, “you shall enter Pu Chau as a lady of high degree.”

Vertigo and darkness again conquered. A dreadful globe of passion rounded and swelled upward within her, destroying all but the force that bade her leap free and run, run through blind spaces for which the wilderness were too narrow, and die. At full stretch, the agony burst like a bubble. Her own spirit, blown away, gave room to another: an old, cold, cunning spirit which laughed and spoke.

“Sir, you dazzle your captive with too much lustre. But let me for decency mourn my parents one year.”

This cold spirit had neither hope nor dread, only an aim. It could face the shining evil in her father’s robe, bow down, smile, and touch the forehead to the deck.

“You live”—Meantime it secretly called river, sandy waste, rock, mountain, sun, all things visible and invisible, to witness—“you live till you have slain him.”

One of the men clutching her arms, cried out:—

“Right enough! No more than fair. Let the child perform a year’s mourning, or bad luck will overtake us!”

“Keep your wisdom, Frog,” advised the captain. “I don’t borrow it. Another such remark to me, and the fish pick your backbone as well. Girl, you may enjoy six months of pious grief. At your age you’ll find it more than plenty.—She’s fainted again. Take her below.”

Day and night wearing by, the voyage did not continue for ever. A merciful numbness drugged her. Pu Chau, when at last entered, was but evening dusk, multitude, voices, feet that scuffed granite, a wave of new smells, and through a crack in her sedan chair as it balanced onward, moon-lanterns gleaming and swaying down corridors.

“You are alone. Many people, not one soul for you. Alone: a ghost carried in a box. But never lose your aim.”

The room which became her prison was large, quiet, and poorly furnished. It had one window looking upon a bare courtyard between high walls. For her attendant there came and went a sour old woman, who either was deaf or pretended to be, and who worked angrily without speaking.

At times, in her doorway, appeared the one object of life, the captain Jeong Hsu.

“Aha, my pretty? You do not mope?”

More genial, easier, plumper from high feeding, he now had a lordly strut of success.

“Not moping? That is good, a good child.” The thing condescended, with hook nose in air, and smirk from aloft. “You shall not wait six months, but two.”

While he stood in her room, Bright Honor could bow toward him, return a gentle answer, and hide the trembling that sickened her; but when he had gone, she dropped like empty cloth and moaned into the crook of her arm on the floor.

“Weak, weak! No sharp edge, nothing with a point, and the naked hands cannot do.”

Autumn glorified the distance above courtyard and wall. Clouds like snow mountains of fairyland towering, exalting their brightness, deeps of blue where thought plunged into a region beyond time and space, offered no consolation but rather tormented her as with a promise forfeited or broken. If she were a bird—the trite fancy became real and aching—if she were the meanest creature on wings, how far, far away she could escape. Tears drove her from the window.

One afternoon a hullabaloo disturbed the house, men trotting back and forth, haranguing, shouting contradiction, bumping furniture, clattering dishes. The echo of it in distant rooms told that her enemy prepared a great banquet. To hearken, she leaned from her door. Beyond there was nothing but a darker vestibule, barred always, or locked.

“Open?—Have they forgotten you?”

In the gloom an upright band of gray shimmered. It was another door.

“Ajar.”

Pushing heavy wood that creaked, Bright Honor slid between its edge and the jamb.

“Useless. Caught. No farther.”

People, busy and noisy, filled this outer room. There crouched the old deaf woman, peeling almonds; near by stood a man-servant drawing a fowl, and three fat rascals bent over a litter of straw to dig out brown-bellied wine jars. Like master, like men: the pirate’s kitchen or scullery was a riot of waste and dirt.

“Hold on!” cried a fellow. “Here, let’s break this one by accident, and all have a drink!”

No one saw her, no one turned. Straight ahead, wide open, the back door framed a bit of courtyard and of diagonal sunlight warming the ground. Flattened like a shadow, as in the time when she and brother played at hiding, she kept still; then like a shadow moved along the wall. Straw rustled; crockery snapped and chinked on the floor; a man laughed; and with the sounds behind her, she was running across the court.

Near the back gate stood a wheelbarrow heaped with enormous baskets, like a wicker mountain. To this, an hour or so afterward, came a man who cut the lashings from a hamper, jerked it free, and carried it indoors on his back. The sun had left the courtyard; and therefore, or perhaps being merry with stolen wine, he did not observe an armful of pale pink silk under the far edge of the barrow.

The silk put forth a head. Eyes clearer than the eyes of a mouse watched him go.

“The gate has a latch only. But,” considered Bright Honor, “you must not try it for a long while.”

Cramped between flagstone and wicker, she had grown cold; yet until darkness began to come, and beyond her courtyard wall the river of talk, the squeal and rumble of carts, the clank of hawkers’ bells to die away, she could not rise and run. What mob, seeing a young girl in silken finery, in Empress-Face-Powder-Pink—for nobody had given her one rag of mourning to wear—what mob would ever let her pass down any street by day? The armful of colored cloth lay still again; or still but for shivering.

“Wait, though you freeze. Wait.”

The noises were draining off. Twilight gathered. The black oblong of the house door, melting from view, suddenly became a red panel.

“The first lamp. Now it is time.”

From under her barrow she crawled to the gate, then stood up, and fingered the latch with care. A crash, a clang made her jump. It was only music beginning to play for her enemy’s feast. The gate swung. She darted out, closed it, went pattering down an obscure thoroughfare, but halted and gave a long look backward. His gongs and flageolets played on, faintly here.

“Remember this gate and wall; for you shall pass them once more, to be his bane.”

Dark corners, the fringes of lamp-light, whatever tunnel to right or left seemed empty, the girl took for her way. Running, pausing in a gutter, watching till men were far enough ahead, then flying to the next bit of darkness and waiting there, she practised the same art, now timid, now bold, as in their game of Water Demon; but this evening, alone, played against a great and terrible city.

“Ah, Blossom!” A rough joker barred the lane with his arms. “Out too late? Hunting your sweetheart?”

She ducked underneath and ran on, so blindly that in a moment she was checked, surrounded, lost, the full current of a crowd baffling her. Lanterns and faces thronged. No one could hide in this maze. Yet now, at the worst of it, came luck. Before her jolted a procession of carts, their drivers alongside on foot. Slipping in where a horse’s head bobbed after a tail-board, she kept the pace, and travelled among their shadows. They ploughed a furrow of human beings, who, forced to the wall, had no eye for her.

“Hola! We are closing. You arrive behind the hour.”

Carts and horses came to a stand, where one draughty lantern flickered at bottom in a vault, an arch of smooth-worn masonry. The carters began wrangling.

“Let us go! We’re early! You gate-keepers are all alike, frauds!”

“Ha-ha! The hinges need oil of silver!”

“Greed! Greed! Too much! Don’t pay ’em. Never!”

The vault rang with echoes.

“Let us out of your rotten old robbers’ fort! A man has to bribe for breath in Pu Chau. You stinking Tartars! Barbarians!”

Worse language followed. Hearing, she knew the arch to be a city gate. While carters raged and guards laughed and both fell to counting money, she dodged below the horse’s mane. There was width for creeping in a black network of spokes and legs, though from each north-country wheel jutted an axle-tip to bruise her. Forward she went. The lead-horse of the train drooped his neck before an expanse of grimy wood,—Pu Chau gate, not yet thrown to.

Villagers climbing home that night by moonrise brought a story that remained good all winter.

“On Heave-Pony Hill,” they declared, “a fox overtook us. No, nothing in the flesh; her eyes larger than two cups of tea. A fox-woman, little and tidy, quicker than your thumb-nail. It skimmed the mist without toe to ground, and wore a light jacket of Empress-Face-Powder-Pink. We are not liars. The moon rode well off that ridge. We can see. It stared but never spoke.”

What our poor little vixen ghost went through, saw, heard, and felt, no gossip can render. All that night, all the next day, a purpose drove her to go and go beyond reach of tongue or eye, to outrun a devil clothed in her father’s name and authority. She forgot food. Another night she kept warm sleeping with a dog who owned a bed of chaff outside a hamlet; who, god-like in kindness, had not barked but come to snuff her over while she crawled through the moonlight. Once an old woman hardly richer than the dog, and quite as thin, gave her a barley scone with a cup of hot water. Once a madman of the beggars’ guild snatched her to him, and though he lost hold again, pursued for hours, a varicolored scarecrow hobbling and howling after her in the wilderness.

Four days or five—she no longer counted them—brought an end.

“Father! Mother! Level Heart! Brother!”

Kneeling where she had fallen for the last time, Bright Honor cried their names aloud in a place where there were no people, no villages, nothing but hills, black, yellow, cinder-gray. With clothes torn, shoes and stockings cut to rags, her feet puffy masses of blood and grime that could not endure another step, the child gave in.

“Why call for help any more? No good is left.”

The track wound through a savage glen, among branches where a few autumn leaves hung bleaching paler than gold, or curling, scorched brown with frost. One tree leaned from a rock overhead.

“Father, mother, brother, I will come find you somewhere, if I can.”

The moss and rock gave her agony. She climbed, hugging them, sobbing. On their top she rose, undid the sash of her trousers, knotted an end about the tree, an end about her throat. A cloudy sunset filled the long ravine with shadows brimming up; she saw them through a glaze, and toward them leaped into the air.

Frightful pain, darkness trying to burst, infinite compression with every atom a sting throughout the root of mortal sense, welled out, strove like an earthquake and made explosion in a vague light floating milkier than opals, fragrance of honey perfuming the mouth, divine repose, music ineffable.

“Döi, döi, hrrup!”

A man rode down the glen talking cow-talk to his horse, for they had put in a dull day and bored each other.

“Döi, hrrup!”

The horse, a thick little shaggy buckskin, pointed his ears toward the insult but held his own gait. The man, a dark youth with ruddy cheeks, wore sober hunting dress, and carried a long-bow across the pommel. Knobs of silver dotted his broad brown belt, from which there stuck a quiver of arrows painted orange and black, feathered scarlet. He brought no game, as he and the horse knew very well.

“On, boss, on, cowherd. A pair of us. Home again, home again, jiggetty-jog. We could not overtake Yu’s tortoise gone to bed, old fellow.”

The pony shied. From a bough of golden foliage right in his way swung a tattered pink flower, moving.

“What?” cried the bowman. “A girl? Or a trick of hell?”

After sunset high in a ravine where nobody ever lived and the damps of autumn died, it was not Nature that left a child hanging so. He ought, all tradition warned him, to kick his pony and gallop, for cold hair blew up the scalp.

“Alive.” The youth had a gift of mild yet stubborn reason. “Horribly, too. It suffers. Devil or not—”

He leaned, caught her body against his own, lugged from scabbard a hunting-knife, cut her sash, and dropped with her to ground.

The milky light bathing a universe contracted, rushed together, was griped into a ball of darkness pierced by hot needles. Resurrection brought a pang to which that of death was bliss.

“Right, now. The poor mouse. All right.—Who are you, my dear?”

Who? She was a breath of air turning solid, a remnant far away dragging home to identity. She had fingers and a nose, for they burned in excruciating fire.

“Who are you?”

She saw twilight above, dim golden leaves, a golden horse’s head, and a man’s eyes that sparkled with an influence not of earth, being kind.

“Father? Are we both dead now? Have I gone . . . the right way . . .”

Too young, too young: it was an unknown who had his eyes, a glorious archer of ghost-land; a spirit, not the one whom she had taken this journey to find, yet another spirit. He was wrapping her in fur as Level Heart had done, balancing her on the golden horse. Wet leaves of autumn, stars, then her old adversary the moon watched them go down hill, roundabout and down to sleep.

“My name.” She woke, remembering. “You asked, O Heaven-Guide. Pardon. My name was Bright Honor.”

“Thank you. And I am Wun Sai Chun.”

“Of no house any more. My father died.”

“Mine too, little pup. Talk by and by. Forget now. You will like my mother.”

She obeyed, and forgot, in his arm where the moon could not chase or hurt her. Down they jogged, warm, limp, and secure, to nothing again.

The country seat of the Wun family, as all men know, crowned with its garden a wooded hill that curved steep into a green valley toward a shining river. Days passed before she knew so much, or in what room she lay abed. An old woman servant came coaxing her to live; a white-haired man who said he was only Poi the Herb-Gatherer, made her drink tea worse than wormwood, and held her by the wrist, and smiling hummed a vague, funny ballad until the eyes drooped in content; but all this while her archer god failed to appear.

He was having his own trouble.

“Big milk-sop,” cried his mother, “what next? Girls hanging on mountain bushes, indeed! Seventeen years old you are, and have no sense yet. You make our house an orphanage, bringing in this rat, this reborn devil, who knows?”

“My mother,” he replied, “merciful as Our Lady of the Seven Seas, will not throw the poor babe out? It is a lost child of some high family. You can tell—”

“I can tell the witch is pretty. They often are, to beguile and wreck. Wait until I have heard her.”

One day when Bright Honor could sit up, they entered her room,—the dark young god without his bow looking very tall and meek behind a little spitfire woman who scolded while she came.

“Good morning. You are better? I am glad. Now tell me everything. Who are you?”

The woman had a round maternal face, humorous like her son’s, but not so patient.

“Come, come!”

Bright Honor ran to her and knelt.

“Great Lady, thanks from the soul are naught. I am naught, a wicked thing that killed itself, to join father and mother. Where are they? Or is this the land of the living?”

“Yes, they call it so.—My boy, for once you were right,” said the spitfire. “A girl of true family. Voice, and breeding. Rise, dear. Have you nothing more to confide?”

It came hard, her answer. This was the old world, then, of life. She had eaten their food, she wore now their gorgeous lendings, but she did not know how far might reach the arm of Jeong Hsu, murderer, jailer, tyrant of a boat and a city.

“Nothing, madam.”

“Your people died? Where?”

“Madam, while travelling.”

“And were buried where?”

“That”—The girl trembled. “A river place. I did not hear its name. That I cannot say.”

The small, fierce lady hugged her.

“Don’t worry, child. You are to stay and be my daughter, for I had none. Come here, Lumpkin. Call her Sister, can’t you?”

The tall young deity ambled forward and grinned.

“Morning, Mui.”

“And he thought you a devil. If you forgive him, call the fool Brother, to please me.”

Bright Honor tried, but failing, hung on her new protectress and wept. This house, lived in by gentle spirits, was too like home.

“There, there! Sit down and rest you.”

As time went by, the likeness to home grew a comfort. These people asked no further, but made her one of them, sharing their daily peace and affection. The mother, widow of a colonel in the Emperor’s army who had died some years before, maintained her state rather in ease than in magnificence, ruling with sharp tongue and warm heart. Servants, no lack of them, ran at her bidding but ran with smiles, and turned work to play. Every room contained beautiful old things to enrich the sight. Outdoors, great as a park—the wall so hidden by trees, the paths everywhere so convolved through a diversity of shrubs, flowers, little crags, ferns, carven stone, a hill-brook welling from the moss, a cascade, a grotto, a dragon bridge undulating in red, black, and gold, that it all seemed forest without end—lay the garden. Here unsuspected nooks, found by chance, were always giving delight.

“Oh, it’s you, is it, Mui?”

Into such a nook Bright Honor strayed one morning early and was greeted by the young master.

“You have learned the way to my den?”

He stood laughing, on tiptoe with a bare knife poised in each hand. Flowering quince formed the walls to his den, a level plot, where in one corner sunshine trembled on a gigantic urn or bowl of glossy, ripe-olive brown earthenware.

She made an excuse, and backed away.

“No, don’t go,” he added, quickly. “You’re welcome here or anywhere. I was only keeping in practice.”

He completed the movement that her coming had taken by surprise, then swung into another and another, leaping, thrusting, guarding, wheeling now right now left, at full stretch but free as air. The glitter of the long blades dazzled her.

“Oh!” she cried. “More lovely than a dance! If you would teach me—”

He stopped his fencing, laughed again, and eyed her whimsically.

“What, you a fighting-woman, Little Sister?”

“Do!” she begged. “Please do!”

“Why should you want to learn?”

She could not tell him, or would not.

“You are,” he mused, “a funny wee thing.”

In the end she had her wish granted.

“Where did you learn the art,” he inquired, “of teasing so prettily? Enough, enough, I will.”

Though often away hunting and more often closeted with a book, Sai Chun kept his word and devoted an hour or more daily to her. The exercises, first, then the play of the quarterstaff, of the knives, and of the sword, he taught her with happy good nature but with strict eye to form, being himself the trained pupil of an old master.

“Mui dear,” he said once, “I’m proud of you.”

Their pleasant outdoor den, the green room of the flowering quince, became her favorite above all other delights in the garden.

His mother caught them there, hard at work with broad-swords.

“What, what, what? Stop, stop it! Lumpkin, are you out of your head? You will kill her!”

Sai Chun drew back and lowered his weapon, smiling.

“Fear for me, Mother, not for her. That child is better than many of the profession. Now, already.—Observe her a moment, please.”

The soldier’s widow let them finish their bout.

“A mad pair.” Her bright black eyes were full of indulgence. “What a garden to keep,—swords flashing and whizzing till I dare not poke my nose round a tree. What are you children, tigers?”

All three laughed. They had much laughter in their days together.

Alone with her son, the widow often said:—

“You have learned nothing more?”

“Not a word. I watch her and watch her,” he replied, “but she never speaks out. Of course it is her right, to keep her secret. In everything else, open as the day, and as true. A strange little berry we picked off the mountain bushes, Mother. A riddle. But charming, how charming. I think it must be too deep and dangerous a matter she broods on. She is of high family—”

“I know that, wiseacre! You cannot make ivory of a rat’s tooth.”

Besides play, comfort, liberty, fun and talk, they gave her that rarest of benefits to a girl, the chance of learning; and not from any Winter-Hearth pedagogue, but from an old scholar gentleman who taught like a fond though shrewd grandfather. The days, too busy for lamenting, were come and gone as if without division of them, as if the quiet country-house on a hill stood above their passage, clear, enchanted. Two years meanwhile slid away like water down the stream in the valley. Change had been at work. Bright Honor herself was changing unaware, beginning to forget, and to be happy without reproach.

This calm season broke at a word.

“Who?”

They sat in an arbor, all three, where early sunlight fluttered among vines. The widow and her son were talking at random. Bent over a stitch to be undone from her sewing, Bright Honor heard their voices but had lost their drift.

“Who?”

“J’o Peng.”

Her father’s name: she had no strength to look or turn: her father’s name casually spoken as if he were alive, crashed down like the Axe of Thunder.

“J’o Peng, a new prefect, you know, at Pu Chau. The man’s life is a holy scandal, a blot. Hate him? They call him Green-Devil-Scum. Poor people do, that is. Riding about, I hear a good deal from them; and if ever was a filthy rascal in power, it’s J’o Peng. Toward the rich, of course, he’s all honeysuckle tea so far.”

She pricked her needle safely into the cloth, got on foot, made excuse of whatever kind, and went out from the arbor. It choked her, that cool air through glowing leaves. The very garden stifled. She did not see the path, or know her way.

“Happiness! Happiness! Oh, father!”

Blind habit may have drawn her to the alcove of the flowering quince. There, at any rate, all motion ceased but the dark inward tumult of remorse breaking and rolling together like storm-cloud. What supported her, a cold, smooth bulk, she found to be the great ripe-olive earthenware jar under the boughs. A huge urn breast-high, in diameter seven or eight feet from lip to lip, it confined a pool of sunny water. She leaned there as if grown part of it, her forearms crossed on the brim. White pebbles lay at bottom; rags and tails of emerald weed swayed to the movement of lazy fish, red-gold, blue-black, silver; while above yet throughout them shone reflected the veiny green translucence of leaves, a coral-pink where blossoms caught the sun, and a wedge of brilliant azure infinitely deep.

“Father, I have lied! In both worlds I have abandoned you, abandoned your name to be dragged living through the dirt of this.—Happiness? O fool! Shame!—Forgive me when I shall have acted. Your daughter was losing her soul here.”

Her words had no sound, not even breath to stir the water, nor did anyone reply; and yet she felt a presence join her, a waiting, a longing. This did not pass, but remained very quiet, supernaturally near, and benign. Among sunbright leaves and petals in the water, beyond a likeness—unseen till now—of her own face, there appeared the face of a man. It was not her father’s, not Level Heart’s; and though moving her strangely with a look as of their eyes, it brought unfathomable difference. Only her old playmate Sai Chun had come to stand behind her. They were silent. Their ghosts in the pool held communion. She saw now what the years had been doing, sharpening this moment, this forbidden joy: the face on the water was the face of her beloved. He must never see.

Dropping her arms from the brim, she turned.

“It is true.” Sai Chun spoke hoarsely. “True. Tell me, tell me.”

Bright Honor shook her head.

“Do not keep hard thoughts of me,” she begged, “when I go.”

He cried out, indignant.

“Go? Where?”

Her answer amazed him.

“How can we foresee where? The saying is right, Elder Brother. Life is a candle between two open doors.”

With her eyes hidden, she ran by him, out of their green play-room.

“To her bed,” a servant reported. “Not well.”

Next morning his mother greeted him in a cold rage.

“Now, son, ride up your mountain and pick me one more. Gratitude, a lovely fruit. She’s off, your paragon, without bidding us good-bye; the fox ran back last night to her hole in the earth. And I called her daughter! Well, good riddance to all vermin of sorcery. We were blind.”

Sai Chun said nothing rude, but in height began to have an air of the colonel.

“Mother.” He bowed with ceremony. “You will call her so again to more purpose, if we have any fortune.”

Walking to the door, he shouted:—

“Ma-fu! Groom-ho, saddle the buckskin! We hunt!”

“Not for her? My dear son, let her go, a worthless minx.”

He hurried off to his room, and presently came back dressed for riding, whip in hand.

“What did she take with her?”

“Almost nothing,” replied the widow. “Some of her pin-money, but very little. No finery, none of the clothes I gave her. She bought from the gardener’s boy his oldest working rags—to play a joke, she told him. Oh dear, dear! I was fond of her.”

Sai Chun stood bending his whip and thinking.

“I too. She carried off my best pair of knives. The child goes back to trouble, Mother. Let us hope I overtake her in time. Good-bye.”

“No, no! Stay!”

For the first time in their life he disobeyed. Rushing out, he vaulted on his pony, wheeled through the gate, and clattered off down hill.

“Too long a start. Keep your feet, Old Tortoise, for we must go!”

The village had no news; the main road, side paths, mountain tracks, all that day and the next day and the next, had none. He talked with innkeepers, farmers, children, peddlers, a whole countryside whom he knew and as many strangers, but learned nothing. On the fourth day, however, he rode up to a miserable wayside inn crammed with people, everybody chattering at once, making merry, crowing with high glee.

“What now, friends?”

They burst from the doorway to swarm round his horse, tea-cup, food bowl, chopsticks and all.

“Not heard, sir? Great tidings, and good! Green-Devil-Scum is no more. That vile prefect at Pu Chau, he was killed, sir, last night. Blessings on her! I tell you, she deserves a Gate of Memory across this road!”

“Who, brother?”

“Our deliveress. Her name unknown, for she does nothing but cry. A young girl, hardly over sixteen, they say. Very beautiful. High born—”

Sai Chun felt giddy and sick.

“Dressed like a boy,” he groaned, “in ragged blue?”

“Yes, yes! How did you know, sir?”

He waved them apart, rode through, and sent the pony flying down the track.

“For her life, now.”

Late that afternoon the guards of the jail at Pu Chau had a whirlwind of good luck. A tired, very dusty, imperious young gentleman who scoffed at rule or denial, came pouring double handfuls of silver, and fairly broke, they said, his way into prison. Who could resist? The warden, a dry little gnome, put on his conical red hat of authority, and trotting through the dark shrilled orders to stop him, eject him.

“Take me to her at once.”

“What? Impossible!” cried the warden. “Her? She who murdered His Excellency?”

“Green-Scum, yes. Murder, no. Between two men of the world,” proposed the young intruder, suavely, “what need for pomp and circumlocution? We know all about Green-Scum, you and I.—Her case comes before the Governor to-morrow? An old family friend of mine, the Governor.”

Between two men of the world, conferring in a dark stone corridor, more double handfuls passed without a jingle.

“This way,” murmured the gnome, grinning. “Step carefully, sir.”

Care was not amiss in the slime and reek. Through galleries, holes, burrows among hewn stone, where every breath tasted abhorrent, where shadows who had been men gaped from an everlasting midnight of despair, the jailer flitted on and on.

“Here.” At last he halted. “Here’s your poor lady.”

The angle of a buttress contained her. She sat in filth, knees drawn up, arms crossed, head sunk between them. Her blue rags, and the loop of chain hanging, from time to time shook.

The jailer, hardened to queer doings, found that he had yet to learn.

“Mui!” Down on filth beside her dropped the shining young Lord of the Bottomless Purse. “Mui dear, tell me now, everything!”

She stared at him, lost; then in a paroxysm tried to draw away.

“They—they don’t believe.”

“I do, Bright Honor.”

It was a long time before her voice came to Sai Chun again, stifled in his coat. He heard her with wonder.

“. . . And so to his garden, last night. Jeong Hsu’s garden. He killed my father’s body. How could I let him kill my father’s name? So last night I waited by a tree, oh, long, long! Till he came. In starlight. He walked home from a feast, half drunken, humming. I stepped before him. I said:—

“ ‘Jeong Hsu, pirate and murderer, stop.’

“He was frightened. He began whispering—

“ ‘What? Hush! Who are you?’

“I told him, and gave him the choice:—

“ ‘Drop my father’s name, go back to your river, or fight me now.’

“So I held out your pair of knives, for him to take one, if he chose fighting.

“He laughed.

“ ‘Why, it’s that girl grown!’ was all he said, but he jumped, and snatched at both knives, turning them to strike in. I struck first, as you taught me. O playmate, my beloved!”

The jail-gnome in his red hat was hovering close, but could not hear. They made him wait, burn in ignorance, and go on waiting. A thought consoled him: the bottomless purse might come into play again.

It did, lavishly, when its bearer jumped up.

“Officer, my friend.” Sai Chun led him apart, and spoke. “Safe-guard of the Virtuous, carry my sister to a clean room. Let nothing lack. She will go home to-night, and those who chained her may suffer.”

Out in the street, blinking at sunset air and wholesome crowds of dull free men, Sai Chun for a moment lost courage. He had spoken brave words, but told a fib, whopping; for he did not know the Governor from a side of bacon. There was but one hope.

He bumped full into it.

“Uncle Ting, I do beg your pardon.”

A slender little dignitary in black silk, frail as a cricket, regained breath enough to be meek.

“Rustics have a hard impact,” said Uncle Ting. “I never learned why they paint their cheeks brown and red, so very brown and red, before they charge. Turanian, quite. You are well, nephew, I feel sure, I feel, I feel thoroughly to the back of my teeth. And your mother?”

He was a relative not by blood, this cricket with a wasp tongue, but by endearment from old time, from the colonel’s day: a friend, an adviser, learned in law and humanity.

“I was on the way to your house. Uncle Ting, come with me!”

“Willingly, nephew, if not pinched off at the arm. Old, yes indeed, damn it all, I am, but do you know, my boy, we can see where to plant our feet?—Eh, what song’s that you’re singing me? Last night’s murder? Why, my dear nephew, extraordinary. Proceed.”

They talked all the way through Pu Chau. By candle-light in a shadowy acre of a room the Governor heard their conclusion.

“That prefect? A crumb of reason and relief, thank Heaven!” The Governor, tall, slim, fond of fun, quiet, whose elegance hid a gift of striking hard, wriggled his fingers up in air, then dropped them with a sigh. “For two years the man has driven me crazy.—Here, take an order. Secretary, an order?”

One came running, prepared to write.

“Surround the house of the late prefect. Arrest everybody there,” said the Governor. “Put them to question. Piracy and murder, as follows . . . . Good, off with you. No, wait. Bring the girl here. My house and I are unworthy, gentlemen, but I will adopt her.”

At the moment Sai Chun wanted only to bow down, with his heart full of triumph and gratitude. A month later, at home, he was finding how hollow a triumph may prove, when every day he met that dreary old beast, the self, to be fought and tamed. They had saved her, plucked her out of the very shadow, and restored her to high place, a Governor’s daughter; but here he went about grumbling, dispirited, as if they had failed. His great house on the hill seemed empty; the garden time-worn, dry as dust; and the books which he ought to learn, dead rubbish, not worth mulling over. The pith was gone out of it all.

“I miss our child,” said his mother, too often. Her praise exasperated him. “You had more faith, my son, than I. You did right, you did well. But I miss her.”

“You think I don’t?”

Ashamed of the retort, he went out glum, trailing his long-bow and quiver of gay arrows. The buckskin pony caught his mood. They rode clumping over the hills, wearying of them, and sighting neither fur nor feather.

“Tortoise, we hunt no more. Stay at home and eat your head off.”

He stalked, gloomier than before, into the garden.

“Come here, savage,” called his mother. She was laughing. “Your manners! We have a visitor.”

The sun, the trees, the cascade of the garden brook, sprang to life again. In pale brocade with gold flower ornament twinkling above her ears, a young woman stood there, not quite afraid to smile.

“His Excellency her father, and your uncle, are at the house, to call . . .”

Sai Chun did not hear. He was behaving rudely.

“Bright Honor!—By and by, Mother, not now.—Mui, I have something to show you. Come.”

They were leaning on the giant olive-brown jar, looking down at the water, intent, very still, when two gentlemen in black robes entered the bower of the quince.

“Ah?” The tall gentleman, carrying in one hand a fold of yellow paper stamped with the Imperial seal, gave his companion a touch and a nod. “I think you were right.”

Uncle Ting, frail as a cricket, made a chirp like one.

“Tell me,” Sai Chun demanded, “what you see in the pool.”

“That fish,” Bright Honor said, “has grown three long filmy tails.—Oh, yes, I see the fish, and—and whatever was down there before.”

The two men in black turned away.

“Excellency,” murmured Uncle Ting, “do you know, I believe the Emperor’s decoration may wait half an hour. They are beyond reach of glory, quite insensible. Heh! I regret having brought you here to anticlimax.”

I.

“One day, de one willitch, lek op here, in a hills, abou’ fo’ hunder’ five hunder’ people.”

With his noon work done, his white jacket unbuttoned, Yi Tao took whatever ease there might be on a wicker stool of hour-glass form drawn into shade behind the cottage. One hundred and four degrees of heat oppressed that shade; his only hearer sat none too comfortable in a wet bathing-suit; but Yi Tao, relaxing, enjoyed peace of body and mind, let his favorite journal the Sai Gai Yat Bo droop unread between his knees, and viewed the landscape with benignity. From the back door a little yellow field of volunteer oats ran a brief way upward to meet over-hanging trees, then became a mountain steep in oak, arbutus, and laurel, their various green high aloft mingling with a cinnamon haze of madroña bark. Over the mountain soared three buzzards that kept their distance in the old Egyptian pattern, a triangle of outspread wings, dry brown upon hot blue. A thousand feet below them, under the mountain, curved the river, a glaze of willow-green among willows. The afternoon slept. A whiff of sweetness from French plums drying far away, now and then cloyed the air.

“Lek here, hill contry. Kwang Shai Shan. Welly quie’, welly beauty. De people pooty goodt, keep quie’ alloso, no trobble.”

Tao smiled at the view, as if thinking not of these hills but of the others, dreamily distant, beyond even his home.

“But trobble he can com’, all place. Can climb, can lon. You lock op you’ house op tigh’, he can jomp inside allo same. Ho, jixy ease fo’ him. Can com’ de willitch I tole you, too.”

In that mountain village where people were pretty good, keeping quiet, lived a man, his wife, and their only child, a baby girl who from daybreak till dark was the liveliest little thing afoot. She woke laughing, talked to an imaginary playmate, or sang in her bed while neighbors’ children bawled for their morning rice; and at an age when they but learned to creep, she was running, jumping, spinning round like a top. Everyone called her the daughter of happy legs. Her face made sour old men grin against conviction. If a child’s manner, movement, and eyes have that peculiar bright gift (so the doctors tell Yi Tao) there is no better medicine for the family heart, for long life.

“True enough,” said her parents. “Only to watch her, it keeps us young.”

Her first fine dress, though of cotton, made her squeal and dance like a mad fairy.

“O Moonlight!” she chanted. “The color, the color! O Talking Bird in the Moon Forest!”

So appeared a funny trait of character, her passion for blue-green, the color of blue jade or of certain changeable feathers.

“Let me,” she begged, “let me wear this kind always?”

Father and mother agreed, for the whim cost nothing, to clothe her in her beloved hue. At their door good-humored workmen who paused, between burdens, enjoyed her skipping and singing.

“A leaf that wags on the tree of music. What are you to-day, child? Kingfisher? Phoenix?”

The girl wondered at them,—young mirth overcome by grown stupidity.

“No, elder brother. No, no. This earwig feigns to be the magic parrot of the moonglade.”

“Why, so you are! Pardon, great blue sorceress; pardon our blear-eyed and pumble-footed error, for we load-bearing bent-necks cannot see well off the ground.”

They all grew fond of watching her, so lively before the door. While yet an infant, she began to weave new tricks into her dance, and with extraordinary grace, mimicking the old sinuous postures of tradition, to kill airy demons with a bamboo slat for knife.

“How she ever copied that,” said passers-by, chuckling, “is a mystery and a marvel.”

Poor men, whose time counted more than money because it brought food or hunger, astonished her with gifts—a wooden sword, wooden lance, halberd, bill-hook, or a trident cunningly whittled from a sapling fork, all made to scale by hand, and rubbed smooth—noble gifts, works of beauty and love. She could not find a word large enough to thank the givers.

“Oh, friend!” she cried once. “How friends do fill this world!”

Indoors and out thenceforward the child played nothing else but combat, holy war. She fought the good fight, delivered their village from ten thousand unseen devils, or enacted that old champion the outlaw hero of the hills, Mu Chung, who with his merry men lived by bow and spear setting wrongs right. They were silent games, not to be expounded.

“Is it safe, do you think?” Her father and mother, who were nearing forty years of age, became anxious. “Is it correct? These toy weapons may brutalize the child. Our only one. She grows too rough, all day jumping, jumping, slashing the air.—I do not know. She’s very strong, my dear. Look, how strong and light!”

One rainy afternoon when they all three sat together quiet in the house, an odd thing happened. A shadow came and darkened the door, already dark. A loud but not unpleasant voice hailed them.

“Inside Benevolence, aid the needy?”

What threw shadow, and following the voice heaved into sight, had the form of a burly fat man broader than their door. They knew it was no man at all, her spoken formula forewarning them. The long black gown wrapped across like a double-breasted overcoat, with wide sleeves that engulfed both hands and half a walking-stick; the shaven head crowned by a jaunty black skull-cap, its hole on top left open as though rain were not worth a tug at the puckering-string: these, her placidity, and the hamper bound on her back, declared their caller to be of the Ni Ku, a Buddhist nun.

“Welcome,” they replied. “Welcome, soul of peace.”

Father and mother were more polite than cordial. At the gathering of contribution two or three times a year they always gave a trifle; but for the Lake Shore nunnery eight or ten miles away, below, they had no zeal. It was too prosperous, too well controlled, guided in its begging, none too savory in repute.

Here began the oddity. This mannish fat woman read their thought. Her face remained severe: only her eyes emitted a bold unwinking humor.

“Your servant is not of that foundling factory. My name, Ching Wun. Homeless. I come from far.”

At one view she seemed round as a barrel, at another square as a bale, at another all width and flatness; and the more you looked, the more you felt her size expand, greaten, harden from obesity to brawn. Here stood a woman capable of anything. Rain bothered her not a whit, and might have been sun, for waiting in a downpour she glowed and steamed with health.

“Hola!” she continued. “What is here? A child. The Blue Girl? I have heard of you, playmate.”

Their daughter sprang up and ran to the door.

“Wild bird in a cage, blessing on you.”

From the cuff rolled back over a sleeve appeared the nun’s hand, big, and tawny as leather. It patted the girl’s head.

“Lend me this.”

“What?”

“Lend her to me,” repeated the strange woman. “You see, how she clings? We have known each other an age ago, this young spirit and my old what-you-may-call-it. Our eyes understand. Let me bring her up.”

Father and mother grew not only frightened, angry, but jealous; for here their little one hugged a dripping stranger with all her heart.

“Lend? To you? Our only child? Not for gold, not for the throne, Sister.”

The nun drew hand up sleeve again.

“It’s a wild spirit.” She laughed. “It may rob and kill, for you tame ones cannot rear that kind. Enough. Being refused, I leave. The Lord knoweth what a babe grows to.”

Gloom and a sheet of rain enveloped her. They heard her stick go tapping down the way. She had put nothing of theirs into her hamper, and forgotten to beg, except for what they could not give. Fear caught them in the dusk.

“Let me out!” The girl ramped up and down, crying bitterly. “Out! She is gone away. I shall never see her!”

The wanderer failed, indeed, to return. For weeks the man and his wife kept a vague dread of her, as often as rainy twilight reminded them; above all when their daughter, omitting to play in the sun, brooded like a visionary or watched both ends of the village lane for a coming footstep. In time, however, the episode began to lose all significance, then faded out of memory.

Life on their mountain was a slow, even, yet busy recurrence of days, where the gray or golden-brown huts perched under rock and tree, where every neighbor was of the one clan, with which all grew old happily. Change came but in weather, in work according to season, and in rare festivals that brightened the calendar; news not often, and if worth remark, always bad enough to make you bless the lack of it. Rumors climbed up, for example, from those unfortunate towns below.

“Of course,” agreed the elders. “What can you expect? Poor lowland wretches, breathing rank mist and night poison, they have not our long-life air of the hills.—But what is this fresh wrong they endure? Missing children, you say?”

Merchants who rode through in chairs or on pony-back, tired coolies who sank down for a gulp of tea, made the same reply.

“Missing children.”

“But how missed?”

“No man knows how. Children vanish, one here, one there. Your babe or mine as it might be, sir, eats his morning rice, laughs, runs out at door, and—never comes home. Never. Gone, sir, in a wink. Lost.”

“Horrible,” said the kinsmen. “A lost child? How heart-breaking!”

When villages like their own, hidden over a spur or down a gorge, but near by, sent a report of little ones going into thin air, house after house caught the alarm. Here came evil spreading upward, a new pestilence.

“What shall we do? What cure?” asked many a mother. “Fiends are abroad. None can see, none hear them. To prayer, to prayer! It creeps toward us, this fright, in broad day.”

Everyone took heart when a wild fellow running down from a charcoal camp brought in the tremendous history of the tiger.

“We saw him!” panted Smutface of the Kiln. “A tiger, great as a mule! He went bounding higher than your eaves, and glowing like a butterfly! The ancestor of all tigers!”

“Good, good,” muttered their chief grandsire. “We know him, now. If tigers can eat children, grown men can eat tigers. Go, you and you and you, get the spear in hand. Our devil was nothing but a bloated cat, eh? To him, cousins. And keep our children at home, close, till further order.”

By day the clan guarded the village, before nightfall they shut every house up. From all over the range, hunters chosen for their skill and daring took to the woods, clambered the rocks, crawled into dark subterranean holes, dug pits, built dead-falls, log-traps, and spear-point snares. They coursed and quartered the mountain like a pack of dogs, worked like heroes, but caught no tiger. At home the children lived in a fearful joy of expectation; yet when a week passed, a fortnight, a third week, their confinement grew irksome.

“I don’t believe that charcoal burner,” declared the more restless. “He saw nothing at all.”

About noon of a glorious, warm day, the Blue Girl sat thinking so, in her door. She was now ten years old, more lively than ever, and suffered this quarantine as though each hour of it were torment. Her father had gone some errand, her mother to a cupboard in the next room.

“If only those men would kill the tiger,” she complained to herself. “We’re all in prison. I can’t bear it.”

The street lay empty but for a guard squatting half awake under the huge pistachio tree, and for a man who came lazily, with head bent sidewise, fanning his throat.

“You are sad, little one?” The man halted, and smiled. A stranger, he appeared amiable. “It is wrong to be sad, when so young and beautiful.”

He praised the weather, folded and tucked away his fan, cast an approving glance into the room behind her, then smiled again. Well built, neatly dressed, he had a bland face, very winning eyes, and a gentle turn of speech.

“Here,” said he, “is what may sweeten the affair.”

He gave her a thick lump of candied melon-rind, fresh and crisp.

“I know your father well, my dear. What is your grief?”

“Nothing, thank you, uncle. You are most kind, your melon is heavenly. A stupid girl was fretting because the tiger keeps us penned in.”

The man laughed.

“That famous tiger? Dear child, set your mind at ease. The tiger’s gone, long, and far away. They saw him nine days ago on the west mountain beyond the other valley, and are chasing him. So fear no more, and run about.”

She jumped up, to duck him a little bow of gratitude.

“You remind me,” said her charmer, her bringer of glad tidings. “Do you know the bird’s nest, under your house here, that has five baby birds hugging one another? They open their mouths to beg food, and let you look right down their throats, which are redder than strawberries bitten in two. Young palpitating mites they are, not fledged. Great fun. Come see them gape red and hug in a bunch.”

She followed him to the corner of the house. Between it and the neighbor’s a path or narrow chute of broken rock dived among oak and chestnut that slanted billowy, top under green top, forest leaves cascading down the ravine.

“My mother?”

“Oh, true.” He lowered her gently into the path. “Wait. I’ll go back and ask whether you may or not.”

Up round the corner he climbed. If he and mother were talking by the front door, she could not hear them. But in a moment he returned, broadly cheerful, slid past, and beckoned her downward.

“All right. Mother said Yes. Come on.”

It was pleasant to be free again, to climb below the houses, and to go plunging deeper and deeper down a cool green shade. Their rocky stairway dropped into a path, more or less well-beaten, which descended toward the left, and on which her companion began striding briskly. He fanned himself as he went. After him she trotted, asking a hundred questions.

“Not so loud,” he warned her. “Sink your voice.”

“We must not frighten our birds?”

“That is it.” He smiled back at her. “You are clever, little one.”

The path went winding down through leaves, branches, rocks, led them zig-zag through a steep grove of pines, and then among old camphor trees dense with lighter foliage. Threading a lonely hollow, they waded in blue salvia. The flowers, the profusion of color, gave her great joy but almost as much alarm. She had never seen this fairy place before.

“Are we going right?”

“Only a dozen steps more, now.” The man gave her another crinkled slab of melon candy. “By the time you have eaten that, we shall find the nest.”

Half-way down a glen smothered in bamboo, where the green trunks made bewildering pointed arches that opened every way to close and tangle, she grew frightened.

“Let us go back. It is too empty, uncle. You said our birds were below the house.”

Her guide halted, and turning, cast down at her an odd look. There was mirth in it, but nothing friendly.

“True. Well below the house.”

“Where are we?” she cried. “I must go home!”

“Must you?”

The child shrank away and screamed. He caught her fiercely in his arms, choked her throat, and at top speed ran with her down the ravine. Kicking, biting, scratching, she felt the man’s power grip her like nightmare. Bamboo switched their faces, then camphor leaves, then brush, undergrowth, flowers, and brambles while the runner went crashing down, jumping from rock to rock. Gravel slid and clattered away. Light blazed through her tears.

“Got one,” he grunted. “Wake up there, be alive!”

They stood in full sunlight by water, a narrow clear green water that reflected the branches and vines drooping into it, the iron-red cliffs impending like fantastic ruined walls. Underfoot lay a small open boat, old, greasy, dark-brown, from the gunwale of which a dark-brown man, naked to his loincloth, sat upright with a jerk and grinned. He had an ugly, pock-pitted countenance.

“A good catch,” he grunted. “Luck, this time. A pretty one.”

“Ai-yah!” Her captor jumped on board. “She is stronger than a devil.”

When they had pushed into mid-river, he let go her throat.

“Yell now, brat, if you dare.”

She sank before him, kneeling.

“I will not go! I will not! My father, my mother . . . Take me home!”

How could she have thought this liar’s broad pale face to be kindly, or the smile in his eyes anything but fraud? He tilted his fan for a sunshade, and mocked her.

“Help me, help me!”

“Oh yes, help you.”

He struck her across the mouth so hard that she fell flat. Up-stream hurried the boat, quivering to the sweep of the paddle. Cowed by the blow, the first ever dealt her, faint with heat which the gunwales confined like an oven, she lay sobbing and wiped off blood from her lips.

“A handsome one.” The boatman laughed as he paddled. “A beauty. Trade is looking up. The Master who bites the clouds at Wind-Weary Notch will be pleased.”

All afternoon their journey continued on still green water, through gorges of hanging forest and rock. The two men chatted in a private undertone, with many words of slang or of doubtful sense, though there was nothing on the river but now and then wild ducks that scuttered from view. At sunset the boat rounded a sharp woodland promontory, and gliding to the opposite bend among alders, grated its bow on shore.

“Up with you!”

Her enemy snatched the girl, jumped out, and half carrying, half dragging her under branches, came headlong into an open place, a nook between river and mountain. The tumbledown spectre of a house gaped here among wild shrubbery. This hovel he entered, and dumped her on the weeds of the floor.

“Stay there,” he ordered, “and be quiet, or I kill you.”

An afterglow of sunset pierced the ruin with orange fire. It was a habitation, the girl knew, for cannibals and ghouls and unholy ones of the night who make medicine from babies’ eyes.

“Let me go!”

She bounded up, screaming, and when this ghoul drove her back from the doorway, ran screaming round the room. He gave chase, knocked her down with blow on blow, pummelled her into a corner, and began kicking her head against the wall. Pain and terror were the last things to swim away.

“What child?”

In a dullness of the same pain and terror she woke—or had a feverish dream that she woke—to hear a loud voice and behold the room darkening, the orange fire gone.

“What child is that who suffers?”

The broken doorway contained a figure, black on early twilight: a squat, broad figure, with great sleeves hanging loose, and a puckered skull-cap on its head, which bent inward as though to peer and hearken.

“My own,” replied the voice of that man, the ghoul. He stood near, and sounded gruff. “My own child, a bad girl whom I had to reprove. Be off with you, sir. It is fulfilled so of evil, our part of the woods here, that strangers who have circumspection walk by nimbly toward their own affairs.”

The figure at the door laughed, and walked right in.

“I am no sir, but a woman,” it said. “All our world, Wise Elder Brother, so abounds with multifarious gewgaws of evil that I fear nothing any more except to grow like them. Or to acquiesce. Therefore let a weakling of the Ni Ku, if she may, correct for you this wanton child who lolls her head on the downy magnificence of your floor.”

The man strode forward.

“Bah!” said he. “One of the Three Aunts. A fat nun, crammed with the food of the poor.—Come, enough gabble. On your way!”

The bulky woman did not stir.

“After I examine the child.”

Their adversary bristled in a rage.

“You East-West!” he cried. “Outdoors, and leg it, you Mountain Cow!”

“A petty error,” sighed the nun, “yet error it is, to speak like those whose grandparents have neglected the strain in breeding.”

The fellow hit, with all his might, at her face. Though hardly appearing to move, it was not there, but elsewhere, and beamed as placid as ever. Out from her gulf of sleeve shot an arm larger and darker than a smoked ham, which made one reply, with a crack. The kidnapper’s chin flew round to his shoulder as on a pivot; he stood wavering, mouth open, eyes glazed; then joint by joint he limbered himself down like a folding-rule, and lay on the indoor weeds.

“Well,” sighed the nun, “so far so good. Any more?”

Two more leaped in, shouting—the boatman and a lanky giant with a cudgel. As they came, they struck. She put out one finger, blunt as the butt-end of a yam, and lungeing twice, pegged first the boatman then his mate plumb between the eyes. With a howl, each rascal clapped his hands over the spot, and turned, and ran staggering into the twilight. Long afterward they swore that an ogress drove an iron bolt clean through their brains, leaving a hole which, though invisible, ached for many a day.

“And so good evening,” chuckled the Sister. “Now, pet bird—Why, it’s my little Blue Girl? The pattern of our life is woven together. I thought so, when we met and you ran toward me in the rain. Ah, poor battered head!”

If this were not all dream in sickness, the Blue Girl felt herself raised, comforted, and borne away. Mighty arms carried her as on a floating bed; whispers, kindly nonsense, inveigled her to think no more, to cease from wonder and fear, to let pain grow dim like every shadow of earth, like this rapid, easy motion where black leaves went winging by and a thousand stars melted into sleep.

II.

Daylight woke her. It was the early sun, inclining through an open door and across a bare white room. She lay in bed. Her first waking breath came cool with the fragrance of waterlilies. Remote, confined, mellow, a gong boomed one stroke that passed throbbing on still air.

The girl sat up.

“Father, mother?”

Her head was not giddy now, but sore to the touch, even through bandage wound like a turban.

“They are both well. Sleep again.”

Squatting on the ground by the door a black bundle of cloth made this reply, and lifted a human face, a wide, calm face that beamed in the sun. It was the fat woman of last night’s dream who spoke. Her hands moved quickly, threading or plaiting golden bamboo fibre across a round frame, a sieve or tray for the winnowing of tea.

“Go on,” she advised, “with your nap.”

The girl watched her for a time.

“Noble Aunt, where are we?”

“Where?” The nun bit off a thread of bamboo as if her teeth were wire-nippers. “Lotus Pond Abbey.”

“How came I here?”

“My arms brought you,” grunted the weaver. “All night, at a quick trot. And you are solid, blue bird.”

“May one go home?”

The busy brown hands kept on working. Out of bed jumped the girl, to cross a floor which became tottery, and sit on the ground.

“May we go home, Aunt?”

“Hush, dear. Lean your back against my wall, and enjoy morning.”

High jagged hills, pinnacles of cypress and tallow-tree, bosoms of clearing dotted vineyard-like with tea-shrub, drew a ring close round a little green valley or basin, brim-full with sunshine. Here at the bottom of it, huddling as if to warm their aged stone, a gray dwarfish temple and low gray buildings formed three sides of a quadrangle. Water lay on the fourth side,—an oblong pond where scallops of mirrored light shone among lily-pads.

“You cannot doze here?” From her winnowing tray the sister looked up, now and again, watchful. “You cannot absorb the quiet?”

There was no sound unless a rumor of the temple gong, humming like a brazen bee in a cavern. Bright with sun among flower beds, dark with massive trees, the quadrangle held not a human figure, not a movement except the wavering of butterflies. Nun and girl sat alone by their door, the door of a stone hut which lay somewhat removed, near the pond. Lilies, rose-pink or white as clotted snow adrift on water, gave out a cool purity sweetening all, withdrawing, on some unfelt breath of air.

“It is peace. But it is not home.”

The stout woman laughed.

“Aha, my tiny blue parrot,” she said, “you would rather chatter than sleep? Well, have your way. But lean back and listen. My name is Ching Wun, and I speak the truth to you. The Lotus Pond Abbey is not my home, either, but one of many places where I sojourn by the way. A tea-buyer who left here at dawn to cross the mountains will tell your father and mother where we are. I could not send you with him, for he’s a five-pronged rascal. The country is disturbed, unsafe, darkened. As a poor follower of the Light in all darkness, I have certain steps to fumble after, to grope toward, and then to take with extreme care. These must come first, before anything else. In time I can bring you happily home. Not now, perhaps not for many days.” The nun dropped work to bend on her hearer a long, penetrating stare, which went through and beyond the nearness of their eyes. “Do you think, little soul, do you think you can believe an old wandering creature who fought over you last night?”

Without thinking, the girl knew once for all.

“I stay. Keep me, Enlightened One, for your daughter a while.”

Ching Wun’s face, broad, leather-brown, writhed for a moment like a hard man’s face weakening to cry. Then it smiled briefly, and grew composed.

“Enough, daughter. Come, tell me how the sons of darkness trapped you.”

Weaving, nipping off bamboo threads with her teeth, nodding, she heard all the tale of that liar and his melon candy.

“What?” she inquired. “His boatman talked of the Master doing what, where?”

“ ‘The Master who bites the clouds at Wind-Weary Notch will be pleased.’ The boatman talked so. I could not understand him.”

“But you remember it?” said Ching Wun. “You are sure, word for word? Then glory be where due for ever, but you own a good head, and you keep it even when clouted. Go on.”

At the end of the narrative, she made a comment.

“One step begins to grow clearer. With your help we shall take it.—Ah me, selfish old sinning woman, when you are not fed. I go cook.”

She jumped up, flung away her sieve, and ran indoors.

With this talk, a plain breakfast, a course of quiet healing,—for the nun, it seemed, was both fighter and medicine woman, who could not only crack heads but mend them—began very smoothly the career of the Blue Parrot. So everyone, from abbess down, called her. They were many, these long-coated, shaven sisters, many, and in a tranquil way busy, and not unkind to the girl. She seldom found the quadrangle bare of them again, except when rising at daylight she went with her novice’s broom to sweep the temple stair and the ground beneath a venerable tree. Without hurry, under no compulsion, she became a good weaver, a good seamstress, and a better cook of vegetables than her mother had been or any woman at home. On the steep hillside, high up that funnel at bottom of which the abbey lay like a toy village, she and the nuns climbed among dark evergreen shrubbery, from bush to bush of the well-ordered rows, picking tea, laughing, singing. Afterward an old woman taught her how to fire, and roll, and winnow the fragrant leaves.

Meantime Ching Wun came and went, vanished, reappeared at uncanny hours, yet had always great leisure for the instructing of her handmaid.

“Come, Blue Parrot.” She beckoned the way one morning to a level ground, hidden between blank wall and forest. “We take a lesson of our own.”

It was an odd lesson. The fat vagabond raised her hand, balancing a pair of chopsticks rather high, as if about to eat an imaginary morsel.

“Attend.”

Overhead sailed one of the many butterflies. After it she ran, sprang like a bounding bear, plucked once, and came to earth lightly. It was an absurd gambol, yet a wonder; for there she had the butterfly, caught between her chopsticks.

“Unharmed. Never hurt them, dear.”

On her palm she let the butterfly rest with wings folded, then threw it in air, to go deviating at liberty, none the worse.

“Can you do that?”

She handed the girl her chopsticks. They were not of black wood, but of iron, two heavy little wands.

“Oh, no, Aunt! It is magic!”

“It is control,” replied Ching Wun. “A true eye, a strong, quick, delicate hand; these you are to have, and you shall. The body is but a horse, an idle sulking brute, which the spirit rides. You must learn to ride, to control.—No, no, wait, you do not begin by mashing our butterflies. There will be hard practice before you can toss a green leaf up and catch it without bruising.”

Hard practice indeed was this game of iron chopsticks daily, hour after hour, as aching in all her bones Blue Parrot worked for a trainer whom she could not satisfy, who drove her to repeat the first and dullest movement with fingers or toes, and who cavilled at a hair’s breadth of misplay. She had not even caught a falling leaf, or been allowed to try, when suddenly came reward.

“You have the gift, little daughter,” said the nun, as they drank tea beside their door one evening, “and you have patience. The time is near when an old fool may show you why we drudge at our foolery. But now go in, to sleep. I will wash the bowls. Quick, pop into bed as you are.”

Hardly a breathing-time afterward, so the girl thought, she woke and felt a hand withdraw from her forehead. The room was dark.

“Up,” said a whisper. “Come.”

It moved away. She rose, followed, and outdoors by starlight overtook the great shadow of Ching Wun, waiting with hamper on back and staff in hand. A chill and a forlorn sense of late hours haunted the air. Fog reared ghostly above the pool. Shadows together, woman and child hurried across the courtyard; avoided the temple where a solitary night-lamp stirred a haze of gilding and darkness within; avoided the skeleton barricade where dryers of tea had left their bamboo trellises; and so on higher ground entered a ravine like a pit yawning. Up this the nun clambered without a word, a pause for breath, or so much as a click of her staff. Blue Parrot kept at heel by eyesight only, watching a gross blur that now melted into rock or tree, now heaved unshapen toward the stars.

By hill-top, connecting ridge, abrupt descent to the foot of harder and rougher climbing again, their journey continued for what may have been half a night. Dawn overtook them in a grove of oil firs.

“Here.” Ching Wun left the path, and dodged into a hollow, a den among rock and brush where the firs grew thickest. “We go to bed.”

Unbinding her hamper, she drew from it a wadded quilt.

“We sleep on evergreen.”

They did so, bundled together. When Blue Parrot woke, noon sunlight and a warm savor of balsam filled the grove.

“Mark now,” advised her companion, as they ate from a wallet. “Remember. Night marching while other folk dream has great virtue: they whom you leave behind cannot tell where you go, they whom you seek cannot tell whence you come. A great and two-fold blessing, in my work.”

“What may be your heaven-directed work sometimes, Reverend Lady of Peace?”

“Oho!” cried the sister. “Wait a bit, sugar-tongue. You’ll know quick enough, this evening.”

All afternoon their path wound along mountainside. The day was clear and hot. They found the cover of walnut or of lance-leaved pine to be grateful, but more often toiled against a bare height of crag, their breath turning dizzy, their feet scorching, as if they walked on a brick oven. The peaks above, the narrow interfluent gorges choked by tree-tops below, had no sign that anything unquiet remained on earth but the rush of some stream like a sunken breeze. When the path began to drop, however, to lean far down with shadows pouring athwart and rays of green-gold mist deepening and dissolving the woods, fragment after fragment of habitation caught the eye,—a road that hooked round granite, a sagging bridge, claw-marks hoed on a wild farm, and tatters of thatch among foliage.

“Now,” grunted Ching Wun, “it is near. We rest before battle.”

They halted, sat, and fed in a thicket of azalea, overlooking roofs, nine or ten huts dribbled where a pass like the cut of an axe nicked the mountains. Beyond this nick, sunset glorified a country descending in waves to a remote level green as meadow; sunset painted with airy color an old town cocking on a hill not far below in the vista.

“Wind-Weary Notch. For a long, long time I never could find it, because the name is not a true name, but thieves’ jabbering.”

“And the Master? What is he?”

“One whom we shall reason with to-night. Are you afraid?”

“No,” said Blue Parrot; then to be truthful, added—“Not with you.”

The nun, taking from a soapstone vial a pinch of herb snuff, doubled her brawny legs to sit cushioned on them like a graven image. Her face wore its oddest look, a wide benignance covering hard humor.

“He may find our mode of reason too strict.”

The azaleas began to darken with twilight.

“This will do,” murmured Ching Wun, and rose. “Late enough.”

Down a bank of briar and fern they crept into the village. It was altogether silent, every hut as though asleep or dead or long abandoned. The Wind-Weary Notch contained in its gloom neither voice nor footstep, only a hollow sigh of warm air drawing through. Ching Wun led the way, bobbed round the corner of a house, and at a door beneath which glimmered a faint strip of light, caught the girl’s hand, and waited there stock-still.

After a time they heard a rustle and a change within; a clink of brass, dull strokes which might have been a cracked bell failing to ring, and at which as at a happy omen Ching Wun gave a nod and a squeeze of the hand; then after more silence, a languid voice droning words that remained inarticulate.

“Very well,” came an answer. “To-morrow.”

The door opened. A man stepped out, and closed it behind him. Moving away, he encountered that broad obstacle, the nun.

“Who are you?” His growl was both angry and alarmed. “What do you want here?”

“To congratulate the Master. I’ve brought him a good catch,—this young prize in blue, as lovely as Yang Kuei-fei.”

The man, who was tall, bent and peered at them.

“You’re not of us. An Old Wife? No, a Shave-head, meddling here?—You won’t meddle twice!”

His hand flew toward the hilt of a knife, which it never got. Ching Wun’s hand, flat open, dealt him a terrific blow near the base of the neck. He leaned backward all of a piece against the wall, upright, his chin aloft.

“The first paralyses, you now observe. The second kills.” Ching Wun threw his knife over the house, away up the fern bank. “Tell me, sir, what you have reported to the Master this evening. No? Shall I strike again? The second kills.”

He whimpered, with long-drawn croupy noises.

“Wait till you can swallow,” advised the nun. “So. Now report.”

Her hand rose in air like a hatchet ready to chop.

“Only one boy.” He gabbled, hoarse and sick. “One boy. We left him—in the hole of Black Mountain—seven li from here—outside the Notch on your right—just before the salt smugglers’ way goes through Brook Tunnel. One boy is all.—My throat, my throat! Let me go, Great Champion!”

Taking him by an ear, she removed him from the wall as one peels off a placard.

“Away then, sir. The next time you meet a child, run for your life.”

Somewhere down the darkness of the notch, her victim cleared his wind-pipe enough to go railing.

“You mud worm, you sow, let our trade alone! You Lu Fung, you ugly ancient evil odor!”

“Thank you very much,” called the nun. “Gentle stranger, your lightest word is a command.”

She patted the girl’s hair, and for a moment stood shaking with jollity. Then, quiet and active, she waddled nearer the door to give it a push.

“Tight. But no matter.”

A dark oblong of window patched the house-front, overhead. Ching Wun sprang from tiptoe, caught the ledge, went up like a spider, and butted with her head. Two leaves of wooden shutter flew apart. Through the lighted opening her body stuffed itself, her head and arms hung down.

“Reach and take my hands.”

Blue Parrot, obeying, soared over the window ledge. Except for that bump of head on wood, their entrance made no sound. They were in a doleful room where a lamp guttered beside a bed, and soft, sweetish fumes wreathed like miasma. On the bed lay a man who crooned and muttered, either not knowing that anyone had broken in or not caring. By and by he rolled on his pillow, thrust forward one hand with an opium pipe, and knocked ashes into a brass bowl, which gave the same flat ringing note as before.

“Ai-yah!” he yawned. “Fill, and fill, and fill another.”

Ching Wun walked straight to the foot of his bed.

“You bite the clouds this evening, Master?”

He twirled a shaking bead of opium to roast and sputter above the lamp.

“I nibble,” he mused, as if alone. “I nibble them, I nibble. Eh, heh, very good. Yes, I nibble the clouds of glory.”

His answer made him recall, perhaps, that there had been a question. He drooped again on the bed, to stare vaguely round,—a dry little old reprobate with taut skin glazed over the bones of his face. When that roving look discovered her, a black phantom square across the bed-foot, he came to life. It was a shocking resurrection, the cold, keen, wicked blaze of intelligence in this mummy’s eyes.

“You appear late,” said he. “Robbers? If you come to carry off my goods, I have none.”

“To carry off you,” replied the fat nun, cheerily. “And you know why, Master Baby-Snatch.”

The smoker whirled out of bed, and launched his pipe at her face like a dart. She moved hardly at all, yet enough. As it flew by, an awful hand gave him the very chop which had stunned his fellow.

“Undo the door, my child. Run out, please, and fetch the back-hamper.”

With joy Blue Parrot skipped on this errand, wondering what her magnificent companion would do next, hoping it might be to cram the old man double down their basket. When she returned, however, Ching Wun had him bound with cord from heel to shoulder, and was laying him a long stiff parcel, on the bed.

“Thank you, dear. Shame to hit such a runt; but though puny, he is king of the vile. Now fasten door and window for me. That’s very nice.”

Ransacking her hamper while she talked, the nun dragged from it a cheap account book, a worn-out crumb or nubble of ink-slab, and a frowsy brush. Near the lamp on the table she arranged all these, then drew a chair and planted herself, waggling to make proof the chair could maintain her.

“Here comes the hard lug,” she groaned. “I do hate writing.”

She sucked the brush to a point, frowned like a hobgoblin, scratched her head through the puckering-hole of her cap, and began work.

“To His Honor the magistrate in the town below. Damn this ink and this fool robber’s lamp. Oh, pardon, Lord of Light, an ignorant old woman cursing what she cannot do. Forget your ears, little maid.”

Muscular toil with many a grimace and puff did the deed. She rose from it weary. The written page, torn out, she folded into a narrow ribbon, and tucked it under the cords down her prisoner’s back, while he made no motion but that of breathing.

“Our worst job’s ended.” Ching Wun repacked her hamper, then shouldered it. “My arms are full—”

She picked up the smoker, dandled him like a baby, and grinning, blew out his lamp.

“Therefore you will carry my staff, won’t you? It leans round the corner. Good girl. Shut the door.”

After clinging sweetness of opium, air and starlight revived them with cool mountain purity. Downhill they trudged through the gap, and so beneath a wider firmament.

“He weighs less than you. How small a thing can be how evil!”

Without another word spoken they came at last into a town, a riddle of dark and stinking ways. There somebody, faint-hearted watchman or beggar, drew toward them and hailed:—

“Who so late?”

The sister went marching by.

“A widow,” she moaned, “with her poor son. Look out, he has the falling sickness, my friend, and may tear his own body or yours. Pray you keep clear.”

In the dirtiest lane of any, under a wall with tiled coping, she set her burden to ground.

“This, my sweetheart, is the jail.—Here, take off our basket. Hold the loose end of his cord; be ready, throw it up when I tell you.—Now to bite a piece out of the roof.”

So saying Ching Wun gathered low, ran, and fluttered to the high eaves like a bat. On the jail roof there sounded, presently, a hint of tiles clinking.

“Throw up my cord, brave one.”

Blue Parrot swung and let it fly toward the whisper.

“Well aimed.—The hole’s big enough for two of him. Back away now. I hoist.”

From the mud up the wall over the coping obscurely, jerked in a tight package the Master who bit the clouds.

Alone with starlight and a fearful odor, Blue Parrot hugged herself, waiting.

“Oho!” The nun dropped at her side. “He’s in, lowered away. Their roof won’t even drip, next rain. But what a surprise for the ungodly, to-morrow morning!”

III.

When the morrow morning broke, two dialogues far apart in space went on at the same time.

A worthy prefect, bored by the routine of a highland station, crawled from bed wrong foot foremost. He had been playing chess late with a companion and a jar of wine. Could not these barbarians let a man sleep?

“Urgent, Your Honor,” his major-domo persisted. “Urgent, horrid. An outbreak of devils.”

The water-lamp still burned. By its light the prefect huddled on his robe, then swept angrily to his office.

“What outbreak?”

Cringing, twittering, an old man with a vermilion hat bowed before him.

“Not quite, Excellency. Forgive me, but rather, to be precise, inbreak.”

His Excellency took the chair so hard that a pair of candle-flames bent down blue.

“It is an extraordinary hour, my dear sir; but if we are now both beginning the day, perhaps not too early to talk sense. You keep the town jail, do you not?”

“To the fag-end of a mean ability, I do, sir.”

“Proceed.”

The jailer bowed, coughed, stammered, and could not begin. Fear shook him like a palsy.

“How, how careful I am,” he at last groaned, “your omniscience is aware. My books also prove it. Fidelity, sleepless fidelity . . .”

“No doubt,” barked the prefect, “you have a hundred eyes without an eyelid. Be brief.”

“Excellence, hear me! What can the Five Unalterable Virtues do when a law of Nature is broken? Last night we counted every prisoner, made the jail more secure than a rock. The key hung at my side. This morning in the corridor we find a strange man lashed with cord, on the floor. One too many. Laid like an egg. Can a man dissolve through stone and mortar? Can a man bound helpless as a pig in a porter’s basket . . .”

“True, indeed. Very acute and searching. What did this miracle of yours offer in reply?”

“Nothing.”

“What does he want?”

“To be let out again.”

“My ingenious brother,” said the magistrate, grimly, “if you are diverting me with a winter’s tale—”

“No, no!” The warden wrung his hands. “In my distress I had forgotten. Down the man’s back was this label or ticket, which bears your venerable name.”

A narrow fold of paper, when undone, showed by candle-light as nothing more than a flimsy page torn from an account book, with writing down the pink-ruled columns.

“Illiterate.”

So affirmed the judge, with a smile; but he had not read far when the smile departed.

From a silent reading, the prefect leaned backward. Where one had shaken with fear of death, there now were two. The warden saw the eyes of greatness turn more haggard than his own.

“What did you with your—our new prisoner?”

“Chained him, sir.”

“Good. Well done.”

The paper, lighted at a candle, vanished in fire. The prefect’s hand was tremulous.

“Keep him so, my friend. I will put him to the question. And hark, friend.”

“Excellence?”

“Being a prompt, loyal officer, you must have care of your health. We can’t afford to lose you. Have a tender care of your health. Do not tax the vocal organs. You follow me?”

“Your most obsequious mute.”

“Black art and statecraft—I say no more. Will you call my clerk? Time presses, and there are many orders to give. I must have runners out on that Mountain by sunrise.”

Thus began an era long remembered in town and country; it brought ruin to a thriving trade, some woe-begone children home, various heads to earth in Execution Yard, and to a prefect whose energy all men had undervalued, great renown.

Over the hills and far away, at the same hour, another dialogue went on, but without fear and with much hilarity.

“What in the world makes you laugh so, my Parrot?”

“You, Aunt Mother. You are so great and comical. Greater than those who live in the story of old time.”

“Fie, honey-tongue!”

Like a black bear in a cotton robe, the nun sat on her haunches and waved her paw. She was fanning a heap of live coals. Dark blue dawn penetrated with mystery the fir wood, the hollow among balsam and rock, their former camp on high.

“Still flattering, when you have seen my job?”

“Oh, it was wonderful!”

“Not bad.”

The little fire shone ruby on a moonface and thick lips pouting to blow.

“Not bad for night-work.—When you make tea, dear, boil the water only so, to this moment when pearls weave up and joggle at you. Never spoil by over-doing.”

Ching Wun set the pot away to draw, then diced a cake of bean-curd in a skillet. The hiss and the hungry odor of good frying accompanied her talk.

“Wonder, you think? No, plain performance. Or to me, a fighting woman bred, an old vagrant rough-and-tumble, half outlaw, the wonder appears moderate. Our art has only a threefold root:—purpose, or clear conscience; training; and knowledge of the weak part, where to strike, how easily, for what hard effect. A wicker nose-ring leads a buffalo. That’s all. As with tea, never spoil by over-doing.—Ho, ho, sweetheart, the cook babbles!”

“And I,” cried Blue Parrot, “do love to hear her! Your wisdom opens a door into the world. Tell me, tell me, can you take a weakling through it, O subtle champion, to go with you for ever?”

“Hmm,” said the cook. “It smells done. Let’s eat.”

Their fire shrank, an ember; the strange blue darkness among the firs waned into common dusk; and before they drank the hot brew flavored with ginger, and ate their bean-cake dice, all round them a stir, a change, a solemnity of difference came wakening the mountains.

“For ever, no, I cannot take you so far,” replied Ching Wun at last. “But part way, I can. We shall not clip off this pretty hair, to make you a dismal old thing like me, everybody’s aunt, nobody’s. Will you come with me to Lotus Pond, and when you have caught your butterfly with the iron chopsticks, learn all our ancient method? Or go home with me to your own father and mother? Choose now.”

For a time Blue Parrot remained still; then she began to sway back and forth, crying.

“Woe on this hour! A bitter choice!”

The nun laughed.

“There spoke your true heart,” she answered. “Little maid, father and mother have given me word. You may stay if you like.”

Uncovering her head, the girl sat in a kind of glory, a nimbus, all rapture and tears.

“Ah?” Ching Wun’s leathery face betrayed nothing. “The right ones never choose; they are chosen.”

In the fir boughs a peephole showed morning vapor welling milk-white from a chasm, rising thin and luminous toward a western peak that floated bright above sunrise.

“To have got our small boy in his cave—Bah, no. Can’t do everything. He’s all right by now.” Sister Ching Wun admired the mountain top. “Well, novice, loving this great bag of misery, the world, you may do for it—What not, who knows? Come; under my wing, chicken.”

They rolled their quilt round them, and with it, like a charm, the sleep of tired hunters.

IV.

Their life together was happy. The bare chronicle, without those legends which confuse or adorn it, might pack a volume. Their wanderings took them far afield, to city and wilderness, plain, highland, wheel-worn cañons of yellow dust, wet fever-swamps, mountain temples, murderous inns kept by broken hireling fighters, nunneries, fishermen’s huts by a lake broad as the sky and terrible at night with historic phantoms walking the water. In all places, or on the road, Ching Wun let never a day go without instruction. Every weapon, its fair handling, its foul play; every trick in boxing and wrestling; what herbs to gather, how to decoct them, how to make salves, potions, liniments, and five-thousand-year drugs like the Horse Sweat, ephedrine: these and more kinds of knowledge our fat nun taught her Blue Parrot.

“The time has gone like a day.”

So with heavy hearts they agreed at the end. This came on a warm afternoon, as the pair halted in steep forest.

“I cannot bear to leave you, mother. Come up with me.”

Ching Wun tried to smile, but made a queer mask of it, and wagged her head. The girl entreating her was now a young woman of seventeen, upright, slender, with dark yet clear beauty enhanced by thoughtful eyes.

“No, not now. Your true mother who is waiting just above, has reckoned it to be more than one day, I’ll warrant. We part here.”

Under the trees roundabout shone blue salvia.

“On the very path where Melon-Candy stole you. A bad piece of work for his neckbone. Humph!—Now that you’re home again, don’t forget me.”

While talking or grumbling, the sister pulled from beneath her coat a long flat scabbard of brown leather, brass-mounted, with a hilt of polished hardwood and of brass gleaming at the upper end.

“My daughter in the spirit.” Roughly, awkwardly, with eyes averted, she made her gift, drawing half-way a short sword, two-edged, brighter than silver, then running it home down the scabbard with a click. “Take this: an old hero’s weapon, its name is the Last Word. I’ve had the thing all my life, but never used it, never killed a mouse. You’ve learned what little I know. You’re very strong, quick as a Lion Dancer, and accurate; but you haven’t got my weight. Ho, hardly! So in a fight, never you press, but yield, give ground, and time your return stroke, dear.—Enough. Perhaps we meet again, perhaps not, for I grow old. Be a good girl, a faithful champion, help the poor and the little people. Daughter of Ching Wun the childless, you will keep my name for ever in this world.”

She tried to laugh, but could not; then turned or wrenched herself away, and went down the mountainside, trotting like a black bear with a hamper on its back. Twice the girl called after her. She neither paused nor gave sign of hearing. The trees hid her, below.

“Must all good things vanish?”

With sword tucked under arm, Blue Parrot, grieving, doubting the future, began to climb. Up the ravine of oak and chestnut, up the hot, crooked path of broken stone, between her father’s house and the neighbor’s, into the village lane she mounted as into an age gone by. Except that the trees were higher and broader, nothing had changed. There was the door, open, where a moment ago she had sat longing to run and play.

“Inside Benevolence?”

No one came. Dizzy with the beating of her heart, she waited.

“Who—?”

Her mother was in the door, her father behind, both staring. How little they were, how shrunken; yet how strangely unaltered, but for a few gray hairs.

Her mother put forth one hand, trembled, and gave a squeak.

“The color! The color of your dress!”

They caught hold, clung, cried and laughed, while father edged round them putting words in.

“What, what? Where have you been? A great girl you are!”

They had hardly remembered their manners, the decorum between age and youth, when every soul in the village crowded the room, rejoicing, wondering, bawling questions, conjobbling; and as all were kinsmen of one old family, all must remain till far into the night, keep up their friendly hubbub, and through its great noise try to gather what this young scandal of a cousin might be telling.

“Our generations,” remarked the head of the clan, while they argued their way home under the stars, “our generations are not in vain. They have flowered.”

The oldest and the quietest, he had a way of being heard.

“Travellers’ tales? That girl, you mean, is a liar?” The chief pulled his moustaches-down, and gave a dry cough. “My dear nephew, do not take a running jump at the chance to be a fool. Her face, her voice, declare the modesty of truth. She may bring us renown. So be careful, my lad, for the toadstool at home need not scorn the wild rose in a forest.”

V.

As time went, the villagers found not so much fault with their changeling. Everyone for months, of course, talked about her and spied on her least movement; because your one way—so wrote a master who lived in the White Deer Valley, or if not he, another—your one way to stop men and women from talking of your deed, is not to do it; and even that may fail. Soon, however, they grew to like this Blue Girl Runaway.

“She is fun,” reported the children. “She knows how many games!”

“Well bred after all,” said old people. “Considerate.”

By and by the rest agreed.

“She put on few airs. We saw little harm in her. Quite like one of us.”

Whatever difference the Blue Girl felt, she spoke of none. Their kindly mountain life, bygone tricks of speech, odd gaiety, odd solemnity, their quarrels picked on the tenth of a straw, their loyal patience toward a neighbor till death and beyond, moved not only her heart but the deep forgotten roots of childhood. To love them was to laugh over them in secret. While doing housework, tending father and mother, she often bent behind a cupboard door until she could lift out a straight face.

“You’re a tidy cook enough,” complained mother. “Too fine, taught by those who worship the Belly God.”

Father made less objection to that, though he did say:—

“What boy dare look at you now? I can’t lug half your load. Proud muscle. You a woman? You’re tough as a highway quarterstaff bravo.”

It seemed a pity, but it was true, that Nature pricked them on to be jealous of her old fat nun. The foible might have saddened or vexed her, had she not put all such things lightly away, and without effort, by good humor and affection, kept the tenor of home peaceful.

The ill news, one morning, broke their peace. It came from down country, below. A cousin whom they had never seen, a bland little townsman with an air of polish like lacquer, humbled himself and filled the room with propitiation.

“If you forgive a bringer of sorrow,” he concluded, “the household of Ngan Si may take comfort.”

At this, mother turned pale, for Ngan Si was her favorite brother.

“What, sir?” she cried. “Is he dead?”

Their cousin made a long, polite speech amounting to Yes. In time they got the facts from him.

A merchant of high repute, Ngan Si had gone by some lonely mountain road to collect a few debts, and had never come home. His partner in the shop, waiting four days and growing alarmed, had sent out friends to hunt for him. They found in a path his body sprawling; thirsty hornets forming on his bosom a patch like rough brass; and lying along by his ankle, the knife which had been used. A pair of belt-purses, full, not even unbuttoned, hung in place right and left.

“What?” exclaimed father. “You believe that? Robbers who kill but who take nothing?”

“It is all true,” said the cousin. “And all we know as yet.”

In a passion which was now grief, now fury, mother would hear no more.

“I go to see him,” she raged. “What have they done, the liars and devils of your abomination below there? My brother is not dead. I will see! Girl, make ready. We go, you and I.”

Downward among lower hills the day’s journey brought them—a weary little woman grasping her tall daughter’s arm, and crying—into the darkness of the town. Their cousin had not lied. At the door of Ngan Si’s house gleamed the two lanterns, white, inscribed with blue, of mourning; and when the travellers had entered, there by candle-light stood his coffin, there on the floor drooped widow and children, bundles of woe in sack-cloth. This was no hour for questioning. Mother sat down to lament.

On the next day uncle’s partner, a kindly, shrewd old soul, gave them what knowledge he had.

“Our affair, madam,” said he, “is not simple. That knife which we picked up bore a name,—the trademark of the smith or cutler who fashioned it. His Honor the judge took the knife back to him. The smith, examining his book, found that he had made the knife to a man’s order, half a year ago. The man’s face he could not remember, but his book showed the name, Ao Jun Yuen. Extraordinary, madam, incredible: for Ao Jun Yuen is the most harmless fellow breathing, a schoolteacher, mild as a babe. He lies now in prison, half dead with terror, but swears that he never heard of any knife. Meanwhile His Honor the judge keeps an open mind, and—deliberates.”

Mother had wiped her eyes and grown quiet. She now spoke. Being mountain-bred, she let go a free tongue.

“So the old fool does nothing?” She whipped about, faced her daughter, and began to scold. “You! Why don’t you open your head? Mum as an image. If your bald-headed she vagabond taught you such wonders of magic, you might perform a trick or so here, to find out how your uncle was killed, you great stupid, strapping wench. But nobody cares. Oh my poor brother, nobody!”

Stupid—thought uncle’s partner—was a wild word to throw at this girl in blue. Her eyes, meeting his own, flashed a clear signal of pity, humor, intelligence.

“I’ll try, mother, if you like.”

She made this offer prettily, modestly. The old man, whose wits many a year of trading had sharpened, felt as it were beneath her calm a touch and go of hidden delight.

“Had anyone cause, do you know, sir, to hate my uncle?”

“No, child. On the contrary, he was beloved. Our whole town takes it as an outrage.”

“Did the smith who made this knife, see the prisoner?”

“Ah, yes, I forgot.—Both men declared they had never set eyes on each other before.”

The girl mused.

“If your experience will grant a little more aid, sir,” she ventured, “is it singular or not, that an enemy so careful to take nothing away, not even a purse of money, should be so careless to leave anything behind?”

The old merchant approved, with a nod.

“Charming,” he thought, “charming.” Aloud, he made answer:—“You go very neatly, my dear, to the point.”

In silence, with a bow, she thanked him.

“How sweet,” grumbled mother. “Talk, talk, compliments, chopping the wind. Why not act, why not do?”

Uncle’s partner smiled.

“Leave this young woman here, madam,” he advised. “My son will take you home when you go. Give her time. The catcher of the Green Snake does not run his arm down the first hole.”

Thus recommending caution, he little knew how a fat nun taught her disciple.

With twilight that evening a river fog crept in to muffle the town, to perplex each crooked gallery of street, to blot out the sign-tablets hanging overhead, to thicken, pour, and rise in cold smoke. Gable ends came jutting at you like horned phantoms. The darkness pattered and whispered. The drip from the eaves made an obscure plashing behind, alongside, and before, as of a thing with wet bare feet lurking past you against the wall. It was a good night for water fiends to crawl on shore. Indeed, a stranger out late and bewildered, saw one take human shape, fly from the ground to a roof, and there dissolve in mist. It was a good night for men, real men who had never been drowned, to lie snug in bed.

So the warder of the prison had thought, drowsing by his lamp. He woke somewhere after midnight. An incubus had him by the throat, weighing him down helpless, choking him.

“Where is Ao Jun Yuen, the schoolmaster?”

The incubus let go his throat, but pinned his hands. It had the likeness of a man in black, a slender man—made of iron, by the feeling of it—with a blood-red mask over its face. Through holes in the mask, a pair of eyes like black fire burned all his will to nothing.

“Up. Show me his room. The schoolmaster, where is he?”

Those eyes, and the grip of those hands, were supernatural. The warder could think of nothing but to do as he was bid. In silence and fear he tumbled out, got his keys, and led the way. No doubt there was a charm laid, for he never knew the prison to be so still. Down the corridors floated mist. The water-lamp quaking in his hand wore a dim fungous halo.

“Here is the room, Dread Power.”

“Unlock it.”

He obeyed.

“That next room, with door open, is empty?”

“It is.”

“Give me keys and lamp. No noise. Not a word.”

The nightmare shoved him into the vacant room. He heard the bolt click after him, then waited, alone, more and more frightened by the dark.

In chains and rags Ao Jun Yuen, a loose little heap of misery, began to toss and twitch as the lamp drew near. Filthy, unshaven, blubbered with woe, he did not have the air of a man strong enough or bad enough to hurt living creature. His face was meek, tired. Waking, he stared like a child in a fever who cannot tell what has gone wrong, where the pain is worst.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said a voice. “I’m only a girl.”

The schoolmaster saw two nimble hands whip away something red; then a face, lovely and sparkling, boyish, roguish, full of high spirit, and yet as tender as that of a young goddess of mercy. It was floating toward him.

“You did not kill my uncle, did you? Of course not.”

She knelt beside the lamp on the floor. If this dream-lady were a fox, or a sending of the black art, she did not scare him. Her eyes appeared to emit light, rain influence, courage, health, belief.

“No, never.” Little Ow raised himself on one arm. “I never killed anybody.”

Opening a packet, she gave him food and a tiny brown earthen jar.

“Peck away,” she said, “and drink wine. We must be alive, sir.—Had any man a grudge to do you harm?”

The prisoner ate fiercely and took a brave pull at the jar.

“Your words,” he mumbled, “are dangerous.” But having gorged, and sunk into thought, he found that her eyes not only demanded the truth of him, but shed a clearness on it for the first time. He sat up, hauling his chain. “Why, how did you—There was, yes, there was a man! Tortoise-egg of a brain, I forgot! Danger or no danger, you shall hear, great lady. It must have been.”

He began slowly, with a timid glance round the room; then fixed his eyes on hers, and like a very dirty small boy confessing to a mother, unburdened.

“Yes. A rich man, Liu Buk Yun by name,” he whispered. “Rich, mighty, a vast coarse mouth devouring the poor. He, Liu Buk Yun, spied my daughter at a New Year’s play in the temple yard, and came to take her, buy her—my one child, my dearest—and give her to his son for a second or third wife, a by-play! No man walks our earth, I told him flat, who can take my daughter so. He went home snorting fire.”

The pedagogue in chains grew bolder as he talked.

“His boy, the rich man’s booby son, full grown, had encumbered my school but never worked out of infant class. And now one night when I was busy teaching, he would break into my house and carry my daughter off. He climbed a vine to her window. My plucky girl—she was alone, for her mother is no more—poked a bamboo right into his big chops, and cried ‘Thief!’ till neighbors came running. The spoilt booby let go his vine, fell, cracked an arm, a leg, and ribs. Men-servants carried him home, where, his blood being gutter-foul, he died. His father hauled me into court; but for once, a wonder, the judge was too honest or afraid of a howling scandal; so money could not win.—To-night I see, great lady, I see! Who got the knife made in secret? Liu Buk Yun. Who had my name written on the cutler’s page? Who hired the blow struck, a year later, on the anniversary, the day of his son’s death? Liu Buk Yun, and this time he will take my head.”

The young face of her who knelt there grew brighter, a heavenly comfort among shadows in limbo.

“Not this time, sir, nor ever. Keep your head, and now give it rest. You will bring many more budding souls to open like your own, fearless and true.”

Before dawn, a chief jailer numb with cold was lying in his bed again, watching a mystery that cowed him. The Dread Power in black held a brush, and wrote or painted on his wall.

“Work, signed.” It froze him with one look through the bloody mask. “Read there, by day. Let the schoolmaster go at liberty.”

It broke his lamp on the floor, creating darkness and utter silence.

Morning brought no interpretation.

“Was it a fiend, Excellency?”

The judge himself, though called in to rebuke underlings, and though he arrived angry, did little but pucker his mouth.

“Right over my bed, sir. Unheard of.”

On the masonry, depicted in three or four strokes but lifelike, its color drying, perked a blue parrot.

“Well, ah, not quite that,” amended the judge, in his tone of the roundest and weightiest. “Uncommon, we may say, not unheard of. I remember a colleague who, ah—In fine, there is or was a phenomenon, a Night-walker Through Walls, or absurdity of the kind. The brood may persist. But hold your tongue. By the by, did you say we had an actor, a shoemaker, no, a schoolmaster, in here? Yes. On the whole, yes. If the evidence was trifling, he might as well jog home to his, ha, elementary sing-song. He can’t be worth a great deal of our sleep.”

VI.

Bright and early in that morning her uncle’s partner found her at his door. She carried a parcel—of clothes belonging to his younger son—and thanked him demurely. That he did not ask her why she had borrowed them over-night, may go to the credit of a shop-keeper who was by nature most inquisitive.

“You extraordinary maid,” he thought, blinking affection. “You stealer of old hearts!”

Their talk, pleasant, random, led nowhere. Recalling it when she had gone, however, the merchant smacked his knee and began to laugh. This child who gave no information, took what she wanted. The names of all rich men in town or countryside, their families, houses, habits, characters: he had sat paying out, reeling off their history, and never once felt her unwind the thread of discourse.

“O Sly-boots!” He loved a good bargainer. “The Devious One! What can she be driving at? Which man of my—ho, ho!—my catalogue?”

As for the Blue Girl, she made her way quietly through narrow, crowded streets toward a mark.

“Liu Buk Yun: purse-proud, cruel, debauched. His only son died a year ago. It hangs together,” she concluded. “And now for the shop, of bad odor, in Pure Effulgence Lane.”

A ramshackle quarter of the town, hopeless, abandoned by peddler and beggar, sank into gloom. At its core, like a worm-eaten passage long empty, burrowed the lane of Pure Effulgence, dark beneath old mats, torn paper, foul weeds of cloth cramming a rift overhead. The walls, blank or tight-shuttered, gave hardly room between. Here no trade could flourish, or even be. Yet here in the dimmest corner a signboard flamed red, green, and gilt—“Expanding Loveliness”—and a shop gaudy with frieze and scrollwork yawned open to display abundance. Things costly, delicate, far too fine, silks, brocade, jars of paint for the face, ornaments for the hair, vials of scent, jade bracelets, ear-rings, gold phoenixes, whims in kingfisher plumage, in silver, in ivory, mingled all colors and all degrees of brilliance.

A woman, her back turned, was piling fancy goods. Neither shop nor lane held anything alive, at mid-day, but that one woman.

The Blue Girl went by like a mouse behind a cat. Her heart thumped. Safely round a corner she took up her heels and flew.

“You have seen enough to be frightened.”

In the wholesome crowd again, she slackened pace, but made for the town wall, through the town gate, and then alone up rough hillside to a gorge that hid all view of the roofs.

“Danger.”

A brook went rushing white among ferns, making them sway to the cool breath of its motion.

“Danger.” For a long time she sat there, while the brook carried her thoughts downward and town-ward. “If my dear Ching Wun were with me, to give courage. It is no shop, the place below; a gay door of hell. Can I prevail against it?”

She felt weak, young, lonely, afraid. But stillness up here through the mountain gorge, foam slithering, runlets tumbling jocular into pools, wet fern and spikenard waving, brought her gradually a contentment like the voice of her old nun.

“If you fear a tiger’s hole in the rock, you will never catch his cubs.”

How often had she heard that proverb, without hearing? Now it spoke not to be denied.

“Loathesome. But we must go in. How can I go, without jewels and rich trappings?—What said uncle’s partner? A great clan, their name Si or Hsi; with a daughter, pampered, of my own age or more; their house twenty li from town. I cannot, but I must.”

That evening was mild and warm, with no moon but a heaven full of stars uncounted layers deep. Countrymen spoke highly of them, drew indoors gaping, and between words, at the next breath, sank into oblivion like things forgotten a thousand years ago. Starlight drenched the earth in slumber. A bat flying would have seemed too loud, too wakeful.

On a hill the Hsi family’s old house reared gray among black trees. The power of the night, heavy and drowsy, gave it a grim air, as if it were no habitation, but solid rock.

“A window, though. And life.”

High in the upper storey burned as it were a thread of dim yellow fire.

“You cannot choose. That or nothing.”

Where other feet and hands could not have taken hold, up the wall swarmed a lithe dark figure clinging to ledge, frame, and crevice. Window-shutters made no barrier to the nun’s pupil.

She went gliding over the sill to the floor.

A night-lamp, round like a little moon, showed the chamber to be of goodly proportion, the furniture plain but rich. In bed beneath white mosquito gauze lay a girl sound asleep.

“Like a rose-bud in a mist.—What fortune: the right room!”

Waking beauty admired for a moment, then caught aside the veil, and with finger-tips light as a moth’s wing touched again and again the cheek of beauty that slept.

“Do not fear, my lady.”

The girl in bed gave a sigh, a stir of languor, a frown of dreamy protest, all captivating. Her long eyelashes winked.

“Go away, please. Let me—You’re not my maid. Who are you!”

She bounced upright, staring, and caught the Blue Girl’s arm.

“What is it—robbery?”

The Blue Girl shook her head and laughed.

“No, fairest. A poor meddler who has come to borrow.”

They sat on the edge of the bed together. No man pretends to have heard all their whispering; but as it continued, as good will and fun brightened their eyes, they both began to shake in a high gale of merriment.

“You have done all those things? A champion, a world-walker! Here am I, three years older than you, and nothing but a slug-abed! Tell me more.—Take anything you want, my dear!”

The lady of this fine chamber jumped up, scurried barefoot across the floor, knelt by a camphor box, and rummaging, tossed out magnificent fabrics on a pile.

“Take more,” she begged. “Why do you pick the worst! Here, this; and these. Apricot becomes you; or try the pink, the lilac-and-green.”

They romped like children dressing for a play.

“No, no, you tear them! One dress, that will do.”

With a small bundle under her arm, at last, the Blue Girl perched in the window.

“But you’ll come again?” Her new friend spoke sadly. “Come back and teach me, World-Walker, for I also have a dragon to fight. Promise. Won’t you?”

“If only to return your clothes and jewels, dear Slug-abed. Much more, to see you again.”

Dropping her bundle into darkness, then kicking her legs out after it, the visitor promised with a nod of radiant energy, and sank. The window framed nothing but a tree black in starlight.

VII.

Down Pure Effulgence Lane, the woman who kept shop for Liu Buk Yun had, three days running, a customer that bade fair to be worth attention. It was a girl extravagant in lilac-and-green silk, her face dead-alive with powder. She bought pigment to redden the lips, muzzle-grease, of not more than a few cash in value; but spent her time and talk without end, rolling a fatuous glance into this or that mirror, preening her hair, doting on trash wherever gaudiest roundabout.

“No coin.” The woman in charge, a plump, smooth creature, too motherly to be real, had studied this kind. “All her money on her back. No brain or breeding. A pretty enough piece, but fool eyes. We may venture.”

So thought a matron who guarded the shop of Expanding Loveliness with care, and as a wife to a professional fighter and gambler, knew her world well down at bottom. If she mistook—she afterward said—let those who know everything blame her.

On the afternoon of the third day, she led the talk with caution.

“Sweet child, are you not very dull, gossiping here with an old body like me? As Nature’s darling, you were meant to be gay, to have all the fun of the fair, to turn many a heart dizzy with admiration.”

The sweet child, simpering, looked most inane.

“If I thought so . . . If I knew how . . .”

“My Golden Honey,” begged the matron, “let us be confidential!”

They were, at great length, with nudging and giggling.

“It is too easy! Your fortune is made. Come in here with me.”

The fortune-maker parted a curtain hanging from a high shelf, and beckoned. The girl shrank, but came after her.

“Do you really think so, really?”

“Goose! Follow and trust me. You will carry all by storm.”

At the rear of the shop they entered a dark recess or cupboard, which gave them standing room, though a tight fit. Here the matron passed her fingers along bare woodwork. Had she spun round, she might have caught close behind her a pair of eyes not at all stupid, watching. Her fingers met a knob, revolved it three times one way, four times another. The back wall slid rushing down into the floor, and the cupboard, as by one jerk of transformation, became a narrow tunnel.

“Ooo!” squeaked the girl. “Protect us!”

Turning now, the woman saw only a fool in a fright.

“It is nothing, my dainty pet,” she explained. “Sorcery, a trick of devils. Take my hand. Move with care.”

The gloom had a stale, dry, worn-out smell, unfit to breathe.

“Now here, pause. Wait.”

The frightened fool was hard at work thinking.

“Bother! I can’t see what the old harpy’s doing with her feet.”

One of the feet gave a stamp, no doubt on some hidden bar or lever; a door swung open, ahead; and light filled the corridor,—a sudden blast of light, and smoke, and noise.

“That you, my duck?”

A man’s face popped into view.

“Yes, and a young lady. Go with my husband, dear.”

Light and smoke, a confusion of talk, a drum clacking, flageolet and rebeck wailing, a high falsetto voice that sang, cash jingling in fán-t’án bowls, rattle of dice, laughter, made hullabaloo from end to end of a vast room where old men, young men, hags of women, girls, were crowding round many tables, or lounging apart in corners. Hot and vitiated, the air swam with perfume, tobacco, lamp oil, whiffs of rice gin, and the fainter yet more clinging suavity of opium.

“Well, fresh one, you like to join our game?”

The door had closed. Leaning against it, the harpy’s husband, an obese giant seven feet tall, grinned at the new-comer. His face, brutal and scarred, wore the look of a man who believed nothing but in his own strength, and to whom life was one coarse joke.

“Yes, sir.” Before him the girl hung her head. “Yes, sir, if you please. But I am afraid.”

“Ho, ho! We don’t eat people,” roared the man. “Jolly companions every one. I’ll take care of you. If you want help, sing out for Tall Yi; that’s my name, and they don’t play rough while Tall Yi’s on hand.—Here, you!” He leaned forward to snatch at a girl in pink frippery with a Full Moon guitar beneath her arm, who was hurrying by. “Come here. Shove a new friend of mine about.”

The Full Moon player dropped a cringing little bow. Her face was bluish white, and had no more expression than an egg.

“Master, with all my heart.”

The girls flitted away together. A sad round of merry-making, thought one, as she followed this dreary puppet who talked by rote: gamblers at the brass cube of pò-tsz, at the Sky Dog dominoes, at Nine-Tally cards, at the Cow Herd, at Haú Luk dice; the crash and thump and wail of music; the falsetto voice ever yowling out an abhorrent song; the cloud-biters who lay as if dead, or worse who gabbled like feverish monkeys; the midnight lamps burning by day:—the whole rancid, rowdy, pent-up scene brought on a weariness of melancholia.

“What fun!” said the Blue Parrot. “You squander your time like a queen!”

“Oh, yes,” drawled her guide. “Great fun.”

“But you are tired? The racket pains my head, too. Where can we rest?”

Wandering through the crowd, they had reached the far end of the hall, where began a maze of doors and passages.

“In here.”

A forlorn room contained a bench, a broken chair, dust, and high up the wall an iron-barred window. The girl in pink shut the door, bolted it, then put her Full Moon guitar on the floor and herself on the bench like things equally wooden.

“I am always . . . glad . . . to sit down.”

To an image anything but glad the Nun’s Parrot spoke bluntly.

“What’s your name?”

“All names are false now, indoors.”

“Then what’s your name now?”

“I am called Peach.”

“Where is Liu Buk Yun, your owner?”

“Stop. I don’t know. Stop.” The blue-white Peach had an emotion left in her. “You, you, you must not. He may hear.—My family think I am dead. So I am. Let be.”

“Very well.”

They sat looking eye to eye in dusk that grew deeper. Music from the hall whined at them like a brute scratching to get in. By and by the Nun’s Parrot, as if alone, began to speak or meditate, her voice running on and on, low, quiet, almost indifferent, yet conquering that other sound. What she told—outdoor gossip, news of town and farm, of buying and selling, of crops, of children, of berries ripe on a mountain—was trivial, yet somehow the chronicle wove an incantation. The wooden slave-girl moved on her bench, turned, fidgetted.

“Cruel!” she said. “You are cruel!”

Her tormentor laughed, but the laugh was not unkind.

“Then Peach my dear, tell me the way out. We’ll both go, to-night.”

“Never. It can’t be done. I don’t know.”

“Oh yes, you do.”

There was no evading of those eyes.

“The back door,” Peach leaned forward to whisper, “the back door is locked. Always Yi the Tall, who answers it, carries the keys at his girdle, inside. The front way, into the shop—I know the trick of it, which buttons to wind, which floor-board to stamp on; but they do us no good. He will be there, Yi the Tall; or at the other end, his wife.”

With a whisk of silk, Blue Parrot was on the bench beside her, conspiring, lips to ear.

“Keep near the front door to-night, as much as you may, and be ready, for we go out.—Now, answer true. Is Tall Yi chief servant, right hand, of Liu Buk Yun?”

The bond-girl whimpered.

“Stop.—Yes, he is.—No more. Let me go.”

“We go together.—Now slip on ahead, but stay near the front, and watch for me.”

Uproar in the hall had swollen, redoubled, the singing, fiddling, piping, drumming; more lamps hung lighted in the clusters of green and gold fi-choi, of enamelled featherwork like arborescence overhead; gaming continued at many tables, though round more skipped waiters and kitchen imps to lay supper; while roistering through and disordering all with horse play came in a fresh band of young men, half tipsy, who by their dress and behavior seemed fighters of low origin, outcasts, members of no guild, riff-raff. The crowd having swallowed up little Peach and her Full Moon, our friend in lilac-and-green paused near one of the quieter games, and looked on.

Behind her, against the wall, sat a man bent double who held his forehead in his palms.

“Do you suffer, sir?”

On her tour of the hall she had remarked his face, and thought it the only decent one there.

“I do, child.” He now glanced up with a wry grimace, comic, woe-begone. “The pain is not in my tummy, but in my soul or purse. Your most obedient to command, for ten days I’ve been playing Heaven Dog. Ruined, swept out. All my earnings gone to—to engorge another gentleman. A fool at fifty is a fool indeed.”

As though admiring her shoes, the girl bent down toward him.

“To engorge Liu Buk Yun, sir?”

“Very dainty feet!” cried the gambler. His eyes took swift account of all who might overhear, then gave her warning. “My dear girl,” he murmured, “you guess right; but never employ that name too freely in his own den. Drop it.”

“Have you seen him here?”

Again the man darted suspicion to right and left.

“Not for three or four days. Drop it, I tell you.”

Though disappointed, the girl while she moved on felt a growing indignation. Who then was Liu Buk Yun, a bugbear, a tyrant, a god, to scare mortals and never be named? One mortal in the room did not fear him. No, that was a brag; for having drawn in her chair at a supper table among nondescripts, and begun to feed, she acknowledged a tremor of anxiety.

“It is all,” she thought, “too vague. What have you learned? How can you ask your way?”

In a surprising manner, her way opened. Through the crowd lurched half a dozen of those tavern brawlers, highland bullies, who sang and shouted.

“Hallo!” cried one, passing behind. “A new girl, hey, sweetheart?”

He clapped her on the shoulder.

“New? Let’s look.” Another, in front, reached across the table knocking dishes off, caught her by the jaw, and yanked it upward. “Let’s look. How now? Here, Face!”

Her temper flew to the winds.

“Enough of you all!”

What came next, came like an explosion of fire. They who jumped or crawled into safety report that a continuous bright ring whizzed level through opium smoke. It was the blade of the nun’s gift, the Last Word. To our own day they tell how the brightness cut heads off three or four young men. It did not. At a point in circumference the ring flickered or swooped; and there from the head of one chin-fondling boy soared a black disk high toward rafters. The disk being the crown of his cap, he hugged the floor. His companions backed away and overthrew chairs, tables, fiddlers, girls, to make the ground ready; for by an art which had forsworn them and a training neglected, they knew without argument a real slice of the sword.

“Oh, Yi! Help! Come here, Yi the Tall! A master! Come, look out, rough play, a champion in the clothes of a girl!”

Their shouting died as the Tall Yi broke through them like a buffalo among pigs. Naked to the waist, his yellow body as if oiled, with knobs and ridges of muscle under sagging fat, he held above them a bare sword, or hanger.

“Girl, man, fox,” he crowed, “let me deal with it.”

Into the clearing he hopped, enormous, light on foot. He laughed, his countenance glowed with joy not of battle, of butchery.

“A master, eh? Well, master that!”

His blade swept down in a curve higher than the knees. Over it the girl danced as over a skipping-rope. She replied with a back-hand cut from below, so easy that her point seemed to deliver a mere nick by chance. The tall Yi dropped his weapon, howled, and sprang backward, his left hand clutching a powerless right arm from which the blood squirted in jets.

“No one stir,” commanded the champion, “or I finish this man.”

He endeavored, kneeling, to bind the arm with a strip from his belt.

“I shall anyhow,” she added, “unless you render up the truth.”

That glow of joy, that butcher’s readiness, had enlightened her and convinced.

“You, not any schoolteacher, but you. You killed my—You killed Ngan Si the merchant?”

In silence, in a gape of wonder, every man and woman turned on him. The yellow carcas forgot its red arm.

“No.”

They watched an ugly face of a liar surprised.

“Out with it. You killed the merchant? Speak out.”

Her blade, the Last Word, shone to and fro like a tail switching at him. If he denied again, she was beaten; right or wrong, she could not end him here; only the power of the eye might conquer.

“What if I did?” Before spirit, a lump of flesh gave way, and the Tall Yi groaned. “Yes. I do as Liu Buk Yun orders me.”

“All bear witness!” The girl’s voice rang. “All have heard!”

She took his keys, took the sword off the floor, and with her own waved him to rise and go. The crowd left a lane. Into the room where Peach had rested, the giant went growling.

“Tend your arm, or you’ll bleed to death.”

He roared back:—

“Ain’t you meaning to help me, boys?”

The trade-fallen bruisers, a half-hearted mob, ran at her. Then began a spectacle of many driven by one; for with a sword in each hand, the one put forth wings like a dragon-fly, wings of steel vibrating, whirring, filmy as the smoke they cut, brighter than the lamps,—a dragon-fly darting beauty and terror. The many, the “boys,” tumbled into his room after him. She locked the door.

VIII.

One more person entered the hall that night. A sweet-spoken woman who kept the magazine of Expanding Loveliness, found herself brought in without ceremony, by the ear. There was plenty of noise, but neither music nor game, while haggard captives waited for morning. Only three persons went out. They closed the shop, made every shutter fast, left all tight as a drum, and in the black burrow of Pure Effulgence, parted.

“I got back my own,” said the ruined gambler, “with usury.”

Grinning, he held up a lighted lantern and a bag.

“Share with me, young Pearl of Warriors?”

“No, thank you, sir. No blood money. But you will guard this poor thing to her home? I still have an affair on hand.—Go with him, Peach, and walk safely.”

A scared little ghost in pink followed the bobbing lantern.

When day had come, an early riser, a ventripotent and grave dignitary, the prefect, stood in his office and frowned upon the table. A document lay there which no secretary or courier had brought, or ever seen before. It was a letter, properly addressed, but short and blunt in phrase. The prefect read it again.

For signature the letter had a thumb-nail drawing, vigorous, lifelike, saucy, of a parrot colored in blue.

“I’m a light sleeper. I heard no one moving,” thought the prefect. “Is my house, like the jail, porous to emanations? Are we to have no peace? But we must act.” He hurried to the door, and called in anger. “Here, if you please, quickly!”

At the same hour, alone in a hired room, she who had written the letter bent to examine finery, her lilac-and-green silk.

“By the favor of heaven,” she concluded, “it hasn’t caught a speck, neither blood nor dirt.”

Having brushed them, she folded the gorgeous borrowings away; then with a yawn, a sigh of content, lay down to forget the world. All day she slept, and at evening woke merry as a cricket.

“Now for your dear Slug-abed,” she proposed. “After last night’s rag-tag and bob-tail, how charming that there is anyone like her!”

Real crickets were trilling over the hills by starlight when she had gone from town and crossed open country. Again the black trees and the old gray house towered, with one vertical chink shining far up at a window. She tucked her parcel under her jacket, and climbed.

“What? A mistake?”

Before, this window had shone at the right hand; now it shone at her left. It was not her friend’s window. Hanging by a vine, she peered through the crack, and saw into a room, the wrong room, where a young man sat pondering a book. Elbow on table, cheek on hand, he out-thought some old and crabbed page.

“He looks,” quoth Blue Parrot, “very kind. A fighter—not like me, ignorant against ignorance; a fighter with learning. He won’t hear.”

Her friend’s window was open, dark. She mounted the ledge, touched the floor with bare toes, and went quiet as breathing. A vapor of mosquito net rose in the corner, but no one lay abed there.

The girl put down her bundle on the camphor chest, near by, and retreated.

“Who—Eh?”

A door swung, lamp-light wheeled in, a shadow caught her by the arm.

“What are you up to?”

The shadow—it had a firm hand, a cool voice—drew her into sight.

“Now then?”

It was the young reader from the next room. Alert, handsome, rather inquiring than reproving, he bent his brows on her.

“What’s your trick?”

She could not find a word for shame, but pointed to the camphor box.

“A girl?” said he. “Why, look here, who’s dreaming, you or I?”

“Let me go, sir. I borrowed clothes. I have returned them, there.”

The young man dropped her arm, and began to laugh.

“What, my sister’s friend, the World-Walker? Pardon me, for I’m her brother, known as Bookworm. Sit down, and have a cup of tea.”

“No, thank you, sir. I can’t stay.”

“Ah, now, quite all right. Let me fetch the lamp.”

He dodged out. When he returned, the room was brighter but emptier.

“Excuse—Eh? Gone? Hallo! Devil a word. Why, she’ll break her neck. It must be an adept.”

He craned over the window-sill. A bunch of garden leaves wet with dew hit him in the face. He could not see who had thrown them, but heard her run away laughing.

IX.

Father and mother knew not what to believe. The mountain villages hummed with talk, with news of the girl, boy, or fairy who had overthrown Yi the Tall, defeated other champions, taken single-handed the stronghold of Liu Buk Yun, and driven that mighty rogue to escape for his life.

“You did it?” exclaimed the girl’s father. “You, alone?”

“Your fat old vagabond,” cried mother, “she prophesied:—a wild bird in our tame nest!”

“How could you dare?”

“Is it true? How many heads cut off, do they say?”

“Not one.” Their daughter laughed. “I was horribly frightened. The rest is true. Keep it all secret, or we’ll never catch Liu Buk Yun.—Oh yes, I must go after him, somewhere to the north. Our work’s not ended.”

Though bursting with the glory of her secret, the old couple held their tongues; and when later she took the road, they watched with even more pride than grief the last motion of her blue dress, her tawny back-hamper, as down she climbed from sunlight beneath oak and chestnut boughs.

“Fame, wife. She’ll bring us fame.”

“A word,” said mother, “won’t fill a house.”

They returned slowly to their door. Through the woods, alone, the Blue Parrot began her Second Wandering, of which the fame has filled many houses. To overtake one man, a subtle fugitive hiding among millions, was a task which in theory demanded supernatural wisdom. In practice, with knowledge of the country and by hard thinking, she might narrow the search.

“If Liu Buk Yun ran away north,” she reflected, “he will cross the Lake, then maybe the River, maybe not. A smooth, pale, smiling man; round-faced, with sleepy eyes and broad liquorish mouth; a tremendous eater, a tremendous talker, so loud and genial as to grow tiresome.—An eater. If he passed by Dame Sweet-Tooth’s inn, he could not resist. And he would think her an obscure, out-of-the-way person.”

Two days of rapid journey brought her down over banyan hills, out on a marsh, where in sunset burned like new brass a great forlorn sea of muddy water. Boats lined a pier, fencing it raggedly with their masts. A hut perched above them, or toppled toward the mud that stank of sulphur. This was the tavern kept by Dame Sweet-Tooth, a ragged little witch whom travellers praised from shore to shore, extolling her cookery, her rice and pork, her Sui-Sun tea.

“What, my young precious?” the dame shrilled in welcome. “And where’s Ching Wun, our venerable sister?”

Late that night, private, the girl asked her own question.

“A pale, smooth, plump man, who eats and talks more—”

“Oh, that Clap-Trap? That bottomless food-bag?” The dame threw up her hands and shook with laughter. “He ate me out. My ears are still ringing. He called himself a merchant from the north.—Yes, dear, he crossed the Lake five days ago, in the boat called Fortune’s Minion.”

All the next day, drifting in a hot calm or sailing before puffs of hot wind, another boat carried her across the Lake. Two sailors, a rough, sun-blackened pair, watched with doubtful awe this lone girl who was not afraid of them.

“Nor, as it might be, of anything,” they reported, “for behold what she did.”

At twilight they nosed the bank under a small town with a bad name, drove their mooring-pole into ooze, lighted their fire-pot, and cooked supper. No mortal of any sagacity would go on, after dark, in that neighborhood. The girl ate with them, talked and joked, perfectly at ease; but then she got on foot, and said:—

“Going for a look round. Back by and by.”

The boatmen shouted, warning her. She jumped among the eel-grass, and up the bank, out of sight.

What happened on shore that evening many persons have told in many ways, distorting fact into fable. The owner of a mulberry grove near town was walking home not so early as he would have chosen to be abroad, when a water spirit with an extraordinary pleasant voice halted him. In the dusk he saw her none too well; but she was taller than he, and her feet made no sound on the path. Without threat or harm—except a deadly chill gust up his neck and scalp—she talked with him, asking a few questions. He took infinite care to speak the truth. Had any stranger, for example, come to town in the past five days? None, madam; none whatever. Thanking him sweetly, the lady of the mist floated off toward the road under the black trees. When he ran, his joints came untied, so that he fell.

Under an arch of trees the Blue Parrot paced back and forth, limbering her legs, thinking; thinking not of Liu Buk Yun, but of a youth who had read a book in a high room, who had caught her.

“A boy of good family, polite, brave; no doubt he scorns ignorant wayfarers.”

The thought humbled and saddened her, yet was not bad company in this dark tunnel of branches. Turning, returning, at the far end she paused to hearken. A little continuous cry like that of a trapped animal had broken the silence, near at hand, but smothered or confined.

“A wild thing in a pit? No, human. It suffers. A child?”

The road ran out gray under the open sky. Low, dark, and formless, there squatted a building from which the cry came in rhythm as of pain throbbing.

“A temple,” said the Blue Parrot. “But not a holy song.”

The doors were tight, the walls had not a window. Ruinous, with an air of dishonored old age, the temple sank among marsh weeds. It was a very small, poor bit of masonry. Round it the girl passed, eyeing and fingering wherever stucco or mortar had crumbled, then at last dropping on her knees to work. By Ching Wun’s method of “corner play” she loosened a brick, another, another, and extracted them. Light shone, the wailing cry poured out full volume.

Through the hole she saw a gilded god look serenely on two men with shaven heads, an old priest and a young, beating a girl who lay on the floor. Two wrinkled women, hard-featured but calm as the god, sat like him and observed.

“Can’t let that go on. Pay your debt to the sister, and your vow.”

Brick after brick flew into the marsh. A pair of brethren, degraded members of a corrupt body, felt themselves blown asunder by a whirlwind that rose between them and took form as a mortal woman with flashing eyes.

“Did they steal you?” it said. “Yes? Then roll out of our way.”

The elder priest gave a jump backward, at the same instant, like a trained fighter as he was, drawing and throwing a long knife. It would have passed through any other mortal, but only cut the air above her head, and drove home at a venture; for behind her the young shaveling clapped both hands to its hilt, shouted once in anger, dropped, and never spoke again.

“Thank you, sir.” Blue Parrot held the knife-thrower down, winding him in the ropes they had used to flog with. “And so good evening.”

Lamps on the altar gave uncertain brightness, but enough. She drew the bars from the temple door, swung it open, and turned on the pair of hard-featured women, who shrank from her in a bustle to hide something.

“No, you don’t. Give it here.” The girl deprived them of a leather bag, well-rounded, weighty. “Silver, eh? Your price for that poor child?”

The women began reviling her. She cuffed their faces, and pushed them out headlong into the dark.

“Now, little friend.” She borrowed a lamp from the altar. “Can you walk, or shall I carry you?”

The beaten prisoner, though sobbing and limping, came with her. Outside in mud she put down lamp and bag of silver, then shut the door on the living man and the dead man.

“This god’s money we’ll spend to better advantage. Wait, one moment.”

With her knife-point on the stucco beside the door, Blue Parrot scratched a brief warning to travellers.

“They will know,” she declared, “what kind of temple That was!—Who are you, dear?”

“My name,” blubbered the stolen girl, who was a pretty creature though stupid with fright and suffering, “my name, Illustrious One, is Yün Heong. They beat me because I called for my mother.”

“It happened to me once. Where do you live?”

“A day’s journey upward.”

“Which will be more quick, by land or by water?”

“By water, Great Lady.”

“Then off with us. Home you go.”

They left the lamp shining before the temple of the marsh god, and hurried away.

Two sailors who crouched by a fire-pot in the bow of their boat were so greedily opening a hamper that they heard no one come aboard.

“What are you doing with my basket?”

In the ruby firelight stood a girl whom they had hoped never to see again. Caught stealing, they jumped up and tried force.

“Be quiet.” Her money-bag rapped each man on the crown just hard enough to knock him silly. “Get up, amateur thieves, and pole your boat off. We have slaughtered nine or ten priests in a temple, and the town comes running hot-legged as hornets to find you.”

It was their terrible passenger the fly-by-night, beautiful without mercy, who laughed at them.

“Pardon! We thought you were gone. We meant no harm, Summer-Lightning Ineffable!”

She laughed again, but kindly.

“Up stake, boys, and out. It’s not a good shore for you or me. Let us put out, and meddle no further with baggage. Free pardon; all right. A young lady who lies weeping on deck, aft, is to be carried home. You will earn forty pieces of silver, a god’s money to do a god’s work. Haul your stake.”

The boatmen plucked it up sucking from ooze. The boat, unmoored, slid on water where stars grew long, parted, and sank drop by drop through a ripple of motion.

“Rest. Cry if you want to,” advised the Blue Parrot, holding a girl’s head on her lap. “Are you comfy? Then rest. I was born three years before you, but went through it all ages ago. There, there, we sail home.”

They poled round a black fringe of weeds. Fireflies covered them in a storm drifting like golden snow.

X.

Her search for Liu Buk Yun was delayed, broken, impeded by many such bits of work along the way, and still further perplexed by a new hindrance, the growth of her own fame. It was the rescued girl’s mother, a wealthy widow in a town up the Lake, who surprised her by saying:—

“You cannot catch him, for your name flies abroad on the wind before you. Everyone knows the Girl in the Blue Dress. I’m having boy’s clothes made for you, with a boy’s cap and shoes. Let me beg you to wear them.”

Throughout her wandering, from then on, the Parrot went as a young man, rather too handsome, in jaunty attire. From lake and fen land she journeyed on a great river, across it to the north, among hills into rough, poor country. Her deeds in month after month of this travel are known to fill another book. None of them fetched her within sight or hearing of Liu Buk Yun, however; for at the end she had lost all track of him, and given or spent all but a handful of the marsh-god’s money, to find herself gone quite astray far up in a wretched hamlet where barren slopes of yellow grass, withered bush, rocks worn into scales and flakes as of iron rust, made a high surrounding wilderness. The region held no farms or farmers, only pastoral barbarians.

“To go on is labor thrown away.” The Blue Parrot sat thinking in a dirty room of an inn which was altogether dirt. “To go back, miserable failure.”

Disturbance in the corridor, noise, threats, bad language, came as nothing new, for the landlord of this inn was a starved scarecrow with a bitter tongue. It wagged so outrageous now that she opened her door to quiet him.

“What is wrong, sir?”

“Wrong, sir?” yelled the inn-keeper. “Why, here’s an old reprobate owes me for bed and board since the last moon! He’s dying, and he can’t pay! Out he’ll crawl, and so I tell him. Beggars can’t do their dying in my house!”

“Poor thing,” said the Blue Parrot. “Sir, let me reason with him.”

On the floor in his room the sick man lay covered by a rat’s nest of torn quilt, his face the color of old bone, his eyes vaguely bright and distant and tired with watching for death. He roused, or gave a slow nod.

“Let me improve your comfort.”

Having made him tidier, and brought her own quilt, she held his wrist for a moment.

“Be at ease, Elder Brother,” she said. “I will defray your lodging here.”

In a whisper, hollow and hoarse, he tried to be thankful. She drew the inn-keeper away, outside the door.

“Get him some broth, your best. I can pay for the remainder of his time in this world. It won’t be long.”

All afternoon she sat by the stranger while he dozed, or from time to time woke in a scared bewilderment, then grew calm as he found her there.

“Young gentleman,” he whispered, “your eyes promote courage; for in my sleep, devils throng about me.”

Toward evening his voice became clearer, and he talked more, straight up at the roof-beams.

“A hodge-podge of a life, mine,” said he. “A strange gallimaufry, a mess. And here at the end of it, something novel, for—” he rolled his head toward her, and stared—“for I never saw anyone like you. Why do you sit here with a dull pauper who hasn’t even a cash to stick in his ear, like the coolies? Once I was rich. Once, young fellow, I was the life, soul, wit and wag of any company, drunk or sober, to keep them in a roar. Ah, yes, I was, though you can’t believe me now.”

It was pitiable to hear. The Parrot lighted a lamp on the floor beside him, for she had bought oil.

“Thank you.” His features were shrunken, but the lips, full and gross, retained a mocking humor. “That will keep the hobgoblins off.—When you felt my pulse, you were too gentle for a man. Are you spirit, or living body, or hallucination? Come, what are you?”

He spoke much too loudly, in fever. She gave him a cooling draught of herbs, and answered as near the truth as might be.

“A poor ignoramus wandering round, sir: a failure in the world, going home to be the town butt. Drink, and sleep.”

Her medicine was heavy, good for all night. He blasphemed it, but lay down.

“A greenhorn like you,” said he, “can’t be too careful, wandering; for this world’s naught but rogues, dogs, liars. Keep your eye peeled for ’em. Advice, from me! Oho! Well, good tea may spout from a bad pot. They robbed me, they pounded the life out . . . So walk wary, Master Soft-Heart. Never can tell who’s what. You may think me a pious old noddy. Nothing of the kind, my lad, far from it, I cut my wisdom teeth, I could bite! Everybody lived in fear of me at home, when I was Liu Buk Yun!”

He never beheld what a shock he gave her; for turning his face toward the wall, he grumbled:—

“Why run away to die in this hole? Fate. Panic. Me, Liu Buk Yun the Grand, who could have bought a dozen judges? Or if not, a good sharp biff in the neck is better than these pains all over.”

He sighed, yielded to the drug, and at his next breath fell asleep like a child.

Overcome, haunted by the irony of their meeting, Blue Parrot stole out. The door to his cubicle she drew after her, and with hand on latch, for a time stood there without motion. The wonder of life, the vanity of human wishes, the contradiction of all purpose, took away her strength to rebuke and yet gravely console her. She had come so far hunting a tremendous evil one, devising how to drag him home for punishment; and here lay a spectre who might no more than brag at her feebly as he died in the dirt.

“You can’t lift a finger,” she thought, “except to nurse him.”

Darkness in the tavern hung foul and heavy with smoke stinging her eyes. The need of air became a thirst, and woke her to move on. At the sound of a door closing, she turned. It was not the sick man’s door, but one beyond, from which came hurrying past her a young woman with head bent and face averted.

“Was that?—No, never.” The Blue Parrot gave a start. “But yes, that was. And crying, too.”

The young woman, shadowy in smoke, flitted by a water-lamp and through the deserted common room.

“I couldn’t mistake her. But here alone, and running outdoors at night?”

Without a sound the Blue Parrot made after.

“Yes. There she goes.”

The splendor of the full moon dissolved earth and heaven, transforming old grass on worn-out hills to a brightness richer than grain, every hump of rock to a gnome’s fortress, every bush to an ink-black figure that waited. Up the steepest hollow a living figure climbed and was gone, shadow into shadow.

“My friend whose lilac-and-green silk I wore. What can she be doing?”

The Parrot climbed nearer to one of the black bushes, and hailed it.

“No fear, tiny poppet. I’m not a man, but a girl. Only the girl who borrowed your clothes, in the high chamber of the Hsi family, if you are Slug-abed.”

“Oh, World-Walker! You can’t be!—Come here, I’m lost, hungry for you.”

Next moment they were hugging under the bush, talking too fast for comprehension, as they had done before in a high chamber.

“That evening you put me to shame,” said the owner of fine raiment. “I told you I had a dragon to fight, you remember? The dragon was Liu Buk Yun, who had my father killed for him, when I was little, a baby. Oh friend, it’s terrible, for I took a vow. To-night in the next room through the matting of his wall I heard you and him, voices from my own country. Liu Buk Yun, the dragon, is only a sick thing dying. But my vow, my vow! I made oath before a prefect, years ago, to bring him the heart of the man who killed my father. And having seen you, being shamed, I ran away to do it. How can I?”

The Blue Parrot could not form an answer, but held her friend in her arms. Below, the moonlight dreaming away down hill made the inn, the roofs and gables with all they hid, no bigger than mushrooms or warts. Up here in this veiled magic of light, all should be peace. A kindly, forgotten smell breathed roundabout, from old time,—the smell of a wood fire quenched in tea and tea grounds.

“Poor pretty, I cannot help you. A vow is a vow.”

“Nonsense!” cried the bush behind them. “You disturb my camp with nonsense. How ineffectually I taught you!”

The bush parted, crackled, to let through a vast rotundity which came plump down between them, and which was the Fat Nun, laughing.

“A bad vow?” She threw an arm over each of them, and spoke as if she had never been gone. Her face beamed like the moon. “To-morrow, buy a sheep and give Liu Buk Yun a gallon of mutton broth, if he wants it, with bone juice. We must help the man go out by Nature’s door. Then lug the sheep’s heart home, dear, to your prefect, who won’t tell any difference by the time his nose peaks over to inspect.—How are you, my young blue devil, and why do I feel proud of you?”

All night they sat talking under their bush, till the moon dipped on a western ridge.

“My brother,” said the girl of high family, “would like to know you. Come home with me. You threw leaves in his face.”

Blue Parrot leaned against her nun, happily.

“Odd things are performed,” she sighed. “But to go home with you, while so much remains wrong in this world—”

“Nonsense! Don’t be a fool,” said the Fat Nun. “Though yes, no doubt, all the same, don’t be in a hurry.”

A June day was ending, with sunset warm on the buff grass, the tops of oak, of laurel, of plum orchards, and a high green mountain that rose at the back door. All day long Yi Tao had worked, opening the cottage after another year, airing beds, horse-whipping rugs, hauling a gray canoe out of doors, chasing a yellow-and-black ringed snake from the laundry, sweeping mummied hornets, the nest of a field mouse, and half-round pads of clay cemented by the mason wasp, forth into open air. He had cooked between-whiles a good dinner for one, served it by the light of a lamp rubbed clear as crystal, trimmed to perfection; and now took the liberty of resting, perched low on a corner of the old bookcase where the playthings hibernate in two drawers, which form a ledge or half-seat for children.

“Too many tam I tole you too olo, too mochee fightem,” said Yi Tao, thinking in repose. “You likee, I tole you somesing new?—jixy happin, welly hart to say, awfu’ tame, no fightem, no exsigh. You see, nowday in China, too many yong fella yong gir’ he talkee lartche ’bout—‘All Flee, Ewellybody is Flee.’ He fool, all same Looshia. How is Man-Ooman flee, nissee worl’? You likee, I can tole you.”

By lamp-light and the glimmer through a western window, Yi Tao began his awful tame story without excitement, of this world where mankind however young and loquacious cannot be free.

“One day de olo benka in Peking, in Chun Ting Nan Hong name he’s benk, he not poo’ but not welly well, woss ’bout fifty yea’ ole becom’ millionai’. He catchee one daughter one wife, no mo’, no sonn, no blodda-sesta.”

The banker, Jü Yung Tu, in growing rich had kept his mind open and liberal; or if not, had come to think his one wife and one little girl so far beyond compare that he gave them largely their own way. A quiet man he was, pale, thin, sharp-eyed, wearing sober cloth tight-cut and smooth. Traders who met him only in the bank thought Mr. Jü to be as accurate as the click of an abacus or the ring of his own silver, and to have as much feeling. A small band of intimates knew the warm heart, not to say quick temper, hidden by his cool formality; the shyness like that of a child, which made him pass for indifferent or proud; and the brief-spoken habit, never gruff but never promising, which kept him at a distance from you till the time came for action.

“He’s not fine-weather company,” declared they who had seen the time come. “A friend in need.”

His daughter, Thriving Garden, knew him best as a playmate who would join whatever game she begged for, and fill it with delight of new invention. Her mother could not do so, nor could her old nurse Yin Ma. They lived in a great house, or cluster of houses, protected by a wall thirteen feet high with broken glass fangs on top; by a door of red lacquer, smooth pigeon-blood, which if the gateman thought fit to open, yawned beneath a pent-roof of mossy tiles; by a brick devil-screen reared across the opening, within; by servants wide awake all day, and at night by hairy black dogs big as lions roaming the compound, man-eaters from the Land of Grass. House and compound, though Mr. Jü had bought them rather late in life, seemed to have been the family stronghold for generations,—calm, neat, secure, with an old garden breathing retirement, and rooms haunted by age-long beauty. Here the little girl grew up, a rich man’s daughter and darling.

The nurse Yin Ma, once rolypoly but now dried and shrivelled, kept watch on her from the day she was born. Yin Ma’s black eyes, that appeared to see nothing but the mild joke of daily existence, were never off guard.

“I want,” said her mistress, “to go learn painting.”

“Go? Where?”

“Out.”

It was a fine spring morning, the acacia gorgeous in yellow, the air fragrant with peach blossom. On that day Thriving Garden had become fifteen years old. She wore narcissus color, and might have been a flower-spirit charmed into life by the sun among petals. Yin Ma thought as much, but took care to say not a word like it.

“Out? Why? Here at home you have learned singing, dancing, reading, embroidery, playing upon the dulcimer, and composition of verse, all wonderful. Here at home your father, that Noble-Severe, will bring you the greatest man of all outside who can teach you to paint. Ask him, and he gives. You will be the marvel of ladies for—”

“For pampering, yes, Yin Ma.” The young spirit looked with scorn at her companion flowers, and made a face. “Who learns from praise at home? It must be Out.” She made another face, lovely and comic, at the wall. “Old Brick and Mortar, it shall be Out.”

Father always came home tired, for even now, though frail, he kept as long working hours at the bank as in the time of his youth and poverty. One evening when he had finished a temperate meal, drunk one cup, no greater than a walnut shell, of hot wine, and sat back to rest by the mellow lamp-light, he found his girl prettier and more beguiling than ever.

“What,” he thought, “is the minx up to now?”

She was feeding him candied ginger, crumb by crumb, laughing, and making him laugh, at an absurd tale of household affairs. It was like a play, to see and hear her.

“Come, Unwinder of Cares,” he demanded, “what monkey-trick is your aged progenitor being wheedled into, eh?”

She pouted, and feigned annoyance.

“Oh, you are too clever!”

“Thank you, but I need be.—Come, the fly waits for the honey.”

She laughed, then with a moving earnestness told him what she had told Yin Ma,—her dream, hope, desire.

“Go out?” said her father. “To a school? And learn among rabble—”

The old man checked himself. He had turned pale, for a moment worn his professional mask, unfeeling calm; but by no other sign betrayed the anger and disgust,—not at her, his heart’s light: at this corruption from without which dared to breathe on her. He coughed, and waited.

“I remark a significant absence of Mother to-night,” he continued, smiling. “Is it wrong to infer that you have already spellbound one doting parent?”

“Mother cried,” said Thriving Garden, honestly. “But she told me to ask you.”

Mr. Jü, comprehending the sober wealth of his room, felt it insecure, threatened by an omen.

“My child, you cannot conceive what you ask. I think as it is you paint most admirable pictures. But we’ll hire for you the master of all masters in the land, to come here, at home.”

“Father!” she begged. “Our love misleads us. How can they be admirable, the playthings of an ignorant girl? How could they fulfil the first of the Six Canons?”

“And what’s that?” said he. “I’m only a moneylender, you know.”

Her color, the glow in her eyes, frightened him.

“The first and the great. It was laid down of old. ‘Living movement of the Spirit through the rhythm of things.’ ”

Neither in his bank nor out of it was Jü Yung Tu a dull person.

“That’s very true, dear,” he agreed at once. “True. Exact. Fundamental.”

They kept silence for a time, but with better understanding than before, as if they had met on foreign ground by a new dawn of intimacy.

“No, all the same, pigsney, no. You want me to cut you a hunk off the moon.—Where’s that ginger?”

Quiet but inexorable, he determined the affair once for all.

So he thought. Ten days later, with his full permission, Thriving Garden moved out to see the world and have her way again. A gorgeous cart, its body and wheels of polished golden wood thick set with gleaming brass, its cover of the finest blue cloth, contained her and Yin Ma, both well hidden, though both peeping through window screen to enjoy that marvel, the hurlyburly of the streets. A giant mule, cream-white, the brass mounting of his harness or panoply crusted with garnet and carnelian, took his own time, ignored the driver and the gay acrobatic groom who as counterweight leaped on and off the thills. Her cart lumbered with dignity through ways broad and narrow, among trains of shag-head ponies, caravans of chewing camels, wheelbarrows, rickshaws, enormously burdened coolies, and peddlers blowing horns, chanting, ringing bells, or beating gongs. Color, noise, raw smell of life, and the sun purple in dusty air, could have unrolled no more grandeur before a queen.

“Is here the College? We stop. Nurse, I am afraid.”

“You would have it,” snapped Yin Ma. “Climb down, go. I will sit in a corner of their ugly house while you interperambulate the Art.”

Three times a week Yin Ma waited near the College door. Three times a week their friend the driver unharnessed his noble white mule, took it home, and led back a nobler one, a sorrel seventeen hands high or a mouse-colored, so that no foreign creature might suppose his master’s child to want variety in stable.

“Beat that!” said he, when some lewd engineer of a motor car tried to mock him. “Show me the like born and bred, boy! Your smoke-box flying on a belch of hell is not worth one hind hoof. Where’s your pedigree, fireman?”

The banker saw his young rebel come home so vivified, in a transport of happy affection, so keen to have him share all her doing and learning, that he thought the risk perhaps well taken.

“But my dear,” said he, at the hour of ginger, “can you work, bundled into one room, a mess of green boy and silly girl?”

“Of course we can.”

“I doubt it. Contrary to Nature. Never was done in my day, or work suffered. Come, now, tell me. You like to see a Hot Noise? You fool your time away?”

Thriving Garden laughed.

“Some do, father. You are right, some of them do. Not all.”

“Ah?” Father leaned back with an absent air, as if talking at random. “Not all. Who’s the excepted?”

His daughter gave a start. Lackadaisical, fatigued, he was yawning at the roof. She admired this dear old dissembler who could hide, almost from her, so much penetration.

“Truly, no one!” she declared, smiling. “Indeed, no one. My heart is quite free, and quite yours.”

He lowered his head, to regard her with much fondness, but more gravity.

“It won’t always be, playmate.—I can’t pretend to like your going to this hugger-mugger school. My own way was fought up through the world, so you must believe me to know it in spots, both good and evil. Of the good, you are my best, neither selfish nor dull. It would take more than a college however new-fangled to harm you—though here you were talking of weeks, thrice a week to class from home, foreign calendar. What the devil’s a week? In my time we counted First Day of the Moon, then Fifteenth Day of the Moon, right, as women go to prayer in the temple. Right. But let that be.—After all, your boys at your college, or some of them, belong to rich old families. If we keep an eye out, and . . .”

“Never, never!” she wailed. “Oh, please never! Don’t choose one for me! I can’t bear them, the sons of rich men!”

“Why not?” demanded father, angrily. “The young brats, are they rude to you!”

Her coloring had always a rosy tinge. It now grew deeper, though she laughed, and answered him at once.

“Not a bit rude. Only too polite, they are, hanging round ready for chatter. Gilded waterbugs, I brush them away. In faith, I do. They’re all of a pattern, empty, wearing too high clothes, too sleek, firing money about, haunting theatres, cracking worm-eaten jokes. Your girl had rather see men who do, who know, who mean something; like you, daddy.”

She would have sworn this to be true, whole, frank, unreserved. Afterward when life turned wrong, she could not remember how deceit crept in. For a long time her work was what signified; nothing more, certainly no one among those admirers, flatterers, vaporers whom she ignored.

Still, there was a quiet youth of about her own age, whose manner gained by contrast. He had nothing to say, and worked like a creature possessed, a hermit laboring at some vow.

“Tell me,” whispered Thriving Garden to another girl, one day. “Who is that?”

“The Silent? The Demon-Driven?—His name is Fong Hsu.”

About middle height, he carried himself with natural ease, and an air—except when at work—of grave unconcern. His face was dark olive with an outdoor hue of ruddiness, his eyes were bright but steady, and his features rather clean and firm than anyway handsome. Had he worn western garb, he might have passed among foreigners for a Spaniard, perhaps not without Indian blood. The clothing he did wear, was of the commonest black, painfully neat, mended to the extreme of durability.

“Isn’t he a relic?” said the girl, grinning. “He comes from the Eastern Three Cities.—Why did you ask? He’s nobody. Poor as a famine rat.”

Thriving Garden began to feel she never had liked that girl.

“I must take a peep at his work.”

Not long afterward she took it, between pity and curiosity,—one glance from behind his back. It was revelation, as if in a dull room he had thrown open, then quickly shut, a magic window. She returned to her own place, and sat there, overcome, dazzled.

“That boy, to be the only one among us? He can do it. The power has chosen him for vehicle.”

They met by chance in a corridor.

“Sir, one moment. You have made me very discontented.”

The young solitary jumped as if she had wakened him with a prong.

“You? Made you?—Pardon, but—”

Then he saw in her eyes the timid yet kindly humor.

“How? By what?”

“Your work, joy and despair. You go so far above us all, heaven-high.”

Fong Hsu gave a panic-stricken look, murmured or groaned, and ran by her like a thief.

“Well,” she thought, in pique, “none too civil!”

When their class next gathered, however, he walked up to her, and bowing, made a set speech. By the light on his face, the rigid manner, she knew it was taking all his courage. He seemed to hide a clenched fist up either sleeve.

“And you, you made me happy beyond belief,” said Fong Hsu. “For two good reasons. Thank you. A lonely man will not forget.”

Thriving Garden grew scared of emotion in public.

“Tush, now, admire that!” She waved her latest failure at him, a black-and-white scroll of prune blossom. “Can you behold it and call me a judge?—But what were your reasons?”

He dropped into her mood, laughing,—an outdoor, sunburnt gentleman with no care on earth.

“Plum twigs, oh, yes, they don’t grow that kind of lozenge pattern, do they?” he agreed. “The old Manchu Woman used to draw them so, but then she was an empress, maybe.”

“I’m not,” said Thriving Garden. “What were your two reasons?”

He replied with a shrug.

“One’s enough. Paint good pictures, heaven-high as you said, or starve. Or do both, no doubt. The right course. Ever so many thanks to you.”

Class-mates pouring in made confusion, chatter ended, routine began. Fong Hsu and the banker’s daughter met seldom, for a word here and there. She learned that he was an orphan, his father a petty official who died poor, and whom the boy’s mother did not long survive; that he had no kindred anywhere near; and that after scrimping his way through a final term of study, he would live by one talent if he could. It became wonderful, in retrospect, to think with how little talk they were drawn together. Only their eyes, more and more often, exchanged a quickening confidence:—

“How goes it with you?”

“Well and happily.”

“We understand.”

“We two alone understand.”

On the last day, when Fong Hsu carried off not only his diploma but highest honor, he came before her like a man trying to bear misfortune.

“I am glad they did you justice.”

He made as if to speak, then shook his head.

“You are melancholy. Why?”

He looked at her, and waited for a composure which did not arrive. Instead, they both felt power from beyond, a trepidation of the spheres, run through that moment and leave them shaken.

“We need not ask why,” said Fong. “But to-day at the end you may hear my other reason. You’re the only being who—” Again he waited. “The one whose good opinion I value more than anything in life. And so. Good-bye. Class-mate.”

He uprooted the words with pain, and turning, knocked against a chair as if the aisle were too narrow for his hurry.

“Oh, my friend! You have it! How—how do we meet again?”

Her call stopped him with a jerk. Fong wheeled about. His dark face burned.

“I shall work at a back-shop in an alley,” said he, and named a wretched quarter of the town. “Do you imagine—”

The big room, so lately crowded with people, and now drained dry of all but one thought, seemed to ring, echo, urge it to be spoken.

“You can’t!” he cried, fiercely. “No! Impossible!”

With that he was gone.

All the way home, jolting in darkness under the blue hood of the cart, she maintained a silence which old Yin Ma did not even try to break. At home there were few questions. Time dragged by. When or in what roundabout way father learned her secret, we cannot tell; but he soon came out with it, abruptly, though not unkindly.

“One tooth aches, no peace for the mouth,” he quoted. “How can I bear to see you drooping, dear? Why do we suffer together?”

They walked back and forth, shaded from afternoon sun by an awning, a reed mat which, high on scarlet, green, and gilt poles, roofed all the courtyard and made it a pavilion of shrubs and flowers.

“We do, my girl, don’t we? And why? What spoiled our life?”

“Nothing,” she said, and would have laughed. “Am I grown tedious?”

“Come, confide.”

“But there’s nothing.”

“Not true!” He halted, with such a roar of anger as to strike her dumb. “A lie! How of this Fong boy, the ragamuffin, the sneak—”

A violent spasm of coughing cut him down. He dropped upon a garden stool, waited there, bending, limp, and when breath returned, spoke hoarsely.

“I beg your indulgence. I did not mean to. Let us forget. But you shall stay at home now. That is an order.” From between his arms he looked up, still giddy. “Enough and over much of going out into the world.”

Not once again did father act unlike himself. He was on the contrary so gentle and timid and so prodigal with gifts of atonement that she often had to go cry. His command, however, held: their great lacquer door shut her in, and the wall of their compound grew day by day more forbidding.

“Look here, old friend,” urged peace-makers who feared not Jü the Great in his ringing sanctuary, the bank, Chun Ting Nan Hong, “we have never known you to commit an error. That boy’s all right, a good lad of clean parentage, who’ll go as far as any of us. What more do you want, a god off Omei?”

“No. A man,” the banker growled at them. “No sneak. Let him deal as a man.”

The mediators went to Fong, whom they discovered painting by dim light in a cubby-hole behind a shop. He heard them out courteously, thanked them, and replied with good sense.

“The right stuff there,” they thought. “Our old crony, if he can’t see it, is playing the highland bull.”

When they had left him Fong Hsu’s black eyes grew brighter and harder. He sat down angrily, wrote, then tore what he had written, meditated, and began afresh, weighing every word.

The letter, which cost an afternoon’s work, old Mr. Jü read next day at a glance.

“Bah, pretty sentiment!” He flung it down. “A word-monger. If he comes ranting my way, I’ll painful-surprise him for good.”

It was mother who took the blame of what followed. She had been young herself, a beauty as a girl, with high spirit, fond of fun; and though now demure, subdued, perhaps awed by her husband’s grandeur late in life, she could remember the years of plain dress, plain fare, hard work, and more contentment in less room. A tiny silken figure, she crept about like a mouse in a palace wondering how came it there.

“My girl is unhappy?”

Thriving Garden ran to her. In a dark corner they stood whispering.

“Your girl cannot live. Mother, let me go speak, so that he won’t think me a flatterer who forgets. Only a word. I promise you I’ll come straight home. Before noon. Only a word, to—to say good-bye; to say that he has a friend, though he will never see her again.”

“For shame! How, child, are your wits departed?”

Mother had raised a storm of imploration that in the dusk beat upon, frightened, overbore her.

“We are doing wrong.” She sighed. “But . . . If you take Yin Ma . . . Hush, quiet! Go then. And home at once.”

In his back room Fong Hsu was coloring a threefold panel when the wonder came. He sprang up, caught a brush from between his lips, then did not move.

“Like a pair of images,” reported Yin Ma the nurse. “They turned to stone, both. I waited in full view beyond the open door. They talked while one might eat, maybe, half a hot dumpling; not more. I heard her say—‘never anybody else.’ That is all, she came to me crying, we hurried away.”

The child kept her promise, and was at home before noon.

“It’s ended. Thank you.” She wandered in like a phantom, vague, weary, and pale. “Thank you, mother. It’s broken.”

They both believed this for a time. The compound wall topped with fangs of glass, the red gate, the devil-screen, the porter and footmen, the hairy man-eating dogs from the Land of Grass, kept them safe. Outside was only Nature, who may be expelled with a pitch-fork.

All the same, Thriving Garden went out and away.

“Husband! My sin! Beat me, kill me,” begged mother. “She has gone.”

Father swayed, turned his back, and with a few clumping steps began to move nowhere. He halted.

“We’d better sell this house.”

Not then but next morning, he added:—

“Never name her who spoilt our name.”

They kept the house and lived empty, an ageing couple shy of each other, who in talk feared estrangement. The nurse Yin Ma played go-between or gossip, to tell how their daughter and Fong Hsu married, kneeling before witnesses in a rented room, exchanging the right documents, calling on Lord of Heaven and Lord of Earth.

“So? Correct,” said father. “Let ’em call on Judge Lu the green-faced magistrate of hell, for what I care. This freedom, hey-day, freedom!—Have done.”

Thenceforward he would neither speak nor hear of her. He began to fail in health, to abandon work, and often to keep a dreary, silent holiday at home. Yin Ma, the wrinkled smiler who saw nothing, held watch on his every look and motion.

“They do not starve. They are happy.” The woman smuggled in word to mother. “Happy but for—you know what. Young Mr. Fong toils harder than a coolie. He was not too proud to hang his pictures on the street walls, before New Year, as poor painters do. He sold a few there, and more in the shops. They manage to live.”

Another New Year was at hand, when the nurse came running, hardly able to speak.

“Rejoice, Tai-tai,” she panted, “for you are a grandmother. They have a child, a son, born yesterday.”

In the dark corridor where they met, servant and mistress laughed together, cried together, whispered, and took counsel.

“Yes, he must, he shall know it.”

Father was lying, that day, on a great divan of ebony.

“Should you not like—”

He opened his eyes, but let them rest vacant.

“What has frightened you? Go on. Like what?”

“To see your—your dear grandson?”

The vacancy became a hard glare. His mouth twitched.

“No.”

Drawing the coverlet of green wadded silk up, across his face, he turned toward the wall.

“No.” The word came smothered and angry. “Let be.”

In the third moon after, Yin Ma brought bad news.

“They have gone, babe and all. Moved away. No, the neighbors could not tell me. Somewhere far outside the walls, to hire a cheaper house. Oh my lady, shall we never see her again?”

Two years went by, deepening their melancholy. As autumn grew toward winter, the sick man, very early one morning, stood in his hall to admire what the gardener had sent,—a noble chrysanthemum, clear yellow, the pride of the season. He arranged it carefully in a dark bronze jar older than Peking. Beside him Yin Ma kept her eyes not on the flower, the globe of tousled radiance, but on his face.

“How perfect!” He dreamed at it a while; then with an irony which might have been bitter, or no more than dry—“I doubt,” he continued, “if she has that kind on her table!”

The watcher sprang to life.

“Shall I go bring her?”

Not staying for answer, she ran right out of the house. Long ago she had warned their gateman to be ready when the moment came, so that now at a word he flung the red leaves open, grinned, and wished her luck. Down the lane Yin Ma went hurrying. It was grown full day, the sun just up, heaven a cloudless deep wintry blue, the air sparkling but chill.

“No clothes, no money, and I dare not go back for them,” she thought. “The time will not come twice.”

Morning flew by in a desperate dream, a hunt among strangers who wagged their chins and did not know, or advised her off the wrong way. Three hours after noon, a shivering little body, footsore, tired, Yin Ma dragged through a village far out on the plain.

“No good. Lost. But try till you drop.”

An aged loiterer was carrying, like an infant, a pig who slept in a crate, or woven capsule.

“O Sir, do you know a young Mr. Fong who may live about here, who paints pictures?”

The pig woke and grunted. So did his master.

“What know I of painting? I am a swine-husband.” The man stood and blinked; but as she gave him up for stupid, and went on, he called after;—“Wait, madam. The head may spare the trotters.” He plunged into revery. “Go to the coal yard. We’re having sharp weather, so the coal merchant will know everybody’s name.”

The nurse made him a low bow.

“Provider of delicacy, my blessing on you and your stye. May you outlive us all. The first man of sense I have met with to-day.”

At the coal yard, among donkeys and panniers, a black goblin shook his head.

“I never heard that name.”

A blacker and fatter goblin popped neck and shoulders from a hole in the wall, stared, ran out his tongue like a tag of red flannel, recovered it, and bawled:—

“Fong the Scholar, who paints? Yes. Turn to your lucky hand, round the corner, then forward till you reach a gate with the name Peng On Li.”

A few steps brought her there, to a wall of new masonry. By the door under the name a toy temple shone with gilding, and contained a jolly god three spans high, Old Man Watch-the-Gate, who in his many-colored robe sat snug, beaming eternal good will, and did not frown to prevent her. Yin Ma slipped by, and entered a court full of houses, thirty or forty alike. She knew the place by hearsay,—the building of a rich man who gave fair quarters at low rent, yet gained both merit and money.

“The boy kept his eye open,” thought Yin Ma. “Nothing bigger than two rooms, but all decent and quiet. He’s taken care of my pearl, I do maintain.”

She went from door to door, calling:—

“Mr. Fong, does he live here?”

In time the right voice, the right footstep, made her heart bound.

“Yin Ma? Dearest! How did you find us?”

No one saw their passion of welcome.

“By foot and tongue,” quoth Yin Ma. “Thanks to a pig-dandler, a smut-nose, and the intelligence of the Lord, here we are.—Oh, Man-Child!”

More beautiful than ever, bright in surprise, radiant, Thriving Garden had caught up from the floor her baby. The meagre little room was like a shrine.

“Grandson!”

The baby stared at Yin Ma with forbearing wisdom, allowed her to worship, then to hold him, and to squeak unutterable nonsense down his neck.

“What has happened?” Thriving Garden said, in the first lull. “How are they?”

With a small finger tracing the map of wrinkles up and down her cheeks, Yin Ma could not look grave, but she replied sadly.

“Your mother’s health is fair. Your father . . . Well, you know, his cough. Last winter he spent in bed; and this winter I fear he’ll be worse. The truth is, dear—” She broke off, and told of the yellow chrysanthemum. “He broods on you all day. When the neighbors talked of children, your mother was too slow, and did not catch the hint alive. To-day I caught it. Sweetheart—oh, the poor old proud thing, he sickens for you! Can’t you come home? Ask your man to let you!”

They heard somebody move in the next room, and speak.

“A very good thing. A capital idea, right.” Fong Hsu entered, smiling. Thin, tired, poorly dressed, this tall dark boy had an air of power yet of kindness. “We are no strangers, you and I, madam. Sit down, rest, and have me bring you tea.”

He made the old woman comfortable, with plain talk. They were friends at once.

“It will be hard for you, sir, I know. You approve?”

“Excellent. Capital,” repeated Fong. “But is there any letter, asking me to give my wife back?”

The child, who had run to his mother’s knee, laughed.

“Wife!” he said very plainly. “Back!”

The grown folk were silent for a time.

“There is not,” confessed the older woman. “I came in too great haste.”

“But,” said the younger, “they do want us.”

Fong Hsu leaned forward, to take his head in his hands. When he spoke at last, he might have been reading a dull sentence written on the floor.

“If you are Fong Thriving Garden, you stay; if you are Jü Thriving Garden, you go.”

The two women exchanged a look of pity.

“Oh, you men with your self-respect!” Yin Ma got on foot and began to scold. “Break, spine, but never bend!—All the same, we like you for it. Now to trudge. Yes, you are right, sir, and shall have your letter if reason prevail on earth!”

Her leave-taking was grotesque, a jumble of tears, laughter, baby-talk, messages of love to be carried, and promises to return. Thriving Garden lent her a warm coat. Fong Hsu took her home, walking as far as the red gate in the wall.

No letter came out of that stronghold. Her mission brought only harm. It sent Jü Yung Tu into a dumb paroxysm, after which he lay abed and cared for nothing.

“Keep that meddler off.”

When Fong brought his wife’s coat, he found her in distress, the baby whimpering and refusing to eat.

“He has taken—What? Fever?”

“It scared me while you were gone, dear.”

They watched him together, more and more uneasy. The child fell asleep tired. Always at this hour they had talked in the next room. To-night they sat and hearkened.

“You think I did wrong, not letting you—”

“No, no. Quite right. Hush, dear, we’ll wake him.”

Three hours before day Fong rose to work. His pair of dreamers did not know, for long practice made him cunning as a house-breaker in the dark. With easel, paint-box, canvas, and a wallet of food, he was gone outdoors like the smoke of his own breath by starlight; then off, marching toward the west where a planet burned slowly down into the rim of a black ridge.

“Well or sick, happy or not,” ran the words to his march, “they live by your hand, your eye.”

The dawn found him striding along a sunken road, a dusty furrow cut in the plain by wheels and hoofs long ago, but now abandoned; the sunrise threw his long shadow before him up higher ground; and morning, though brilliant, was not yet warm when he climbed among the hills. There, like a hunter who had lost his track, he ranged to and fro the barren slopes, from crest to crest, down a rocky defile, up the next, and so on toward farther wilderness. Fong Hsu quickened his gait, but eyed every landmark. What he sought was a place forgotten of men, hard to find.

“It is near!”

Above him, where steep ravines drew together, jutted the fragment of a camel-back bridge. Crumbling, a dark snag of masonry, it had let fall more than half its curve into the brambles, the torrent down which no water had run for centuries.

“Here we are.”

He mounted the ruin, and spied out the land. Far away the undulating hills came here and there to a peak, a tuft, a hint of roof and corner, which he knew for temple or monastery. They were the sole reminders of habitation. A black-and-white magpie escaped from under the bridge, and carried off all sound or movement. The young man stood alone as on a tower, and saw directly beneath him what he came to find.

“Here it was,” thought Fong Hsu, “that father and I missed our way on a journey.”

Since boyhood the place had been a haunting dream. Pine trees, lofty and sombre, guarded the darkness of a cleft between two hills, a narrow gorge rushing down like a broken stairway to the lower world. At bottom of their gloom, the evergreens parted on a region of bright air, and on a bush, a flame of autumn leaves and sun, irradiating all the depth with magic.

“No one has wandered here from then till now,” he fancied. “Nothing has gone by but the years.”

He sat all day on the bridge working, a part of the stillness, and went home with content.

“A fair beginning. To-morrow, go again and catch the color.”

It was long after dark when he passed Old Man Watch-the-Gate’s lantern and so indoors. Thriving Garden had supper hot for him, with tea ready to draw, but not her accustomed welcome. She never could wait to hear all that he had been seeing and doing. To-night she failed to ask.

“How’s our little boy?”

“Worse. Very hot, languid, and heavy.”

By the dim float-light, reading her countenance, he saw a look of tears withheld, of discouragement and misgiving, which grew alarm as the child in the next room began to whimper, then to cry.

“I’ve sat still all day,” urged Fong the liar. “You go to bed, now. Your turn to rest.”

A night of anxiety wore by. His little son tossed and muttered, or with dull patience lay wondering at him who did not right this wrong.

“No change,” Fong reported, next morning. “Perhaps no worse.”

“I will give the herb tea again,” said Thriving Garden. “It may be nothing but one of the Three Maladies. And you, you poor sleepy dear, must get back to work.—No, no! You can’t do yours and mine both.”

She took charge bravely, and pushed her man out at the door.

“Be off, old stout heart, and good fortune!”

Midday was past when he climbed up his bridge in the hills. Grudging even the time to undo kit and prop easel, Fong wasted none, but bent all his energy and began. The huge pine trees caught with topmost needles a faint and splintery brightness fringing their pads of shadow, then ran down aslant and over-darkened the narrow glen. That burning bush in the vista held once more the enchantment of autumn.

“The golden bough,” thought Fong. “Catch it, hurry, to-day or never.—But how now? What’s gone?”

A strange thing had happened: the freedom, the power, the virtue whatever it was, had left his hand. He bent the fingers, wrung them, scowled at them, and knew their defect was not bodily, but ghostly. He tried again to paint, and again, and could do nothing.

“Is there a devil in this ruin?”

If so, he gave it battle. The sun drew near the mountains before he would quit and wipe a dishonored brush, having made only a stroke or two of raw contrast.

“Home. Our boy may be—”

Fong stared from his broken camel-hump down the pass.

“He may be dying. Our funny little one.”

This, a dread which he might not bear, had been his thwarting influence, his devil in the mountain.

“My only child.”

The pines were now black. Under and beyond them shone, filled with sunset, the mockery of the golden bough yearning with all the splendor and transience of life.

A thought, a voice from there, left him in awe.

“She, too, was her father’s only child.”

Fong turned, swept up his bundle to carry, and fled.

“Brute beast, you!” Thought or voice, it drove him down from the hills. “You, trying to understand our earth, while an old man suffers by the year what has killed you for half a day!”

Starlight on the plain, cold air, and the swing of rapid walking, confirmed his judgment. He came home ready for good or bad.

“How is little son?”

Thriving Garden sprang up and ran to him on tiptoe.

“The fever broke,” she whispered. “He’s cool and well. Sound asleep.”

Fong caught his wife by both hands.

“Beloved, you shall take him and go to your father.”

“What? No!”

“Yes. I was a fool.”

Of the loneliness afterward, Fong Hsu never spoke. He lived at a club or chummery of poor fellow-craftsmen, worked, and finished the daub which only kept his loss aching in mind. He sold the thing for a few dollars. Who had bought it, he neither knew nor cared, until the day when a servant hurried in, flustered and happy.

Many wise persons have talked of The Golden Bough, yet never seen that rarest work by a great painter; and reason good, because it hangs in the bed-room of an old gentleman, Mr. Jü Yung Tu, retired from the bank Chun Ting Nan Hong, who will no more lend it for exhibition than lend you his grandson.

He is a haughty old rogue. All he said to Fong Hsu the painter, was:—

“Come here. You’re more of a man than I. You’ll make a good ancestor. Look at that picture on my wall,—just what our girl predicted: the shining movement of what’s-name through the departure of things. . . . Hallo! Yin Ma, where’s our little cub?”

I.

Breakfast alone on a dark day of rain, a fortnight’s rain pelting the cypress hedge silvery beyond the window and coursing down the road like a brook, might have seemed forlorn. It was not. Yi Tao stood by, and remarked that one of the eggs had a double yolk.

“Welly power hen.”

Tao laughed. Of course the talk ran toward that strict M. D. long ago, who would not prescribe for a dragon disguised as a man with a sore eye, but who cured it when the dragon politely and sincerely returned in a black cloud to twine its own head through the doctor’s door. We all know how this oculist gave sight to a blind widow. Her son begged him, but was told only to wait and feed her with nine yolks laid by one fowl in one morning.

“How can?” said Yi Tao, skeptical. “But bimeby dat boy hear de hen howla, howla, t’ree tam de hen he howla-ing becoss he lay she’s ekk. Go catchem.”

Every egg of the three contained three yolks. The blind widow ate them, and saw.

“Har’ to blief. Docto’ he got shining lound he’s head, all same gloly. Maybe. T’ousan’-t’ousan’ year he was life now.”

A physician with a halo being not unknown or incredible, the talk went on. Afterward in the laundry, to the sound and by the obscure light of rain, Tao as he ironed his white jackets, blowing spray over them with a brass funnel or without it, expounded medicine. There are good herbs, there are bad. If you leave home and marry a girl, Tonkinese or Annamite, south in the French country, be careful what you bite and sup: for before you start homeward again, she or her mother may give you the heart-ensnaring drug, so that you must return down to her within a year or die. This venom, and others like it, which bind a man to hypnotic slavery for an hour, a week, a moon, are employed also in the North. Did not a warlock above Nan-king poison the people, make them obey him? Was it not the lawyer Fung, son and grandson to doctors—“he smaht allo same docto’ hese’f”—who by his grandfather’s recipe for the antidote cured the sufferers, liberated them, and so caused the warlock to be shorter by a head? All that is history.

“Ching fahminy jix beginning, dat tam. Lartchee men no likem, say—‘Down Ching, op Ming!’ ”

The grandson of doctors, Fung Tai Wah, had taken and passed his examination under the young magistrate Wan. He became Wan’s chief secretary and adviser in the law. They convicted the poisoning wizard, they gained fame. A viceroy begged the Emperor to make them go quell the pirates of the coast, between Fuhkien and Formosa. They went, having no choice; they took Wan’s younger brother Kit for company; and in a curious way these three friends hunting pirates caught what they never looked for.

“Pooty long.” Tao grinned at his iron, and made it hiss with a wet finger spot. “Som tam you no bully, I tole you mo’.”

II.

So the great young magistrate Wan Man Li, with a retinue of sedan chairs to hold him, his wife, his babies, his lawyer and staff of clerks, jogged one day on the road overland from Fuhchau toward Amoy. His brother Kit, a lean, merry, hard-featured youth—one of the best fighters in the Empire—was riding a bay horse, throwing a sword up end-over-end, catching it, and chanting that love-song of the Merchant Far from Home on Moonlight Snow. It was gray vernal weather in the hills, warm, but overcast by sea fog. A bright-colored procession, they kept good order and good cheer, more like a family moving than an expedition against pirates.

How the pirates had come to wreck all trade in Fuhkien Strait, and to need putting down, is an earlier question. The law-secretary made it clear to his master while they journeyed, or at halts for tea.

“Trouble had arisen,” said Fung, “before your grandparents or mine, sir, paid us the honor of controlling our days on earth. It began with the ingenious lad, Jü Yat Kwai, the fortune-teller’s apprentice, the Ming boy.”

III.

When our last Ming emperor took his own life in despair, and a barbarian family by the name of Ts’ing hoisted their boots on his throne, many good ruined people fighting for a lost cause or running away went driven backward to the ocean hills, down into the surf, or over it even to Formosa.

On the mainland heights within hearing of surf, the orphan Jü Yat Kwai found himself at four years old trotting as disciple after a long-legged blind man who knew his way everywhere and who forecast the future. He had sharp ears, a good memory. Whatever the blind prophet said to powerful clients—or about them afterward, which was side-splittingly different—the boy crammed into his head and never forgot. Roaming up-country among prosperous valleys, farms, towns of rich old clansmen, hillsides worked and terraced and manured and gardened into wealth by generation after generation, the pair became familiar figures, welcome, trusted. They gathered and kept enough secrets to break half those grand men toward whom they bowed lowest.

“Be ignorant, my son, till you can employ knowledge without danger.”

“I know nothing, sir, not even the bottom of your bounty.”

“Little dog!” The fortune-teller grinned, and smacked him. “Truth perches on your tongue like an egg on a priest’s head. You know far too much.”

Rain fell that afternoon. Drenched, muddy, they were squatting on a temple floor and shivering. The roof leaked.

“A hungry night, this will be,” declared Longlegs the Prophet. “Come, to keep our hand in, let me draw your horoscope. When were you born? Where? At what hour? No trickling away now, young Oil-Drop. The souls of your father and mother, I can hear them listen at my back.”

Hugging wet rags, chattering their teeth, all goose-flesh, man and boy talked frankly for once, too miserable to lie or pretend.

“Great Lord! Tsong Kapa!” The soothsayer mumbled western words of alarm, dipped his finger in a rain puddle, and began by accurate sense of touch to mark lines, dots, curves on a dry flagstone. “You will be a tremendous thing, a peril or a salvation. Here! Look, Eyes, observe. Child, if you live to twenty-one or a quarter past, you may rule this broken world of ours, and mend it.”

Ten or a dozen years went by. What happened to Longlegs the fortune-teller is not known: he may have died under a bush, regained sight to become a devil-dancer among the black hermits, or gone his last and long-desired pilgrimage high up the mountain land, to sit wearing a maroon robe and in darkness meditating the four sublime ways toward the centre of Boundless Light. His apprentice wandered on alone.

“My master cannot help,” said young Jü Yat Kwai. “Alone I will do it.”

He had written three little books full of men’s names. Now he purchased a very old metal box and a soldering kit.

Times were bad. Men grumbled. The brotherhoods, lodges, and secret orders—of which it were impiety to say more—began to murmur a dangerous thought. Outdoors, on the road, in the street, ran chiming a by-word of discontent:—

“Down Ts’ing, up Ming!”

It filled the air like a song known to everyone, sung by nobody within view.

“Down Ts’ing, up Ming!”

A catching song, a deadly rhyme, it made the music of rebellion.

Hot summer nights drove people from a town to go rest beneath trees, talk, fan themselves, give their caged linnets the evening air, and enjoy the evening planet or the moonrise.

“Look!” They roused. “What is it? A thunder-bolt? Earth-gold? Wildfire?”

Under a silhouette of old camphor tree, as from its root, a blue-green flame shot up,—one dazzling puff of light, and leaves, and smoke.

“Devils cook supper?”

Every night the tree flashed from below and turned dark. It stood more than a bow-shot away. Daring men, rice-needy, who would tap the bung of hell for three cash, got courage at last to go near.

“Subterranean gold. Bring your pick, Wart,” they said. “And you, Humpy, quiet, borrow a hoe.”

The camphor tree, when they climbed down to it, was like any other large tree by night, except for a choke of brimstone and saltpetre thinning.

“Dig, before it flames again.”

They lighted a lantern. Wart and Humpy dug half-way round the roots. One of the pair hit metal.

“Tunk! There she sounded! Me, me first! Get out, back, all! Room! No, me!”

With bleeding fingers the poor men scratched now dirt, now one another.

“Aw, no good! Too light heft!”

One, raging, threw a muddy casket back into the trench. An old rascal, the oldest there, pawed it out again.

“Open!” he bellowed. “Open this, anyhow, fools!”

The box was hard to crack. They worried the seams apart, and found nothing but three small books.

“Trash.”

“Not so,” argued the oldest. “Written. Full of living men.”

Before the invasion he had been a scholar. He dropped on his hams, beckoned for the lantern, and sat reading. The rest of the pack, glowered at him like wild-cats in a ring.

“Names: names, and a prophecy.” The reader looked up with awe. “Written full, three books, of names that shall rise and rule in grandeur, when our true Emperor shines forth.”

“What Emperor? Who, where? Did this fall from the sky? What Emperor?”

A breath of hot wind passed shivering through camphor leaves. The old man’s voice made hardly more stir.

“That, too,” said he, “is written aforehand.”

After a long silence, Wart spoke.

“That’s the boy who dogged our blind seer.”

“Both gone.”

“A sending, in fire.”

The wild-cat ragamuffins drew back, rose, and slunk away. Three or four bent hurriedly to puff out the lantern.

“Me for the road.”

“And me,” said Wart. “I like my throat in one piece.”

The old reader, left in the dark with those three prophetic books, carried them, it may be to some great name on the roll, or to the master of some fraternity. From that night onward the rhyme—“Perish Ts’ing, flourish Ming!”—went syllabled by airy tongues livelier and farther.

A man who dealt in cast-off goods made a bargain, giving less than value for an iron pan, burnt granulated as with powder. He had it from a lean, laughing youth who called himself a tinker, and who pawned a soldering kit. The man did not brag, for in his trade it was not always the owner who cast off.

As for that laughing youth, he told a fib. He was no tinker. He was breeding and raising ducks on a puddle, behind a village, under a mountain. The few persons who wandered that way swore he was a fool, who took no care for the morrow or the price, but who called each duck by name and taught it, against Nature, ungodly, to perform tricks like a human being.

“He’s half-witted.”

Indoors, when his hut was barred and they could not look, Jü Yat Kwai might have seemed to possess no wit at all. He made a couch of bamboo, very smooth, and on it carved in thorny points and pricks the outline of a dragon with five-clawed feet. Every day Jü Yat Kwai stretched himself down, careful, exact, then waited and thought like a mad or holy man doing penance on a bed of spikes. He could bear the torment under him, could even grin.

“A strong prophecy may thrive in a weak man, if his birth be true.”

The summer continued hot. Workers who went naked to the loincloth, sweating, began to see a marvel.

“Heh! Ahead!”

“Who?”

“That boy. Stand-ho! What’s your name?”

“Jü Yat Kwai.”

“Your profession?”

“Duck breeder.”

“Why have you a dragon red and angry between the shoulder-blades?”

“Oh, quit your bosh. Let me go.”

The boy laughed, running away, dodging beneath a tree. But as he ran, everybody knew the dragon seal on bare flesh.

“There! Our lost Ming!”

A grave embassy of men filed in secret, one afternoon, to the duck pond below the mountain. They wore sad robes, yet glittered with embroidery. Jü Yat Kwai came wading, met them, and bowed.

“You wish to buy, gentlemen?”

They looked hard at him. Their chief spoke.

“We do not trifle, Sir. How of the dragon on your back?”

Their dignity formed a crescent before the puddle. Jü Yat Kwai, in his turn, met their eyes hard and true.

“My mother said I was born so,” he replied. “The birthmark may have grown more clear.”

“Your name is written above all in the Three Books. Here they are.”

Jü Yat Kwai read the pages like one who had never seen them before.

“Well,” said he. “Then?”

“Do you believe?”

He bent down, wiped mud off his legs, and threw it aside.

“I believe nothing,” he answered, “but God, honor, effort, and at the end, peace.”

The head of the embassy wept.

“Can you lead us, Master? Can you lead men?”

Jü Yat Kwai turned, and shrilled on his fingers. From the pond, hurrying, breasting a reflection of sky and mountain into ripples; dodging through reeds; waddling up the ooze on a bank star-printed with their web-toes, quacking, flapping, billing feathers into propriety, came white ducks by the dozen. They were not a flock, but a platoon.

“Form!”

The ducks crowded together, and in a mass or column roughly square, waited.

“March!”

A young drake with his tail bent high and quivering, led them against the ambassadors, who parted to give them the field. They took it on parade.

“Right hand!”

Sergeant Drake wheeled right, and was followed.

“Lucky hand!”

They wheeled to the left.

“Halt!”

The platoon obeyed, but with raggedness: for they quacked, squabbled, and nudged.

“To be still and to hold the tongue,” said Jü Yat Kwai in apology, “are hardest of all.—Barracks!”

A dispersion, white wings, eager necks, and yellow feet running, vanished into the door of a wattled hut.

“Food.” The Dragon Boy smiled. “Food and fair treatment.—Are men worse to handle?”

“Governing beasts! The sign foretold.”

What he and the prime legate said that evening alone on a terrace, a barley field, is not recorded: but months later when their conspiracy gaining might have brawled its force away, the trainer of ducks knew how to behave. A pair of chieftains, one up Snake River, one from the Black Tea Range, fought each to have his daughter made Empress ahead of time.

“Gentlemen, hush.” The Dragon Boy consoled them. “What is your girl, sir, or yours, my friend, to the good of our country? I’ll marry both.”

Thus dear Fuhkien Province rose, brave always and again, to war. It failed again. The lost Ming boy, the Dragon Child, met his death in battle with a laugh, going forward, so happy at twenty-one years and so full-blown with hope that he remained upright, rigid on his feet, among the fallen. Westerners may not deride, for a man stood up so at Waterloo, dead, winning or losing, it signifies not now.

IV.

“My narrative,” said Fung the law-secretary, “brought me here and there by its warmth, as Your Honor may have remarked, somewhat too near the confine of treasonable speech?”

His master, the great young Wan, smiled.

“By no means, Learned One. Pity for misfortune can not overstep the bound of correct sentiment.”

They understood each other well, this pair. Although in the service of a new emperor, both men kept a hidden regard for the old cause. Now, as Fung ended his chronicle, they were taking their ease, after supper, at a highland inn,—a large, comfortable house in a market town. Wan Man Li’s runners or harbingers had engaged every best room. The food was good, the landlord neat and civil. At table with them sat Brother Kit the young fighting-man, who seldom talked much but was a rare listener, keen-eyed, quick of perception.

“Your admirable account,” said the chief, “made past things live again.”

“Thank you, sir,” replied the lawyer. “They bear directly on your commission against pirates. The Ming Child having gone, both his wives hid their jewelry, dressed as beggar girls, ran away, and were given sanctuary by the great and good Mr. Lum, whose benevolent heart cannot be magnified by any words of mine. In the Lum household was born a son, posthumous to the fallen Emperor—excuse me: to the unfortunate pretender—a son, Jü Kai Kwai. When grown, this boy, like his father, headed a rising. It failed. He and his men escaped in boats to the hill country near the ocean. He died not long ago. His tribe have lived by the sail and the sword-arm, by plunder. Who their king or admiral is now, I never heard tell; but they, Excellency, these poor broken Ming loyalists, are your pirates.”

Wan gave a nod, thinking, frowning.

“A family of high spirit,” he pronounced. “I don’t love our job. They will be hard to exterminate.”

Kit the fighter shoved back his chair, and jumped up.

“Hard?” said he. “It would be a crime! A disgrace!”

His elder brother flashed on him the rebuke of authority.

“Govern your tongue, sir!” he ordered. “I speak to you as an officer of the throne.”

Kit bowed, bending very low.

“You may be seated. Remember we travel on duty.”

The lawyer turned the conversation. They picked remaining tid-bits from the bottom of their bowls, and chatted of their day, the journey, the landscape, the road. It grew almost yawning-time, the inn quiet, when suddenly behind the nearest door down fell a crash and a breakage.

“What’s that?”

“In my bed-room?” asked the mandarin. “My bed-room is empty.”

Kit, who always moved like a wild animal pining to go, had risen, flown at the door, and vanished. The other two men waited, knowing that against thief or thieves, armed or unarmed, Kit would not desire their help. Through the door which he had left ajar, they saw the peaceful glimmer of a night-lamp, and heard at first nothing, then a clink as from broken crockery. Some little time passed. The young man returned quietly, and drawing the door shut with his toe came forward holding both hands full at his bosom.

“Hole in the roof. No one there.”

Before them he dumped the fragments of a tile.

“Smashed on the floor. Purposely. To make noise.”

Kit’s bold, sharp face wore a look of anxiety.

“Elder brother,” said he, “you are not ill?”

“I?” exclaimed Wan Man Li, staring. “Ill? No indeed, thank you.”

“Nor have summoned any doctor? Any strange doctor?”

“No.”

“Any purveyor of strange medicines?”

“No! What has bewitched you?” cried the mandarin. “Speak out!”

“Then it’s all too dark for me.” Wan Kit gave a shrug. “This lay on the floor, and so that we might come to find it, the tile was thrown down to break.”

He spread on the table a paper bearing a few short columns written. His brother took it up and studied them.

“What on earth, gentlemen? It is addressed to me, but unsigned. A prescription. A doctor’s prescription. Why, the thing’s absurd. My health was never better.—Hark to this folly!”

Spacing down each column with a chopstick, Wan Man Li read aloud:—

Half-way through a catalogue of drugs and herbs and potions and powders dose on dose, the reader laughed.

“Gibberish!” he cried. “What does this quack mean, this crawler on the roof? He would frighten a well man into becoming his patient?”

Fung the lawyer thought not.

“A doctor so agile to gain practice, or so pushing an apothecary,” Fung reasoned, “would never omit name or shop. May I read?” And taking their document, the secretary pondered. “No. Nor perhaps a quack. Whoever wrote it had knowledge of medicine. Hmm. Well, well. Extraordinary. Gentlemen, a tough riddle. Of the drugs here, a few may be rubbish; I never heard of them; but the rest are paired off by contraries, by opposites, nullifying or antidoting each other, so that if Your Honor were to pour the whole mess down, it might be nauseous, but could neither help nor harm you.”

As Fung was not only son and grandson to M. D.’s, but one time a pupil of the Great Comical Independent Doctor Chun, his opinion bore weight.

“Accordingly,” said Mr. Wan, “you infer?”

The man of law shook his head, and went on reading. Brother Kit broke out:—

“That it’s not a prescription at all!”

“What then?”

“Don’t know,” confessed the young fighter. “A warning.”

“You talk round a circle, my boy. A warning, of course: that my interior needs decoration: which is a lie.”

“Daresay,” growled Kit. “Maybe. But anyhow I sleep across your door.”

They turned in late, without further happening and without any better conclusion drawn. From somewhere Kit brought a long lance, and prodded up rags enough to caulk the hole in the ceiling, tight.

“Don’t camp on my floor, little donkey!” scolded his brother, who lay abed reading. “Off you go, to your own room!”

Kit only snored.

Between midnight and the first cock, a loud cry woke him. Sword in hand, he jumped from his quilt, over which the lawyer came stumbling.

“I have it open.”

Mr. Wan lay safe and enjoyed their alarm.

“Hard sleeping on it,” said he, “for the riddle worked and twisted with me. Dear brother, you were quite exact, I was both rude to you and wrong. Here. It’s no recipe, but a warning. Read it level, the top row of the columns, cross-wise.”

Clerk and swordsman obeyed. From right to left the upper line of characters had meaning.

Kit nodded.

“Good sense, old man. My department. Road work. Bye-low.”

V.

Early that morning, when the bustle of departure had begun, Mr. Fung came hunting for Kit, with whom he sought a word in private. The fog was thick, the courtyard a drift of smoky twilight where men ran shouting, and the sedans heaved into order, their wet hoods undulating, shining forth, disappearing, like the back of a long serpent. Quiet in all the hubbub, Wan Kit stood by his horse and fingered beneath the saddle with care.

“Have you eaten well, sir?” inquired Fung.

“Very well, thanks. And you?”

The secretary lowered his voice.

“That affair, last night. Do you think it may be serious?”

After a tug at the girth, Kit swung round. He was wearing two swords, right and left. Wide awake, happy, as if the day promised good fortune, he grinned.

“Sir, in the kingdom of hornets,” he proposed, “a man looks on a bench before sitting down?”

Fung Tai Wah nodded.

“Quite so. A precaution occurred to me. His Excellency being threatened, how if you, our adept, were this day to do on your brother’s robe and ride in his chair?”

“No.”

Kit spoke short as a whip. The lawyer stared.

“No. I’m willing to die for him, any moment.” Kit laughed. “But not in that way, sir. For two reasons. First: you might dress me in gold cloth and peacock tails, but this yellow ugly phiz of mine would give it all away, wouldn’t fool a suckling. I’m no scholar, and can’t pass for one,—too bony. Fighting’s all I can do. Therefore, second: how fight, boxed up in a chair?”

Fung waived his point, with good grace.

“Most devoted of younger sons,” he cried, “from now I shall not again undervalue the clearness of your heart!”

The speech made that bony face grow red.

“Oh, Learned in Law,” muttered Kit, “you—you couldn’t.” Still blushing, he got on horseback. “Ho, fellows! Line, there! Be ready to go!”

All day the procession of Wan Man Li and his retinue wound over mountain road in a high fog which, breaking its upward, westward motion, let now and then a peak of dark firs or a slant where mist coiled among other evergreen, draw into view, then sink, tatters of a world gone below. The road seemed empty, lost in cloud; but from hour to hour voices came dropping in cascades of talk, sing-song call and response, the mountain chant of coolies who, unseen, made the height echo their approach, then loomed enormous, grotesque through a blur, as if trees and rocks one behind another were marching down. Once alongside, they took the shape of honest poor fellows bent under huge burdens,—packmen of the overland trade, northbound, carrying golden rattan woodpiles; fragrant sandalwood plank; many-colored boxes netted together, of precious value and evil smell; tiny but heavy jars of quicksilver. To clear a path for greatness, they balanced on the rim of nothing, their naked torsos agleam with fog and sweat, brighter than polished brass. When, running a gauntlet of question and answer, Wan Man Li’s troop had filed by, the road went up lonely again, an obscure way, each end blotted in smoke.

By degrees, however, the range of sight broadened; the veiled air turned luminous; and overhead a pearl-white wafer, the sun, began to glide as if backward in heaven. The travellers made their noonday halt beneath a tufted wall, a vertical mass, of red spiraea fresh in bloom.

“You think,” demanded Fung, strolling apart with his young friend, “you think they may attack in force?”

“We can’t predict, sir.”

“If they do, what then?”

“Oh, I suppose,” rejoined Kit, “I’m good for a dozen of the surf rats.”

“It is well,” sighed the lawyer, “to have youth and confidence.”

His tone bespoke grave doubt.

“My dear instructor,” said the boy, “don’t fear. It’s not vain-glory. We pupils of the Eight Men-at-Arms know each his limit. By record. One of the Eight was a woman, the Sword-Mistress Chun. She taught me. The only person whom I can’t handle, so far, is another of her teaching: he and I play about even: you know him well, the Tiger Cub.”

“What, even, with him?” exclaimed Fung, brightening. “The Tiger Cub? Young Mr. Kom?”

“No one else!” Kit laughed. “The brother of the girl I’m engaged to.”

Afternoon was quieter than morning. They met another band of packmen, they heard some wild thing crash among boughs, and they frightened a mountain blue-jay with topknot of black satin who vilified them in his foreign tongue. The fog ceased rising, drove contrary, opposed itself in whirls, then cold and thick poured away down hill. Once it melted to uncover the flight of a dream—wooded crags, bare peaks, and sea-water mirrored in a bay far off—all depth, all glow at sunset, all vapor, all gone.

Toward evening, the bearers put down their chairs for a moment, and took breath. Pine forest, gloomy and steep, reared over them.

“By the map,” said Wan Kit, leaning from horseback toward his brother’s chair, “we’re now at the bottom of Green Dragon Hill.”

The magistrate looked up at him, yawned, and smiled.

“Rather arduous ahead. Our men will not object to a good supper.”

Fung Tai Wah came gliding between the horse and the poles.

“A year ago, Excellency,” he murmured, “you promised to grant any reasonable favor I might beg?”

“Very true.” Wan Man Li’s bright eyes twinkled. “But you never beg, so my debt remains.”

The clerk bowed.

“To-night I do.—For the climbing of Green Dragon Hill, may I put on your garments and ride in your chair?”

Mr. Wan shook with laughter.

“I thought as much!” he answered. “No, indeed! My friend, my teacher, you may not!”

The secretary implored him. Brother Kit joined their argument.

“I wish you would, sir. How if enemies do lie waiting for you, up there, who know you? They find a stranger, instead. The wrong man, they say; and let us by, or hang back a trifle. To our advantage. You’d make it easier for me, for us all.”

The head of the family chuckled.

“A droll pair, you two.” He yawned again, stretched, and heaved out of his comfort. “As you will, then. I resign.”

Up Green Dragon Hill, therefore, the secretary went bobbing in his master’s chair, leaning forward to display the grandeur of his master’s hat and long black silk robe. His own countenance—the dry, sedate little face of a thinker—was pale. He shivered in his finery. Let it do him honor that, being small and weak, misdoubting every shadow for pirates in a thicket of spear-blades, Master Fung tried to enact authority bored with travel. Beside him rode Kit, who spoke once to forbid the lighting of lanterns, and again to warn him:—

“When I cough, sir, you dodge back and lie flat.”

A noise of brooks dashing milk-white through rock and fern, disturbed the forest like a breeze, then grew hushed, below. The track, paved with old flags of granite, became darker as it burrowed up among pine trees, which hung their boughs athwart more and more densely, to overcome evening by night. Chair-poles groaned in rhythm. The shoes of the horse clinked, and hammered out fire, a dull red smudge or two. Daylight was gone. Fung could only guess at a rider bending, watching, all cramped forward in one desire, to see.

The rider cleared his throat, and coughed.

On their right hand, out from the pines, a thing leaped at the chair. Kit was off his horse like a whirl of shadow, and fighting it. Steel met steel in the dark. Women, down the line of the halt, screamed. Footmen dropped their cargo. The lawyer beheld a mass, a knot, a contortion of violence writhing up the bank to crash and slash among rocks, roots, and branches.

“What’s there?” he called. “What is it, my boy?”

The fight ended as the crowd ran in.

“Don’t know,” came Kit’s voice, panting. “But I nabbed it. Hither, bring rope. A devil, may be. Strong, too light for a man. Flint, there!”

A lantern arrived, burning dim in fog.

“Ho!” cried Kit, under the evergreens. “Look, look! Nothing but a girl!” Then he spoke more doubtfully. “Anyhow, it has taken that form.”

VI.

The lawyer craned out and saw him go down the row of chairs, carrying in his arms a trussed bundle.

“Quiet!” he was commanding. “Hold your tongues! No roughness there, hands off! Devil or not, it’s a game fighter.—Douse the lantern. Everybody, quiet! And get on, forward!”

The young man returned, a shadow, mounted the shadowy horse, and rode again beside Mr. Fung. They climbed on, up the darkness of Green Dragon Hill.

“Stowed it in an empty chair,” Kit murmured. “It nearly got me, sir. Fought like one of the Eight. All I could manage, to take it alive.”

“Do you think,” inquired the secretary, “there are more ahead?”

“Who knows? It never opened its mouth. Dumb-mad.—Excuse me, sir, but we can’t watch and talk.”

Once more they rode, a long way, to the accompaniment of swinging chair-poles, of harness-leather and horse-shoe iron, and of the fog dripping from trees, a continual ghostly stir in ambush. No one flew down at them or appeared. Without hindrance they climbed at last from the woods to a bald summit, where lamp-light near the ground made a smother of golden haze.

“Our lodging, sir.”

The inn of Fragrant Plenty received them with decorum.

“A wayside hut,” cried the landlord, who doubled himself at the open door, “is unworthy.”

Wan Man Li, in the best room by candle-light, had a caller.

“Pardon the undress.” Kit’s face was a crust of dry blood; his tight-sleeved gown rent across the bosom, hanging in muddy flaps and bristling with dead pine needles. He put on the table a naked sword, then bowed. “Sir, you wish to examine your prisoner?”

“What! You are hurt?”

“Scratch above the forehead, sir.”

The chief gave him a smile of approval.

“Dear brother, take food, repair damage. Let the rest go till we have eaten.”

Early that night, after supper, they fell to work. Wan Man Li kept state behind a group of candles where the naked sword lay. Near by, at another table, the secretary Fung opened his book of record, ground his ink, and to make his little face more severe, beamed through horn spectacles. The room, with travellers’ gear stacked against the wall, shadows in every corner, was a formal enough court of justice.

The door swung. A footman held it open and waited. In black silk, shining and upright as an ebony wand, Kit advanced to the middle of the floor. He brought with him and left there a stranger who might have been some boy of his own age.

“Excellence, your offender.”

The door closed. He dragged a box across it, and sat down.

The standing figure, though in habit like a man’s, was that of a rather tall girl, her arms crossed and lashed behind her. She looked at the judge with brilliant, scorning eyes, then fixed them on vacancy over his head, as if alone.

“Gentle breeding,” thought Mr. Fung. “Spirit.—Our friend Kit is humane:—he gave her a chance to be tidy.”

Her clothing was torn, and streaked with mud, but her hair showed little sign of disorder.

“What,” began Wan Man Li, “is your name?”

The girl neither spoke nor stirred. All three men sat admiring beauty, intelligence, power, in a young face that ignored them.

“Where were you born?”

She remained a statue.

“You would have taken my life. On what quarrel?”

Again there came not a word. She stood in bonds, contemptuously free.

“My dear young woman,” said her judge, “you cannot overlook the gravity of a crime.” He laid his finger-tips on the bare sword. “With this, you tried to murder me. Did you not? It is your weapon?”

The prisoner’s great eyes flashed at him.

“It was the sword of the lost Ming, the Dragon Child.” Her voice, clear as music, betrayed no feeling. “It is now mine, by right of descent. He was my father’s father.—You are all infamous. Have done. Kill me. Earn your hire.”

Dismissing, forgetting them, gazing toward the wall as toward a mountain peak far off, she withdrew all presence but that of her body. They questioned it, they reasoned. It would not hear. Wan Man Li grew angry.

“To-night we persuade. To-morrow,” said he, “hard hands will make you a tongue.—Off with her. Contumacious. Hold her under guard.”

Kit, removing himself and his box, opened the door. Meanwhile the secretary bent forward to whisper.

“Yes. And then,” added Wan Man Li, “come back. Secure her for the night, brother. Join us here again.”

With arms pinioned, and a swordsman at her heel, their prisoner walked out like one moving by choice, calm, solitary, and free to go wherever the fancy led her.

“Astounding!”

“A madwoman?”

Behind closed doors the two, magistrate and counsel, wagged their heads.

“Draw near, learned guide. Let us compare thought.”

The young man, returning, found them seated elbow to elbow, in a parley so quiet and eager that he heard no more than undertone. They kept him waiting there, forgotten. All at once, however, both heads bobbed up, and over the candles two pair of eyes invited him.

“Here,” said his brother. “Sit with us. What do you think of her? A fanatical woman?”

Kit weighed his reply.

“No, sir. A devoted.”

“Ah. Devoted to what or whom?”

“To a cause.”

“You believe her brag? This highway stabber is, in your opinion, a grandchild of the Ming boy—er, I mean, the so-called?”

“Yes. But a highway stabber, no, not for one moment. Look at her sword. Look, gentlemen. A beautiful old sword, better than any of mine.”

Lawyer and mandarin exchanged a glance, dry, covert, as if the reasoning tickled them.

“But her motive, my dear junior, her aim?” continued Wan Man Li. “Birth granted, you cannot suppose this girl, single-handed, to be raising a rebellion?”

Kit grinned. Whenever it spread over those hard features, the grin was captivating, a play of light.

“She’d raise anything, or try, sir. Had you fought her under the pines, you’d think her aim too devilish good.”

Mr. Fung took off the big spectacles, but none of his acumen.

“Your brother is modest,” he chirped. “Your brother believes—frankly, dear sir, we all believe—that he has captured for you the Queen of the Surf Rats.”

“Do you, brother?”

“I do, sir. And a most unlucky haul. If they know she’s here, we’ll have two or three thousand of ’em tearing this inn to pieces before day,—and us with it.”

Fung Tai Wah nodded.

“Us, the inn, the province, and more,” said he. “If they knew, they’d come up here like waves of the sea, no stopping them. We run a risk. But when you mention bad luck, I differ. With all my heart, young man, I consider this your deed to-night as of the happiest augury, a noble stroke. You have won fortune’s prize. We must handle it with caution.”

The three men sat close, eyeing one another. From a distant room voices murmured like broken talk in sleep. Over the roof and the hill-top a night wind stirred, a breath of loneliness, of dark space.

“Her trial to-morrow,” began the magistrate, “perhaps will end nowhere.”

“That?” His lawyer chuckled. “It won’t be a trial.”

“What do you mean?”

“It will be a play.” Mr. Fung looked roguish. “A play, or nothing. Legally, sir, we haven’t a leg to stand on; for until you reach Amoy and take office in due form, you cannot hold court or judge a case. The girl need but say—‘You lack authority.’ Her trial would end right there. We are powerless.” The little man set his finger-tips together, and blinked at the candles. “But a Pirate Queen is no doubt unfamiliar with law. Speak the child must. If we enact a play, the simulation of a trial, it may do. Shall I manage our theatre and give out the parts? A comedy. With your wife and children up here, Excellence, on a hill that has given me the bone-cold creeps, tragedy is quite near enough.”

Wan agreed, smiling.

“Thank you, preceptor. You are right. Go on.”

“Comedy, then.” Fung Tai Wah grew brisk. “Very good. Let us rehearse.”

They did so in whispers, and were late to bed.

Morning came dark, in a heavy noise of showers; wetness and gloom all day enwrapped the house of Fragrant Plenty; the roof leaked, spattering discomfort; and where window-paper hung torn, a greenish light thick with rain hid the outdoor world. Not long after noon, yet by lamp-light, a crowd stuffing the common room of the inn formed an obscure mass, a double rank or hedge. Like worshippers facing the altar of a grimy temple, they saw brightness removed at a far end, where Wan Man Li had taken the chair. Behind him sat Fung, before him stood a pair of clerks, trim and ready writers, cruel examiners; with a colored screen as high background for them all.

Mr. Wan, placid and terrible, spoke.

Up the lane toward him through the crowd four lictors brought something. They dropped it, bowed their conical red hats, and backed away. A clerk snarled at it.

“Your name?”

A buzz, a hiss of surprise, flew round the room. Craining, elbowing, everyone saw her who knelt there,—a young beauty in torture, wrists and ankles knotted together, drawn till her frame was a bent bow of agony. She stared at the roof.

“Your home?”

Again and again the clerk snarled.

“Your fellow conspirators? Their names?”

In her lovely throat, which was bared by the strain of head toward heel, a pulse throbbed.

“Answer the court, or we tighten. Name yourself and your crew.”

She gave a moan, but without fear.

“My name,” she said, “is Valiant. I have no crew. I came from the sea to fight you all, you land monsters, corrupt, who eat poor folk. If a gentleman were here, he would kill me.”

The mandarin leaned back in his chair,—a cold, smooth ascetic who, having heard enough, dropped her from the mind.

“Gratify your prisoner,” said he. “Take her out, and slice her head off.”

It was Wan Kit who began to obey, and who from the dark end of the room swung past her, easy as a leopard. His hatchet face never looked more grim than when, frowning into the candle-shine, he halted. Moments passed. Rain sounded overhead, rain dripped on the floor with now a double now a threefold beat, and grew loud, regular, expected. The young man did not move. They who stood near saw, with wonder, a passion glowing through him like fire at the heart of smoke.

“Excellency, pardon!”

Kit flung himself down before the judgment seat.

“This lady, let her go free!” he begged. “She would have struck a blow in error, no more, mistaking you for one of the cruel, the unjust, the blind mouths who devour land and people. Set her free, and I will remain as her pledge.”

Wan Man Li glared at his unnatural brother, in surprise, wrath, disbelief, outrage. They were perfect, these emotions. You would have sworn he felt them, even to choking.

“What?” he thundered. “A pledge? Pawn your body for a woman who tried to kill me?”

The suppliant was meek but firm.

“Yes, Your Excellence. I pawn my head for her head. Of exalted courage, a champion who fights for her own, she will understand fair dealing. Prove to her that we are not butchers, not extortioners, but men of honor and men of peace.”

“Flowery.” Wan Man Li’s hand put all rhetoric aside, in boredom—“Prove, to her? Who is on trial here—the court or the prisoner? Out of the way. Get up.”

Brother Kit rose. Brother Man Li examined the polish on his table, cocked his head, let the rain drip a tattoo, and recovered his god-like austerity.

“If this green boy become your pawn,” said he, “and if we let you go, how then, Miss Valiant? You fly at our throat again to-morrow? Speak out, be civil; or even to a land monster, be frank.”

With her head straining so far backward and downward, the girl could see only beneath half-closed lids, in a water of pain. Kit’s face, ugly, sharp, and kind, wavered before her.

“He is real, he is true,” she thought. “By word and bearing a disciple of the Eight Swordsmen, who follow honor to defend the world.”

As if thought were current, crossing and meeting in silence, he nodded.

“For the sake of one gentleman,” cried the prisoner, “I submit. Thus far: toward him and his family, no others, I will keep the peace.”

“Fair enough,” said the judge. “Unbind her.”

Dizzy and cramped, she got to her feet, and made the young bondsman a courtly bow.

“Sir, I thank you. As my pledge, fear no harm. I will not break the word given.”

Master Kit grew flushed.

“Great Lady,” he stammered, “you—you put me to shame.”

The weigher of life and death had risen from his table. Behind him little Fung was whispering.

“Well played, sir. Now, quickly, hand her over to the women.”

VII.

The crowd in the common room had not found tongue or broken ranks, when a small housemaid, coy and trim, appeared from nowhere.

“Mistress, will you come? Tai-tai sends her compliments, and would gladly have you rest with her.”

After pain and the menace of death, it was wonderful to hear such words.

“Do come, please, mistress, for Tai-tai is the great lap of comfort.”

There was no denying a little messenger who begged so hard and who ducked so solemnly.

“Way!” cried the lictors, opening a path. “Way!”

Through the press, down a corridor, Miss Valiant and the maid walked into a quiet region free of men. It was warm, bright with lamps, gay with silken hangings.

“You poor dear, come to me and rest!”

A plump, short matron, Mrs. Wan had no gift of acting and required none. She was the jolly mother of a jolly half dozen, and now took Valiant by both hands, welcoming her like one more to be scolded.

“What do you mean by it? I never slept a wink all night, dear. You must go away and lie down, tell the maid to fetch everything, don’t be naughty, go rest. We’ll have our good long talk by and by.”

She let fall genuine tears. The girl saw, and like a tragic princess, beaten, acknowledged them.

“I meant you no hurt, madam. It was ignorance. The world of my people had gone wrong. Forgive.”

Thus two women, different as any two could well be, hawk and dove, met on a common ground of pity or understanding.

“To your room, child,” said Mrs. Wan, “till supper.”

Comfort, kindness, hospitality that began with leaving her alone, rich dresses brought her by the maid, were all parts of a dream. The supper—delicacies unknown till that night in the house of Fragrant Plenty, and cooked by the mandarin’s chief artist—might have been a royal banquet. When the servants retired, Mrs. Wan spoke with freedom.

“You are no pirate but a fairy. Charming. Now do tell me all about all. No one can overhear.”

She believed this to be true. They had their good long talk.

“And you,” said Valiant, smiling, “are like my own mother. You make a fool happy to confess. There’s no good pretending that father’s men are not pirates, though, because they are. He died when I was fifteen years old, and left me in charge of them. They are difficult, men.”

“Well I know!” agreed Mrs. Wan, patting her on the arm. “Eat another sweetmeat, dear. Men, men?—they are babes in a muddle!”

The rain sounded on the roof like waterfalls pouring overhead.

“Father was the Dragon Boy’s only child, I the only heir, my inheritance four thousand fighters or more. They do obey me, for old sake; but madam, who can change them into farmers or fishermen by a hand’s turn? We poor Surf Rats who lost an empire, we so terrified the mainland north and south from Hokchiu down to the City of Genii that hardly a vessel dared come our way. A bad livelihood, and we were spoiling even that. For the one course left, I called into assembly my father’s captains, the chiefs, my uncles, and so on, to tell them:—‘You are killing your own trade.’ I had them open offices in every large port, the office of the Sea Guards Company. We protect any ship that will fly our colors. The fee is moderate, according to the value of the cargo. What else could I do, Tai-tai? A make-shift, yes; but not robbery or war.”

It was fortunate, after all, that the rain kept up such a plashing; for near their table a screen hid the door by which the servants had gone out, and behind the screen a man choked with laughter. The man was Fung Tai Wah, sitting very snug in the dark.

“You young fox!” he thought. “Blackmail. At your age. And perfect innocence, too. You are a joy.”

“It worked, my lady,” said Valiant. “It is working well, our company of Sea Guards. The junks begin to prosper, and so do we. But then came this deadly news from the North,—an expedition marching on us, a new enemy with a great name. Who could stop him? It is not the habit of our family to lie safe and push underlings into danger. So I came and tried.”

Mrs. Wan held up her hands.

“Alone! What bravery!”

“No, despair. You say true, Tai-tai: men are babes who must be weaned from this and that. In a short time, ten years hence or twenty, father’s poor fellows may be weaned back toward peace. Not over-night, their tribe. Here were advancing fire and sword again, brute force and corruption—so I thought—to throw us down the same old pit of misery.”

In his hiding-place, Fung the eavesdropper nodded like a toy image.

“Right, right,” he told himself. “It rings true. A heart full of good sense.”

The talk went on.

“My husband,” said Mrs. Wan, laughing, “is not a fire-and-sword man!”

“No,” cried the Queen of the Surf Rats, “no! He is powerful, calm, a sunrise mountain. Pray, Tai-tai, for the sake of our poor thousands, pray him never to be moved against us! Time, not force, will win.”

“I promise to do what I may, dear. But now tell me of your mother and your home.”

They were soon deep in confidences. Behind the embroidered screen Fung caught a cramp, trying to overhear, and what was worse, doubting. His master’s lady had forgotten. Would she come to the point?

“Women, women!” he fretted. “They cannot do as they’re told.”

He was wrong. A moment later, in the full vein of gossip, admirably, sweetly, a mandarin’s obedient wife put the main question.

“And you, daughter?” sighed Mrs. Wan. “You, bud of loveliness and virtue, have given your word to what fortunate young man?”

The secretary became all ear.

“Why, to nobody,” replied Valiant, in surprise. “We live outside the world. And then our trade, you know.”

During the next burst of rain, a shadow crept from the room, and closed the door without seeming to have opened it.

“Good.” Fung trotted away down the passage. “That’s all we need.”

Warm and clear next morning, sunshine made the roof to smoke on the house of Fragrant Plenty, and the dark beaks of pine forest to glitter as they plowed whiteness below. Day was breaking fair.

“Mistress, we part.” The little man of law had come again, with ceremony, to a quiet corner of the tavern, where he stood beaming. “Your sword. A bag of silver for your journey home.—Eh? No, take them both. His Excellence could not bear to have you go empty away.”

Miss Valiant looked on him with wide black eyes full of doubt.

“Here, take them,” he urged. “And let me, afterward, come call on your mother?”

The black eyes flashed.

“We shall be happy to see you.—If you dare.”

Mr. Fung laid money-bag and sword at her feet.

“By nature,” said he, “I am timid. But you give me hope.”

VIII.

In peace and fine weather, Wan Man Li’s expedition came down to Amoy. Here much business awaited him; but of this the heavier part was cleared off by Mr. Fung, toiling day and night at a pace fit to kill a giant.

“You are not made of leather,” his chief warned him. “Spare yourself, my friend.”

Fung bowed. He was pale and dizzy with overwork.

“Affairs of routine,” said he, “are now going orderly. May I take a rest?”

“If you would not offend me, do so. Begin to-day.”

“Sea air,” continued Fung, blinking, “is a cure for defatigation.”

The mandarin laughed outright.

“So that is your dream of repose? Are you in earnest? Would you endanger your life among pirates, and go balance it on a woman’s whim? No, I can’t let you.”

They held an argument. Fung Tai Wah, though half asleep where he stood, won it.

“Away, then!” growled his chief, exasperated. “Try. But at your own risk.—And do be careful.”

The secretary went lagging from the great hall, so tired that his feet scuffed on the floor. Wan Man Li sat quiet and watched him go, thinking:—

“You body of a mouse, you spirit of a conqueror! Good luck to you, but I fear not.”

The tired mouse crept along to Kit’s door.

“Will you sail with me?”

Brother Kit in his room was whirling like a dark-faced young devil, jumping, making a halberd whizz through the air.

“Will I?” He left off practice, rammed the halberd into the rack of bright weapons, and came. “Yes.”

That afternoon saw them aboard a junk heading down the channel in a quick, noisy cobble tide.

“We sail, but you did not ask where.”

“Old Wisdom,” said Kit, “with you I’d go to where the Fusang cocks, crowing, spit orient pearls.”

His reply was a tag of ritual.

“For brotherhood?”

“For anything; because you’re game, sir, game as a quail.”

Mr. Fung’s eyes, drunken-red with want of sleep, had life enough to be astonished.

“Me? Dear boy,” he murmured, “you flatter. I’m frightened out of my wits, already. Heaven send a fair wind, for we must arrive and act before an emotion has time to cool. How long is that?” He gave a shrug. “Delightful to have you. Keep good lookout.”

Yawning, he staggered down into the cabin, dropped on the bare boards, and curled there as limp as a cat, a round bag of bones.

“Why bring me?” wondered Kit. “Nothing to do.”

Throughout their voyage the lawyer did nothing but sleep, rouse for meal-time, gorge, and lie down again either to snore in the cabin or from the deck to gaze at the sky. A light, baffling wind carried them northeasterly, on the port hand a range of hills blue with distance melted away, while to starboard the air and the water joined in a pale calm, no horizon drawn but by sunrise and sunset. The captain of the junk remained as dumb as his own porcelain god below. The crew spent their time throwing dice, fiddling, or wailing barbarous, unintelligible Hakka song.

“Dull,” said Kit. “Very dull.”

On the eighth tedious morning, early, when he woke, a ring of islands imprisoned them,—lofty cones, whalebacks, promontories of rock browner than the sails, brown as old iron, and cracked with rusty fissures. Here the sea had become a forbidden pool, a gray glass reflecting and by mirage distorting, heightening its border, so that every here and there a peak floated off the world’s rim.

“Holy Tai!” That mute, the captain, cursed or prayed. “O Salt Savior Tai, Fat One, delicate Round-Belly, bring us out of here with life,—all I ask.”

What scared him was not navigation, for he had plenty of water, bold water, and the junk drew no more than a man’s leg.

Mr. Fung stood near, wide awake, shivering.

“Aid me now, Brother Kit,” said he. “Don’t fail. My heart is a crumb of ice.”

It grew full morning, the sun high and warm. Sea fowl innumerable dotted the glowing margin of the water, and a few soared black on the sky, white under the shadow of land. Incoming tide and a faint breeze drove the junk slowly round a crag, to open a little bay from which the greenest of valleys ran—wedged like the frog in a horse’s hoof—up among iron rocks.

“Here we are,” sighed Fung. “Pirates’ Harbor.”

Not far away ships at mooring crowded a cove, but with no human stir among their hulls, bare poles, and painted eyes. The junk left them astern, and came to a red beach where a quay—part boulders fringed with rise and fall of seaweed, part grass-grown logs—waited for her quite empty.

“There goes one of ’em,” the skipper mourned, as he tied up. “Haul your spring! Make fast! There goes a Surf Rat.”

A tower of iron-red stone jutting from branches overlooked the quay. On that tower a man’s head bobbed out of sight.

“Let us follow him,” said the lawyer. “We are now expected.”

From the quay a road, paved with granite slabs and overshadowed by tall, dark trees, led straight up the middle of the valley. As Kit and Fung began their walk, they saw a tiny figure, a wisp of blue cloth, a twinkle of bare feet, go racing into the long perspective, and where the trees met, vanish.

“Our friend from the tower is nimble.”

Crows cawed along the avenue. Once, in a rift of sunlight, an osprey wheeled by. There was no other sound or movement; the valley, the island, might have been desert for ages; but the two friends moving up the lonely road felt a presence of watchers. The day was both hot and still. Mr. Fung wiped his brow, then shivered again.

“Ah,” said he, looking back. “Yes.”

At the lower end of the road, between them and the beach, a great concourse of men had gathered, some on foot, some squatting by the tree-trunks, and all silent.

“We do not return,” declared the lawyer, “without permission.”

Brother Kit agreed.

“No. Not that way.”

On they went, mounting a knoll to where the cover of branches ended. Heavy and high across the opening reared a wall with a grim gateway, a prison-like door ajar, and on its tiles a dance of heat blurring the sunshine. Little Fung drew himself together. He strolled forward with an air of unconcern.

“Yes,” thought Wan Kit, admiring, “you’re game. Walk into the stronghold of the Surf Rats, like a man coming home!”

“Why, Learned Friend!” cried a voice. “How delightful!”

In the door, laughing, stood Miss Valiant. She wore a gorgeous array of silk, primrose and lilac.

“So you did dare! Welcome, welcome! What a happy surprise! And you—” She bowed, with infinite grace, to Brother Kit—“you, sir, my pledge, why, this is like your kindness!”

A moment later she had brought them through a courtyard into a huge house, and a room severely grand with beams and pillars of carved wood.

“My mother,” said Valiant, “is here.”

A pale, slender woman in black received them, at one word, one look, casting over them the charm of gentle nature.

“Madam,” replied Fung, almost weeping, “it is good to have come.”

“Brave men, kind men,” said the widow and mother of pirates. “And Master Wan Kit, my gratitude for your deliverance of her . . .”

She thanked him so sweetly that the young man, who was not at all proud of his play-acting in the house of Fragrant Plenty up Green Dragon Hill, became awkward and confused. Taking pity on him, she guided the talk elsewhere. They were soon chatting like old friends. Mr. Fung bowed, and hugged himself.

“My lady,” he broke in, “our pleasure tempts me to forget our errand. But you see, I am a man of business.”

“Errand, sir?”

“Your daughter, that bewitching person: have you promised her in marriage?”

It was Valiant’s turn to be confused, to look down at the floor, her great black eyes and the curve of her lips betraying mischief that might have been a smile.

“Our guests, mother, lack refreshment.”

With that, she went from the room.

“A flower in a breath of wind,” said Fung, watching her go. “Ah. Madam, I take it she is not promised?”

“No, sir.”

“Then it is my good fortune—” The lawyer grew very earnest, and spoke with dignity—“my good fortune to propose an alliance which will bind three noble clans together in power and concord. For this dear child, this amazing child of yours, my lady, I know but one man. He is the only son and heir of the great Kom family.”

Kit cried out in joyful astonishment.

“The Tiger Cub? Why, he’s the brother of the girl I’m engaged to!—I beg your pardon for bawling, madam, but—but, why, he’s the finest fellow on earth!”

“And handsomer,” said Fung, “than this ugly toad.”

“Yes,” agreed Kit, “and a better swordsman, too.”

Valiant’s mother bestowed on the young man a look of quiet liking. All three remained silent; and in their silence Kit had a flash of wisdom.

“The long-headed little devil,” he thought, “that’s why he lugged me here!”

Mr. Fung went on talking. Devil or not, he spoke with a smooth angelic tongue, and in full career of persuasion.

“A great stroke, madam,” he urged. “Our young friend’s brother, Wan Man Li, sits high among those who rule. He would be a tower of safety to us. All up and down the River of the Snake, you can find nothing mightier than the Kom household. Your daughter’s husband, the Tiger Cub, is even now bringing glory to his father, a man already famous. On the mainland, their strength; on the islands and the coast, yours;—think, madam, think I pray you, in joining this threefold power you bind the very destiny of the stars. You end a miserable dark age. You light the way for peace.”

Valiant’s mother heard him out, folded her hands, and waited.

“It moves me, sir,” she replied at last. “But an affair of magnitude cannot close in one morning. Stay with us, gentlemen, and let us give more thought. You shall dine with the captains of the fleet, my daughter’s chief captains.”

They did so, four evenings later, at a banquet in hall. Grave sunburnt men, soft-spoken, rather care-worn, with sea-faring wrinkles about their eyes, the captains had not much table-talk. When the wine passed, however, they grew genial.

“Yes, I approve,” declared the eldest. “Have your master keep hands off meanwhile, and we won’t touch his damned government ships. Marry her off to your Tiger Cub. He’s a man. Look here, sir, though. You tell me her mother gives consent, but only if their two horoscopes agree?”

“They will,” chirped Fung, merry and wise in his cups. “Oh dear yes, yes indeed. They’ll agree.”

At bed-time he was confiding in Kit, and grinning.

“Horoscopes, pooh! I know a good venal fortune-teller, may be a hundred. My dear boy, these pirates, they show an admirable judgment in wine.”

“Get you to bed, little night-owl.”

“Yes, yes, yes. By the way, when do you want to be married?”

“Soon.”

“I’ll tell your girl so. Now that we have our hand in. Me, a wedding-broker! Victory, ho ho! Wan Kit my son, I believe it has gone a trifle to my head.”

IX.

Next morning on the quay the friends parted. Kit, with letters to his brother, was bound for Amoy in the junk which had brought him; the lawyer, in a pirate vessel, for Snake River and the Happy City.

“We meet again soon. Tell your brother my hope is high.”

“You can perform anything, Lion Heart,” said Kit, laughing. “Have my girl’s family bring these marriages on the run, both of ’em.”

“No fear. Walk safely.”

In due time Fung landed from a river boat far up-country among the Min gorges. Hot sunset poured through a cleft in the mountains, to gild their fantastic heights where pine forest and rock hung above the corrugation of barley terraces, green or ripe yellow, that in turn came plunging down like a giddy stairway to the orchards and the village roofs on the bank. Fung, stiff with cramp, followed a path which led among orange trees. Busy workmen, porters, women of the field, met or overtook him, jogging by.

“What is this pair of shining ones?”

Through the orange grove from the sunset came two loiterers, a man and a girl. They came with a swing, a perfect liberty of motion. The light being behind them, or their eyes being the sharper, they knew Fung before he made them out, and ran toward him like the wind.

“Oh, Learned in Law!” They rejoiced. “Well met! Our friend, where are you going?”

“Pretty Moth? Tiger Cub?—I was on my way to find you.”

The brother and sister captured him between them, and, both talking at once, turned back.

“Where have you been, dear Old Sagacity? What have you done? Yes, father and mother are well. The sight of you would make them so. Come, come, tell us everything!”

They were indeed shining ones,—Pretty Moth a radiant creature, the Tiger Cub a handsome youth—who appeared like twins in action, speech, and quickness of thought.

“Where have I been?” replied the secretary. “To the fortunate isles, for a cargo of blessing.”

While they went on, he broached his cargo and laid it all before them.

“A pirate queen to be my sister? There!” cried Pretty Moth. “Just what I wanted always!”

The young Tiger Cub laughed.

“You do make her very attractive, sir.”

“Miss Valiant is more than that,” rejoined Fung. “You’re lucky, boy. Horoscopes fit.—But one thing baffles me. Who could have dropped the warning and the tile into my master’s bed-room?”

“I did,” said Pretty Moth.

“You!” Fung halted, thunderstruck. “You?”

“Me, or nobody.” Kit’s girl, off-hand as Kit himself, enjoyed her triumph. “I too have gone about the world, sir. It was on the journey home, north. At your inn I overheard a charming girl ask by what road the new mandarin might arrive.—She is really charming, bother.—Dressed like a boy, and deceived the landlord, too. I didn’t know her, but knew her sword, for there’s only one sword of the Ming child. If she meant an attack, of course Green Dragon Hill was the natural point. You see, brother and our—our friend Kit, and I, when we were tiny things at school, we learned fighting and medicine under the Eight, from Lady Chun, the doctor’s widow.”

Fung lifted his face toward the mountains, and chuckled.

“You runagate! Why didn’t you stay that evening, and see poor faithful Kit?”

“Indecorous.” Pretty Moth began to hurry them along. “Besides, I never knew he was there . . .”

A purple glow, one broad shaft of color, burned across the orange leaves. Mountain shadow had quenched it, as from his gateway an old man, hearty, light-footed, came out to see who was laughing with his boy and his girl.

“There’s father.”

“Hallo, goblins!”

The head of the Kom family waited for them.

“And who? No. Yes. Hail, man of law! Come in! What have you been doing this hundred year?”

Little Mr. Secretary Fung bobbed forward.

“Making peace. It is a work—though I am not qualified to compare them—like making war. Have you a bed for me?”

End

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of Tao Tales, by Henry Milner Rideout.]