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THE WHITE BRIGAND

Persons this Story is about—

JUNE HARTE,

tall and slender and lovely, with golden-brown eyes and hair, pretends that she is June Hammond, secretary to Dr. Theodore Harper. Actually she is the schoolteacher daughter of Winton Harte and claimant to a fortune in Chinese jade.

DR. THEODORE HARPER,

June’s relative, is an eminent geologist who has come to China in search of a mountain of jade. He is short and plump and untidy, with a big gray dome, a gentle soul, and a courageous heart.

DIMITRI KOSLOF,

Dr. Harper’s Russian interpreter, knows everyone in Shanghai, but no one knows him. He is aristocratic in bearing, dandyish in dress, and pure Piccadilly in speech. An amazing linguist, he has a wide knowledge of China, but for reasons best known to himself he has remained an unimportant go-between.

LEE KIANG,

born of white missionary parents but reared as the foster-son of Prince Kiang, is Chinese in everything but appearance. He has unruly dark hair, dark eyes, a high-arched nose, a square jaw, and a big, humorous mouth. But the expression in his face shows that he has known and touched distant and hidden things.

PRINCE KIANG,

Prince of the River, overlord of the province of Chwanben, is middle-aged, with a pale ivory face of small, delicate and ascetic features. He is high-bred, priest-like, inscrutable, sinister and wise in the ancient lore of his race. He does not find it beneath the dignity of his great heritage to indulge himself in a modicum of kidnapping, coercion, and blackmail.

CHAO-YUAN,

loyal henchman of Prince Kiang, has a big body, a middle-sized mind and a small soul. This son of a mandarin is ruthless, realistic, cruel, and he bears small love for any member of the white race.

SHEN-SHAN,

Spirit of the Mountains, niece of Prince Kiang, is small, demure, and entrancingly beautiful. She has large velvet-black eyes, smartly shingled hair—and she is in love with Lee.

KOKO,

an ancient Chinese, has a face like marvelously worked leather. Years ago he was the body-servant of June. Now he is a house servant in the palace of Prince Kiang.

GENERAL HU,

powerful war-lord of the upper Salween River, is a middle-aged man with brutal jaws and sunken eyes. He is friendly to white people and anxious to win the favor of the Nanking government. He is likewise covetous of the neighboring province of Chwanben.

What this Story is about—

Old legends told of the existence of a mountain of jade in the remote fastnesses of Western China, but its exact location had been lost in the mists of time. When Winton Harte discovered the priceless vein hidden in the side of a cliff, he was accompanied by his twelve-year-old daughter, June, and he impressed the details of the site on her memory. Then for ten years the mountain was lost again—except in the vague charts drawn by her father, and in the memory of June.

When she returns to China as a lovely young woman to seek out the mountain of jade, June is quickly abducted by dashing and arrogant Lee, a white Chinese, and is transported by air, by parachute jump, through capture by headhunters, and by pack-train to the distant province of Chwanben, where she becomes a prisoner in a magnificent palace which had once been the home of an exiled Dalai Lama.

In this Lost Horizon setting a tense drama of East and West unfolds. The players are a Machiavellian Chinese prince—his foster-son, a white man reared in Oriental splendor—his niece, the breathtakingly beautiful Shen-Shan—a young and lovely Ohio schoolteacher—a distinguished American geologist—a carefree Russian adventurer—a cruel and sinister mandarin—a gentle Chinese servant—and a rampaging Oriental major general. This international group plays a fast game of life and love and death, and the stakes are a kingdom and a king’s ransom of jade and the human spirits of the leading players.

This is a fascinating and colorful and exciting story of romance and intrigue and high adventure—light-heartedly told as only Edison Marshall can tell it.

Copyright, MCMXXXVII, by Edison Marshall. Reprinted by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y.

The White Brigand

Only twice in twenty-four hours had the acres of lobby of the great Cathay Hotel in Shanghai obtained this air of quiet and desertion. The first lull had occurred just after dawn, when the last nightcap had been served, the latest reveler had rickshawed home through the hollow-ringing streets, and the first morning bracer was still in the big black bottle. The second was just now, four o’clock in the afternoon, too late for tiffin and too soon for tea.

At one of the hundred tables in this vast pillared lounge June Harte sat alone. This was really her name, she remembered—not June Hammond as she had so adventurously registered at the hotel. The only other patron, a solidly built young man, was asleep in his chair. But June welcomed a breathing spell to go over in her mind all that had happened to her and make sure it was really true.

In her Ohio town she was a first-grade schoolma’am, sharing a cheery but modest cottage with her mother. Here she was a conspirator in a major plot, the depository of the most thrilling secret any adventurer could prize. As any summer tourist on her first trip to the Orient she had come to Shanghai, shopped on Nanking Road, danced at the Little Club, and had even been proposed to by the Marrying Major, a marine officer who offered his hand to every pretty visitor coming his way; but actually she stood again on the sacred soil of Cathay where she had walked as a child, sniffed the smells and heard the strangely familiar babble of tongues and seen the endless yellow faces that in the last ten years had faded to a dream. If the great adventure won, her schoolteaching days were over. The wolf that had howled at her mother’s door for ten years would be banished to the North Pole; green Chinese gold would make every wish come true.

“But no one is all happy from his beak to his tail,” said the Adjutant to the Mugger. “And you’d better snap out of it,” June Harte said to herself. “You ought to be ashamed.”

For also she had done a ridiculous lot of schoolgirl dreaming. She had fancied herself not as a silent partner, but as one of the captains of the expedition. At the least she had counted on working in the field beside Doctor Harper. And only at lunch today had she discovered what a silly little fool she was. Harper had told her very plainly that she must wait in Shanghai until the excitement—yes, and the danger—was over and the prize was in the bag. The wilds of Chwanben were no place for a white girl of twenty-two.

Yet they had been all right for a little white girl in pigtails, ten years before. She had gone there with her commercial-botanist father, Winton Harte, and with her own eyes had seen that green-and-white vein of rock all but hidden by vines on the broken face of a granite cliff, that terrible day their bearers had deserted and they had ridden to the Momba village alone.

“You do see it, don’t you, June?” her father had insisted in a queer, husky tone.

“Yes, Daddy. Like the inside frosting of the cakes Mamma used to make.” But she didn’t have any cake that day, or even any bread.

“And do you see that V-shaped gap in the mountains toward the setting sun? And the big cairn of rocks with the black one near the top on your left hand? Remember these landmarks, and this little creek—”

“It looks just like any other little creek,” June had interrupted thoughtfully, “but it sings differently. I’ll never forget how it sings.”

“Hum! I wonder! But fix that cliff in your mind’s eyes. There are thousands here that look just like it, but notice that hump on the top—”

“Just like the camels we rode on at Chando!”

“Anyway—don’t forget. For you see, June, if something should happen to me, you’d have to lead a lot of grown men to this very spot, to get that green stuff out of the rock.” For Winton Harte did not hide the facts of life and death from his little daughter.

“It would be fun to lead a lot of grown men. But I don’t want to unless you come too, Daddy. But I won’t forget.”

She never had forgotten. To save her life she couldn’t draw a picture of that humpbacked cliff, but she knew she could recognize it instantly from any cliff in China. And she could still hear the little river singing like no other water in the world.

The green stuff was jade. Her father had stopped and chipped off a few pieces from the vein, and she wore them now in a bracelet on her wrist. They were the purest emerald green, and worth all she made in six months’ schoolteaching. But her father had never gone back to get the countless tons of deep green, pale green, and white jade that remained in the rock. He had returned to America to try to get capital and influence to work the mine, and had died there.

At first no banker would believe June’s story or the sketchy maps her father had brought back; and as long as Tibet claimed the country no foreign-devils could get permission to enter. Only in the last year or two had China established claims to the territory, and Doctor Harper, the famous geologist who was her mother’s cousin and the family’s best friend, had found the money and influence and faith to undertake the expedition.

He had memorized Winton Harte’s maps and burned them up. He had come to China ostensibly for some coal surveys, with June posing as his secretary. Because the rumor had once got out of Harte’s discovery and the Chinese have long memories, Doctor Harper thought it best that June travel under an assumed name. No one must suspect their mission until he had located the jade deposit and made the right kind of a contract with the Chinese government.

But she knew now he had only brought her here to please her. He could find the place without her help, he had told her kindly. Half the profits after the Chinese government had taken its share would be hers just the same. Wild Chwanben on the border of Tibet was infested with bandits, headhunters, leopards, and malarial germs, and she was too precious to risk. And there was just a possibility—he hemmed and hawed—that a report had gotten out—and then he hemmed and hawed some more. There wasn’t a chance in a hundred, but still she couldn’t go.

That was that. At any moment Harper would meet her here, and then she would go upstairs and help him pack for Nanking, where he would complete the contract with the Chinese government and take off in a private plane for Chwanben. In the meantime, she could have a large, fine time in Shanghai.

“Oh, well,” she said with a game little smile, “that marine major isn’t a bad sort, after all.”

Just then she saw Doctor Harper come in the door, a man less than medium height, round-stomached, untidily dressed, only his big gray dome and the thought lines about his kind gray eyes giving a clue to his amazing mental stature. He was trudging along, his hat over one ear, his thoughts no doubt wandering in the Lower Eocene.

“Here I am, Uncle Ted.” She always called him this when no one was in hearing.

His big square-toed shoes, favoring his corns, turned in her direction. His plain face lighted up, for he saw someone very pleasing to his eyes. In fact, he had always marveled that a plain, timid woman like his cousin Martha could have a daughter like June.

Quite tall and slim, still there wasn’t a straight line on her unless it was from point to point of her long, light-brown eyes. Her mouth had a little curve, like a permanent quiet smile, her nose was curved up, and the arch of her eyebrows made her look interested and eager, even when he was talking about igneous rocks.

Beautiful to him was the alert and lovely set of her head on the throat of a nymph. By Jupiter Olympus, her curly hair was the same shade as her eyes—a hazel fluff bobbed and turned up at the ends. And because she had small, perfect bones—as a geologist, reconstructing a flying-lizard from a few broken fossils, Theodore Harper knew the importance of bones—her features were clean-cut as a hound’s tooth.

“Well,” he beamed, “I remembered I was to meet someone here.”

“It was me,” she told him, in a mysterious stage whisper.

“I. Remember your calling, the noble one of instructing the young.” As always she did not know if he was teasing. “Now let’s see. Just what were we going to do?”

“Go upstairs and pack for Nanking,” she answered briskly. “Both of us—for you remember you decided this noon to take me after all.”

He was immediately wide awake. “June, I decided nothing of the kind. You can’t work that bluff on me. And—and it disappoints you a little, doesn’t it?”

“I’d hoped to go to Chwanben. You know the charts aren’t very complete—”

“Lower your voice. That man in the chair might hear you. The charts are all right, and with a little more coaching from you, they’ll be where I can’t lose ’em—in my head. That is . . . not unless I lose my head too.”

“And that’s the real reason you’re not taking me. Not discomfort—not that you don’t need me as a pinch-hitter—but because you think we might both lose our heads.”

“Unlikely in the extreme. Still, a treasure-hunt for the richest jade mine in the world gives scope for accidents. By the way, June, did you see that Chinese, Chao-Yuan is his name, whom Dimitri Koslof brought here a night or two ago?”

“I noticed him.”

“He has approached me, through Dimitri, to do some mineral surveys for his master, a mysterious and very powerful figure in Chwanben.”

“Chwanben?” she echoed, alarmed.

“It sounded quite innocent, on the face of it. Hiring Dimitri as interpreter, I’ve let him think I’m going to Western China for some coal surveys. He suggested that I accept this other commission and kill two birds with one stone. Moreover, Chao-Yuan has offered to furnish a private plane direct from here.”

“But you suspect—”

“Not really. But it’s possible that the lord of the country is suspicious and wants to keep an eye on me. His name is Prince Kiang—Prince of the River. Do you remember your father mentioning him?”

“Plenty of times. On the caravan road we passed within a day’s march of his palace. He’s a great prince, but was one of the leaders in the Boxer troubles and we went to a lot of trouble to avoid him.”

“I’ll avoid him too—just in case.”

But Doctor Harper had forgotten to stop by for his own and his interpreter’s air tickets to Nanking. Would June mind getting in a rickshaw and going after them? The office probably closed at six.

Yes, she’d go gladly. Her chance for great adventure had gone up in smoke, and she wanted to get her long face out of Harper’s sight. . . . But what a persistent little idiot she was, what a beggar for punishment! As she made for the door she deliberately went two tables out of her way to get a glimpse of the sleeping man’s face.

She could not trip over his feet or drop her handkerchief. Not that she’d put it past herself, if it offered any profit. But she liked his unruly dark hair, the shape of his head, and the set of his shoulders in his coat. She just wanted to see if his face fitted the rest of him.

Just then a Chinese servant sprang forward to push away a chair from the aisle. The sound wakened the sleeping man; he raised his head the precise second that June reached his table. As his eyes opened they were gazing straight into June’s eyes.

Just for one breathless second it seemed to lead to something. But nothing more happened—his eyes did not change expression. The shutter opened but he did not get a picture. He only gave a little grunt to find himself awake, and glanced at his wrist-watch.

As she swept past him, she heard him get up and come hurrying out behind her. Late for his date, she told herself with a wry smile.

Still the little comedy had one half-hidden vein of drama. Although the dark-haired young man had not seen her face, she had seen his. It was one of the most arresting faces in her experience.

There was nothing unusual about his features. Dark eyes under heavy brows, a high-arched nose, a jaw inclined to squareness, and a big, humorous mouth—they might appear on any American or English face. But their expression startled her. In spite of that face, he was not like other Americans and English. It was as though he had known and touched distant and hidden things.

“Hold on, June,” she cautioned herself quickly. “The man’s probably an insurance salesman. And anyway, you’ll probably never run into him again.”

She erased him neatly from her mind and lost herself in the wonder of Nanking Road. Taxis honking every turn of the wheels . . . Chinese, like ants in a hill . . . rickshaws in droves and swarms. One of the latter was trying to pass in the heavy traffic. The coolie was already abreast of her wheels, and if the fool didn’t watch out . . .

“Watch out!” she shrieked—too late. And too late her own coolie swerved toward the curb. The left wheel of the passing rickshaw snagged her right wheel; there was a crackle of broken spokes and a bone-shaking, tongue-biting jar as her axle struck the pavement. But she had always been quick as a cat, and she clutched the side of the cart, preventing a fall.

She had been riding fairly slow and was not the least hurt. And sitting here in a wrecked rickshaw, on a seat inclined at a dizzy angle, would probably be the liveliest adventure of her China trip. . . . No, she was wrong, dead wrong. She perceived this with a jubilant leap of her heart.

Never run into him again! For the man who had got out of the other rickshaw, and was reaching a hand to help her to her feet, was that man.

June had a sound, clear head—and kept it. It was no miracle he had turned up Nanking Road behind her, nothing to write home about that in hurrying to his date, their rickshaws had collided.

His hand was firm and strong, but had not done much work. “A thousand kowtows,” he was saying—if she could believe her ears. “And if only you are not injured—”

“Not a bit, thanks.” And then as though she had flown, she was standing on the sidewalk.

“Will you wait here, just an instant? Those coolies are creating an uproar—”

“I’m all right. Just call me another rickshaw.”

But she didn’t call one herself, she noticed, although the street swarmed with them. At least she would give the gods of adventure plenty of rope. He said something to the coolies in Chinese, and passed them something. And the latter must have been impressive, because their shrieks were instantly cut short.

He was returning to her now, concern in his square, strong face. But beneath his distress for her, even beneath the sensitiveness so plain on his big, clean-chiseled features, there was poise without end, the calm of the great Buddha of Lung-men.

“Are you sure you’re—all right?” he was asking.

“Perfectly grand.”

He smiled then—a winning, homely, friendly smile. Maybe he was an insurance salesman.

“At least you’d better sit down for a brief period. Just within we can get a cup of tea—or even a chocolate soda, if that’s your national drink. Since we were fated to collide, it is well we are in front of a tea-room.”

He was not much taller than she, she noticed, as they entered the shop. But he was sturdily built, and she went on liking the set of his shoulders in his beautifully tailored pongee suit.

“My name is Lee,” he told her, when they were seated. And this too was a bit curious, she thought. One man to another in a casual meeting might give only his last name, but she would think he wouldn’t be so stingy with a girl. And her warm impulse to give her own name stopped with a little tremor in her throat.

He did not seem to care. “I hope this minor accident today will not mar the pleasure of your visit to Shanghai,” he went on gravely.

She felt her eyes growing very wide. It was such a queer remark, so formal, so ceremonious. From a Chinese mandarin to the American ambassador, okay, but from a good-looking young American to a passable American girl . . .

No, he was not an insurance salesman—not anything she had ever met before.

“My visit to Shanghai will get along,” she answered. “And that reminds me—my boss is leaving Shanghai tomorrow and I’m on the way to pick up his plane tickets. And as it must be nearly six o’clock—”

But he had no intention of losing her so soon. He would at once telephone the air-line offices and have them deliver the tickets to the steward aboard ship. Two tickets in the name of Theodore Harper? Right! And before she could protest, he had given her an odd stiff little bow and hurried to the phone booth.

She was glad to have him go. In his absence she could arrange things in her mind. Yet she grew a little breathless when she saw him returning to the table. He was at once so familiar and so strange. She wished she understood the glint in his eye, as of secret triumph. It was as senseless as all the rest.

He had scarcely sat down when one of the Chinese waiters trotted up and bowed. “Please, rickshaw coolie street-side. He say, please gentleman speak to him, very kind.”

It turned out to be Lee’s man, requesting a note from the missy stating that she had not been hurt and absolving him from blame. It would be nice of her, Lee said, as the police regulations of the Settlement were very strict.

“Of course I will.”

So he supplied her with a page torn from a small address book and a fountain pen. . . . And it didn’t really matter, it was only interesting, that the pen was made of precious apple-green jade.

He delivered the note, and now the waiter brought their drinks. Lee had ordered tea, without milk or sugar, but he merely tasted it, grunted in contempt and pushed it aside.

“That tea was brewed for white men,” he complained.

She felt startled in a queer way. “Well?”

A mask seemed to drop over his face impervious to her gleaming eyes, then slowly faded away.

“Most white men do not know tea,” he explained with a smile. “I do happen to know it. Some day I should like to brew you a cup of Hsi Wang Mu White Flower.”

“I’ve read Chinese history. Wasn’t Hsi Wang Mu—?” He was gazing at her with startled attention, so she thought hard. “I know. ‘The Royal Lady of the West.’ ”

“Splendid.” His eyes were shining. “Education in America must have made great strides.”

“How long since you were there?” she asked, carelessly.

“An extraordinary woman, Hsi Wang Mu,” he went on, ignoring her question. “Some of the greatest lords in China claim descent from her. And particularly their modernized daughters worship her soul, because until her time Chinese women were not known to possess souls. They were regarded only as playthings for men.”

“I understand that they still are, pretty largely.”

“Why not? China is very wise.”

“Well, I’ll tell you right now I think it’s horrible.”

“It is permitted.” And he made a very curious movement of his hand.

That odd phrase and gesture was a slip! Her wide-open eyes did not fail to catch his effort to retrieve it. He smiled quickly, leaned forward, and said with almost boyish charm,

“You are worthy of the White Flower. It comes from about ten acres in the Rima Hills. However, my friend Hop-Chung serves Sze-Tao, a fair leaf, and an excellent Chinese dinner, too.”

“It’s pretty late—”

“It’s later than you think.” She wondered if this were originally a Chinese saying. “And Hop-Chung’s dinners start early, to allow his guests a proper leisure at the tables. It would be well to go direct from here.”

There was no real reason she should not accept. She had dined with new acquaintances before—and was free, white, and twenty-two. What made her hesitate was her own breathless excitement.

“I can’t go. I’ve got to do some work for my boss.”

“Summon him to the telephone. Invite him to go with us, if you desire. I will be honored to meet such a distinguished man.”

She wished her mind wouldn’t run away on so many foolish errands. Her friend’s scientific reputation was either known to Lee—a rather peculiar fact—or else he was employing extravagant courtesy foreign to Americans. But he was an American. That was all that mattered. His smile and his eyes spoke for themselves. And as he had invited her old friend, certainly he couldn’t be—

Be anything but nice! And a moment later she was at the telephone booth, having Harper paged in the lobby of the hotel.

“Look, Uncle Ted. Can’t you do your own packing?”

“One of the servants can help me, but why—”

“I want to go to dinner with—with Lee.”

“Lee? I don’t remember you mentioning him. But you must know him pretty well to call him by his first name.”

“He’s one of the American colony, one of the nicest,” she evaded. She gave herself a quick glance, white sport shoes, a sweet little linen dress with a yellow scarf, and patted her hair under a perky white hat. “And I think I’ll go from here and not go back to the hotel.”

“I take it he’s that nice young chap we met at the air-line offices. Well, have a good time. But June—”

“Yes?”

“I wish you’d take off that jade bracelet your father gave you and put it in your bag. It—it’s quite valuable, you know. Some thief might see it and—and—follow you—”

“You’re a dear old silly, but I’ll do it. I’ll be in by midnight if not before.”

She hung up, blushing. Probably her old friend wouldn’t have gone to the dinner, anyway, but she had taken pains to have Lee alone. And if she had told Harper the truth, she wouldn’t have gone.

No, and if she returned to the hotel to change her dress she wouldn’t go. That troubled her more than her scheming or deceit. The inference was, if she wanted to look at it . . .

But when she put her bracelet in her bag and came out of the booth, she looked only at Lee. He was smiling as no black sheep could smile. By his eyes she liked him—and knew that he liked her—and that was enough. But those eyes were sharp. . . .

“You’ve lost your bracelet!” he exclaimed.

“No, I’ve got it in my bag.”

“By Lord Buddha, I am relieved! You may care to know that I have never seen finer jade. Indeed its only equal is a piece or two once owned by the Dowager Empress, the history of which is lost. It has quite a different luster from the river jade of Burma—”

“Is that so? A friend of mine just picked it up somewhere.”

He helped her into the cab, and gave the driver directions in Chinese.

At Lee’s suggestion, they stopped in the Palace tea-dance for a cocktail. There was time, he said; and there proved to be time for a waltz, played by a Negro orchestra typical of these fabulous crossroads at the mouth of the Yangtze Kiang.

June was not sorry she came, only deliciously glad. The tune was one that had been popular two years before in America. As they danced, the strangeness went out from this man whose arms were about her. This melody from home stole upon him and took him with astonishing power. She felt the rapture of shared nostalgia.

He was holding her quite close, and his eyes were shining. A most vital man, he was; she had never felt more vividly alive.

Not one of the crowd, many of whom she had met, appeared to know him. She was dancing with a different rhythm and movement from any she had ever danced before—because she was following him, sharing his almost barbaric fire. But it did not matter—nothing mattered but her marvelous good time. When he forgot he was with a white girl and said, “it is permitted,” she only smiled.

“You dance beautifully,” he told her. “ ‘When the slave-girl speaks let the buyer beware, but when she moves he can judge if the price be fair.’ That’s the clumsy translation of a Western China saying.”

She wanted to clear away that last little cloud. “My name is June Ha-Hammond.” Goodness, she almost forgot her alias.

But he paid no attention and led her to their table.

A few minutes later she saw Dimitri Koslof, Doctor Harper’s interpreter, come in the door. He stood very still, as though startled to see her there, then smiled and waved his hand.

Dimitri had always puzzled June. He seemed to her one walking contradiction. He knew everyone in Shanghai, but no one knew him. An amazing linguist with a wide knowledge of China, yet he remained a minor go-between and interpreter between Yellow and White. His bearing was indubitably aristocratic, still he made no claim to titles and looted palaces on the Volga. Hard as flint he seemed to her, but his dress was precise to the point of dandyism. Although a Russian of the Russians, his manner and speech were totally Piccadilly.

“Jolly running into you here, Miss June,” he said. “Jove, had no idea you two knew each other.”

“Dimitri and I are old acquaintances,” Lee told June quickly. And he invited him to a drink.

“I just saw your boss,” Dimitri went on presently. “We were to dine together, but he couldn’t leave his dashed reports. I suppose you’ll soon be toddlin’ off to help him, hard-workin’ little secretary, and all that.”

June felt confused. It was not like Dimitri to babble in this way, or not mind his own business.

“On the contrary,” Lee said, “I have invited Miss Hammond to dinner—at Hop-Chung’s.”

Dimitri lighted a cigarette in an ivory holder and inhaled slowly. “Why Hop-Chung’s?” he drawled. “Cozy place, good forage, but didn’t think his jolly old arrangements permit entertainin’ ladies. Sing-song gels, and all that—”

It seemed to June that Lee’s eyes darted to Dimitri’s in quick suspicion. But she must have been mistaken, for at once he was smiling. And bent on adventure, June said quickly:

“I like sing-song gels, and all that.”

“I dare say you’ll soon be tricklin’ along. Miss June, how about one dance before you go? I’m skilled at your American steps.”

It was the first time he had ever asked her to dance.

“Time does not permit,” Lee broke in quickly, “but you shall come with us to dinner.”

June had been about to insist on a dance with Dimitri, to take Lee down a peg . . . at least that was the only reason that made sense. . . . But when Lee offered to make a crowd of their company tonight, the wind went out of her sails.

Dimitri glanced lazily into Lee’s eyes. “Hop-Chung’s?” he echoed.

“It is permitted.”

“Awfully nice. Accept with pleasure. Well, shall we toddle off?”

There were three taxis by the curb. Lee passed by the first two to choose the third, a seven-passenger sedan of American make. The driver had just turned away two other white men, but he accepted Lee’s party.

Lee talked with boyish enthusiasm as they rode through the glooming streets. June lost all sense of direction and only vaguely felt that the eating-house of Hop-Chung was an astonishing long way. A stiff taxi-bill he’d have to pay, she considered with schoolmarm thrift . . . but the meter wasn’t running!

Dimitri sat very still. She could hardly feel him breathe . . . and as Lee leaned forward to call through the speaking-tube to the driver, she felt him touch her hand.

“Stay close to me tonight,” he whispered.

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Do everything I tell you, without question. I’m your friend. Believe that, June.”

Was the man crazy? All the freaks and fanatics in the world came soon or late to Shanghai. It was just an interesting dinner date. She had to believe that, or else . . .

A moment later they were discharged in what seemed to be the walled courtyard of a large, ramshackle residence. A portly Chinese met them, bowing and jabbering pidgin, and escorted them into the building.

Lee had chosen the perfect background for a real Chinese blowout, June assured herself quickly. It was better than she had hoped—in fact, just a tiny bit adventurous. There were many doors, and two or three halls that made unexpected turns. And the light from the old iron lamps was distinctly bad.

The place was very still. Their footfalls made surprisingly little sound on the shabby, old rugs. Yet it seemed to her they were not alone, that there were people behind every door, people standing in the black alcoves, people over her head and under her feet, all breathing very quietly. It was just her imagination showing her a good time. But one thing was quite real, a confusing and disturbing thing. As he walked beside her, Dimitri’s face was the color of wet ashes.

She was watching for a chance to speak to him when the parade ended in one of Hop-Chung’s dining-rooms. It was a rather ordinary room, but she noticed three things about it. One was the fumes of incense, the second was an odd assortment of chairs and tables, and the third was a pair of quite wonderful blue Chinese lanterns, whereby she could read a menu perfectly well but at ten paces couldn’t tell a broomstick from a gun.

Two other tables were occupied, one by a lone Chinese, the other by a group of five Chinese. There was something odd about this group. She wished she could pin it down and be rid of it. Not their clothes, which were ordinary . . . nor their faces, because the light did not show them well. Nor was it their ill assortment—sharp contrasts with one another—that so often draws attention to a party of people. But suddenly she grasped it—and a queer little chill, like fear, grasped her heart.

There was nothing odd about this group! That was the trouble. Shanghai was the New York of China, a hodgepodge of short and tall, ugly and beautiful, but those five Chinese were like pigs from the same litter. No, wild horses of the same herd, for they were all big, rangy men, and there was something rough and free in their movements.

Once before and long ago she had seen men of this stamp—carrying loads and riding shaggy ponies on the caravan road through Chwanben.

It was of no importance. Hop-Chung’s might be a favorite rendezvous for back-country visitors to Shanghai. She was about to dismiss it from her mind when she glanced at Hop-Chung’s other guest, the Chinese who sat alone.

Dim though the light, she knew she had seen him before. . . . There came a vision of an enormous room with many tables, and Dimitri and Doctor Harper, with a big, rangy man of middle-age and a cast of countenance quite different from most Chinese. . . . She couldn’t be sure. The memory and the light were both so dim. Still he might be Chao-Yuan, ambassador from Prince Kiang who had offered Harper a commission in Chwanben.

As though Lee’s coming was a signal, Chao-Yuan rose and left the room.

A waiter brought in teapots and small handleless cups. They were very old and beautiful, she thought, and the drink was fragrant. But as she raised her teacup she met Dimitri’s eyes. His wet-ashes look had disappeared. She had never seen him so debonair, but his gaze met hers with the force of a physical blow. At the same instant he gave a quick shake of his head.

She put down her teacup. “Mr. Lee, is this the White Flower of Hsi Wang Mu?” she asked.

“Later you shall have the White Flower. Try this now. It’s quite a good leaf.”

“First, you must follow our American custom, or it’s bad luck.” Her words required no thought, her plan was there by magic in her head, ready to use. “You must give me the first cup from your pot, and take mine.”

He looked only interested and amused. “That’s a charming custom. We should adopt it in China. Oddly enough, I’ve never heard of it.” And he drank the cup she gave him with a little gesture like a toast.

A false alarm. But fear still had her by the throat. She could not guess where the danger lay, but she knew it was marching in this dim room.

Now Dimitri moved again. His quiet roaming eye stopped at a silk painting displayed under the lamp on the far wall. “Deuced interestin’,” he said. “Sung dynasty, perhaps. May I have a closer look at it, Mr. Lee, while you’re orderin’ the feast? And, Miss Hammond, you might like to see it too.”

“Thank you, I’d like to,” June played up. And followed by Dimitri, she strolled across the room.

“The best Sung paintings are usually on silk,” he began, when they stood side by side in front of the picture. But his voice dropped gradually to an intense murmur. “Ask me questions about it,” he breathed. “Anything you can think of. And do what I tell you.”

“The Sung dynasty! Wasn’t that about eight hundred years ago?”

“As soon as you can, excuse yourself from the table.”

“I suppose such paintings are very rare?”

“Ask Hop-Chung for the washroom.”

“Lovely coloring, isn’t it?”

“With any luck he’ll show it to you, the door to our right.”

“And what do those characters represent?”

“When coast is clear, turn right again, into narrow hall.”

“That’s so interesting. But are you sure your information is correct?”

“Good God, it may be life and death. Through hall, out last door, fast as you can run. Don’t stop for anyone. Through courtyard into street. Run . . . hide . . . anything to get away, then find policeman.”

“Dimitri, I didn’t know that. Oh, you were mistaken about the tea.”

“For God’s sake believe me. Smile, I tell you, smile. Are you all right? Have you got it? Now back to the table . . . and good luck.”

And then, as he strolled beside her, and in his best Piccadilly accents, “Oh, I dare say there are many such treasures hung about in these Chinese cities. Of course it may be imitation. . . .”

They took their chairs. June was able to lift her teacup without spilling the liquid. Did Lee suspect her fears? Had the time come to make that desperate break for freedom? Was Dimitri himself playing a crooked game?

The waiters had brought the first course. She tasted the soup, then laid down her spoon. And then she heard her voice in the haunted silence.

“Excuse me a moment, please.” And she started to push back her chair.

But she stopped, her skin prickling, when Lee replied quite kindly.

“Do not leave the table, Miss Hammond.”

“But I’m going to the washroom—”

“I regret that you must remain in your seat, until I can give you further instructions.”

On a frantic impulse she sprang to her feet. But she stood there, rigid, as three Chinese filed in the washroom door and stood there on guard. At the same instant the five men at the next table rose with military precision and formed a line, a strange, silent human wall of uniform height, facing the prisoners.

“You see it’s quite useless,” Lee said, smiling at her. “But you will not be harmed if you obey orders. And please understand that this is necessary to the greater power and glory of my august father, Prince Kiang.”

With deliberate movements, June resumed her chair. When Dimitri held out his gold case, she took a cigarette, tapped it on the table, and breathed deeply at the lighter held in his steady hand. It was only a gesture, of course. Everyone knew it. But somehow it helped. Some of her feigned strength passed through a psychic change and became real strength. And her first rational thoughts were of her Uncle Ted.

At that very moment Doctor Harper’s thoughts were of her. He had dined early and now was sitting in the crowded lobby, waiting for June’s return. He had no heart for the Lower Eocene tonight. Somehow he wished he had inquired further whom Lee might be, or at least where the two young people intended to dine. It was foolishness, of course, but he was an old fool.

At that moment Chao-Yuan approached his table. “Excellency,” he inquired in his foreign-sounding but capable English, “may I have the honor of speaking to you?”

Doctor Harper admired this soft-spoken, self-disciplined, brainy Chinese. “Yes, but if you’re hoping to persuade me to go to Chwanben—”

“I shall not mention the matter. It is in other hands.” Chao-Yuan settled himself comfortably in his chair. “Your secretary, the young virgin, has been abducted.”

He employed a level and quite casual tone, not quite loud enough for the people at a near-by table to catch his words. They had been looking at him curiously, but now they returned to their own affairs.

“What did you say?” Doctor Harper replied. “I couldn’t—quite—get it.”

“I said that your secretary, the young virgin, has been abducted.”

“Oh, you’re using the wrong word. What do you mean, man?”

“No, I am quite familiar with your noble language. But be careful, Excellency, not to raise your voice. And kindly control your facial expression, as far as a white man can. Otherwise you will never see her again.”

“Oh, my God.” The veins stood out on Doctor Harper’s hands. “All right. Tell me. Give me the straight of it. But can’t you hurry?”

“There is no great haste. We like order—leisure—we Chinese. The young virgin is being held for ransom.”

“You’re lying. It’s not ransom.”

“I beg you to be careful, Doctor Harper. Be very still and restrained. It is quite true. You are the ransom.”

The bewildered horror passed from Harper’s face. Suddenly he was a far more dangerous antagonist. But Chao-Yuan saw his gaze flick to the nearest table.

“I warned you, Excellency,” he said. “Not a sign nor a sound to alarm our neighbors. Are you ready to come with me now?”

“Just a minute. I’ve got to make some explanation to my friend—”

“I am a trained operator, Doctor Harper, and there is another in this room, watching us this very moment. If you speak to anyone or try to pass a signal, he will do one little thing. Then you may abandon hope of ever again laying eyes on the young virgin.”

At surrounding tables men and women laughed, sipped drinks, chatted.

“The master must stand by his servants, Excellency,” Chao-Yuan was saying. “You will do nothing to lose the young virgin in your charge. For no matter what happens to me, it will not save her.”

Harper drove his will to ask a question. He was utterly and deadly cool, but he made it sound bewildered and terrified. “But—but your master hasn’t any interest in the girl.”

The yellow mask did not quite conceal a fleeting look of curiosity. “Except as your hostage.”

“If I go with you, she’ll be released at once? You’ve got to give me your word, or I’ll give the alarm.”

“I am sorry, Excellency. I cannot speak for my master.”

Doctor Harper hesitated briefly, then gave a little gesture of surrender. “All right. I’ll go with you at once.”

Chao-Yuan directed him through the main door of the lobby to a waiting car. As they drove off through the thronged streets, the Chinese found on a seat a little folded square of cloth.

“This will show that you are not on a fool’s errand. Unless I am mistaken, it is the young virgin’s handkerchief.” Chao-Yuan touched it to his nostrils. “A lovely scent—like the incense from our poppy fields when the wind blows off the Rima Hills.”

In the meantime June was sitting in that incense-scented room, saying hardly a word. Her employer would be here soon, Lee told her gently. For he had not turned into a monster before her eyes. Sometimes she saw the shadow of another world fall across his face, but mostly he smiled, asked her to be calm, urged that she refresh herself with the good Sze-Tao tea. Dimitri smoked urbanely.

When Doctor Harper was brought in, both men rose. When she saw him want to kiss her on the cheek—but stop and remember she was just his secretary—her eyes filled with tears.

“I am honored to meet such a distinguished man,” Lee told him with a bow. “Shall we go at once, or will you have a pot of Hop-Chung’s excellent tea?”

“I’ll have some tea, thanks.” And he took the chair Hop-Chung proffered.

To see him there laid the spell of a dream on June. Here was the same lack of harmony and sequence, the same feeling that if she could but waken she would see how preposterous it all was. It wouldn’t surprise her to have a Scotch bagpiper walk in the door, playing Yankee Doodle.

Dimitri looked bored. The five tall guards were like wooden pickets in a fence, except for the slits of their eyes. Hop-Chung stood off a distance, counting with a series of buttons strung on wires. Chao-Yuan had sat at table with her uncle, but now stood behind Lee’s chair.

“I take it you are in charge here,” Doctor Harper addressed Lee. “Will you explain this?”

“Must we hurry so? But I suppose it’s a national characteristic, to get to business at once.”

Doctor Harper began to polish his glasses. “Quite true,” he conceded. “We live to work, and the Chinese work to live. America makes a living of business. China makes a business of living.”

Her old friend never spoke without cause. Was he playing for time?

“We are naturally uneasy,” he went on. “Mr. Lee—if that is your name?—will you please give us the lay of the land?”

“That is precisely what we want you to give us, Doctor Harper. The lay of certain lands in Chwanben. But you refused to go, regardless of the fee, by your own will.”

Doctor Harper seemed shaken. “How about my secretary?”

“Safety demands she must accompany us, but I apologize for the threat against her made by Chao-Yuan. It was an artifice to save bringing you here by force.”

“And my interpreter, Dimitri Koslof?” Doctor Harper asked.

Dimitri had been gazing into the smoke of his cigarette. Very leisurely he glanced up.

“Am I to join the party, Mr. Lee?” he asked carelessly. “Dashed if I see where I’d be any use.”

“My first intention was to get your promise to say nothing and not interfere,” Lee answered. “I had reasons to think you would give it freely and abide by it.”

“A few blots on the jolly old past, eh? And now?”

“Now I have decided to have the pleasure of your company.”

“But what are you going to do”—and Doctor Harper looked him quietly in the eyes—“if we refuse to go?”

Lee returned that steady glance. “I shall continue to obey the orders of my honorable father.”

He left the room, and Chao-Yuan led the prisoners through a short hall to a heavy teakwood door. They were really prisoners now, not merely unwilling guests. His voice and manner were not at all like Lee’s.

“The cars are just outside,” he said. “You will get into them without making any noise—for any noise will be immediately silenced.” His eyes, cold and bright, looked from June to Doctor Harper, but oddly enough skipped over Dimitri. “Is that quite plain?”

“Perfectly,” Doctor Harper answered.

They were ordered to the rear seat of the same big car that had brought them, while Chao-Yuan and one of the guards took the folding chairs; two other guards sat in the front seat. Lee was at the wheel of the roadster, and the two remaining guards mounted to its rumble seat. The motors were idling, and at once the big car led the way out through the courtyard gate.

There were glimmering street lights, houses and little groups of people, corners to turn—just as in any automobile ride. There was wind blowing her hair, and Dr. Harper and Dimitri sitting beside her. The lights of Shanghai dimmed and faded out behind.

It must have been fully ten minutes later that Doctor Harper turned to Dimitri and asked,

“Parlez-vous français?”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“And you do, June,” he went on in French.

“Yes, if you go slow.” And she had never dreamed he remembered this lone accomplishment of hers.

“What about our friend? Do you suppose—”

“He may. Chwanben is fairly close to Yunnan, where there is French influence.”

“Good girl. Geography is the first pillar of erudition. Well, we shall take the risk. June, this is bad business at best. We’ve got to fight it.”

As if she didn’t know! She turned white, but spoke quite clearly.

“You’re the boss.”

“Dimitri is young and powerful, and I’ve always been strong. Somewhere on this road there’ll come an opportunity to strike. Are you ready, Dimitri?”

“Sorry, not for me. I wouldn’t relish a broken rib and a gag. We had better go where we’re going, in good health.”

“You can count on me, Doctor Harper,” June said.

“Good. If we can raise an alarm—”

She touched his arm. Her heart gave a furious bound. That opportunity Harper had foreseen might be close at hand. She sensed a nearing crisis in the rattle of words between Chao-Yuan and the driver. As though to signal, the lights on the car behind flashed off and on.

Chao-Yuan turned on his folding chair and spoke in low tones. “Far up the road you make out a very faint light. It is a post of Chinese police, who will ask to see certain passes which we have provided. The officer will probably address you in English, as he is very proud of the accomplishment. And it may occur to you to try to explain this situation and seek his aid.”

“What would be the use?” Doctor Harper said.

“None whatever. You understand I would be beheaded just as quickly for an attempted kidnapping as for—murder. And I do not share my young master’s ideas as to the sanctity of the lives of young virgins.” And something gleamed darkly in his hand.

“Don’t say a word, either of you,” Doctor Harper ordered his comrades.

A moment later the car drew up before a light wooden barricade. The police officer glanced over the documents handed up by the driver, asked questions in Chinese, then with a wide smile peered back into the tonneau.

“Please, velly pleasant weather,” he said.

“Very,” Doctor Harder agreed.

“You Number One missionary, Heng-Chow, velly good, eh?”

The pistol held low in Chao-Yuan’s hand glimmered no more, so steady and still it was. “Very good indeed,” Doctor Harper gasped.

Then he looked with open-eyed admiration at June. “You velly much like teach China school, Missy, please.”

“Dote on it,” June answered, not knowing whether to laugh or scream.

“You,” fixing his eye on Dimitri, “missionary doctor, velly smart. Fix plenty babies, no die. China mans velly much sick, make well. Thank you velly much.”

“Thank you, old thing,” Dimitri answered.

“Good night, please. A’right you go now.”

“I don’t think you would have shot my secretary,” Doctor Harper said thoughtfully as they rode on. “If anybody, it would have been the officer, to slow up pursuit.”

“I have a proper regard for my own word, Doctor Harper,” Chao-Yuan answered quietly. “And for future guidance I assure you—the word of my young master to the contrary—that if you had made trouble at the hotel, you would have never seen the young virgin again.”

The words echoed long in June’s ears. There was no other sound but the purr of the motor and the spinning wheels on the road. There was nothing to see but rice fields in the moonlight, and an occasional squalid village.

Now the car left the broad road and took a narrow lane between flooded fields. The moon tore through the water, keeping abreast of the car; frogs chorused; water birds mournfully honked. They skirted what seemed to be a considerable city, then turned through a decorated gate of a long, gray wall. What might have been the Roc, that flew with Sinbad from the Valley of Diamonds, roosted with wings spread on the open field beyond.

It was a big, three-motored airplane. Utterly silent it hovered there; motionless and still were three Chinese standing on guard. The car rolled to a stop beside the plane. The noise of the motor ceased.

But June broke that haunted silence with a low cry. For it was all true. She was convinced at last. It was not a tale told by a traveler; it had happened to her, June Harte, a young schoolteacher from Ohio. And it had only begun.

As Chao-Yuan dismounted from the car, the three guards saluted. But their backs arched in the full salaam to Lee. And the two men were hardly out of hearing when her uncle began to speak rapidly, in a tense and breathless undertone, in her ear.

“June, did Lee see your bracelet?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell him where you got it?”

“Not the truth.”

“You didn’t confide your name, did you?”

“No.”

“Thank God. If anybody questions you, deny that you’ve ever heard the name of Harte. Deny that you’ve been to China before. Although a distant kinsman, I’m just your boss—you know nothing of my intimate affairs. I picked up that bracelet on a previous visit to China and am just letting you wear it. Do you understand?”

June did understand. She understood only too well. She was the woman who knew too much.

The prisoners could take their seats in the plane, Chao-Yuan told them. Like a flock of sheep to the slaughter-house they filed out of the car, casting long shadows on the moonlit ground. But Doctor Harper stopped to speak to Lee.

“Look here, young fellow,” he began in friendly tones. “You say you had orders from Prince Kiang to fetch me to Chwanben. Were you ordered to fetch my secretary, too?”

“No, my illustrious father did not know the girl was with you.”

“Then why not leave her here? Whatever work you force me to do, she’ll only be in the way. She is nothing but a typist, and is not in my confidence regarding my business in China.”

“I am sorry—”

“I am much more likely to accede quietly to your demands if you grant this request,” Harper persisted, trying to keep his desperation from his voice. “She will promise on her honor to wait there for my return and say nothing of this abduction.” In the moonlight they saw Lee shake his head. “She will say nothing even if I do not return, and she never lays eyes on me again.”

Never lay eyes on that homely figure? The words echoed with an awful solemnity in June’s ears. There he stood, his hat on the side of his head, his glasses at the end of his nose, his round stomach casting a grotesque shadow on the moonlit ground.

“I’m going with you, Doctor Harper.”

“Shut up, June! I’m managing this.”

“The young virgin speaks truth,” Lee said. “She is going with you. What promise would seal the lips of a faithful servant whose master is in danger?” Chao-Yuan broke in with a high-pitched sing-song, at which Lee listened haughtily.

“Anyway, the men who are to take the cars back to Shanghai are not safe drivers,” Lee added.

“What does he mean, Dimitri?” Doctor Harper demanded. “What did Chao-Yuan say?” For this was no time for the amenities.

“Dashed difficult, that dialect,” Dimitri replied. “But I gather it’s safer to keep Miss June beside you. Chao-Yuan has ideas all his own for makin’ sure the young virgin will cause no trouble. Very triflin’ matter to Chao-Yuan, young white virgins.”

With heart beating wildly but shoulders straight, June climbed the metal steps to the cabin door. The moonlight through the windows showed beautifully lacquered walls and damask-covered chairs.

“Dimitri, can you think of anything?” Doctor Harper whispered, when the three prisoners were seated. “If we could only disable the ship—”

“No fear, with that guard watching through the door.”

“They’re pumping gas, outside. If we could set it on fire—”

“We’d be blown further than Chwanben. But I’ve been thinking—”

As he leaned close to Doctor Harper’s ear, June had a strange feeling that she was seeing something without seeing it, some little thing that might be all-important. Then with a cold thrill up her spine her gaze fastened on it. The right side of Dimitri’s coat was sagging as though there was something heavy in his pocket.

“Dashed odd, y’know, that Prince Kiang would go this far for a bally geological survey,” Dimitri was saying thoughtfully. “Perhaps you understand it better than I do. Deuced awkward that there’s nothing we can do.”

But there was something, if the guard would turn away his eyes. In Dimitri’s pocket was a small pistol. Hardly a dozen times in her life had she touched a firearm, but that life was as dead as though this ship were sailing to another planet.

But the guard stepped into the cabin . . . and another . . . and another . . . and there was Chao-Yuan coming through the door of the cockpit . . . and now there was nothing to do but listen and watch and dream.

Four of the five guards squatted on the floor in front of the seats. She saw no sign of the fifth; probably he was with Lee in the cockpit. The motors began to drone. Chao-Yuan closed the cabin door and ordered the prisoners to fasten their safety-belts.

Glancing from the window, June saw the dead earth in the moonlight pick up its bed and walk. Then it trotted, then it ran, then it was flying by. Her eyes fixed on the ponderous-looking wheel. It was kicking up a small cloud of dust, throwing back a little shower of gravel. But soon it was spinning in empty air.

June’s heart was not one frozen lump of fear. Hope was there; it was hard to kill in a girl like her—and wonder—and, especially sharp right now, remorse. She yearned to speak of it to Doctor Harper, but the guards were close by. She did not know whether they understood English, and while the ship panted up the sky she could not find safe words.

“Doctor Harper?” she called at last.

“Yes?”

“I disobeyed your order about your air tickets to Nanking. Lee tricked me into letting him cancel them. And I tricked you into getting off work to go out with him, just because I wanted an adventure. So the whole thing’s my fault.”

To her enormous relief and gratitude, Harper gave a nervous chuckle. “So you wanted an adventure? You seem to be getting it. I forgive the peccadillo. Let me put it this way— All work and nothing shady, would make June a dull lady.”

It was an atrocious rhyme but she took the spirit for the deed. She wanted to unfasten her safety belt and spring up and kiss him. And this meant not only that she loved him. It meant she’d stand by him till all the yaks come home.

“How about you, Dimitri?” she asked at last. “Is it square with you?”

“You need feel no concern for me, Miss June.”

She knew, then. Partly by his words, mostly by his tone and his twisted smile, Dimitri had confessed. He had been a partner to the plot against Harper, but had not known until tonight that she too would be its victim. That fact made a difference to this strange Muscovite. Even he did not regard women as playthings for men, or as pawns for a mountain of jade.

Meanwhile the big plane had climbed almost to the stars. All that remained of the earth was a few glimmering squares, where the moon shone on flooded rice fields. And now Chao-Yuan turned on the cabin lights. It was good, June knew, to see her old friend’s face.

Again he leaned across the aisle, his eyes feverish. “Not now, but in a moment, look up on the rack beside the cabin door.”

What she saw there resembled a big square pillow with some odd loops and straps. “Parachute,” she whispered.

“I think so. Curious, just one. Why do you suppose—”

“Lee brought it for his precious self, in case there’s an accident,” she answered bitterly.

One of the guards passed trays and napkins. Then came pots of steaming tea, hot toast, marmalade, and crisp rice-cakes. Life goes on, June thought.

But after supper there was nothing to do but slump in her chair and think. Not a cloud relieved the sense of infinite solitude and space, not a glimmering light reminded her of men still walking the good earth. Except for a slight rocking, their ship seemed fixed as a star. There was no sound but the muttering drone of the motors.

Once Harper pointed out a queer little glow-worm, with yellow feelers in front and yellow dots along the side, creeping uncertainly at the bottom of the night. “I wouldn’t wonder but that’s the Nanking Express,” he said.

“Bold chap, this Lee,” Dimitri observed, “flyin’ straight across the most populous valley in the world.”

“You can be sure he’s prepared for anything—everything,” Harper answered wearily. And he slunk down as though crushed in his chair.

But he wasn’t fooling June one little minute. She knew that old bowed head was working like a dynamo and his eyes were glittering with excitement behind their lowered lids.

Presently Lee came through the door of the cockpit. “There’s a washroom aft,” June heard him tell Harper and Dimitri. “Beside the door you’ll find two traveling bags, one for each of you. They contain toilet articles and a few extra clothes to tide you over until we can fit you out in Chwanben.”

He turned to her, then. She marveled he could look her in the face, high-handed though he was. Stranger still, so incredible that she must have been mistaken, his gaze seemed eager and admiring. . . . Yes, she had been mistaken.

“On the overhead rack you’ll find two suitcases, containing garments for you. The servants will get them at your order. And here’s a toilet-set.”

He laid on her lap what might be the jewel cabinet of a Sultana. It was about two feet long, a foot wide, and six inches deep, of ebony inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Too dazed to answer, her fingers absently pressed the catch. The top flew back, to display a hairbrush, comb, manicure and make-up set, and innumerable little boxes for powders and creams all of old yellow ivory inlaid with dark green jade.

“I won’t accept gifts from you,” she told him.

“ ‘Let the handmaiden bare her face to the telltale looking-glass before it be reflected in the Sultan’s eyes,’ ” he answered imperiously.

She opened her mouth to let out fire, but his next words smothered it.

“The parachute on the overhead rack is for your use, in case our motors develop trouble.”

He bowed and walked toward the cockpit. She had despised him before but now she hated him. Giving her presents and extra privileges! Providing her a parachute, because she was a helpless girl! Oh Lord, let her show him!

If she could hoist him with his own petard . . . for once she had seen a newsreel of a hundred Soviet girls bailing out from airplanes, every one coming safe to land.

Could she do it? Alone, over a foreign land? But she had trod that earth before, unharmed, a little girl in pigtails. She might, just might.

And it was June Harte saying so, not some girl she had met in a book. At first she couldn’t believe it, as though she had never really known June Harte before.

Waiting her opportunity, she leaned across the aisle to Doctor Harper’s ear.

“How bad is this fix?” she murmured. “Can you tell me now?”

“Not now. Too long a story.”

“Suppose one of us could escape, at great risk. Would it be worth it? Could he get word back to Shanghai? Wouldn’t he be captured by bandits and held for ransom?”

“What’s on your mind, June?” He saw her eyes flick once to the parachute and back to his eyes. “I see. Yes, even that would be worth trying. Most Chinese are friendly, as you no doubt remember from your own childhood. Even if you couldn’t get word back to Shanghai in time to save me, at least you’d be out of it.”

She gazed at him, breathless. His shoulders sagged, his hands hung limp, the careless guards had only to look up to see a man too old to fight long odds, dazed and defeated—but June saw his eyes. They were alive, shining, and forever young and clear.

“I can’t do it for myself,” she whispered. “Only if it will help you too.” But she didn’t know why this was true.

But wise old Harper knew. It was the way of woman. “For both of us,” he answered.

“When?”

“Not until daybreak. It would be too dangerous to jump blind. Perhaps the guards will be asleep by then, or we’ll get a break. Now you’d better go to sleep yourself. I’ll call you if there’s anything to be done.”

But June did not sleep. There was something to be done her old friend did not know about, a long stride toward victory. Even if the guards were awake at dawn, it was possible to tie their hands—if her own hand tonight was steady, swift, and sly. . . .

The Roc flew on toward his lost roost in the west. By his rhythmic breathing Harper slept—stirred—slept again. One by one the guards stretched out on the cabin floor and their slanted eyes shone no more. Dimitri’s head nodded; finally he rested it on his arm.

Not all the gods were against her. Chao-Yuan lumbered up from his stool and flicked off the cabin lights. Only the moon in the window watched her now.

She waited until she saw Chao-Yuan’s head nodding against the glimmering pane, then she stealthily rose and hovered beside the sleeping Russian. . . . Steady, swift, and sly were her fingers in his sagging coat pocket. . . . And half a minute later she was back in her chair, a small automatic pistol keeping strange company with the lipstick and powder-puff in her handbag.

June settled down to sleep. This too was an obligation, to save her strength. It was no small chore to pin down her taut-drawn eyelids and close her ears to the little changes ringing through the monotonous drone of the ship in flight, and to clap under hatches that jack-in-the-box, her heart; but she strove womanfully, and after a while slipped away into a half dream.

Once she slipped too far, over the brink of the world, hurling down and down past all the stars—and she jerked in vain at the ripcord of her parachute. Then she landed wide awake, not knowing where she was.

When she slept and wakened again the moon had set, and a grayer, colder light was sifting uncertainly through the windows. It was not sound that had aroused her, but silence. The rumble of the motors had died away to a faint murmur exposing, as failing daylight exposes the glimmer of the constant stars, the chunk-chunk-chunk of propeller blades turning against air.

She had had a rendezvous with dawn, but it had failed. The ship was landing.

“Are we there?” she asked Doctor Harper.

“A long way yet. We must be landing to take on fuel.”

“Shall—shall we try—”

“No use. Your only hope would be a long head start, and that means the parachute over rough country where he can’t land. But June, there’s something you might do.”

Stay by me, nerve, she whispered. Aloud she said, “Shoot the works, Uncle Ted.”

“Lee and the second pilot will want to stretch their legs while we’re taking on fuel. I’d like to stroll into the cockpit and see his charts. If I know his exact course, I’ll know where to let you off.”

Mighty cool about it, he was. Well, she was cool, too—incredibly so.

“You might manage to divert Lee’s attention,” Harper went on. “Talk to him a bit. Ask a few questions. I’ll have Dimitri talk to Chao-Yuan.”

“Okay. I’ll ogle him and try to pick him up.”

So soon, so smoothly they were down. Chao-Yuan opened the cabin door. “It is another day, and if you wish to stretch the tired limbs—”

June rose without a word and left the cabin. The four guards followed and squatted jabbering about a basket of cooked rice; the assistant pilot joined them. Lee was leaning out of the cockpit window talking to the foreman of the field hands.

He would not come out to guard her. There was no need, here on this remote landing-field in a naked desert gray with daybreak. Even if he did come, she could not speak to him. The ice to break was thick and cold as Greenland’s glaciers. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, her head was so empty it rang.

But suddenly he was striding toward her, his lithe shoulders swinging. At first she thought he was smiling, too—a friendly, Yankee smile—but he was grave and far-away when he stopped just beside her.

“I wish to talk to you,” he said. “Please come with me.”

It didn’t matter how he gave her orders. Nothing must ever matter but escape. So she trailed him like a hound to the moonlit steps of what appeared to be an abandoned farmhouse.

“You’ve taken this thing in very good part, Miss Hammond,” he told her. “I am very much relieved.”

“I didn’t do it to relieve you,” she answered.

His eyes also seemed to light, and at first she did not understand. “I have heard that the American girls were very bold, but I am not offended. Perhaps I am proud, for I—”

He stopped short in an odd, disconcerted way.

“For you are an American too?” she prompted.

“No, I am Chinese. I shall always be, regardless of my pale color.”

Well China could have him. She wanted only his scalp nailed to a stick. And her father’s jade!

Warming to her work, she diverted him nearly an hour. It was not a hard task, or especially unpleasant. The abduction had been most carefully planned, she learned, and she must not hope for help from her government. Her note to his rickshaw boy and a sample of Doctor Harper’s handwriting had permitted clever forgers to cut all their ties with Shanghai, on the excuse of a hurried air trip to Western China.

“At first I was sorry to force you to accompany your master,” he told her, “but now I am glad.”

“Why? I don’t understand geological surveys. I won’t be the slightest good to him or to you.”

“There is an old Thai saying, ‘The golden fountain in the king’s palace does not slake his thirst for the wild waters of the meadow.’ Sometimes my dreams wander from our dark-eyed maidens.”

But before she could think up a TNT retort, Doctor Harper emerged from the ship and came toward them. His shoulders sagged, but his step had a little spring. Yes, there was plenty of time for a stroll around the landing-field, Lee told them, and they could have their breakfast in the farmhouse. The ship might not take off for several hours.

“I’m waiting for an important letter, to be delivered here,” Lee explained, and with his stiff little bow, left the two together.

June locked her lips until Lee was out of hearing. “Well?” she demanded then.

“I’ve got the letter,” Doctor Harper answered.

“Good heavens.” For although American girls were bold, they weren’t women of iron.

“Steady, June. Don’t give a sign of excitement. Now we’ll walk around like a couple of tourists—and talk it over.”

Her companion explained that as he was waiting his chance at the charts, a Chinese coolie approached the ship from the off side, glanced about furtively, then entered the cockpit. As soon as he had gone, Harper had made his raid. On the chart-shelf under the dash he had found a sealed scroll.

“I think the fellow had just brought it,” he told her. “I rewarded his carelessness by stealing it. And Dimitri has written out what he says is a very bad translation.”

“Oh, you haven’t it on you now!”

“I’ve destroyed the original, but I have a copy for you to see. It’s a bit of a mystery, and I’d like to see what you can make of it. We must be sure we’re right before we go ahead.”

There was a grass-grown dike near the end of the field, and the two dropped down as though to watch the sun rise. But June’s eyes soon fell to the sheet of note-paper that her uncle had slipped into her lap. Dimitri had written:

June dug a little hole in the ground, stuffed in the letter, and covered it with dirt.

“Well, what do you think?” Harper demanded.

“I think that Prince Kiang has a powerful enemy somewhere between here and Chwanben,” she answered. “Political forces are at present holding that enemy in check, but if he finds out we’re prisoners, he’ll make our rescue an excuse for a raid on Prince Kiang. And of course neither the Frenchman in Yunnan, nor the English in Bhotia—the local name for Tibet—nor the official of the Nanking government, can dare say a word of protest.”

“Good work, June. How about the turtles?”

“The tiger’s ancestors. Not very complimentary, according to Chinese ideas. But it’s no worse than calling us ‘white rabbits.’ ”

“How did you do it, June? I’m afraid I’ve never fully appreciated—”

“Remember I spent three of my most impressionable years in China, and I’ve sat for hours listening to father’s stories.”

“I made the same interpretation,” Harper told her. “Also, I know who that enemy is. The Chinese term for ‘Old Tiger’ is Lao-Hu—and there’s a powerful war-lord on the Upper Salween River named General Hu. He’s known to be friendly to white people, and is trying to win the favor of Nanking. If without telling him too much, we could get him word of our plight—”

“I see.” For her eyes had grown very wide. “Since Lee didn’t get this letter, he’ll probably fly straight over General Hu’s territory. But it wouldn’t do any good to drop a note.”

“It would never be found.” And leaving all the rest to her, her old friend did not even look her in the face.

“One of us would have to go down there,” she went on, in low tones.

“And you’re the one. Believe me, June. When the time comes, you could sneak the parachute into the bathroom and put it on. The cabin door is close by and I’d meet you there. It’s only a chance in ten we could get the door open before the guards have us by the throat, yet we could try.”

June drew a long breath. “But it would be a lot better than a chance in ten,” she murmured, “if you had a pistol.”

“Yes.” And their eyes met.

“I’ve got a pistol. I stole it from Dimitri.” And careful not to let it glimmer in the sun, she slipped it into her comrade’s pocket.

“June, does this mean—”

“Right! Thousands of people have bailed out—some whom I know—and I can too. I’m not much scared of Chwanben—I’ve been there before. But first I want the cards on the table.”

Doctor Harper lighted a smoke, but his hand trembled. “Of course you realize that Prince Kiang is after the jade. Perhaps the vein was found—and lost—long ago; and Prince Kiang had heard legends of its existence. And possibly there is a leak in the state department at Nanking.”

“He intends to force us to show him the vein?”

“Me—not us. For God’s sake, June, he mustn’t know your part in it. If you can’t get away, you’ve got to hide your name and your knowledge of the mine at all costs. But you must get away.”

June stilled her heart and waited.

“Don’t you see they’ll get at me through you? They’ve already done it once, and there’s no telling how far Prince Kiang will go in the way of pressure, or even of amusement. And if they have us both in their power they can keep the jade with no questions asked.”

The contrast of those grim words with her old friend’s quiet tone and still face went home very straight to June.

“Force us to tell and then silence us,” Harper went on in brutal truth. “Put us in the ground where we can’t make trouble. But if you get away, you’ve tied their hands. They won’t dare beat me up enough to keep me out of the field, and I’m hard to scare. And they’ll be expecting a rescue army any day.”

“I see.” June was pale but strangely calm. “Still, I don’t think it’s quite as bad as you think. At least Lee’s a white man, and if we’d surrender the jade, I think we’d be set free!” She paused and gave Harper a brave little smile. “Just the same, I’d rather trust to General Hu.”

“So would I, June. So what?”

“When we cross his country, I’ll bail out. It’s a long, tough drop, but it’s better than being dropped head-first in a Chwanben grave. And after I reach General Hu, he’ll bail you out.”

They had plenty of time to perfect their plans. While Lee waited for a letter that would never come, his assistant pilot tuned up his motors for high flying over the western mountains. It was nearly noon when the two prisoners were summoned to the plane.

As the ship winged on, June waited with uncanny calm for her comrade’s signal. It might come any moment. She would bail out over General Hu’s domains only if Doctor Harper failed to locate nearer and better grounds, perhaps by some great city. But flying in broad daylight, Lee avoided the populous plains. One—two—three hours went by, slow as a Lama crawling on his knees to Buddha’s birthplace.

The country grew wilder and more rugged. Occasionally she made out clustered dots that she thought was a village, sometimes green steps climbing the hills that she knew were terraced fields, but mostly there were only mountains, gorges, tropic jungles, and what looked to be a glistening serpent astray from the sea, coiling and wriggling and looping his homeward way.

“That’s the Upper Mekong,” Harper told her. “In a few minutes we’ll be in sight of the Salween, General Hu’s country. It’s our last and only hope, June—Kiang’s principality is just beyond—so get ready.”

But she hadn’t much to do. Her heart had been in a plaster cast for three hours or more. She started to breathe fast, but she counted little clouds until she had calmed down. Back at the farmhouse she had changed to riding-clothes. Lee himself had suggested it, with only a little prompting, when he had told her they would trade their wings for saddles late in the afternoon. In her pocket was a Chinese letter written by Dimitri, enjoining the Salween natives to lead the bearer safely to their master, General Hu.

Her stomach was cold and her tongue inclined to stick to the roof of her mouth. Otherwise—and she told herself so, firmly—she had never felt better in her life. It was no trick to bail out. Parachutes never failed to open. Her wise old friend had coached her how to meet every possible emergency. It was a great adventure.

Yet for all this, she jumped like a shot rabbit when she saw Harper take off and pocket his glasses, her signal to begin.

For one long breath, June leaned back in her chair. Look up, eyes, she pleaded silently. Don’t look down. Show ’em who’s boss, June, and don’t look out the window at all.

But she was cheating already—and she knew it. You’re afraid to look down, she told herself in sudden scorn. You know if you do you can’t go on. Well, I’ll show you! Look there!

As though on tow-ropes, she hauled her gaze out the window and overside. She caught one glimpse of General Hu’s kingdom—terraced hills, villages, fruit orchards in blossom like great brooches set with pearls, and square-cut emeralds that must be rice fields. Then she sat up straight, took her hairbrush and comb from her toilet-set, and started down the aisle toward the washroom.

The parachute was on the rack close by the washroom door. She needed a second or two of clear coast to get it down and away, but these Doctor Harper would provide. To distract the attention of the guards, he rose from his seat and started to enter the cockpit.

The maneuver captured every eye. Chao-Yuan and several of the guards hurried forward to seize him. June lifted down the parachute and whisked it into the washroom.

It was a special type to wear on the back, and as easy to put on as a life-preserver. An inch-wide opening in the washroom door signaled her comrade that she was ready. And an instant later he walked down the aisle and took his position just outside.

“All right, June,” he called.

She stepped out into the passage. At the same instant Doctor Harper drew his pistol, darkly shining in the hard, tropic light. “Do not move,” his voice crackled. “I will positively kill the first man that moves.”

For a few vital seconds the steady steel enforced obedience. Then there was a swirl in the air and the cabin floor shuddered from the rush of feet, but June had no time to turn and look, not even a split second to give to any business but her own. With his left hand Doctor Harper had turned the latch of the cabin door and was thrusting his shoulder against it. June leaped to help him.

Outside was an invisible giant of air, savage to keep her prisoner, but they were giants too today, and the strip of sky widened to let her through. There was one second of cataclysm, thunder in her ears, lightning before her eyes, a tornado beating her breast, then with a final and supreme effort she flung herself forward.

At the last instant Harper tried to hand her the pistol, but someone wrenched it from his hand. And then, as she floated in empty air, she saw the cabin door slam shut behind her.

At first June seemed to hang unsupported beside the ship. It was queer rather than terrifying; she had not yet found room in her bursting heart for terror. Both she and the plane seemed stationary; then slowly, majestically the ship appeared to rise and begin to edge by. Only then did she realize she was falling through space.

Harper had told her to count ten before she opened her parachute. She remembered perfectly, but did not need this curb. Patiently she waited till the plane was three lengths ahead of her and far above, then pulled the ripcord.

With a crackle and swish and roar the great umbrella opened and filled with air. Her shoulders seemed to be jerked away from her body, the belt about her waist cut savagely into her flesh, but at once she found herself whole, unhurt, swinging gently from side to side.

Okay, June, she assured herself. And now she looked again at the plane.

It was turning in a steep bank. Now it was gliding down toward her, gaining with terrifying rapidity. But it passed below her and at a safe distance to one side, then began to encircle her in long, swooping, graceful spirals. Once it passed near enough to show faces in the window.

Lee could stop her, if he liked. He had only to strike her with the end of his wing and the threat to his plans would be instantly cut short. If this would damage his ship, he could shoot her through the window, and nothing of harm to him would float to earth. She should have dropped like a stone, too swift to overtake, until she was close to the ground.

But there was a limit to Lee’s brutality. He was not hunting her, only escorting her to earth. Then he would land as close as possible, to try to capture her before she could reach General Hu.

She began to scan the ground. At first she could see only jungle-grown hills. The wide populous valley of the Salween was half hidden by a purple range. Even there the fields were diked and small; as far as she could see there was no level ground to give Lee safe landing. “You’re out of luck, you mug,” she called to the roaring ship.

But it wasn’t beer and skittles for her, either. She and Dr. Harper had delayed too long and had overshot her mark by a fearful distance. The hills below must be the frontier between the domains of General Hu and Prince Kiang. Unless she could find her way quickly out of their jungle maze—

Just then she gave a little shriek of joy. Luck was with her after all. Five hundred feet below and not five hundred yards ahead she saw a clearing in the forest dotted with buildings. Plainly it was a village, no doubt of peaceful Chinese farmers whose smiles a little girl remembered—and the clearing was too narrow and broken for Lee to land his ship. Her great adventure was almost over.

One minute more she drifted down. Now she was pulling up on the ropes, bending her knees, to break the shock of landing. But kindly tree limbs broke it for her. Her parachute caught . . . jerked free . . . caught again . . . branches whipped her in the face . . . her feet touched earth.

She tripped and fell, but was not in the least hurt. Foiled, the big ship flung its shadow across the trees and roared over her head. And at once its thunder dimmed as it soared up and away.

All okay, June told herself. For wasn’t she safe on land, ten minutes walk from a village, soon to summon help from General Hu? Yet her voice had a little quaver that she despised. The forest was so incredibly silent, now that the hills had cut off the last fading roar of Lee’s motors. And she was so incredibly alone.

She unfastened the harness of her parachute and began to move toward the village. It was westward, she remembered—she had only to go toward the sun. . . . True, the sun was lower than she thought. But there would be plenty of time for the peaceful villagers to lead her to their war-lord before it dipped behind the hills.

Almost at once she struck a trail. Soon she passed a little field in a bamboo fence, then a herd of tame buffalo and a drove of pigs, and before she had time even to think of being lost, she emerged from the blinding trees to find herself at the village gate.

It was strongly built of logs, but open. The wall was strong too, row after row of bamboos with spiked tops, but she did not let her mind dwell on this curious fact. She seemed queerly trying not to think at all, only to take what came.

But the shock of her first glimpse of the villagers was not so easy to take. The faces of women and children in the doorways of the huts looked so dark, and the tribesmen standing in a compact group in the village road were darker still.

They were not peaceful Chinese farmers, but small, almost-black people, hideously lean, with thick matted hair through which their eyes gleamed like wild-beast eyes. And they had long spears in their hands.

She put on a bold front. It was so vitally necessary that it made her feel bold. She was hardly aware of straightening her shoulders, throwing back her head, looking them in the eyes. Yet not one of them touched his hands to his forehead, and not one of them moved.

“Do any of you speak English?” she demanded.

A young native wearing a necklace of tiger claws stepped forward. “Me, interpreter,” he said, with an explosive toss of his arms. “Me stay Fort Hertz. Me talk plenty Sahib talk.”

“Who are these people?”

“Lopa.”

Her thoughts no longer lagged, and soon she remembered her childhood travels in Chwanben. The Lopas were primitive hunters and poppy-growers occupying some of the wilder ranges of Southern Chwanben. They worshiped spirits and had many strange practices that she did not try to recall. For some reason her father had swung wide of their villages.

“I wish to go at once to General Hu,” June said. “Here is a letter for him. If you guide me there, I will pay you well.”

The native took the letter, but June saw by his fixed eyeballs that he was only pretending to read it. Nodding his head, he handed it back.

“So you will take me to General Hu at once?”

The native did not answer, but spoke to the others in his own tongue, a high-pitched gobbling unlike any human speech June had ever heard. A tattooed headman answered, and one savage after another joined the parley until they were all shrieking at one another, gesticulating, brandishing their spears. It was somehow like an evil dream, June thought.

The uproar ceased as suddenly as it began. June noticed that three or four of the savages struck off in different directions, something furtive in their movements. Quick as a monkey, another climbed a tall tree and stood peering in all directions.

No doubt they were trying to locate the plane. It was a natural step, if they intended to smuggle her off to General Hu. But the comfort seemed a little forced, and cold.

“Take me at once to General Hu,” she commanded again.

“No can do, so quick,” the interpreter answered. “Tomorrow, maybe. She danger, go tonight. The sun she go down, fancy that. Rough plenty trail for memsahib. No come horse. You stay here in dark.”

“Will you send word to him at once?”

“Bas. Oha, yess, memsahib, r-a-a-ther.”

He spoke to a murderous-looking elder with a number of charms and amulets strung on his scrawny neck and breast. The latter gave June a quick glance, glanced quickly away, then answered with a smile.

Yes, it was kind of a smile. The fact alone was incredible. The Lopa faces were wrinkled and deeply lined, but were as foreign to mirth as the faces of laughing hyenas. But she liked the up-curling of the thin lips, showing blackened, broken teeth, even less than his frown.

“Man go now,” the interpreter told her. “Sure, tell General Hu. Take letter, eh, splendeed.”

She handed him the letter, and he gave it to another native with a sharp gobble of command. At once the latter trotted away, cheerfully as though expecting a reward from General Hu. For God knew she must keep on seeing the bright side of everything.

“Now, you come nice place,” the interpreter told her. “Nice house, plenty sit down, plenty eat. Very quick, General Hu send mans. Oha yess, not long he come.”

“I’ll wait here,” June said.

“No, no, wait here no. Not good. Plenty bad, wait here. No sit, no eat, no good place. General Hu mans kill us, we no treat you fine.” And he laid his ape hand on her arm.

“Very well,” she said. “I will rest till General Hu’s men come.”

There was another excited parley, and then the interpreter led her to a long, thatched-roof hut half hidden in the trees. A dirty grass mat was laid on the split bamboo floor, and a hideous old woman brought her dried meat, fruit, and water in a cup made of a bamboo stalk. The woman chattered horribly as she laid out the things until the interpreter stilled her with a savage bark of command.

She wished they would all go away. It was hard to look on the bright side of things when their wild-beast eyes met hers everywhere she gazed. She wanted to remember that these Lopas were just human beings after all, savage of course, with strange customs, wonder-struck by her sudden appearance among them but soon to help her on her way. Alone, she could get rid of her horrible slinking fear of suddenly giving way to fear. The only real danger—and she shaped the words on her lips to make the fact perfectly clear—was that Lee would land his plane and come back and capture her before General Hu’s envoys could arrive.

But the savages still lingered. They seemed especially fascinated by her hair, so different from their own matted locks—staring, exclaiming, and sometimes reaching furtive fingers itching to touch it.

“Go,” June told the interpreter. “I wish to rest.”

The man spoke to his fellows, and most of them edged away. But he and another squatted down in the doorway.

“You may go too,” June said.

“No, memsahib. General Hu mans kill us, we no treat you good. We be your servants, watch over you like dog. You no be scare with us this side. We got spear.” And he patted the long-bladed shaft.

June sat down on her mat. It seemed the strangest thing she had done all day, like a discordant commonplace in a fantastic dream. Strange—and grimly funny—and terrifying in its implication of her helplessness! For there was no point in trying to leave the village. If the savages let her go, it meant she had no occasion to go. And if they held her . . .

She did not complete the thought. Just then she noticed a queer decoration on the ridgepole of the hut. It was a row of human heads, eyeless and shrunken, no doubt carved in some dark wood. But the hair of those carvings looked astonishingly lifelike. It seemed to wave in the warm wind through the gap under the eaves.

She did not pay them much attention. Instead she watched the second hand of her wrist-watch go round and round . . . Lee wouldn’t let her go so easily. He’d come down at the first big clearing in the forest. If General Hu didn’t hurry he’d surely get here first.

A sound like a muffled drum rose like great heartbeats through the jungle hush. Gazing through a chink in the latticed wall she saw the whole tribe squatting in a circle in the village road. They were very still . . . they made no sound . . . but something in the center of the ring was very lively. It had the scrawny body of the elder she had seen, but its head was the badly mounted head of a tiger.

Plainly the village wizard was making magic. He drew circles in the dirt with a stick, and pranced about, and gesticulated wildly.

The spectators began to lean forward, their heads thrusting from their necks. Then the wizard squatted on his calves and began to sway his body to the muffled beat of the drum. It was a monotonous movement, and seemed to go on forever without the slightest consequence. But at last she happened to notice one of the front men in the circle swaying too.

One by one, at long intervals, the others joined this strange seated dance. Yet another hour went by before the spell was completed and the whole tribe was swaying as one man. She had never seen such complete self-surrender. Their gods’ lightest whisper would be obeyed.

When June was dizzy from watching, her brain swaying in her head, the drums suddenly ceased. The men continued to sway, like the pendulum of a dying clock, but the arc grew shorter and at last they were still as stones. And now the old woman she had seen began to edge forward on her knees, holding two objects in her hand.

As the magician took them and held them aloft June saw they were a short sword and a pointed stick. The sword glimmered dully in the last rays of the setting sun.

The magician continued his sorcery, swinging the sword, waving the stick, but she no longer watched him. Instead her eyes were leaping about the room, no longer flinching from the row of heads on the roof-beam, no longer swerving from any fact. The room had no windows and only one door. But leaning in the corner was a long-bladed native spear.

The light was failing quickly. In a few minutes the hut would be dark enough for her to steal across the room and get the spear in her hand. The two guards were gazing out the doorway, hungrily watching the ceremony, and even if they turned they would be half blind. There was little hope for one against two, but a little was better than none. This also was a fact to face.

As though in reward for her courage, fate suddenly leveled the odds. There was a rustle of brush outside the hut, and one of the guards went to investigate. Stealthily June began to rise. Her muscles were poised to spring across the room—grasp the spear—

But she stopped. There came other sounds from outside the hut, first like a hammer cracking a coconut and then like something fairly heavy falling into brush. June saw the interpreter stiffen and stare into the shadows with his spear half raised. She sprang across the room.

But she never reached the weapon leaning there. The guard heard her frantic step or else felt the flimsy flooring tremble beneath her feet. With a leopard-like snarl he turned on her—and turned his back on someone who had hovered against the hut wall, waiting just this chance.

June saw the invader spring to the doorway in vivid silhouette against the evening sky—saw his arm sweep down and the pistol barrel in his hand strike the guard’s head. The man wilted on the floor at his enemy’s feet.

It was not General Hu’s envoys. Just as she had feared, they had not come in time. The man standing there, beckoning with his free hand, was Lee.

“Thank God,” June whispered.

Lee’s big hand was waiting for June’s, and silently he led her up a winding path far from that black magic in the village road. A native in a red-smeared Tibetan dress met them at the first fork of the trail, and farther on they found a third native, holding four horses. June was glad of her old acquaintance with boots and saddles, because in spite of rocks, logs, low bridges, and heavy thickets Lee set the pace of a tartar.

They had gained the next ridge before he pulled up. The night was on them, the moon over them, and the truce of silence that danger had imposed was ended. But what could she say to Lee?

Maybe the Lopas had meant no harm to her, after all. Anyway, Lee had rescued her to make her his own prisoner, back from the fire to the frying-pan. But to give the devil his due, he might have let them hang her head with the others on the ridgepole and never had to worry about her any more. And it was possible—she admitted it—that he might have rescued her even if he hadn’t wanted jade.

Well, maybe she didn’t hate him quite so much, but she would fight him harder than ever.

But before she could load her guns, he spoke very casually: “I hope you are not greatly fatigued. We have a ten-mile ride to the plane.”

“And then what?”

“A day and a half in the saddle to my father’s palace. Ordinarily there would be less than a day, but I landed in a dry lake-bed just inside our borders, and I cannot take off until my men have cleared away some trees. But I’ve heliographed the pack-train, and by traveling all night it should find us before noon tomorrow.”

They rode a full hour before either of them spoke again. Even then June might not have broken the silence but for his helping hand in a thorn thicket. “I suppose I owe you thanks for getting me out.”

“Not at all. I had an old score against the Lopas.”

“Oh, I see. Thank you for nothing.” And now she was hating him hard!

“But I am gratified that you tried it,” Lee went on thoughtfully. “It was the thing for a Yankee girl to do.”

“You’d better not be glad. I gave one of the Lopas a note to take to General Hu. Even if he didn’t intend to do it, now he’ll get afraid and deliver it to save trouble for the tribe. So you’d better save trouble for yourself by taking us back to Shanghai.”

“The Lopas have no dealings with General Hu. Anyway, I shall obey Prince Kiang’s commands. But I wonder—if you knew the whole situation—whether you would want the note delivered.”

Suddenly June felt cold, weary, and discouraged. “Please tell me what you mean.”

“General Hu would be glad of an excuse, acceptable to the Great Powers, to make war on us. But the only face you would gain would be seeing my head on a pole.”

“Well, that would be something.”

“You would have that satisfaction, without doubt. Our common people believe in me, but our nobles believe a leopard can never change his spots or a foreign-devil foundling change into a Chinese prince, so they would cheerfully treat with General Hu provided he’d send me to my gods. But he would certainly find out what we want of Doctor Harper—and take it for himself.”

“What is it you want of Doctor Harper? Remember, I’m just his secretary.”

“You may as well know. What is probably the lost Shan-Yu-Shih—Mountain of Jade—believed to be the richest jade deposit in the world. The vein in the black cliff that supplied your bracelet.”

It wasn’t a black cliff, but pale gray. She could see it in her mind’s eye. Aloud she said in feigned amazement, “My bracelet?”

“It was one of the reasons I brought you here. I thought that you might know something about Shan-Yu-Shih. But I realize now that the bracelet was a gift from Doctor Harper to a servant he loves like a daughter.”

“But he bought it in China, years ago,” she lied on orders.

“So he let you believe. ‘Tell secrets to the parrot, the monkey, and the wind, but not to the giver of delights.’ But, June—I address you so because to me you are not a servant—it is best that you return the bracelet to Doctor Harper.”

For the moment she forgot to hate him. “Why?”

“My august father might not understand. If he sees you wearing the jewels, he might question you—closely. I would rather he would deal only with Doctor Harper.”

“And you say—General Hu—”

“He would rescue you with a great show, but both you and your master would meet with accidents before you reached the Salween. He would rather have the jade than the favor of Nanking.”

In a Momba farmhouse close to the stranded plane June slept from midnight till nearly noon. Then perkily she rose, breakfasted, talked a few minutes with her old comrade, and took her place in the pack-train.

It could be worse, she thought. Lee meant the prisoners no bodily harm, and there was many a slip between the jade cup and his lip. The Chwanben country was just as fascinating as her girlhood memories had promised—hillsides gay as an Indian shawl with rhododendron, warm wet valleys lush with tropic jungle, and windswept ridges with frowning pines. Little white rivers burst joyously from somber glens, sky-blue lakes glimmered in lonesome hollows, and the silence of a great forest of walnut and deodar was broken by the uproar of a band of bearded monkeys swinging through the limbs.

The air was clear, fresh, and fine, the sky ineffably blue. Her shaggy little horse was mountain-trained, grunting on the steeps, neighing on the heights, frisking on the levels, sure-footed as a goat on the narrow trails.

Soon they met a Tibetan sheepherder in a woolen robe with rings of silver and ivory fastened in his hair, who kowtowed nearly to the ground. Where two trails crossed they found a Lama on holy pilgrimage, but now it was Chao-Yuan and all his men who bent low. Even Lee touched his hands to his forehead in salaam.

What a strange creature Lee was! Not that he exerted a sinister fascination for her. If they were cast on a desert island she’d cultivate the cannibals. But he was her warden, and elementary cunning demanded that she find out all she could.

It was touchy, patient business—like trying to corral a wild horse, she thought. And his story was touchy too—on silly girlish sympathies for a ruthless enemy—and this made her furious. But she gleaned a few facts that might be useful.

Lee’s parents had been American missionaries, killed by Lopa headhunters. No, he didn’t know their names or where lay their bones. Prince Kiang had rescued him, a baby of three, and in time had learned to love him—but he had not liked questions. He had wanted to break all ties between his foster-son and the white world, and had driven into exile a holy Lama from Tibet who had secretly taught the foundling his mother tongue.

“You never went to an English school?” June asked.

“No, but I attended one of the best universities in the world—the Lamasery of Chamba Thok. It was a thriving school for the sons of Chinese lords when Oxford was a campground. The rest of my American ways I picked up during our visits to Peking, Chen-fu, and Shanghai.”

“You’ve got American blood. It will tell, if you’d let it. Instead of a high-class Chinese bandit—”

Lee smiled gravely. “After twenty-five years breathing Chinese atmosphere? Walking this old earth and way of life? Learning the most enduring culture the world has ever known? No, I’ll stay a high-class Chinese bandit to the end.”

“You revel in it. You love fighting your own people.”

“My own people are Chinese. I love them, regardless of their feelings for me. I’ll never love anyone else—unless it be a little foreign-devil with snapping eyes and a wasp-sting on her tongue.”

June felt a bristle at the roots of her hair.

“As a plaything, perhaps. That’s the Chinese idea, you told me. Well, you might be capable of it.”

“A very beautiful, engaging plaything,” he went on, utterly unabashed. She spurred on her horse and left him.

But he caught up with her at once. They had come to wide white water barring the trail.

“It is high from melting snow,” Chao-Yuan said solemnly. “And the demons of the rapids claimed six horses, let alone four flea-bitten Momba hunters, in the last six months.”

Lee too had been taught to believe in river demons. June saw him nodding gravely.

“See the young virgin’s horse,” Chao-Yuan went on. “Hear him snort! She shall have another mount for the crossing.” And he spoke in Chinese to the fu-to—chief of the coolies.

June thought her little brute’s high spirit was just the ticket for the other shore, and eyed with contempt the lop-eared, draggle-tailed beast brought in his place. Anyway, if there was one thing she could do better than ride a horse it was to swim in fast water. But she did not want to rebuff the first kindness Chao-Yuan had shown her, so she changed mounts.

Chao-Yuan had made a to-do about nothing, June thought, as Lee rode into the current. It was powerful—she saw the tension of his horse’s withers and flanks as it swirled about him roaring—but it was less than four feet deep here at the ford, although just below the gravel-bar the river narrowed into an ominous blue torrent.

Dimitri swung in behind Lee, and with Yankee bravado June lashed her pony and followed.

But things were not as they seemed. This was the first fact of China, the theme of her whole adventure. Her horse gave good service until he was well in the current, then a rock turned beneath his hoof. He did not lose his footing, but he lost something far more important to this river fight—his nerve.

Yellow streak, June thought. Please God, if she had one also let her keep it out of sight! Frantic with terror, the horse began to throw his head, plunge, try to turn back.

But June tightened her rein, dug her foot in the stirrups, and lashed him on. Once he stumbled, but she jerked up his head and he got a precarious footing.

Lee saw her danger and turned back to help her. “Stay away,” she yelled at him. “I can manage this brute.” But he could not hear her above the roar of the waters.

To hold her if she fell, Lee came into the torrent below her, then turned up stream. But his horse caught the other’s terror. She felt the danger growing—saw it mount like boiling water in a pot—counted her heartbeats as it poised to strike. . . . But its victim was Lee.

Her frantic animal’s tossing head struck Lee’s head. She saw him tumbling from the saddle—threw out her hand to help him. But it was too late. He toppled full length into the water and through the blue and white of the splash she saw the current snatch him, roll him over, and spin him down into the blue torrent below.

June’s first impulse was to ride her horse down after her fallen enemy. But the maddened animal had felt her rein go slack as she had snatched for Lee, and had turned back toward shore. In a few frantic bounds he was in shallow water.

June leaped from the saddle, made the bank, and began running down stream. Only Harper ran beside her; the Chinese stood like lifeless stumps of cut forest and no light was in their eyes. The gods of the river were hungry, they were thinking, and who can fight the gods?

But Lee was fighting. She saw him. But he was not wrestling the waters like a man in his full powers. Probably not an expert swimmer to start with, he had been half stunned by the blow of the horse’s head. And perhaps that was why she forgot their feud and ran so fast.

At the end of the riffle, where the waters caught their breath for the wilder cataract just below, there was a submerged tree-top matted and meshed with debris. Lee was swept to one side, but she saw him snatch an outstretched limb and his twisted body snap straight as the current tried to break his hold.

But Lee hung on. She saw the waters break around his sturdy arm. And although they smote him in the face he pulled himself nearer the limb until he could grasp it with both hands.

“Good boy!” June shrieked. “Hold on for all you’re worth.” And instantly she was down on the gravel jerking at her boots.

She had worn the white cap of a life-saver at summer camp, and had not forgotten the primary rule—get off your clothes! Harper dropped on his knees to help her; without a word she extended her feet to him, meanwhile snatching off her polo shirt. Then she kicked out of her riding-breeches, and in silken underclothes took to water.

“Go back,” Lee was trying to yell. “You’ll be drowned too.” But skilfully she slanted through the current and reached the solid end of the limb.

“All in?” she shouted.

“I am spent and dizzy. Forget me and swim for shore.”

“Shut up, and do what I tell you. . . . Work over on your back, your hands braced against my shoulders, just your mouth out of water. . . . That’s all right. . . . Hang on, I’ve got a good grip. . . . Now we’re going to shore.”

She pushed out into the current, swimming powerfully with her breast-stroke, Lee propelled full length beneath and in front of her. But at best it was touch-and-go. Unless she cut a sharp angle into shore they would be swept across the lower bar into the wilder torrent below. . . . Just sharp enough to make, figuring all her strength, all her experience, the look of the water and the bank, the margin of safety measured not in yards but almost in inches.

For once in her mermaid life she was giving all she had. Lee was hardly conscious, but he kicked feebly, trying to help her. Even so for a moment it looked as if she and her enemy would drown embraced, the last laugh of the gods.

She felt Lee’s body hit bottom. There was a moment of blind frantic threshing, and she must be doing most of it but she was too tired to tell. The water was only three feet deep, but it was alive and determined to kill them, full of hate as all the fiends in Limbo.

And then, when it wasn’t any use trying any more, they found themselves still clinging to each other prone on the bank.

Dimitri was the first to reach the two still figures. That was because they had made the far shore. “Mother of God, are you hurt?” he cried.

“Let us alone,” June answered. For she was interested in the queer way the sky was changing from black and gold to blue, and how the shrubs behind her had begun to stand out one by one from a green, swimming haze. Dimitri ran back to shout to Dr. Harper, riding across the river. And now Lee heaved up and looked at her.

She wished her old friend would bring her clothes. Lee was looking her up and down, dazed at first, but soon very much alive. The sunlight was marvelous on her chilled body.

“You are beautiful, Giver of Delights,” Lee gasped out.

Lee would recover, she decided. “Look in the other direction.”

“It is impossible. ‘To know the water and worth of a turquoise, pry it from its setting.’ We shall speak of it later. Now it is glorious to be alive.”

Glorious was no name for it, she confessed to herself. She wondered if Chao-Yuan had tried to do her out of it with a water-shy horse, but she dismissed the idea with a shiver. And now the others were trotting down the bank, yelling and jabbering and gobbling.

But the yellow men grew silent as they ringed about her. And it was not their customary apathy—fine carving in sandalwood—that made them stand so breathless with their slanted eyes so wide. At first she thought it was her extreme undress. Then she divined that this was no more to them than the lack of a saddle on a spare packhorse; they had been shaken out of their fatalistic boots by a young virgin’s victory over the river gods.

She retired into the nearest thicket to put on dry clothes. The coolies offered prayers to Buddha for Lee’s deliverance. And a few minutes later she was back on her own horse, ready to take her place in the file.

Lee seemed to avoid her the rest of the day’s ride. She was glad, because she had a bone to pick with herself, and his presence would confuse the issues. . . . There, that made two bones! She should be haughtily oblivious to one whom she had every reason to hate and despise.

But you couldn’t be haughty and oblivious at the same time, she discovered, nor hate and despise the same person. The truth was—and it had taken the shocks of cold water to open her eyes—she did neither one. It wasn’t fair to hate a man for obeying his gods. But she resented to the core of her being his power over her, and one way or another—it was very confusing—she feared him.

Then why didn’t she let him drown? Why in heaven’s name did she risk her life for his? There was only one satisfactory answer over and above simple human impulse. Like it or not, he was the least of her enemies. As the master of her fate, she preferred him to the Lopas or to Chao-Yuan or the unknown Prince Kiang. Just the same she’d fight him till the last chow dog was hung.

They crossed a high pass where white pennants inscribed with Tibetan characters fluttered prayers to heaven at every gust of air, met a mule caravan laden with wool and salt, passed rug-tents anchored to a windy hillside by great stones, saw a Momba girl with soot-smeared face that shone like a new stove, and dipped down into a well-cultivated and populous valley. June wanted to sightsee the idol-guarded town and gape back at the gaping people; but they hurried on, climbed an endless hill, and stopped for the night in a scented forest of hundred-foot magnolias.

After a comforting dinner of noodles and buttered tea, June sat on her cot near the door of her tent and watched the night come up. No, it didn’t come down as in lawful countries, but slithered and oozed its way from the dark valleys, and stalked and devoured the unsuspecting daylight holding the hills. The little stars came timidly out to watch. The moon panted and toiled up a mountain peak of cloud. And June wished that instead of a prisoner in danger of her life she was free to . . .

Oh, go jump in the creek, she told herself brutally; and changing her outer clothes for a rose-colored négligée provided in her bag, she tied the entrance to her tent and lay down on her cot.

But she was scarcely settled when the moonlight burst through in a silver wave. Fingers quick and light had untied the strings and bold hands lifted back the curtain. Then someone cast a sturdy shadow on the moonlit floor.

“It’s Lee,” came a pleasant voice. “I wish to come in.”

“Certainly not. I’m in bed.”

But he came in just the same and sat not on the stool but on the edge of her cot. She sat up quickly, too astonished to speak.

“I have come to discuss your obligation—your new duties,” he said gravely.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You saved my life—kept me from Nirvana. Surely you know what that means in Buddhist countries. From now on you are responsible for my happiness. You must do everything I ask.”

Any answer she could think of was inadequate.

“So you must welcome your charge, not bid him go. And the fault is double after you have made me come here.”

“I didn’t—”

“I saw you shining in the water. Then I saw you on the shore. It is a perfect turquoise. The memory of its luster shone into the darkness of my tent.”

She gasped. “At least you’re frank. But no pretty speeches can make you welcome, Lee. Even if I were dressed, they wouldn’t. I can’t forget what you are doing to Doctor Harper and me. I tried to save you just as I would any other person drowning before my eyes.”

He actually looked pained. “Don’t you know that what I did was for my father—my prince? I have nothing but the friendliest feelings for both of you.”

“No doubt you think yourself justified, but you’re not, never in the world. And I don’t want your friendship.”

“Then you want me to treat you purely as my captive? Very well. A very beautiful captive, who needs taming. This is the way it is done.”

And before she could move he had caught her to him, pinioned both her arms, and was kissing her leisurely and soundly on the lips.

But it wasn’t the stolen kiss that made her so furious. It was the ease with which he got away with it. His muscular strength was so great that she couldn’t fight him or even appear to fight him. And he was so quick that when he let her go he was instantly erect and out of reach.

“Oh, you brute!”

It was the last thing on earth she wanted to say, what grateful girls were supposed to say on such occasions. But she meant it!

He only laughed. “That was to show you that you had better make friends with me. Then I will ask for your favors instead of seizing them. Remember, this is Chwanben.”

“I’ll never make friends with you. Never.”

“In that case—” and he moved toward her again.

“You wouldn’t dare, if I had a gun. I haven’t—so please don’t. I’m too tired to fight you.”

He stopped very still. “I forgot how much you have been through,” he said in a changed voice. “I am sorry.”

Somehow she couldn’t speak.

“And here’s the gun you wanted. The same we took from your master. To shoot it you need only press down the catch and pull the trigger.” And he put the little weapon in her hands.

“Thanks. I won’t use it right now. Now go.”

“I will go—but when shall I come again?” He moved to the entrance of her tent and began to fasten back the strings. “ ‘Can he who has tasted wine be content with milk?’ Tsai hui—little foreign-devil.”

He didn’t think she understood, but she did. Tsai hui was one of the few phrases she remembered from her childhood visit to Chwanben and it meant, “ ’Till we meet again.”

But they must not meet in this way. Wine was not a good comparison—it went to the head instead of the heart and it did not step up her whole existence so she could see the people on the stars—but she knew what the proverb meant, and she was on a milk diet for a long time to come.

It seemed fitting to June that every hour of the next day the scenery grew wilder and more awe-inspiring, in tune with her great adventure.

The wide valleys were rich and populous, farm roofs yellow with drying corn, villages with wooden gods, countless droves of horses, cattle, and sheep; but they followed the sky lanes where the yak herds grazed, and where Buddhist Lamas gazed on heaven from the windows of their cloud-draped monasteries.

The long trail ended at the brink of a three-hundred-foot chasm serving as a moat for the palace of Prince Kiang. The day had ended too—her horse’s shadow on the rocks long as a pine-tree, and a pine-tree’s monstrous image half across the mountain, and the gulf so deep and wide was filling with purple shadows. The only bridge was a smooth three-inch rope of woven bamboo, from which hung a massive iron pulley supporting a kind of basket.

Two long ropes were attached to this basket, one looped on the cliff-edge with its end fastened to a near-by tree, the other swinging off across the gulf. And in this contrivance, across yawning nothingness, she was expected to ride!

“Nervous?” Lee inquired in her ear.

“Who? Me? It’s just a Momba rope-bridge.”

He gazed at her curiously. “How did you know that?”

She knew it because she had seen one before—over the Dihang ten years before. But she looked him in the eyes and answered, “I read a book, once.”

“I intended to let you go last—or even take the ten-mile ride around—but as you are so intrepid, you and I will make the first trip together.”

There was no way out of her getting in the basket with him, so cramped that she was practically sitting in his lap, to sail out over the gulf. Their weight bore them down the sag of the rope to the middle of the chasm, then coolies appearing as if by magic on the opposite shore began to haul them jerkily the remaining distance.

“If this rope breaks, we will seek our next existence together,” Lee said dreamily. “No mountain of jade can separate us there, no East and West, no prince’s son and captive. A felicitous fate.”

“I’d prefer a good Airedale terrier,” she answered promptly.

But she wasn’t feeling quite so snappy as she pretended. The bottom of the canyon was too dim and far to see clearly, too distinct and near to escape her awed gaze. She saw small gray dots that must be great boulders, interwoven twigs that were huge tree trunks strewn and criss-crossed where they had shattered down the canyon walls, and a crooked Moslem sword that some genii had dropped there, a mountain stream.

Deny it all she liked, she found a childish comfort in Lee’s nearness.

Lee helped her out on solid ground and the coolies across the gulf drew back the basket. And now the truce was ended; the decorated gate half hidden by massive walnut trees on the crest of the ridge was the courtyard entrance to the palace of Prince Kiang.

Doctor Harper had just crossed when one of the haulers cried out and pointed up the hill. Winding down from the gate through the rhododendrons was a wide trail, hard packed and clean cut. Along it came two rickshaws drawn by coolies and escorted by what seemed to be a number of armed guards and liveried servants. In the first rickshaw rode a middle-aged Chinese in a black gown—an undersized man with small, delicate, ascetic features.

It was to this strange, priest-like figure that Lee and all the coolies bowed so low. June did not blame them; he emanated silent and sinister power. But June glanced at him only once, then her gaze fixed on the occupant of the second rickshaw.

So soon upon the wild grandeur of the gorge and her secret guilty dreams, June could think nothing, feel nothing but disbelieving wonder. A Chinese girl was riding there, her little figure gay with embroidered silks—quite possibly the most beautiful human being June had ever seen.

“It’s Prince Kiang, coming down to greet us,” Lee whispered, “and his niece, Shen-Shan—Spirit of the Mountains—whom I’m engaged to marry.”

It was nothing to her, June thought. She didn’t hate Lee now—simply couldn’t make a go of it, regardless of his deserts—but he could be engaged to a whole Chinese harem for all she cared. Yet she felt at the bottom of the chasm. The job ahead seemed beyond her powers; China was too much for her, too old, too wise. Awkwardly she stood here beside her fat old friend, her good looks running to hide from Shen-Shan’s breath-taking beauty.

“Keep your nerve, June,” Doctor Harper whispered in her ear.

She jumped like a woman shot.

“Okay, Uncle Ted.”

And at once the cloud lifted. It had been only a mirage. She was not the daughter of a Chinese noble, only a Yankee girl, but the Yankees went after what they wanted and didn’t lie down. Shen-Shan could have Lee, but if she thought she would soon be decorated with June’s own jade, she could jolly well think again.

The rickshaws had come to a smooth halt. The face of Prince Kiang was pale ivory in the sunset light, high-bred, ascetic, and at first glance as inscrutable as a Buddhist carving. But love was there, she discovered—the strange love of an illustrious prince for his white foster-son. His eyes could be cold as Himalayan glaciers, hard as the heart of Genghis Khan, but now they were glowing and gentle.

He spoke in Chinese. “My son,” June thought he said. Lee raised his head and answered in the same tongue. “My august father,” his expression seemed to say.

Lee walked nearer the rickshaw and dropped on his knees. Prince Kiang laid his hand on the white man’s bared head. Then Lee rose—and his eyes were glowing, too. He loved this yellow man like a father.

Whatever his desires, Lee did not yet glance at Shen-Shan but presented with great ceremony the American geologist, Doctor Harper.

“Delighted,” Prince Kiang said, the westernism startling June. It was so out of keeping with thirty centuries of Chinese culture in his impassive face.

Doctor Harper barely inclined his head. June divined that he too was watching for clues of the situation and was deliberately challenging Prince Kiang to show his hand.

“I cannot express pleasure in the acquaintance of a brigand, regardless of his high station,” Harper said stiffly.

The classic face remained cold, the natural hauteur of a Chinese prince to a barbarian outlander, but a fleeting look of admiration came into the almond eyes.

“I needed your services,” Prince Kiang explained bluntly. “And the young lady?”

“Honorable father,” Lee broke in, “the young virgin is a servant of his excellency, not a handmaiden but a girl of good birth and great learning, who copies his letters and keeps his accounts. It is the custom of great ones in America to have such servants. Her name is June Hammond.”

Prince Kiang glanced at her with total lack of interest. “Sorry you’ve had to take this long trip,” he said with empty politeness. “Lee, I’ll excuse you now. There’s someone waiting to speak to you.”

The long-awaited moment, June was thinking ribaldly. Do your stuff, Lee. And if you think I give two whoops in Hades—

The lovers touched their hands to their foreheads, then Lee swayed toward her and kissed her on the lips.

So Chinese girls don’t know how to kiss, June went on with considerable ill-temper. Shen-Shan not only accepted the caress, but gave it back with all her heart. But she deserved something better! Not merely beautiful in a still, sculptured way, she was vitally, glamorously lovely. In vain June sought a flaw in her heart-shaped face and exquisite little body. She was beautiful in any language, in any eyes.

Her black hair was not dressed high in the Chinese fashion but had the smartest shingle June had ever seen. Her eyes were large, velvet-black, and their suggestion of a slant gave them an exotic charm. And she was so colorful in her flowered silks, adorned with turquoise earrings and jade necklace, a flush of happiness tinting to quince the ivory of her cheeks.

Lee presented Doctor Harper. Shen-Shan—the Spirit of the Mountains—kowtowed shyly. But she was not so shy when Lee called up June. Those soft eyes that fell so demurely before Lee’s were proud, assured, almost contemptuous.

“You have mos’ beautiful name, Miss June,” Shen-Shan said in a lovely voice and patronizing tones.

Miss Hammond, to you, June wanted to reply. But she did not propose to make an enemy or let Lee think her eyes were green, so she answered sweetly, “So have you, Miss Shen-Shan. And I’m glad you speak English, because I don’t speak Chinese.”

“Very little, I speak. I did go to school in King-Chow. Have you had a pleasant journey, yes, please?”

“As pleasant as I could hope for, considering it came as a surprise.”

“Oh, but those days and nights on the airship and the road. You and my fiancé had so much talk, most pleasure. But I very much fear it be lonely for you now he has come back to me.”

This fragrant rose had thorns! But June’s thoughts ranged further, and suddenly she believed she knew the feud between General Hu and Prince Kiang and his son. The old tiger has never forgiven you for stealing his fawn, the mysterious letter had read. She had fawn’s eyes, this Chinese Helen, and a fawn’s grace.

Before June could answer, Prince Kiang spoke impatiently. “Lee, my son, now you may escort our guests to the palace.”

His coolies began to tug him up the hill. Sure of Lee and unwilling to dirty her little sandals in the trail, Shen-Shan followed. That left June to walk with Lee, but she was almost glad. It was her last shot at him before she faced the guns of Prince Kiang.

“Your fiancée is very beautiful,” she began.

“Naturally.”

“I had almost forgiven you for coming into my tent last night. Sometimes the moon makes people forget they are enemies. But in America we don’t like cheating.”

And that got under his skin! It was not the sunset that made his face so red.

“To do what you did,” she persisted, “when you’re engaged to another girl—”

“It’s a state betrothal, arranged between my father and his mandarin nephew, Shen-Shan’s father. I wasn’t consulted—it was the will of my prince—and I think Shen-Shan would have preferred her cousin, the great lord Hsing. Anyway, it can make no difference when the moon is shining—and my prisoner awaits in her tent.”

“With a gun,” she added crisply. And then the sight of Prince Kiang’s palace drove all this summer moonshine from her mind.

Lee did not lead her through the decorated gates but guided her around a huge rectangular courtyard walled in by buildings, along a narrow road cut in the side of a towering cliff, to the front entrance of the palace. And there Shen-Shan was waiting, bright as a hibiscus in the garden.

June did not bother her head about her, but looked around her prison. A huge, bleak, four-storied structure of rough stone plastered with mud, the palace was built like a fortress on the sloping face of the cliff, overhanging a long valley between rugged mountains. Below the palace the hillside had been terraced to form gardens, farther down were the roofs and walled squares of a considerable town, and beyond were countless little fields and orchards wedged in between upcropping crags and patches of beryl jungle.

It was all as wild and strange as the Lamaseries she had visited ten years ago. There flitted through her mind those macabre lines from Xanadu:

The little stream boiling around the cliff roared down the garden terraces with an unnatural ferocity into a black pool rimmed with naked rock. Weird arched bridges spanned it at the garden walks; the flowers were dizzy-bright, the rocks took strange shapes and seemed to form a senseless pattern with one another; fountains burst up from stones. There were dreamy summer-houses half hidden by vines; a gigantic she-ape with a human child at her breast carved in stone; and on a slope fantastic with rhododendrons stood a bottle-shaped tower which June recognized as a Buddhist reliquary.

“This was once the home of an exiled Dalai Lama,” Lee told her. “He was murdered here, and his ghost is supposed to walk on moonlight nights.”

“I think you’re lucky to have only one ghost,” June said. “It looks like a place they’d come for a picnic.”

“Ghosts, perhaps, but not invading armies. With the gorge behind and this narrow valley in front, it’s practically impregnable against land attacks. And when our combat planes arrive, we won’t worry about General Hu. We are building a landing-field down the valley, and when you leave here you should be able to board my ship almost at the palace door.”

Would she leave here without the jade? Better ask, would she leave here at all?

Shen-Shan strolled up and stood on her little feet like a tulip in the breeze.

“Shen-Shan, now that our guests have seen the flagon, shouldn’t they taste the wine?” Lee asked in his most formal manner. “Let us honor our doorways by showing them in.”

Steps had been cut in the foot of the cliff to the palace terrace. Servants bowed low as June entered a magnificent hall of startling architecture. It was octagonal in shape, three stories high, and enclosed on three sides by two sets of balconies supported by lacquered pillars. It was all the more imposing because its only furniture was a throne-like chair, a few stools, and black and white Tibetan rugs scattered on the tiled floor.

“As prisons go, it’s not so bad,” June conceded. And then in spite of herself, “So austere—and yet so beautiful. I suppose like your own Himalayan Mountains.”

“Father is an ascetic. This room reflects his austere and beautiful mind.”

“You love it, don’t you, Lee?” she said with a sudden burst of sympathy. “You could never be happy away from here.”

Instantly she was sorry and shamed. Shen-Shan’s keen ears had heard the question, and she answered with a laugh like tinkling temple bells.

“Is a swan happy on Gobi Desert, or an orchid cut from its vine?”

June and her old friend were led up narrow, steep, dark stairs to an apartment opening on the lower of the two balconies. This was to be Doctor Harper’s room, Lee explained; June’s room would be ready for her soon after dinner.

“Speak soft and guard your words,” Doctor Harper warned her as soon as they were alone. “There may be a two-legged dictaphone under the floor. June, is your name on any papers or any of your clothes?”

“I don’t think so, but I’ll look again.”

“It’s more important than ever that Prince Kiang doesn’t connect you with Winton Harte. In fact, it’s all-important. You see—I’ve forgotten the charts of the jade mine.”

“You haven’t!”

“I’m telling the truth, June. I learned them only sketchily, and I didn’t get that last coaching you were going to give me. For instance, I’ve forgotten the number of miles from the Zavul bridge to the cairn with the black rock.”

“Why, it is—”

“Don’t tell me, for God’s sake! June, don’t you understand? Remember we’re in the power of these men. That’s the hard fact. They’ll force me to try to lead them to the mine, and the game is too desperate to try not to find it; absolute sincerity is my only hope. But if I honestly don’t know—”

“Okay, Uncle Ted. I understand.”

At dinner Prince Kiang sat at the head of the table, with Lee on his right hand and Doctor Harper at his left. Shen-Shan was seated beside Lee, and June at the foot of the table. But she was only a white virgin, scribe for Doctor Harper, and the less attention she received the better.

Great golden Chinese lamps lighted the table. Liveried servants materialized from the shadows and vanished there again. June thought of her schoolroom in Ohio as a Buddhist Lama might dream of a previous existence.

In the talk over the teacups Prince Kiang upheld in the most courteous way the Oriental way of life over the Occidental. With the same polite detachment, Doctor Harper defended his own world. But out of this quiet, scholarly discussion came a distant peal of thunder.

“We will resume the subject later,” Prince Kiang said suavely. “Shen-Shan and I are outnumbered tonight—two against three.”

He did not glance at Lee, but Lee looked straight at him. “In plain words—you disown me?” he asked.

“You seem to have disowned us. For the first time at my table, you are wearing the clothes of the West.”

“I find them comfortable—and I owe something to the West. But, if you wish—”

“ ‘The wind blows, the rain falls, and the heart loves beyond the sway of kings.’ Wear what you like, my son.”

Lee’s defiance changed to contrition. June feared Prince Kiang more than ever.

“Chinese garb would become you too, Miss—Hammond, is it not?” Prince Kiang addressed June. “And with a necklace of jade, such as my niece is wearing, around your white throat—”

It was thin ice. June had only to falter, flush, or glance up guiltily to give Kiang the clue he wanted. But she buckled on her skates and tore out for shore.

“Doctor Harper, it’s like the jade in the bracelet you let me wear. Lee, did it come from the same mine?”

“Undoubtedly,” Prince Kiang broke in. “A mine known as Shan-Yu-Shih which was found some centuries ago, supplied a few pieces to the royal family, and was lost again. Doctor Harper, I can see you haven’t taken your lovely secretary into your confidence.”

“Not that I didn’t trust her,” Harper said hastily. “We are quite old friends and distant kinsmen. But certain secrets are dangerous—”

“Quite so. But I’m sure you won’t be so close-mouthed with me, your host. We will discuss the matter at our leisure after dinner.”

June plumed herself on her little triumph. The whole situation was no worse than she expected, perhaps a little better. If Harper failed to find the mine and her own luck held—

“Tea, missy.”

It was only a servant at her elbow. It was not surprising that this close to India some of Prince Kiang’s men could speak English. Yet a horrible wave of cold swept through her, reaching her heart it seemed before the fear that sent it could take shape in her mind.

“Tea, little missy?” That was what he should have said. Hadn’t he said it every morning for more than a year, as he came to a little girl’s bedside in her travels through Chwanben?

She dared not look into his face, because then he would look into hers. But she did. A girl could stand a lot of gaff, she had discovered, when there was no way out. No good trying to hide; it would only arouse his suspicions. So she made her face a piece of plaster and looked straight into his eyes.

“Yes, please,” she said graciously.

That his face did not light with instant recognition she could hardly believe. His name was Koko; it was as though he had served her supper and hung her mosquito net just last night. But it was ten years ago, and she had changed from a child to a woman.

Could she trust to this? At the slightest prompting she would rather trust Koko. He was not one of the deserters the day she and her father had found the jade; when they had failed to come to camp he had set out alone to look for them. She remembered him sitting at her feet, cracking walnuts for her, and telling her tales of entrancing ghosts and demons.

And now the prompting came. Koko’s face was a piece of leather marvelously worked, but as he poured her tea his hand trembled and the liquid spilled on the cloth.

Slowly her own hand rose and laid a finger on her lips. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him give a little nod. Then there was nothing to do but wait till dinner was over.

When she rose from the table she left her handkerchief crumpled by her plate. At the dining-room door she uttered an impatient expression and turned back, but Koko was already trotting after her.

“Hankachee, missy,” he called.

“Come my room, topside, chop-chop,” she whispered in the same pidgin English they had talked ten years ago.

In five minutes he was there with a bowl of fruit. The door seemed to close of itself behind him. But he said no word, only waited with eyes cast down.

Nor did she know how to begin. Ten years were so long, East and West so far removed. But the breath came sharp to her lungs, and she murmured, “Koko?”

“Yes, little missy.”

“You sabe me?”

“So small time no can forget,” he told her in his pidgin, that strange dialect that is the meeting-ground between East and West in China.

“You no talkie other men my name?”

“No have talkie, little missy.”

“After Prince Kiang sabe my name, June Harte, maybe makie me die. You sabe?”

“Me sabe, little missy. But Plince Kiang belong my masta.”

“Prince Kiang want jade belong me.” For she had decided to stake everything on the power of old love, a ten-year memory. “You talkie him, maybe he pay you plenty silver. He makie me find jade, then makie me die.”

“Me velly poor man. Me too muchie old. Me wanchie plenty silver, plenty chow. All same, little missy give me plenty chow before time—for belly and for heart.”

She couldn’t see him plainly because of a mist before her eyes.

“One night velly sick. Old masta pay quinine, you bling tea when Koko no can walkie. ‘Tu’n about, fell play,’ little missy talkie me.”

She nodded but could not speak.

“Tu’n about, fell play, little missy. Me no talkie Plince Kiang.”

Before she could thank him he had opened the door. “What man shuttie door?” he complained. “Just now, me catchie chow.” And with a funny little bow he trotted away.

Koko had hardly gone when another servant brought word her apartment was ready. She followed him down a stone-walled corridor and up a dismal stairway to a jewel-box of a room furnished in gold lacquer. She felt a little glow of gratitude for Lee.

It was not at all like a prison cell. Besides the entrance to the corridor, it had three doors. One led to a bathroom, startlingly modern in this medieval fortress. Another revealed a closet, in which hung the clothes Lee had provided and some Chinese apparel she had not seen before. But the third door opened into another room.

A heartwarming atmosphere of home welcomed her. Familiar-looking books lay on the reading-stand, a radio attached to a storage battery stood by an easy chair, and there were no fumes of incense or sculptured heathen gods. But why was there a pipe and a tobacco humidor on the table and spilled ashes and match ends on the floor?

It was Lee’s room and there was no key to the door!

She wasn’t afraid. Her whole heart was filled up with indignation. She wished he would try to come in! Sitting bolt upright in the straightest chair she could find in the room, she began to rehearse what she would say to him. The only trouble was being a lady—she didn’t have half the scope she really needed. . . .

At last she heard him entering from the hall. At once he tapped cheerfully on her door.

“Who is it?” she called ominously.

He opened the door. “June—” And then he saw her flushed cheeks and the lightning in her eyes.

At first he stared in bewilderment, then laughed aloud. “Oh, little foreign-devil,” he exulted.

Gamely she tried to light one of her fire-crackers, but it fizzled miserably.

“But why did you do it, if—if—if you’re a gentleman? I want another room. I want it the length of the hall from yours. After what you did in my tent—”

“Well, now that you have recalled those delights . . .” And he advanced with a glint in his eye.

“Wait, Lee. Maybe I misunderstood. But there’s no key in the door—”

“There’s no key because I wanted to be able to reach you instantly—if you needed me. You are from my father’s country. Where a mountain of jade is at stake, there are always dangers.”

“Lee, I’m sorry. I—I don’t want a key.”

She looked so lovely standing there, Lee thought, her slim body erect, her generous breasts outlined by her close-fitting gown, her eyes and hair an identical golden-brown, her mouth so wistful. No man with blood in his veins or a heart in his body could turn on her or turn away.

“Are you sorry enough to make amends?” he asked.

“Yes, just once.”

“Does it mean we are friends?”

“No, but you’re my best enemy.”

Just once he kissed her, gently but adequately, and hastened to his own room.

At this very moment Doctor Harper was closeted with Prince Kiang in the latter’s study. The walls were books from floor to ceiling; there were easy chairs and a kerosene reading-lamp, and Harper could hardly remember that the scholarly figure in the black gown was his mortal enemy. But he was reminded of the fact very soon.

“We both are men of mature years,” Prince Kiang began. “We have learned to recognize facts and save time. Doctor Harper, you know the location of the mountain of jade discovered by Winton Harte ten years ago. I wish you to divulge that knowledge to me at once.”

“It’s not as simple as all that,” Harper answered thoughtfully. “I have some knowledge of the charts Harte left—they have been destroyed—but they were by no means explicit. Actually my expedition here was something of a gamble. At least I had no hope of finding the jade without an extensive search.”

“I am aware you have no charts,” Prince Kiang said with a faint smile. “The point was thoroughly investigated at my orders. Tomorrow, then, you may begin your search for the mine.”

“It will require a considerable outfit. It is at least fifty miles from here.”

“You shall have all the men and horses you need, under command of my son, Prince Lee.”

“I am your prisoner. Obviously you can force me into the field. But I am not at all sure I can find the vein. And how can you be sure I will honestly try?”

“Because you are a man of intelligence, Doctor Harper. If we should suspect you are deceiving us—but why broach such an unlikely possibility?”

“Just the same, I’d rather you’d finish what you were about to say.”

“You are a geologist about to undertake a professional mission. I expect to reward you with a fitting fee in jade. To play false with one’s craft is almost as great a sin as to betray one’s gods. You would not make the mistake twice, I assure you. And your secretary would conceal her shame and recover from her grief in the konkuan of one of my noble lords.”

Harper turned quite pale. “You are a scoundrel, Prince Kiang! You are a scoundrel!”

Prince Kiang looked honestly pained. “Oh, I’m sorry you think that. Ordinary rules of conduct are not for princes, and I claim sovereignty over all this country. True, Nanking has not recognized my claim, but it will when it is enforced by hundreds of wan in jade.”

“If I agree to make a conscientious search according to my best knowledge,” Harper went on without pause, “do you promise on your honor as a prince to return us safely to Shanghai?”

“You and your secretary will be sent to safety the day after you find the mine.”

“Do you swear that by Guatama Buddha, your god?”

“My dear friend! I made that vow when the project first occurred to me.” And Prince Kiang’s thin lips curled in a dim smile.

“How about Dimitri Koslof? I feel responsible for him, too.”

“You need not. He was party to the plot against you. I can’t promise to let him depart with you and your secretary. It may be he must remain bound to the Wheel.” And Prince Kiang smiled knowingly again.

“What if I try in all honesty and fail?”

“I can only say that the sooner you find the mine, the sooner you will be sent to—safety.”

“Very well, Prince Kiang. All the cannon are on your side. I will make the best of a bad situation and begin the search as soon as you assemble the outfit. But I shall want my secretary to accompany me, to keep my records.”

Prince Kiang smiled gravely. “I understand. You are afraid to leave the girl here in my charge. I assure you she is not in the slightest danger, but to ease your mind for the quest, she has my leave to go.”

Chao-Yuan led away the pack-train at noon the next day. Because it had to detour ten miles around the canyon, Harper, June, and Lee could spend the night at the palace and by crossing the rope-bridge join the outfit the following morning.

“But for heaven’s sake, be careful,” Doctor Harper implored. “June, you’ll be closely watched, and if they suspect you have any knowledge of the location of the vein—”

“My dear, it’s an old army game for ladies to pretend to be dumb. Don’t you worry.”

For two days the outfit hammered its way across the Himalayan hills. It was villainous country—narrow hot valleys, steep-cut ridges, old glacier moraines, slide-rock, down-timber, dangerous fords, goat-trails along illimitable precipices, and high passes where the wind shrieked like a million banshees. But what June hated worse was its devilish, growing proximity to the jade mine.

Doctor Harper seemed to remember the chart only too well. He had crossed the Zavul bridge and was heading in the general direction of a V-shaped pass through high mountains that the Tibetans called Kangura Drang.

A very strange situation, June thought—her old friend’s determined search for what he prayed not to find. It touched her at times, awed her often, and occasionally gave her a feeling akin to horror, as though she were sitting on the porch of a madhouse, wondering how she got there.

Her first efforts to mislead Harper were fruitless. When with an air of innocence she suggested seeking an easier trail around a brush-grown hillside he gave her a little smile and slogged on. But one night her cunning prevailed.

“We’re licked, Uncle Ted,” she whispered when they were alone. “Your memory’s too darned good. And when that black cliff looms up before your eyes—”

At once she covered her mouth with her hand, drew a sharp breath, opened wide her eyes—every sign of dismay.

“I shouldn’t have brought you, June,” Harper told her sorrowfully. “I’ve been thinking the cliff was pale gray. Chao-Yuan has insisted it was black—the legends have it so—and now I know he’s right.”

So far June had oriented herself purely by her knowledge of her father’s charts. But on the third day they entered a region that she seemed to remember remembering. A Momba village in a hollow lacked a certain strangeness; as she rode the trail it seemed a pigtailed little ghost was leading her by the hand.

Chao-Yuan’s wooden face showed an almost-human exultation. Doctor Harper was leading them into the identical country where legend had the mine. Oddly enough, Lee seemed vaguely troubled.

“But it’s at least six miles,” Doctor Harper told him as a steep hillside forced them to the banks of a mountain stream.

June wondered—heart-sick. The V-shaped gap in the mountains was now plain to see. When she gazed at it now and then—one view on her eyes and the other on her memory—the two scenes coincided like a double picture seen through an old-fashioned stereoscope. It stood at the same place in the sky.

As they continued upstream, she gradually became aware of something very strange. At first it was only a creepy sensation which she was trying desperately not to analyze or heed. When it battered through her barricades she still refused to believe it. It couldn’t be anything but her imagination. If you believed yourself sick you soon ran a fever. Look for ghosts and you saw them; and the weirdest spook that ever rattled a chain was no more unreasonable than this little ghost of a song ringing in her ear.

All mountain streams make the same kind of gurgle, she insisted. It had been only the vivid fancy of a twelve-year-old girl that had given the stream beside the mountain of jade a tune all its own. And it was stark, raving madness that the same girl, ten years later, should now hear the same tune.

The outfit went around another bend. The valley had narrowed and was climbing to a steep-walled gully. June sat very still upon her horse.

Steady, girl, steady, she whispered in desperate alarm. For the bend had revealed a cairn of rocks. There had been several such monuments along these old Tibetan sky-trails; and as it was not crowned with a black stone Harper did not glance at it twice. But the black stone at the bottom of the pile might have dislodged from its place by an earthquake. And it was on her left hand.

Slowly, with unflinching eyes, she looked to her right. And there was a great gray cliff, sheared off in some cataclysm of by-gone ages, and partially covered by vines that found root in its crevices. And it was humped like the camel she had ridden at Chando.

Chao-Yuan stopped his horse. The mountains danced on her eyeballs. There was a roaring in her ears from her falling skies and her bursting dreams, then suddenly no sound but the voice of Chao-Yuan.

“If we go up that gully we cannot get out,” the noble Chinese was saying. “But the country we want to search is all in riding distance, so let us make our base camp here.”

She couldn’t take it, June thought. She couldn’t expect a girl of twenty-two to go through all this. She wasn’t a real adventurer to start with, only an American schoolma’am way out of her depth.

But when Koko began to unload pots and pans within a stone’s throw of the mountain of jade, she only let go a small, inaudible whimper. When Chao-Yuan began to choose tent sites, she did not faint but sat down on a stump and lighted a cigarette with a trembling match-flame. When she saw Lee busying about, a faint choler began to mix with the despair in her heart and there was a perceptible stiffening of her own backbone. And when Doctor Harper began to peer over his spectacles at the distant scenery, she found breath for a secret, bitter laugh.

He waddled up to her. “June, I think it’s a good thing we’re not going any farther. You look a bit seedy.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m ‘tick to my tomach.’ ”

“Better take a pill—Lee has some in his medicine kit—and lie down. I’m going to take a first look at the country. If I could climb to the top of that cliff—”

“Do not attempt it, Excellency,” Chao-Yuan broke in. “Your life is too valuable at present to my prince. If you wish a good lookout, we will ride to the top of the ridge—”

“Oh, Doctor Harper used to climb the Matterhorn before breakfast,” June said eagerly.

It was poker with the lid off. Doctor Harper gave her a pointed look. “My secretary exaggerates, Chao-Yuan. I shall not attempt the perilous climb, but will ride to the top of the ridge.”

It wasn’t worth it, June thought, in wear and tear on her own nerves. Yet they continued to hold up. Almost serenely she watched the camp rise and the coolies gather firewood from the very base of the cliff. When Harper returned from his scouting and announced sadly but with indubitable honesty that he thought they would find the vein in the torn and tangled ranges three to five miles distant, her face wore a mask as dense as Chao-Yuan’s.

That night Doctor Harper came into her tent with a long face. “June, I don’t want you to be with me if I find the mine,” he told her. “I’m sorry now that I let you come this far.”

This far! Good heavens!

“Then why don’t you try not to find it?” she demanded. “If you’d just dillydally around camp—”

“Be careful, June.” Harper scouted for eavesdroppers. “Now you’ve assured me that the mine is a good distance.”

“You’ll find it anyway. What’s the difference?”

“Keep a stiff upper lip. Perhaps I’ll pass right by it without seeing it. But at all costs—stay away from that mine!”

When the horses were being saddled the next morning, June announced she would spend the day in camp. “But I think you’d enjoy the ride,” Lee said wistfully.

“I would, but not if it’s my last ride.”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s likely to happen to any foreign-devil who sees that jade mine?”

In Lee’s face, China and U.S.A. fought a little war.

“My father wouldn’t break his oath to Buddha. He is the Lord of the Rivers of Pemako and Baron of the Snows. And if he should . . .”

“You’d shake your finger at him, wouldn’t you, Lee? Tell the Lamas on him!”

“I am not prepared to say what I would do.” And he spoke so gravely that June was ashamed.

“If you won’t go with us, someone will have to stay and guard you,” Lee went on. “As I’m not very well up on geology, I’ll do it myself.”

Good heavens! He might take it into his energetic head to climb the cliff! Nor did Chao-Yuan seem pleased by the arrangements. He said nothing, and a slow-motion picture of his kowtow would have shown every limb and finger in the correct position, according to the precepts of Confucius, but June saw a malignant glitter in his long eyes.

Since Lee stayed, June had to keep him occupied. And as her billingsgate gave out before half of the long day was over, she found herself in tolerably social conversation with him. It wasn’t boring, she confessed. Just when she had decided he was merely another American he would let fall an expression or an idea as Chinese as the Great Wall. And the identical instant that she declared him an inveterate and impossible foreigner, he gave her a word or a look that made her homesick.

They lunched together under a tree beside the water. Old Koko served them, and once called her “little missy.”

“Why does he say that?” Lee demanded. “It’s a term usually addressed to children—”

“Boy, why do you call me ‘little missy’?” June asked calmly, when Koko reappeared with the teapot. For she knew the old servant was aware of his blunder and would want a chance to retrieve it. But she wasn’t quite prepared—

“Missy Shen-Shan belong big missy,” Koko answered blandly. “Melican girl little missy.”

“In other words, Shen-Shan will be wife Number One, and I’ll be Number Two, after the good old Chinese custom,” June said.

“June, he made it up himself. The idea has never occurred to me.” He hesitated a moment. “No, it wouldn’t work.”

“But at least I might do for Number Three or Four?” June begged.

Just the same, they traveled far toward each other that day, and climbed many a wall. They could never climb the mountain of jade, yet sometimes she forgot it looming there, its humpbacked shadow darkening the camp. And hour by hour he was learning to talk her own language, not Chinese translated into English, but plain Yankee speech, his mother tongue.

At sundown they hurried to meet the treasure-seekers, winding down the mountainside. “Did you find it?” June called to Doctor Harper.

But she need not look at the gray cliff to know, only at the gray face of Chao-Yuan. The cliff loomed over them, aloof, austere, ignored and ignoring, but the face turned darker, and out of it the slanted eyes gleamed coldly and magnetically bright as a cobra’s.

“We did not find it,” he broke in before Harper could answer, looking straight at Lee. “We found the cairn with a black rock near the top and a score of black cliffs, but not a catty of jade. Lord, you have heard the ancient legend that some day a white witch would cross the palace moat and bring woe to the country. Has any such creature been seen?”

“I couldn’t say,” Lee answered quietly. “I have not kept track of the goings and comings of witches.”

Chao-Yuan rode on into camp. Lee turned, his eyes kindling, to June.

“You know, I’m not very sorry.”

“About what? No witches?”

“There’s a witch here, truly. Chao-Yuan is a wise man. Perhaps she has magicked the country so he can’t find the jade; anyway, she’s magicked me to oppose my own father’s will. I meant—and it’s black treason—that I’m not very sorry the search today was a failure.”

“You don’t mean that, Lee,” she marveled.

“Since I’ve been with you,” he went on, “I’ve been haunted by some queer ideas. Silly, sentimental ideas of right and wrong imported from America, and utterly out of place in a bandit prince. I’ve been thinking we should make a truce with Doctor Harper, give him and the family of the discoverer—Harte is the name—a fair share of the jade. We could agree to work the mine and protect it from bandits, pay Nanking and the Lamas their share. . . .” He stopped suddenly and gave her a wry smile. “You see, I am bewitched!”

“Why should you be sorry for a little human decency, even if you are a bandit-prince?” she exploded. “I’d think you’d be glad that your American blood can still function. Anyway, what you think isn’t very important, is it, when you’re going to go ahead and do just what Prince Kiang commands?”

“I’ll talk to him, June, when we return to the palace. That’s all I can promise. But pray to your gods that General Hu does not raid us in the meantime. He’d want more than Prince Kiang.”

One day after another was born, served its turn, died, and was laid away with its fathers in the catacombs of time. June saw only a few of these miraculous births out of the tireless womb of night, but she watched many an old day go down to splendid death.

And Lee was usually watching too. She couldn’t avoid him in this narrow, cliff-walled camp, and he utterly ignored her cold shoulder. But he no longer wakened the banshee in her by trying to steal her kisses.

She almost wished he would try! She’d lain awake nights preparing a salvo to flatten him out. But although they walked in the scented forest, past mossy logs and into green inviting hollows, still he did not even touch her hand.

The moon wasted away; there was the Feast of the Million Lanterns in the sky. Still Harper and Chao-Yuan rode the hills in search of a black cliff with a fissure filled with jade. But one red sunset saw their outfit returning to camp without them.

“Their Excellencies rode off alone, save for two bearers,” the fu-to, chief of the coolies, reported to Lee, “Doubtless there is business afoot not fitting for the eyes of common men.”

A shadow seemed to creep across Lee’s face.

“Who are the bearers?” he asked.

“Shia of the Zavul and Hai-San.”

“Those men? Bearers? One a river pirate and the other a yak thief of Kumbum?”

“ ‘Hao tie pu tan tin.’ (You cannot make nails of good iron.) But my lord Chao-Yuan requests that you be not concerned, as they will return safely before dawn.”

June did not understand the conversation, but she thought that Lee was a little, just a little, concerned. It was hard to see, but she was learning to read him between the lines.

Meanwhile Doctor Harper and Chao-Yuan were seated on a table-like crag overlooking the V-shaped pass that the Tibetans called Kangura Drang. Behind Harper stood the two bearers, Shia and Hai-San, but he found himself wishing they would get into the foreground where he could watch them. Not that they were a pleasure to the eyes. They were even uglier and dirtier than the common run of Tibetan riffraff. Shia had one white blind eye, and Hai-San, with three fingers missing on his left hand, had acted as camp helper and had been caught by Koko in the old Central Asian custom of picking a fowl alive. Why Chao-Yuan had chosen them for this late evening survey, Harper did not try to guess.

Nor was Chao-Yuan himself a pleasant companion. He had been moody all afternoon, had cursed the spirits of the mountains for their ill favor in the quest, and his long eyes had a curious still shine too much like a snake’s eyes. No doubt it was Harper’s own worn nerves. . . .

“So the country ahead does not look favorable to our search,” Chao-Yuan said very quietly.

“No. It’s the wrong formation to bear aluminum and sodium silicates.”

“Yet it is the only area in the district we have not brushed and combed. Do you not think, Doctor Harper, that there is some little landmark that you have forgotten, perhaps some detail recounted by the finder, Winton Harte, that you have regarded as too unimportant to reveal?”

Yes, there was one detail Harper had not told. It was that Winton Harte’s daughter June had accompanied her father the day of the discovery. Nor did he intend to tell it. He found himself repeating this resolve in a language not of the mind, in some depth of him beyond thought, the citadel of his inmost soul. Above all the physical terror that suddenly swept through him the plain fact stood. Aloud he said, “I have done the best I could. Now I’m going to camp.”

“Not yet.” Chao-Yuan rose and his monstrous shadow leaped across the crag. “I have brought an instrument devised by some Tibetan sage of centuries ago, which has miraculous power to restore lost memory. Hai-San, reach in my saddlebag and bring out the Crown of Truth.”

With a little ecstatic sigh, Hai-San obeyed. The Crown of Truth proved to be an iron band, semi-circular in shape, with a clamp on each end. With it he brought two small round bones, somewhat smaller than pigeon eggs.

“The band fits over the head,” Chao-Yuan explained blandly. “These little bones, from the skeleton of a sheep sacrificed with proper rites, are inserted against the temples, beneath the clamps. When the screws are tightened, the wearer of the crown remembers all forgotten.”

Harper, too, rose to his feet. He did not tremble—he dared not tremble—and he looked Chao-Yuan in the face. “If it is put out of my sight at once, I will not report the incident to Lee or Prince Kiang.”

“It shall be put out of your sight. You will feel it, perhaps, but not see it, when it is properly adjusted. In fact, if this instrument is used with lively spirit, the wearer sees nothing at all, from that time forward, but the shadow of his shame. Perhaps you have heard of the fate of Lung Shar, war minister to the Dalai Lama.”

“No.” Instinctively Harper had begun to play for time.

“When the Dalai died, the Crown of Truth was put on Lung Shar by his enemies, and the clamps screwed tight. It is said that he recalled many evil deeds before his eyeballs grew sufficiently long and narrow to leap from their sockets. But sometimes just the sight of this crown quickens the memory, and if you, Excellency, discovered now that you recall—”

“Chao-Yuan, I have told you all I know of the charts. And I warn you . . .”

“Tie his hands, Shia.”

Shia reached into the waist-fold of his robe and brought out leather thongs. With a little clucking noise, he moved toward Harper.

Harper’s first impulse was to fight. It was racial, atavistic. But in spite of his sturdy body, always his great strength had been his mind. And it did not fail him in this moment of utter need. The more he struggled the harder they would bind him, the faster they would strike. Some thought of future consequences restrained his enemies now. Although there was no glimmer of mercy in their eyes, not a trace of indecision in their wooden faces, no man is as bold as he seems; fear of retribution rings hollow in every heart. But if he wakened their passions by resistance even this meager protection would be lost. So he allowed Shia to draw back his arms and bind his wrists.

The same power of mind that made him submit now found him a means of escape. It was a rough road, a tough job, but he gazed into the cold mirror of fact that he had held before him all his life and thought that the situation justified it. The flat crag on which he stood overhung a chasm. He was standing quite near the edge; one bound would carry him over. He reckoned that he would fall clear for a matter of four or five seconds—consummate and primal terror with which no strength of intellect could cope—but afterward he would never know what hit him.

He hated to leave the planet that interested him so, many of its mysteries still unsolved, but it was infinitely better than having his eyeballs grow elliptical from pressure at his temples. June? She wanted him beside her, but really he could help her very little. Now that she had won Lee’s friendship, possibly she would be safer without him.

Perhaps there was some other way out, but he would keep the road open. When Chao-Yuan ordered him to resume his seat, he dropped down close enough to the brink to hurl himself over in one bound; but not so close as to arouse his enemies’ suspicions. Then he waited, thinking of many things.

“You have not remembered the exact location of Shan-Yu-Shih?” Chao-Yuan asked quietly.

“I have no more idea of its location than you have. If you do this thing, you will gain nothing and lose your own life.”

“I have no fears for my life where the glory of my august prince is concerned,” Chao-Yuan said.

“A very pretty speech.” For Harper was fighting with all his powers. “Forgive me if I take it with a grain of salt. As our great poet said, human beings would rather ‘bear what ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.’ Do not think you can escape vengeance for this act. The white man is not finished yet, out here. If not Prince Kiang or the Nanking government, there are avengers among my own race who will track you down and destroy you.”

Chao-Yuan’s thin lips curled in a smile. “You are a courageous man, Doctor Harper. I pity you for it tonight, because it means a long ordeal for you instead of a short one, with the same inevitable end. Shia, you may gather fuel and build a small fire. We will need light to work by, and the fall of darkness brings a cold wind. Hai-San, put the Crown of Truth upon his Excellency.”

Eager as a dog to play, Hai-San stepped forward. His mangled hand seemed adroit as he put the iron band over Harper’s head, inserted the round bones under the clamps against his temples, and tightened the screws to hold them in place.

“Only one turn?” the man asked Chao-Yuan in Chinese. Harper could not understand his words, but he saw a sadist frenzy in his face.

“Two.”

At the second turn of the screw, unutterable pain shot through all the bones of Harper’s head, followed by a dull ache as nature attempted to “accommodate” the pressure. It was only six feet to the brink of the crag. Thank God for that, Doctor Harper thought.

After what seemed a considerable time, Chao-Yuan asked, “Do you not find your memory greatly stimulated?”

Harper fought back a howl of fury and terror. “On the contrary, numbness is stealing over my brain.”

“It will pass. Another turn of the screw, Hai-San.”

Hai-San’s lip gave a hysterical twitch. Harper saw his eyes in the growing firelight. “Remember what I told you, Chao-Yuan,” Harper said very slowly and clearly. “You are signing your own death warrant.”

The words did not end in a scream. As the screw turned, Harper only bit his lip until it bled. That second stab of pain seemed to pierce his very brain, outraging every nerve in his body, blinding him utterly for a moment, but it too receded into a ponderous ache just short of what a man could bear.

But he couldn’t stand any more turns. This was a hard fact. When sight returned, it was no longer normal; every visible object was double, with a hazy edge between.

Harper considered quickly. There was no longer a variety of courses open to him, only alternatives cruelly sharp and clear. No gritted teeth, no power of will, no extreme of physical endurance or even glory of spirit could conquer what was to come. He must either talk or jump.

He weighed each course. If he talked, June would not only lose the jade, a matter of no importance now, but probably her young life as well. Prince Kiang would not care to be troubled or endangered by the tales she could tell. But he, Harper, was already on the downward slope. He had had his day, paid his service to the world, there was little more he could do for himself or his kind, even his power to learn would soon taper off. He might as well make short shrift of what would be a tediously prolonged affair. The bones hurt like a hundred hells already.

“Have you anything to tell us now?” Chao-Yuan asked.

“Nothing.” His voice was still quite clear.

It seemed that Chao-Yuan hesitated briefly, then with a nervous rasp in his tone, “Turn the screw again, Hai-San.”

No, not again. Harper had made his decision. It was very easy, after all; he wondered why he had waited so long.

And then it seemed to him that he knew why he had waited so long. For the first time in long years he was swept by what was either superstition or simple faith; for the moment he believed in a Providence that shapes men’s ends. Inspired from beyond, he had waited for rescue, for help that raced with death. Hai-San moved toward him. Harper had flexed his muscles to spring. But he did not leap to seek mercy in that black gorge below. Mercy leaped up to him.

It was a man’s voice, shouting the name of Chao-Yuan.

Hai-San stopped in his tracks, the diabolic ecstasy on his face changing to terror. But his master was stouter stuff. The sudden outcry in that haunted silence smote him to the heart, but he only stiffened, his eyes flared, and he was not beaten yet. He answered the shout, then spoke rapidly in an undertone to Hai-San.

Although he employed Chinese, Harper divined his meaning. There was still time to make the white dog bark. Chao-Yuan’s own “face” and the future glory of his august prince was at stake. Turn the screw and keep turning until—

But Harper sprang up and retreated to the very brink of the cliff. “If you come one step nearer, I’ll jump,” he yelled at them. “Here I am, Lee! If I go over, kill all three of ’em. Hurry—hurry—”

Horses’ hoofs drummed the trail. Lee was shouting as he rode. And suddenly the glitter went out of Chao-Yuan’s eyes and he waved his hand in a gesture of defeat.

Lee gained the crag, swung off his horse, quickly rescued Doctor Harper from the hurricane of pain beating on his brain, and cut his bonds. “Are you all right?” he implored.

Harper managed a faint smile. “Yes, but thank God you’re here.”

“I want you to know that this man acted without orders from either Prince Kiang or myself.” Without a trace of expression on his face he turned to Chao-Yuan. “You have proven yourself not a man but a jackal, to run and bite in the dark. Your ancestors were turtles, and your mother an ill-famed woman. If you care to deny those truths, draw your pistol.”

“I cannot raise a hand against my lord’s beloved son,” Chao-Yuan answered with a strange dignity, “even though he has betrayed his master and mine.”

“What do you mean? Prince Kiang would never have consented—”

“I worked for his glory. If your arrival had been delayed five minutes more, I might have gained information useful to our quest, without permanent harm to this outer-barbarian. But it is not the loss of the jade that will break the heart of my prince. For the love of a white witch you have sold out to the enemy.”

Chao-Yuan turned, mounted his horse, and rode down the trail toward camp. Harper collapsed in Lee’s arms, but revived by a drink of brandy from the saddlebags, his first thought was for June.

“Don’t tell her what happened here tonight,” Harper said. “There’s no use of giving her any more burdens than she already bears.”

But Harper did not tell his main reason for concealing the night’s horror from his charge. To try to protect him from another such night, she might tell her secret, the final disaster.

“I have no desire to speak of it,” Lee answered bitterly. “I wish it need never cross my mind again.”

“But it’s not over yet. You heard what he said about June. Now that you’ve befriended us, Chao-Yuan is more dangerous than ever.”

Lee nodded, the firelight reflecting very strangely in his eyes.

The quest for Shan-Yu-Shih went on a few days more, Lee riding close to Doctor Harper. But the allotted time was almost gone, food supplies were running low, and presently they must return to the palace, leaving only a few trustworthy men to search virgin country deeper in the mountains.

Still it was darkest under the lamp. Harper and Chao-Yuan had forgotten the cliff shadowing the tents, and the coolies were not given to empty and tireless climbs. But to June the final day in camp was the longest and the most nerve-racking of all.

Chao-Yuan hunted alone that day. Harper rested in his tent and gave her no trouble, but Lee loafed in the sunshine, his gaze drifting to the vine-grown summit of the cliff.

“That’s a noble old crag,” he said dreamily. “You know, June, cliffs like that are haunted by a special variety of spirits—nats the Tibetans call them. They’re supposed to give good advice, reveal mysteries, foretell the future.” Suddenly he leaped to his feet. “June, let’s climb it.”

“No! I mean—what’s the use? It’s dangerous—”

“Not if you follow along that fissure. Come along, June, or I’ll go alone.”

But that fissure was the most dangerous part of the climb. He’d seize the vines for support and pull them away from the green-and-white treasure they had guarded so faithfully and long.

“Wait,” she said desperately. “It will be much more fun to go up by moonlight.”

And that was what she had to look forward to, the rest of the day. When Lee’s mind was made up, he was stubborn as a yak. “Don’t be bright tonight, Lady Moon,” she implored the thin little Gurkha kukri in the sky.

But the sun went down without a rag of cloud, the night came up from the dark valleys with only sham ferocity, dillydallying on the slopes, and bowing and scraping like an old masher to that silly little moon. She was only pint size, but you’d think she was full by the way she flaunted through the sky! A dark green streak in a gray cliff would show like teeth in a skull.

Evil spirits kept her trail. When Chao-Yuan returned from a last lone ride, his temper had gone where the dead elephants go. He no longer blamed Harper—convinced at last the foreign-devil geologist had done his best and kept his word—but he growled at Lee in his own tongue and the eye he cast on June was like that of a bad horse. But even this did not get that haunted cliff out of Lee’s head. When she faded out from the supper table and slipped obscurely to her own tent, he followed her.

“June, have you forgotten our rendezvous?”

“Oh, it’s too late.”

“It is never too late to challenge fate. I have a premonition of something there for me—an experience, an inspiration, or a secret—”

His eyes were getting dreamy. The jade was closer to discovery than ever before. June was of practical mind, but did not want to take chances on Oriental occultism. Lee had been schooled by Lamas, and it seemed perfectly possible that he was just about to read her mind like a newspaper.

“Bosh,” she broke in quickly. “You said you were going so you think you have to go, purely masculine reasoning. Well, I’ll go with you.”

There was no way out of it now. If the stubborn fool goes up alone, he’ll find the jade as sure as shooting, she thought. Somehow I’ve got to keep him looking the other way.

Like a boy on a picnic Lee led the way to the huge, humpbacked crag. Within ten minutes they were within ten feet of the jade outcropping. Pretending to fear a fall—an insult to the intelligence on this wide, safe ledge—June grasped Lee’s hands to try to keep them from the flimsy screen of vines. But she couldn’t capture his eager eyes, and that hellcat of a little moon was fairly scintillating, as though to tattle every secret.

Still June drove her nerve like a four-in-hand, talking, laughing, clowning, anything to hold Lee’s attention. And she might have run the gauntlet with flying colors if two of the leafy tendrils hanging over the outcropping had not chosen this unlucky hour to hang wilted and dead. The green-and-white vein—yes, it was like the inside frosting of her mother’s cakes—showed vivid as zebra stripes behind the withered leaves.

Did Lee see? Apparently not, for he continued stolidly along the ledge until she had worked around a corner of rock to the steep slope of the adjacent hill. But when he spoke, the glitter in his eyes and the tremor in his voice sent cold tingles of fear down her spine.

“Wait here just a minute, June.”

“Why?” Somehow she controlled her voice. “Let’s get this crazy party over with.”

“I think I’ve lost something”—and he smiled faintly—“that I want to find.”

He turned back along the ledge. She waited, cold with dread. But she might have known great China would conquer at last. When Lee caught up with her, hardly half a minute later, his face was pale with excitement and triumph.

But instead of submitting to fate, taking it lying down, she found herself fighting on. Her opponent tonight was not cruel Chao-Yuan nor ruthless Prince Kiang, but Lee, a friend, a countryman. If she had enough courage and cunning. . . .

“Did you find what you lost?” she called to him over her shoulder in carefree tones.

“Yes, thanks.”

“What was it?”

“Just an ornament my father values.”

No diplomat at a conference of the powers ever played more furious poker than June played now. The stake was a mountain of jade. Her cards were her own wits and nothing more. While she kept Lee off guard with gay talk and laughter, her keen young mind was fairly flying, planning her campaign, plotting his conquest.

“He’ll tell Chao-Yuan as soon as he gets down,” her thoughts raced. “So he mustn’t get down—the same Lee that went up. You’ve got to change him, June. You’ve got to make a new man of him in the twinkling of an eye—not a Chinese bandit but a chivalrous American.

“So swallow your pride! It’s woman’s weapons tonight. If you’ve got to act like a gold-digger, do it high, wide, and handsome. But, for heaven’s sake, don’t overplay your hand.”

When they reached the summit, June looked wistfully across the moonlit ranges. “It’s wonderful country,” she murmured in throaty tones. “But I’m only a prisoner here—a pawn for a jade mine.”

“Little foreign-devil,” Lee answered gently.

“I keep thinking of that mine, hidden somewhere in these mountains,” she went on forlornly, “and then I think what you said that first day in camp—”

“What did I say?”

“I guess you didn’t mean it, if you’ve forgotten it so soon.”

“That I’d be almost sorry to have Chao-Yuan find the jade? But I was speaking personally, not as the son of Prince Kiang.”

She turned away her face. “Then I’d better not tell you what I’ve ached to tell you, ever since.” And her voice had a little catch.

He caught her hand. “What is it, June? You have no stake in that mine—”

“I wish I didn’t! I wish I could forget all about it, but it’s not easy when you’ve heard and dreamed nothing else for ten years. Lee, I’ve got the biggest stake of all. My real name is June Harte. I’m Winton Harte’s daughter.”

June jerked away her hand and almost ran to the opposite brink of the cliff. But she didn’t touch her handkerchief to her eyes. It wouldn’t be in character, she decided quickly. Yet she must be living her role, for her eyelids felt swollen and burning.

Lee followed her quickly. She caught one glimpse of his eyes shiny-bright in the moonlight.

“Then it’s been worse for you than I ever dreamed,” he marveled. “Every day expecting the men to find your mine!” He hesitated briefly. “But it’s fortunate, June, you don’t know where it is—”

“But they’ll find it yet. Prince Kiang will never give up.” She slipped her hand into his. “And I don’t blame you any more, Lee. I know you’ve stood by me as far as you can, being Prince Kiang’s son—”

He pressed her hand hard. First he blushed, then flushed, quite a different thing. When he spoke again it was with solemn exultation.

“I know now what I came up here to find.”

She did not answer, but not to let well enough alone. All her cunning had run out and her throat felt full.

“Just you,” Lee went on. “You are the treasure I was seeking, the secret concealed from me so long. ‘Look not at the distant thorns lest you tread on the flower at your feet.’ Thank you, strange little nats.”

“You don’t mean that, Lee. It’s just the moon. It tricked you before, you remember.”

“Did it trick me? Or was it lighting my way? And hasn’t it lighted my way tonight?”

June thought that she herself had done a little of the lighting. But when he swayed toward her, she held him away with her hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard the good old Chinese proverb about playing with fire,” she said.

His only answer was to take her in his arms. She permitted it, because it was part of the play. Every chain she could put upon him meant that much more safety for the jade. But now she entered into her part with a realism, practically an enthusiasm, that astonished her.

She had never—well, hardly ever—dreamed that his kiss would thrill her lying lips with such seeming bliss. She hadn’t intended to give back that kiss, but the debt was paid with interest before she could stop and think. When she got track of her arm, it was full around his neck. Eleanora Duse, she thought grimly.

But even this self-jibe did not bring her down to earth. When she hauled that berserk actress out of Lee’s arms even the moon looked different, absurdly bright and beautiful, and her finger-tips were tingling, and the stars were all lit up in sudden and foolish celebration.

“Again?” he whispered.

“Good heavens, no.” And he knew she meant it.

“It was more than you bargained for, Giver of Delights?”

Bargained was right, she thought. If he only knew! “Anyway, it’s plenty.”

“You are wise, little foreign-devil. But I will call you that no more. When we are together, I too am an outer-barbarian.”

“Thanks, Lee,” she told him with her old spirit.

“We must both count costs. Now, before we go down, I will make a promise. You won’t realize all it means—how great your victory is, what a step I’m taking—but it may comfort you a little. I’m going to try to help you get your jade.”

“Lee—”

“I’ll do everything I can as Prince Kiang’s son—even try to delay the discovery of the mine—to bring about a fair agreement with you and Doctor Harper. And I swear it in the name of Lord Buddha.”

“Just your Yankee word is good enough for me. Okay, Lee! And if you want to seal the promise after a very old American custom—”

She was not called upon to explain further. Very quick at adopting American customs was this white brigand, and very ardent in their performance.

When they passed the jade outcropping in their descent, Lee hardly glanced sideways. And a few minutes later they were whispering good night beside the campfire and wishing each other happy dreams.

Hers would surely be happy, June thought, as she left him. But first she would lie awake and live over every incident of this memorable night, rejoicing in her victory and not complaining at the price she had had to pay. But she stopped—and the glowing in her heart stopped too—at the door of her tent.

Like an evil idol in the lantern light, Chao-Yuan was waiting for her there, his eyes cold and hard as jade.

Chao-Yuan gave June a deep bow. “Unworthy though I am, I beg audience with your highness,” he began.

June was not in the least relieved by this subservience, but she put an imaginary yardstick down her back.

“Hadn’t you better see Doctor Harper?” she answered. “I’m only his secretary, you know.”

“Perhaps so, but your conduct has not been that of a servant, and what I have to say is for your ears alone.”

“There’s a camp-stool. Will you sit down?”

“Thank your highness. I have come to speak of Lee, the exalted son of Prince Kiang.”

“Then perhaps we’d better call him. He’d like to hear what you are going to say.”

“Pu kan tan—I am not worthy—to give orders to a prince, even for his own welfare. There are many in Chwanben who care not for his welfare—many who believe that no child born to foreign-devils should inherit power over celestials—but now I speak for Prince Kiang, my master.”

June’s brain was under forced draft, and with lightning intuition she understood the amazing frankness of this remark. “I hate him and many great lords of Chwanben hate him too,” was breathed between the sentences. “So don’t count on him for protection if you fail to do what I am about to command.”

June inclined her head and waited.

“Prince Kiang would rather see his son cast up on a gravel-bar for the vultures than in love with a white virgin,” Chao-Yuan went on.

“Sweet and to the point,” June said.

“It is his august will that Lee remain his son, and never go back to his own kind. As his servant, I shall do what is well.”

“You might come out and say what you are going to do. I may as well know the whole works.”

“If you have no thought for his welfare, think of your own. If you cannot keep your place and station, I will remedy the evil before we meet the Presence.”

“Lee can look out for himself. He has no intention of falling in love with me.”

“Do not cast your eyes up to him. Do not touch his exalted hand or his lips. In China we have learned to cut the flowering vine that holds the sunlight from a king’s window. The life of a young white virgin is the life of a young white virgin, nothing more.”

Chao-Yuan bowed low, and took his leave.

June sat forlornly on her cot, gazing into the thickening dark. What had she done to deserve this? How had she got here, all the way from an Ohio schoolroom to a tent in the shadow of the mountain of jade, involved with a Chinese prince? Her head began to whirl. The walls of the tent started to reel and sway. “June,” she marveled, “I do believe you’re going to faint—”

But just then Lee appeared in the door of her tent. Just the sight of him was bracing as a cold shower. Faint? Ridiculous! She’d never fainted in her life and didn’t intend to start. Square-jawed, big-nosed, somewhat short and stocky, what was so darned holy about Lee? He was just a plain American who had been exposed in his tender years to too much Chinese atmosphere. The jade was hers by rights. She was free, white, and twenty-two.

“I saw Chao-Yuan leave your tent,” he began in a dry voice. “What did he say to you?”

June told him, in plain words.

“You climb mountains and then you go down into a valley,” Lee commented. “So he gave you until we reach my father’s palace! But June, do not whisper ‘Lee’ in the middle of the night if you don’t want me to come.”

“Don’t pay any attention if I say it in my sleep,” she told him recklessly. But when he started toward her she waved him away and tied shut the door of her tent. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken, she observed sagely to herself, and a few minutes later was lost in dreams almost as strange as her waking adventures.

Three evenings later they stood again at the rope-bridge to Prince Kiang’s palace. Dimitri had come over to escort the three white people across; the pack-train must detour around and up the valley.

“But lord, this rope is old and worn,” Chao-Yuan told Lee. “Let us not tempt the gods by crossing two at once. And my great bulk shall test it first.”

June was startled to see a metallic shine strike Lee’s eyes.

“But you remember the prophecy of the white witch that these foolish coolies believe,” Chao-Yuan went on. “See, they are beginning to mutter among themselves. Let the young virgin cross quickly after me.”

His eyes too were shining, an intense hot light such as burned in the eyes of the great snow-leopard of Himalaya when he crept upwind on the musk-deer. At once he got in the basket and sailed out over the gulf.

But June would not go next. “You will wait until both myself and Doctor Harper cross,” Lee told her with a strange, sinister smile.

Lee crossed in safety. . . . Doctor Harper crossed. . . . And now the fantastic airship was empty and waiting for her. But before she could take her seat, Dimitri sauntered up.

Dimitri Koslof, the unpredictable, the least known of all the unknown quantities in this affair. “Miss June, have you a cigarette?” he asked.

She proffered her case.

“And how about that little pistol you pinched from me,” he went on in the same tone, as he was choosing and lighting the smoke.

“I have it. Do you want it back?”

“Rather—for a few minutes—if you don’t mind. That old johnny seemed dashed keen on gettin’ you off to his loney. Lee’s guardin’ yon end of this bally lovers’ leap, and I want to keep my eye open on this end. But I’d like a little authority.”

She slipped him the pistol. “Thanks, Miss June,” he murmured.

“Thank you, old bean,” she told him—just to keep her nerve.

She got in the basket and embarked in empty space. But now she did not even glance into the canyon. The rope was sound enough. The danger—if she could believe it—lurked on the opposite brink.

God knew she didn’t want to believe it. Until the last three weeks no human being had ever meant her harm, let alone craved her life. But she steeled her heart and cleared her eyes and watched.

She was halfway over now. Lee and Harper had stepped close to the brink to help the coolies haul her up the sloping rope-bridge. But she did not look at them, instead to the higher ground where the rope was fastened to the trunk of a tall pine. Beside the tree stood Chao-Yuan, his lips close at the ear of a man in Tibetan dress. She saw them in vivid silhouette against the crags.

It seemed to her that the Tibetan nodded his head. And the next instant there came a little twinkling shine, low down, that spread like fire to a long, white flash of almost blinding light. It was a sword-blade catching the sun.

She saw the Tibetan raise the short, heavy blade high over his head. His legs were braced, his body half-turned, to put his full strength into the blow. June screamed in terror and warning.

But Lee was on guard. His arm made a short, quick motion; thin and sharp across the gulf came the report of a pistol. The man staggered back, dropping his sword, his hand flying to his shoulder.

“Great God!” she heard Harper cry. Lee barked an order in the Chinese tongue. And then there was no sound but the pulley squealing along the rope as the coolies hauled her frantically to safety.

In dead silence she stepped from the carrier onto the ledge. Lee gave her his free hand and hurled her, half-tender, half-savage, back from the brink. But she hardly saw the pistol in his right hand, or the men in woolen robes who stood so tensely silent, or even the stricken figure of Doctor Harper. She saw only Lee’s eyes—the same that had spoken love to her only three nights ago—one icy glitter in his pale face.

And Chao-Yuan saw them too. She heard him breathing hard as he waited, his hands tucked into his sleeves, for this strange silence to end.

At last came Lee’s voice, low-pitched. “I did wrong in bringing you here, June. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“You didn’t know. I do forgive you.”

“But I’ll do what I can in atonement, starting now.”

Chao-Yuan took a step forward. The pallor of terror was seeping through his yellow pigment. “Why not start with this witch-ridden fool who attempted the white virgin’s life?” he asked, almost shrilly. “You hit him only in the shoulder—”

Lee turned to Chao-Yuan in ominous calm. “I aimed at his breast but I am glad I missed. ‘Blame not the obedient hand, but the wilful heart.’ ”

Chao-Yuan seemed about to make frantic denial, but he remembered his “face.” He lifted his head with indescribable dignity.

“You may blame me, because you are a foreign-devil after all, but my prince will raise me to high honor. I struck for his sake, not yours, nor my own. Except for him, I would pray to my ancestors that the white witch work her charms upon you, and take you back to your own kind, and the good sun of Chwanben never see your face again. And I speak in English that she too will understand.”

Lee gave no sign that he heard.

“If I had succeeded, you would escape her wiles and his heart be saved pain. I am not ashamed, only proud, and I will make my defense to Prince Kiang himself.”

“You will never see Prince Kiang again, Chao-Yuan.”

The slanted expressionless eyes widened very slightly. “Your meaning is not plain.”

“You are in my way. Is that plain? I shall take a page from your own book, Chao-Yuan. Do you understand that?”

“I am the servant of Prince Kiang. You do not dare—”

“And I am Lee. You have attempted the life of my guest. It is not well that you live to make her any more trouble. You have a pistol in your sleeve, Chao-Yuan. Bring it out.”

For long-drawn seconds they faced each other, without a movement or a sound.

“Why are you waiting, Chao-Yuan?” Lee asked. “It’s your only chance.”

A faint smile touched Chao-Yuan’s lips. At once he turned and walked to the edge of the cliff.

“I am the son of a mandarin,” he answered, his back to the void. “It is not fitting that I be publicly beheaded for the killing of a prince’s son, worthy deed though it is. So I keep this road open.”

“Very well, Chao-Yuan. Are you ready?”

The Chinese snatched his right hand from his sleeve. His pistol came with it, palely blazing in the dying light.

But it barked only once. Lee fired the identical instant. And then with a chattering yell of rage and terror, Chao-Yuan toppled back, over the cliff edge, into the shadows, out of Lee’s way.

Whether the impact of his enemy’s bullet had knocked him over the brink, or whether he had escaped the first bullet and had pitched backward to dodge Lee’s second and implacable aim, saving his “face,” Lee and June would never know. They heard a sound as of a little avalanche, swelled by the fall of rocks dislodged from the canyon walls and at once dimmed by distance. Then all was still.

June stood gasping, unable to believe that for the first time in her careless life she had seen death. But there was no long time to muse. Prince Kiang had heard the shots and was hurrying out from the ornamented gate in his rickshaw . . . speeding down the trail . . . gazing impassively into Lee’s face.

Yet his first question was of jade. “The last runner arrived four days ago bringing ill news. Is it better since?”

“No, honorable father,” Lee answered. “Doctor Harper searched faithfully, but by the will of God, Shan-Yu-Shih is not for us.”

“I have reports of his tireless searching. It is well.” His cold eye rested briefly on the red-stained robe of the wounded Tibetan. “This man has been shot.”

“I did it,” Lee answered carelessly. “It is only a flesh wound.”

“Is he not Chao-Yuan’s body-servant? And where is Chao-Yuan? I don’t see his big body among the coolies across the ravine.”

“Do not blame him, august father, because he is not here to kneel at your feet. Chao-Yuan has gone to his gods.”

It did not surprise June greatly that Prince Kiang could remain so still and cold. His slight body was instinct with sinister and silent power. But that Lee, her own kind, could look and speak so casually of his killings thrilled and terrified her in the same troubled breath.

Prince Kiang’s eyes widened very slightly. “He met with an accident?”

“Yes, father. He got in the way of my bullet.”

“My faithful servant, Chao-Yuan?”

“He was not a faithful servant to me.”

It seemed to June that Prince Kiang was at once angry and gratified. He had lost a treasured retainer but apparently had gained a son after his own heart.

“We will discuss it privately. Now you may accompany me to the palace.”

Behind locked doors, June and Harper whispered with pale lips. “Thank God the brute’s dead,” June said. “But Prince Kiang’s still alive. And if we get in his way—”

“You must continue to keep your secret at all costs,” Harper answered. “Even Lee must not guess it—yet. But June, is there any truth in what Chao-Yuan said—that he is falling in love with you?”

“It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

“I don’t know whether it would help or harm,” Harper told her thoughtfully. “Prince Kiang might be afraid to raise a hand against you, if it would cost him his son’s love.”

“By golly, Uncle Ted,” she answered after a long pause. “That is something to think about!”

“There’s no danger of you falling in love with him, is there?”

“I haven’t had any antitoxin. Still—”

“Let’s forget it, for the present. We’re not going to sell your kisses on speculation.”

But as June dressed for dinner, she needed no rouge on her cheeks. She had vowed to save her old friend. Wouldn’t it be glorious if she could save him—as she had for the present saved the jade—by the perilous game of love? Chao-Yuan was dead, and the way seemed open to tie the hands of Prince Kiang.

And she need no longer sell her kisses, she was thinking happily as she went down the narrow dark stairs. From now on it would be a fair trade! Her cheeks were burning as she entered the hall.

Oh, but it couldn’t last! She had forgotten something. A radiant jewel in that austere setting, Shen-Shan had come to welcome home her betrothed.

She wore pajamas of heavy ivory-colored silk incredibly worked with gold thread. Her bow to June was the Nirvana of grace; at dinner they chatted like old friends, and Shen-Shan’s laugh was like little gongs of jade. But after the sweetmeats, she slipped her arm into June’s.

“We walk in the garden, please?” she asked eagerly. “Just June and Shen-Shan.”

June had a second of wild terror. Except for the marble lamps the garden was almost as thick with shadows as the chasm she had crossed today. But I’m strong as a colt and good with my hands, she consoled herself.

So the two girls strolled down a garden walk to a stone bench by a lighted fountain. The sculptured figure of a she-ape with a human child at its breast cast a gigantic shapeless shadow.

Shen-Shan sat very primly, her hands folded in her lap. “I will tell you what she means,” her lovely voice broke the silence, “so listen well.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“The ape-god. She was very, very old when Columbus found America. ‘Good can come from evil,’ she tell us. It is part what the Lamas mean when they say, over and over, ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’ The lotus flowers bloom in the slime, you understand.”

Shen-Shan was leading up to something. June’s heart raced as she wondered what.

“If Lee loves you, it will take him from his father, from the only civilized country in the world, great China, and make him barbarian,” Shen-Shan went on. “So I do evil to bring good.”

“Shoot the works, Shen-Shan. Tell me what you mean.”

“Chao-Yuan tried to stop it, very brave, very true, but he is dead,” Shen-Shan explained. “Prince Kiang has done nothing—he thinks always of the jade. But I, Shen-Shan, am not dead, or blind by green stones.”

“So you are going to take it in your own hands?” June asked quietly.

“Oh, my hands are too small, good only to make love. So I use Prince Kiang’s hands, small also but very, very strong.”

June waited, quite pale but steady.

“So I will tell him one little something that I know,” Shen-Shan added softly.

June counted ten before she spoke again. “What is it you know? Or perhaps you’d rather not tell me.”

“Oh, yes, very soon I tell you.” She nodded her head cheerfully, like a flower in the wind. “But first I offer you—what you say—trade.”

“All right. What price?”

“You see the moon? She is growing big. We say—it is joke—she is going to have baby. But we Western Chinese have marriage when moon grows big, so wife grows big too.”

It was a good example of what Doctor Harper called sympathetic magic, June thought, in some weird, detached corner of her brain.

“The moon will be very big in five nights,” Shen-Shan went on. “It is lucky time for Lee and Shen-Shan to marry, the astrologers say. So you will help us, yes?”

“And if I don’t, you’ll tell Prince Kiang what you know.”

“You are very smart girl, Miss June.”

“What is it? Tell me.”

“Prince Kiang want jade, oh, very much. It very wrong, too, for it belongs to white man named Winton Harte.”

“He knows that,” June said.

“But he does not know little white daughter with Winton Harte when he find jade. And now little daughter grown up and come to China, show Doctor where jade is.”

“What has that got to do with me?”

“Very cunning. Very brave. Prince Kiang have plenty to do with you, June Harte. But I not tell him if I marry Lee in five nights. What you say?”

June kept her feet on the ground. That was her one strength, she thought—all she was good for.

“Is that all?” she asked Shen-Shan coolly.

“Yes, please. And I am very sorry—”

“Don’t bother. We’ll go in now, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to think over this charming piece of blackmail.”

“Blackmail? I see now. Like the letter bandits send to American consul—pay hundred thousand dollars or we cut off missionary’s head.” Shen-Shan clapped her hands and laughed.

“But I don’t think your scheme is very sound. I can’t persuade Lee to marry you, just to protect me.”

And she couldn’t make him realize her danger, without confessing her trickery on the cliff!

“Oh, I know you work it very well, smart American girl,” Shen-Shan assured her. “And he will not be angry with me—he know I love him and do evil to bring good. And this is part of Old Tibet. I am Chinese, but I learn by Tibetan woman not be shy with lover.”

“I’ll say you’ve learned your lesson very well. I’ll let you know in the morning.”

Harper and Prince Kiang were playing chess in the library, Lee kibitzing according to his heritage. But June’s nerve was gone where the lamp flame went, and it was more than half an hour before she could crook her finger to signal to her lover. Then she strolled into the hall, and a moment later he met her there.

“Let’s get out,” she told him, “but not in that lovely garden. I want plain, hard ground tonight.”

He led her out by a side door, through the courtyard and rear gate, then down the winding trail to the rope-bridge. A stone seat was there for the comfort of noble travelers waiting their turn on the trolley.

“Chao-Yuan was right,” she told him. “A white witch bringing plague to the country. He’s dead, I’ve come between you and your father, your marriage to Shen-Shan has been interrupted—”

“Interrupted? It’s canceled—finished.”

“No. I want you to marry Shen-Shan in five nights.”

“You don’t mean that, June.”

“I ask you to. I can’t do any more—except remind you that you brought me here and must pay any price to undo the wrong, even marrying a girl of another race.”

“I will pay any price short of treason.” He spoke so quietly that at first she could not realize the power of the words. “But what’s happened?”

“Don’t question. Just marry her—in five nights.”

“Of course Shen-Shan has discovered your real name and has threatened to tell my father. Still, that alone wouldn’t drive you to this, unless—”

June had no power to check the swift and certain movement of his thoughts. She gave a little shrug.

“Plainly you have another, more dangerous secret that she’s discovered,” Lee went on. “It couldn’t be anything but the location of the jade mine.”

“I was with my father when he found the vein. I was with you when you found it. I let you kiss me so you’d stand by me, but I can’t win over Shen-Shan or Prince Kiang. So what are you going to do?”

“I see now. You played a good game, that night on the cliff. But June, you returned that kiss I gave you—bought from you, should say. Did you have to go that far to gain your point?”

“No.” And she spoke very low.

“Tell me, June. Was that just part of the deal?”

“I’m afraid that was extra—a little bonus I granted in an absent moment.”

“Do you suppose you might grant another now? Not to gain any favors but just because you want to?”

“This is another of my absent moments, Lee.”

But a moment later they were sitting properly on the stone bench, only his hard shoulder against hers, sensibly talking over the situation.

“Very well, June, we’ll face it,” Lee said. “First, there’s no use of my appealing to Shen-Shan. My father’s cousin, the illustrious noble Hsing, loves her and she is half in love with him, but she believes herself an instrument of the gods to save me from going west.”

“Excuse me if I take that with a grain of salt.”

“If she carries out her threat, my father will force you to show him the jade. But what then? Doctor Harper believes he has sworn safety for you both, but he’s an expert at double meanings—he couldn’t be a Chinese prince and not be.”

“Oh Lee, go ahead and marry her. She’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw.”

He raised her hand and kissed it. “But, June, Shen-Shan’s threat may not be worth its breath. Any secret she has discovered my father can discover for himself. And she may have told him before she told you.”

“I don’t understand, Lee. My head’s stopped working.”

“This might be the first use he’s making of the knowledge—to have Shen-Shan trade on your fears so you’d reject my advances and I’d turn to her. The next use—but I pray to my gods I won’t have to choose between you and my father.”

There was nothing she could say.

“If he doesn’t know the truth already, he mustn’t know until you and Doctor Harper are safe. And how can I manage it?”

Lee did not expect an answer. June knew by the utter stillness of his body that he was in trancelike thought, in the complete concentration taught in some of the oldest schools in Central Asia and nowhere else in the world. Finally he gave a little sleepy sigh, stretched, and turned to her with a smile.

“It might be done. . . . A fair deal both for my father and for you and Doctor Harper. . . . But it may take a few days, and Shen-Shan wants her answer tomorrow. Do you think you would dare hesitate—try to play for time—”

“Do you think I’m going to give you up to that beautiful little panther if I can help myself? Just short of my dead body!”

June had spoken impulsively. She should learn not to do so. Lee did not answer—maybe he didn’t like her attitude of proprietorship—so she glanced into his face. At once she realized that he had not even heard her. He was sitting there, his head a little raised, his ears cocked, his eyes showing very bright and narrow in the moonlight. And the next instant he had sprung to his feet and was bounding into the dwarf rhododendrons behind their stone bench.

She had never seen such sudden and complete violence. It was like a whirlwind or a tiger’s leap for prey. Something broke brush in the thickets and tried to run, but did not have a chance. Before she could catch her breath, Lee had overhauled a man in Tibetan dress, thrown him, and a few seconds later was marching him toward her by his arm twisted behind his back.

It was Ta-Kao, “the great talker,” who kept a tea-house in the town and was known as an accomplished linguist.

“Spying, you dog?” Lee demanded.

“No, lord. I did not discover you and the white virgin until I was in sound of your voices, then I tried to steal away unseen.”

“What did you hear us say?”

“Nothing, lord, that I could understand.”

Lee tilted the man’s back-drawn arm a little higher. “Try to remember, Ta-Kao.”

“Yes, lord, I heard a little. But I—I am the faithful servant of Prince Kiang. It is not well—”

“I am Lee. It is not well that I be troubled in the night by a dog’s bark. You know the fate of Chao-Yuan?”

“Yes, lord.”

“Come, you may stand where he stood and look down at the path he took.” And with a little lift on the man’s arm Lee marched and stood him at the very brink of the chasm.

“I see, lord,” the man breathed.

“Now you will swear to me, in the name of Lord Buddha, that not one word of what you have heard tonight—or any word that might bring harm to the white virgin—shall ever pass your lips,” Lee told him in utterly passionless tones.

“Lord, my duty to my prince—”

“I shall repeat the names of the five holy books of your faith. Unless you make your vows before the fifth name leaves my lips, I will give you a little thrust, whereby you shall join your friend, Chao-Yuan.”

Ta-Kao still hesitated. Apparently he doubted what June knew to be the grim truth—that Lee would keep his word.

“Digha,” Lee began.

Ta-Kao shook his head.

“Majjhima,” the quiet voice went on.

“Nay, lord.”

“Samyutta,” Lee persisted without a change of tone.

Ta-Kao opened his mouth to speak and shut it again. “Oh, do what he tells you,” June broke in desperately. “Don’t you know he’ll kill you?”

“Anguttara.”

“Have pity, lord—”

“Khud—”

“I swear!” Ta-Kao dropped heavily to his knees. “By Lord Buddha, I will do all you ask and more.”

“It is well.” Lee let go a faint sigh. “But remember, if you break that vow you will not only die the death of a rat but be reborn in the body of a rat. Now go.”

Ta-Kao kowtowed to them both and backed away. Lee muttered something in the Chinese tongue and dropped into the seat beside June. She discovered that her heart was still beating and she could breathe.

“Lee, did Prince Kiang send him here to spy?”

“Possibly, but I doubt it. June, I think we’ve shut off the source of Shen-Shan’s information.”

June could only stammer.

“Ta-Kao is the greatest gossip in the principality, and has the longest memory. I think he told Shen-Shan about Winton Harte’s little daughter—realized too late it was important news—saw her come to the palace tonight—decided to linger on the outskirts and see what profit could be made. We’ve dashed his hopes—he’ll keep his vow—but we’re too late as far as Shen-Shan is concerned, and such a garrulous fool as Ta-Kao may have told others.”

“So that means—”

“It is vitally important to make a deal with my father at the earliest possible moment.”

“I’ve discovered something too. Not to tell secrets where we can be overheard.”

“Yes, we’ll be watched every minute from now on. But a white bandit can be expected to amuse himself with his plaything captive, so spies or no spies—”

She was getting too darned docile, June told herself.

June was not feeling in the least docile the next morning, waiting to give Shen-Shan her answer. All the intuition and self-knowledge by which she knew her ivory-colored sister told her that her only hope was a stiff lip, a straight back, and a bold front.

The mists of morning were just beginning to rise when Shen-Shan’s rickshaw came up the winding road. Her eyes were bright, her lovely face was lighted by a smile, her silks outgloried the rhododendrons on the hillside. June thought herself acclimated to this rare sunshine, but she could hardly believe it even now.

“I have come about the blackmail,” Shen-Shan told her happily when they met in the great hall. And her tiny perfect teeth gleamed.

“To be sure!” June spoke with unconscious irony. “You said you’d come, and here you are.”

Shen-Shan seemed to look with joyful expectancy into her eyes, but June noticed that her lovely hands were clenched.

“I’ve decided to reject your proposal,” June went on.

“Reject?”

“No can do.”

Shen-Shan, too, could take it on the chin. Her color faded to a softer, no less lovely tint, and she stood with incredible grace on her little feet.

“Oh, there must be some mistake. You have not talked to Lee—”

“Yes, he knows all about it. Go and ask him, if you don’t believe me. If you want to tell Prince Kiang what you threatened, you’ll find him in the library. And if that’s all . . .”

“Wait. Maybe you think Prince Kiang take jade, let you go. You are only little flower, not big tree like Doctor Harper. You say, ‘Okay, I rather have Lee than the jade.’ But already you make Prince Kiang too much trouble. You make little more trouble, about jade, about Lee, he wave his hand. Do you understand?”

“It’s not difficult.” June drew a deep breath. “If Lee marries you, he’ll do it without encouragement from me. Prince Kiang is bound to learn the truth about me sooner or later, so I won’t pay the blackmail.”

“I do not believe you.” But her eyes said she did believe.

“There’s the library door. Go in and shoot the works. In plain words, go jump in the creek.”

Shen-Shan glanced quickly into June’s face, smiled, nodded, then started for the library door. June’s mouth was dry, her skin clammy, her scalp creeping, but she did not make a sound or a move.

Stealthily Shen-Shan opened the door, peered in with bird-like grace, then turned. “Shall I go in, June Harte?” she called in a soft voice.

It was refined Chinese torture. June wished she could tune up her voice, as a fiddler tunes his instrument, before she tried to speak. But she went ahead in her own way and answered clearly, “Just as you like, Shen-Shan.”

The Chinese girl deliberated a moment, then softly closed the door. “Oh, I give you a little more time,” she crooned, moving her head up and down in the gayest of nods. “You do not understand the dangers, so I show you mercy.”

Mercy! June knew perfectly well what restrained Shen-Shan—that her guns were too heavy and she knew it, and their recoil might blow Lee forever from her arms. It was the card on which June had risked her stack, and it had won.

In the meantime Lee was getting some very unwelcome information from Doctor Harper.

Prince Kiang had not tied his small, delicate hands in his pledges to the scientist. His promises were as full of holes as a sampan sail.

Lee was not surprised, but was wearied and a little ashamed.

Prince Kiang would send Harper to “safety,” but he had not specified whether the safety promised was Doctor Harper’s or his own—the safety of silence for Shan-Yu-Shih. He would set him “free”—“let him go”—not keep him “bound to the Wheel” as he might keep Koslof, the Russian. It was all good Buddhist phraseology. Harper did not know that the Wheel was the Buddhist symbol of life.

“But sit still and wait,” Lee advised. “Don’t even play for time by holding out hopes of finding the jade. The less you know about that mine, the safer you are.”

Harper walked away with his stomach wabbling but his head firm and high. Lee went at once to confer with some of his most trusted servants, one of them Lo, the assistant pilot of the marooned ship. But the profit was distant and in doubt.

Later he had a long, friendly smoke with Prince Kiang, urging that the work be hastened on the new landing-field down the valley, and the combat planes they had ordered be rushed in. It was well known that General Hu coveted the country and Lee’s own life.

Prince Kiang promised to give the matter his early attention. Then he told a proverb, the Chinese equivalent of the fable of the fox and the grapes. One way of remedying General Hu’s envy was to put beyond his reach the thing he envied most. The astrologers agreed that in four days the stars would be favorable to Lee’s marriage to Shen-Shan. If Lee consented, runners could be sent at once to the various nobles. . . .

He would consider the proposal carefully, Lee said. If agreeable, he would notify the Lamas in time to dust off the sacred books and light the yak-butter lamps. But shouldn’t his august father settle the matter of the jade before he talked of marriage feasts? And as Lee spoke, his eyes rested lightly on Prince Kiang’s.

“My son, it may be six months before those blind turtles find Shan-Yu-Shih,” Prince Kiang answered impatiently.

He did not know June’s secret! His eyes, face, tone, and words corroborated one another’s testimony, and if these perjured, his heart that still beat close to Lee’s spoke in language unknown.

“But why are they blind?” Lee asked thoughtfully. “Why was Doctor Harper blind, when he had studied the charts and hunted so faithfully? Tonight I will wear again the amulet you gave me, sleep with it on my breast, and seek enlightenment.”

It was as far as Lee dared go for the present. To go this far troubled him more than he would confess. Prince Kiang was his illustrious father, and the Buddhism with which he must trick him was his childhood faith. Anyway, he must give time to one of his aides to complete a journey.

But soon after the next morning meal he stalked into Prince Kiang’s book-lined study. “Honorable father, I have found Enlightenment,” he began sonorously, “and by that sacred radiance you may find the jade.”

He spoke in Chinese. Surrounding the palace were mountains once part of Tibet, dotted with holy cairns over Lamas’ bones, sanctified by footprints of Living Buddhas plain to see in stone, haunted by nats, kui, and good and evil spirits past all counting. On Lee’s face was the dreamy look of a Yellow Hat monk as he turns his prayer-wheel and counts his beads. And the man to whom he spoke was not only a scholar and a Machiavel, but a mystic steeped in Buddhist lore.

Prince Kiang laid aside the diary in which he had been recording his meditations.

“Speak your heart, my son,” he invited quietly, not to break the spell. He had not seen his son so thoroughly Oriental in look and word since the arrival of the foreign-devils.

“You believe the teachings of our Excellent One?” Lee asked.

“Yes.” Prince Kiang folded his delicate hands.

“You know there is no light, no truth, save on the Eightfold Path?”

“Om mani padme hum. The jewel is in the Lotus.”

“Then surely you must know why Doctor Harper was unable to find the jade.”

“Not yet, my son.”

“I have slept with the secret amulet on my heart and the truth has come to me. It was our own evil that blinded and mazed him. Our greed for all the treasure hidden by the gods, when we were entitled only to a share.”

The teachings of the Lamas fought the wisdom of the world in Prince Kiang’s face. “Who else has rights to that treasure?” he asked.

“Do not let your own eyes be veiled. Doctor Harper and the family of Winton Harte should have a third by ancient Tibetan law. The Lamasery and the Nanking government would be content with a third divided between them; Nanking knows well that its sway is only a shadow on these mountains. The remaining third we could justly claim, for protecting the treasure from bandits and digging it from the rock.”

“I had intended to give the priests a full third. Then the Pancha Lama could no doubt satisfy Nanking. But to be content with half the remainder . . .”

“ ‘Better a rice-pot in a hovel than a funeral with many drums.’ But I have not yet told you all my vision. Our Lamasery over the town is small and poor, but it has one great treasure.”

“Yes, Shen Tao, the Spirit Path, the crystal ball brought from Ankor in the reign of Pak-mo-du.”

“You know its magic,” Lee went on. “When the seeker would know the future or seek counsel of the gods, he need only gaze into its misty depths. But if evil would result, or the cause is unworthy, no vision is given.”

“Then most of our peasants must have evil thoughts when they consult Shen Tao,” Prince Kiang said doubtfully. But he had not completely shaken off the spell of Lee’s solemn words, and the latter was quick to press his advantage.

“If you will, we shall go to the temple—tonight. In the presence of the Lamas you shall swear by our Excellent One to divide the treasure as I have spoken and to return the prisoners safely to Shanghai, an oath not to be broken or twisted no matter the provocation. Then I will gaze into the truth-teller and reveal Shan-Yu-Shih.”

“It would be a very interesting experiment,” Prince Kiang answered thoughtfully. “Perhaps our forgotten gods are still in the sky. I will have the Lamas bring the oracle to this room.”

When the library door shut safely behind him, Lee stood still and marveled. Not that he had tried to trick his august father. This was the least of many evils from which he must choose, and perhaps he had come to share Oriental love of guile. But in the act he had tricked himself. As he had put up that pious front, authentic thrills of awe had run down his back. Was he wholly Chinese after all?

Instinctively he went to find June. He had nothing to say to her, no adventure to share with her; he just wanted to be with her. There the white bandit-prince who saw visions and believed in crystal-gazing could turn again into a robust outer-barbarian, fully as mystic as a mule in a Chando caravan.

He led her out a side door to a small summer-house, with a domed roof and frail marble fretwork walls, all but hidden by vines in a secluded corner of the garden. Here they could forget the plots and counterplots of Chwanben Castle, laugh, chat, tease, maybe make a little love, and be alone.

But they were not alone. Brooding by her window in one of the guest rooms, Shen-Shan had seen them hurrying down the path, and her spirit had flown out of her body to follow them.

She couldn’t call it back. Everyone knew that the spirit was a wild, winged thing, restless as the wind and roving where it pleased. But the shameful thing was, it was calling her! Come, little feet, it said. Come, bright eyes, and look through the lattice and see what I see! Oh, you can’t guess what they’re doing now! Come quickly, loving heart.

But she was Shen-Shan, daughter of a mandarin, grandniece of a prince. Oh wicked spirit, to tempt her so!

Come, pretty ears that long for words of love, it called so clearly. You can hear them now, if you creep close to the wall.

Why shouldn’t she come? The foreign-devil woman was a witch. She’d prove her so by walking out that way and listening perhaps to just a word or two. And then the Lamas whose charms she had bought in vain would know better what puja to employ.

But her quick steps grew slower and finally stopped beside the statue of the she-ape with its human child. Not since she was a child had any human being seen tears in Shen-Shan’s eyes, but the mocking ape-god saw them now.

She was stumbling blindly toward the palace when one of Prince Kiang’s bearers came hurrying toward her. But when they met in the path her eyes were dry and her head erect. Prince Kiang wished to see her at once in his study, the man told her.

At her first glance into her granduncle’s face, she knew that great affairs were on foot. “Where is Lee?” he demanded.

“In the summer-house with the white girl.”

“I want you to keep watch of him for the next half hour.” For Kiang had a dim suspicion that Lee already knew the location of the jade mine—that Harper’s missing chart had been found. “If he starts back, delay him.”

So the good gods were on her side! Bright-eyed and silent as a panther, she stole along a little-used path that would bring her to the rear of the summer-house.

Soon she was within twenty steps, near enough to carry out Prince Kiang’s orders. Against the light filtering through the marble fretwork of the far wall she could see a shadow of a shadow, and sometimes hear the murmur of Lee’s voice.

Just a little nearer, her shameless spirit called. Then you can hear plainly, see everything.

Careful not to crack a twig or make a leaf tremble on its stem, she crept nearer. And there was Lee sitting on a stone bench, the white girl nestled beside him.

And at that very moment the witch’s wicked gods inspired him to take her in his arms. Shen-Shan saw it all—the glow in June’s face answering the flame in Lee’s, their eyes so strangely shining, their lips meeting. But there was wormwood on her own lips, darkness in her eyes and in the sky, and something in her heart as remote from love as East is from West.

Shen-Shan turned and crept away, more careful than ever not to crack a twig or make a leaf tremble on its stem. Beside the ape-god where she could overlook the summer-house she waited for her half-hour watch to end. Good can come from evil, the ape-god said, but not evil from good, only from parent evil. And this was the way she would follow now.

She burned to go and make her first offering to her new gods, and at last the creeping shadow on the sundial told her her watch was over. And Lee and his love still whispered and kissed in the summer-house.

But that too would soon be over. Swiftly she sped up the flagstone path, into the palace, through the hall, straight to Prince Kiang’s study. Only when his cold eyes were on her did she take her usual airy pace and childlike smile.

“They are still there,” she reported in Chinese after she had kowtowed.

“Thank you, Shen-Shan. I didn’t find what I was looking for, so I think I have been needlessly suspicious.”

“To keep close watch I approached them nearer than I should, so near that I heard their voices. I ask your forgiveness, my lord. I have lost face.”

“No, you have gained face by your zeal in my service.” Prince Kiang busied with some papers on his desk. “Did you hear anything of interest to your prince?”

“I will try to remember. At least I heard something very strange—probably of no importance. When Lee spoke of one I took to be her father, he used another name.”

“What was the name? Do you remember?”

“An English name meaning the seat of love—or a male deer. Harte? Yes that was it. Winton Harte.”

It was a rich offering she had made to her new gods. Prince Kiang made no sound, his hard little hands did not quiver, but his sallow face was flushed with triumph and drawn with greed. Yet he was the Lord of Pemako, schooled by more than half a century of asceticism, calmed by ten thousand nights with the teachers of old.

But her own face did not flush. Instead it was pale and cold as white jade. And there was no rapture in her heart, only pain.

So she heaped more on the altar.

“It is strange she did not tell us she had been in Chwanben before,” Shen-Shan went on. “Indeed, she was with her father when he made some kind of discovery, but I did not hear her say—”

“I see it all,” Prince Kiang broke in. “Shen-Shan, do not repeat what you have heard to any living being.” He was calm now, and his voice was soft and low.

Prince Kiang did not dine with his guests that night, but soon after dinner sent word that Lee and June could bring the Lama and the oracle, Shen Tao, into his study. Doctor Harper was not invited, much to June’s relief. He had no talent for histrionics, and she wanted to spare him the suspense until Lee had won or lost.

The Lama, a tall Tibetan with an incredibly wrinkled face, wearing a wine-colored robe, was waiting in the great hall. Wrapped in wool, cushioned, and carried reverently against his breast was the sacred crystal ball, Shen Tao.

At once the Lama removed the covering from the crystal ball and set it on its small black cushion on Prince Kiang’s table. An uncontrollable awe began to creep over June. He touched it so reverently and it had such strange lights under the golden lamps.

The Lama took the teakwood stool Prince Kiang provided and began to count his beads. A moment later the study door opened and a servant announced Dimitri Koslof. He was in immaculate evening clothes, but there was a strange glow in his big pupils that she thought might be the desperate courage of a cornered man.

When Prince Kiang bade him be at ease, he turned to the others with a trace of his old sangfroid.

“How do you do, Mr. Lee? Holy One,”—this to the Lama—“my most reverend salaam. Pip, pip, Miss June.”

There was a moment’s silence so heavy that it seemed to impede the breath, then Prince Kiang turned in his chair to face his visitors.

“We can proceed now, I think,” he addressed Lee. “If the oracle can tell me the location of the mountain of jade, I will admit that my former policy was evil in the sight of the gods and agree under oath to meet the terms you proposed.”

Lee’s eyes lighted with triumph.

“But you must meet me halfway,” Prince Kiang went on. “In case of failure, take it as a sign to yield to my judgment on what is best for you and the state, and promise to put the white girl out of your life.”

“I will truly promise not to see Miss Hammond again,” Lee said.

Prince Kiang gave a little start as might a fencer touched with his opponent’s foil.

“Why shouldn’t we make a match between the white girl and Koslof?” Prince Kiang asked. “It would be a very good one, I’m sure.”

“No, thanks, your Highness,” Dimitri broke in. “Dashed impractical, I assure you. You see, I already have a proper wife in Harbin.”

He was lying, June knew—lying for her sake.

Kiang did not turn one princely hair. “If the oracle does not reveal the secret,” he went on at once to his son, “you must obey my gods and marry Shen-Shan without delay.”

“I am afraid that too is impractical,” Lee answered. “I have here a note from Shen-Shan, written this afternoon, breaking off our betrothal for good and all.” And he showed them a small scroll.

Its exquisite perfume wafted to June. But she had no power to grasp the significance of Lee’s momentous announcement. She saw only the cold and mocking gleam of amusement in Prince Kiang’s eyes go out like a blown lamp.

“We’re wasting time,” he said. “Let us have this hocus-pocus over with as soon as possible.”

At Kiang’s command, the Lama made ready for the seance. “Om mani padme hum,” he chanted endlessly, waved his plume, turned his prayer-wheel, made odd movements with his fingers, lighted incense in a bronze censer. It was all childish, June thought, but her eyes felt big and round.

Now the Lama was surveying the table on which the crystal ball lay gleaming. “It is too cold, too dead,” he said in his own tongue to Prince Kiang. “Lord of the River, let Shen Tao repose upon some object permeated with your life-spirit, something long beloved and fondled. Otherwise the cold stone cannot come to life.”

“Lee, turn the key in the lock of my lacquer chest and get the big note-book with the red leather cover. I have emptied my heart into its pages for twenty years.”

Lee opened the chest, his father’s most secret depository, and lifted out the book.

“But Holy One, why should you need my father’s warmth within the crystal when I, Lee, am the seeker?”

The Lama looked dazed. Prince Kiang spoke quickly in English. “Oh, I shall attempt the reading myself. Why not? The jade has been my own affair from the beginning.”

June was watching Lee and saw the truth burst on him. He must either be caught in his own trap or beat a hazardous and face-losing retreat.

“Why are you hesitating?” Prince Kiang demanded. “Naturally, I wish to consult Shen Tao first hand.”

“Father, you are wasting your breath,” Lee broke in, in bold and bald American. “I will consult the oracle myself, as I originally proposed, or the deal’s off.”

“You do not trust my eyes, yet you ask me to trust yours,” Prince Kiang answered. “But I see the solution—and naturally you cannot refuse. The Lama himself will consult the oracle.”

“I do refuse, and wash my hands of the whole business.”

In bitter disappointment, Lee turned to replace Prince Kiang’s note-book of meditations. But as he dropped on his knees beside the lacquer chest, he heard the sing-song drone of the Lama’s voice. Glancing up, he saw that the holy man had stepped forward and was gazing with a rapt expression into the crystal ball.

In instinctive respect to the priest and in sudden awe of his vision, Lee continued to kneel, his head bowed and his eyes resting blindly on the contents of the chest.

“I see dark wings spreading over this palace,” the Lama pronounced. “I see strife within its walls, the young against the old. And I feel strong winds from the west blowing in the windows. There are the clutching fingers of greed, and the hand of jealousy opposing the will of the gods.”

The Lama spoke on, but now Lee did not hear him. Very gradually he had become aware that his eyes were resting on a photograph face up in the bottom of the chest. Presently he saw that it was a young white woman seated, and a young white man in a long black coat standing beside her, his hand on her shoulder.

The light was too dim to see more. But as Lee picked up the photograph and slipped it quickly into his coat pocket, the brightest light he had ever known burst upon him, kindling his heart and illumining all his ways, and he knew that Shen Tao had given him a vision greater than he had dreamed.

It was only a few minutes later that Prince Kiang gave his visitors leave to go. He regretted, he said, that Lee had not dared put his faith to a fair trial, and he thanked the Lama for his pious efforts in their behalf. Now he would meditate alone and confer with his son and prisoners the following morning.

But Prince Kiang’s meditations were brief. The door had hardly shut when he hurried to his lacquered chest. There he crouched for perhaps a full minute, his ascetic face strangely pale and drawn, then summoned his head tu-pin, chief of his bodyguard.

“I will want a free hand for the work ahead,” he explained. “Also, decisive measures are necessary for the salvation of my son.” And he gave the tu-pin a command that made him drop to his knees and his slanted eyes grow round.

Meanwhile Lee had gone straight to his own room. Only when the door was locked behind him did he take the photograph from his pocket and examine it under the lamp. But at first it was dimmed by the mist in his eyes.

The photograph was dated 1905, and bore the imprint of a studio in Lincoln, Nebraska. The pose was stiff, the background had the tawdry elegance typical of photographs of that date, and the dress of the subjects was grotesque in modern sight, but all this filled Lee’s eyes with tears and at once gave him light to see.

These two people were not Oriental potentates, only a poor young minister and his bride, dressed in their Sunday best and being photographed for those who loved them. When they were old, they would show the picture to their children, and call back the first glory and pride and joy of their young love.

But their hopes had failed. Soon after the picture was taken, Lee mused, the young minister had heard the call to bring the doctrine of hope to other poor, driven, and despairing millions in a foreign and perilous land. So he had come to Western China with his young wife, who about three years after the date of the picture had borne him a son. And in three years more they were martyred dead, murdered by Lopa headhunters in the wastes of Chwanben.

Their baby had been saved from the knives; and no doubt because it was regarded with superstitious reverence by the murderers, the photograph had not been destroyed and had been delivered into the hands of the overlord of the country, Prince Kiang. Nor had he destroyed it, the greatest mistake of his reign. For now the dead that it portrayed had come to life. They were with Lee in this room.

Lee wiped his eyes and walked quietly into June’s room. At sight of his face she sprang up from her chair. Without a word, he handed her the picture.

She took one glance. “Your parents?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Oh, Lee!” And tears drenched her eyes.

“My mother looks a little like you,” he told her.

“She’s lovelier than I could ever be. Braver, too. She wouldn’t cry—like this—”

“No braver, no lovelier. You and she are clansmen. And I’d like to think that I look—a little—like him.”

“You do, Lee. Oh, you do!”

“He died for his faith. He never treated with worldly power—or swerved from what he knew was right. I was brought up in another world; I can do only the best I can. Come with me, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

He led her into the gardens, and when she wakened from her trance they were at the foot of the Buddhist reliquary, its bottle-shaped tower rising eerily above her, sublime against the dim western sky. It was hardly forty feet tall, but alone on the hill it seemed to entreat the stars, and it would endure when the newest New York skyscraper was twisted steel and dust.

“Sealed in its inner crypt is an amulet once worn by Gautama Buddha,” Lee told her in low tones.

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

“In my heart. So I bow down.”

Lee dropped to his knees on the stone platform and touched his hands to his forehead. When he rose, he looked deep into June’s eyes. She slipped her hand into his.

“After what’s just happened—seeing that photograph—you still don’t blame me?” he asked. “You still understand?”

“Good heavens, Lee, why should I blame you? I know that Buddha was one of the greatest souls that ever lived.” And with a dim smile she knelt in the same place, touched her hands to her forehead with the same humility.

“Oh, June! I didn’t expect that much. But I’m so glad—so proud. And now my course is clear.”

“Tell me what you mean.”

“I can never forget China. Many Oriental ideas will be with me all my life. But now I know they can’t raise a wall between you and me.”

“The walls are all down, Lee.”

“Now I can give you what I’ve been holding back all these days. I love you, June.”

She felt no great amazement. It seemed not a marvel but an eternal fact of nature, like the moonlight on this tower. Her throat was too full to speak, so she pressed his hand.

There was a long silence. Lee kissed her lips, held her close, and at last found strength to tell her all the rest.

“Now I know that when we part at daybreak tomorrow, it won’t be for long,” he said quietly. “Soon I can follow you—and find you—and never let you go again.”

“We are to part at daybreak?” she asked after a brief pause.

“In a few minutes I will send a man I trust to the top of Ku-tu Shan. There he will light a signal fire which Lo, my pilot, is to look for every night at midnight from our old landing-field, a day distant by horseback but hardly ten minutes by air. In the first light Lo will take off and try to land on the new field down the valley.”

“But it isn’t ready—”

“Not nearly ready. But three chances out of four he can land with an undamaged ship, two to one he can take off again. And he’s going to try it, June. We have no choice. Dimitri Koslof is reasonably safe here, but you and Doctor Harper must go with me to the field before dawn and be ready to board the ship for British Burma.”

“I understand,” she said after another pause. “Prince Kiang knows we have found the jade.”

“I realized he did when he refused to let me consult the oracle tonight. Shen-Shan probably told him—there were tear-drops on her letter to me. That doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is to get you and Doctor Harper to safety before my foster-father forces you to speak. Out of his power, you can force him with the help of Nanking to grant our terms.”

“ ‘Our terms’ you say. That means . . .”

“That means I’m going to stand by my own people and the girl I love to the last mile.”

“Oh, Lee. That’s the best of all.”

Lee insisted that she go to her own room, lie down on her bed, try to sleep. Her door to the hall would be locked and bolted, the door to his room wide open. He would call her in time.

She heard him sending a trusted servant to light the signal fire on Ku-tu Shan. It seemed that she heard every little sound in the whole great, gloomy castle. Yet it must be that these sounds came down to her in the weird and wild frontier between sleep and waking, where exhaustion had carried her, for finally there were some little, short, sharp noises that she tried to listen to but which mingled with her dreams. And it was not sound but silence that aroused her now. The only thing left alive was her heart.

The light in her room had changed since she had fallen to sleep. Before it had been a comforting golden flood from the open door of Lee’s room, but now it was the chill, blue moonlight through her windows. It must be that Lee had put out his yellow lamps and gone to sleep.

She glanced at his door. It was a dark square. But she did not like the look of that darkness. It seemed not to carry her in to Lee, but to cut him off from her. And now her widening eyes saw the faintest burnish of diffused moonlight on wooden panels. The door was closed.

She sprang up, tiptoed across the room, and opened the door.

“Lee,” she called softly to the darkness within.

There was no answer.

“Lee,” she called again, no louder than before, softer if anything. Perhaps never in her life had it been so vitally necessary to take care and not make the slightest mistake.

Still there was no answer. Drawing one deep breath she returned to her bedside and got the little flashlight Lee had given her. Then, with its yellow wedge flitting before her and her shadow dancing behind, she crept into Lee’s room.

Take it on the chin, June, she whispered.

For the rug beside the bed was scuffed up, a coolie’s headcloth lay beside it, and half concealed in his disordered sheets lay Lee’s pistol, but Lee himself had vanished without trace.

June took the pistol and made sure it was ready to fire. She had another, but Doctor Harper was unarmed.

June stood at the door of Lee’s room, peering up and down the dimly lighted halls. Her pistol was in a bag on her left wrist, her flashlight in her left hand, and Lee’s pistol in her right hand.

I’m just June Harte, she thought. A run-of-the-mill American girl who’s taught a little school and made a little love and done other things girls do. Now I’m way out here in China, fighting for a mountain of jade and for life itself, and my main protector has disappeared. I don’t know how it all happened. There’s no time to stop and think. I only know that I’ve got to keep on fighting like a tiger, or I’m up the spout right now. Can you take it, June? Will you see it through? All right, then, shove off.

She began to tiptoe down the corridor. It was a weird journey, black alcoves, interbranching passages where footsteps sounded and died away, her own shadow taking frightening shapes on the dim walls; but it was so safe and commonplace compared to what waited her before the dawn that it was almost comforting. Once she had to hide in a dark corner while a servant trotted by, but her heart missed hardly a beat.

After a long time she stood at the door of Doctor Harper’s room. It was locked.

She didn’t blame him, in this castle of peril; but it was such little mishaps that might put to naught all her valor, all her desperate and magnificent hopes. The gods took such mean advantage. They let an aviator survive twenty combats in the air, then broke his neck falling down stairs. If she went out at last in blood and battle at least she would have a run for her money and the consolation of a supreme adventure, but it was heartbreaking to be defeated by a turned key.

She dared not knock loud. All over the building Prince Kiang’s men slept like cats. She could only tap and tap, very softly, hoping that the persistent sound would finally bore into Doctor Harper’s ears.

Presently she heard a soft knock on the inside panel. She answered—two little furtive taps. And then the door opened just a crack.

“Let me in, Uncle Ted,” she whispered. And the next instant the door was closed and locked.

Doctor Harper was taut with alarm, but at once he gave her a dim smile—and somehow she returned it. Then in quick, blunt words she told him everything she knew of the situation.

“But you’ll have to tell me what to do next,” she said.

“Quite a poser, June.”

“I guess so.”

“We can try to get out of the castle and meet the plane Lee sent for. But the flyer won’t take us up without Lee’s orders.”

“We’ve got pistols.”

“Yes, and we may be able to force him. It’s not too pretty, but what else is worth trying?”

“It might be worth while to try—” She stopped, thought it over, and began again, bitterly honest now. “I hate to leave Lee.”

“So?”

“It doesn’t seem to make much sense—I don’t suppose his father means to harm him, only get him away so he can put the screws on us—still I hate to do it.”

“There may be more sense to it than you think. The pilot will be hard to handle alone. Also, I’m afraid we’ll find all the castle doors double-guarded tonight, and only Lee could get us through. June, do you suppose old Koko might know where they’ve put him?”

June’s cold and leaden heart leaped up. “He’s worked here for ten years. Send for him, Uncle Ted, can you, without arousing suspicion?”

“Get out of sight,” Doctor Harper ordered. Then he unlocked the door, lay down on his bed, and pulled a bell-cord. A moment or two later a servant rapped.

Harper complained volubly of a toothache. Not understanding a word of English, the servant listened with a wooden face. Then Harper put on a dumb-show, putting a finger in his jaw, swelling out his cheek, wincing with feigned agonies. June had never known he had it in him.

“Koko,” Harper pleaded. “Send Koko.”

The servant nodded and trotted away. And a moment or two later Koko was in the room.

At once June came out of hiding. There was no beating about the bush.

“What side Lee have got?” she asked.

“Me no sabe,” Koko answered, “but I tly think.”

Koko crouched in the corner and his eyes sank back into his head. For five minutes he did not move, did not even seem to breathe, and June knew that his faithful spirit was rushing faster than the wind up and down the corridors of the great building, gazing into every room. June and Harper were careful not to make a sound. At last he drew a long troubled breath and came back to them.

“No can find Lee topside,” he said.

Against her better judgment June had believed. . . . “Thanks for trying, Koko,” she said kindly. Never say die, June, she whispered to herself.

“But maybe he belong down bottom-side,” Koko went on, blandly.

June couldn’t speak.

“I talkie you. Before time, Dalai Lama stay this side, makie hide. Have got two, thlee, four piecie room, all same plenty house, down bottom-side under rock. But Chinese had man come, makie Dalai Lama die.”

“You can sabe what side this place?” June asked.

“Bad place. Dalai Lama come back, walkie, carry light, blood on holy gown, white man no see, China man can see. Too muchie bad place. More better you no go, little missy.”

“Just now must go this room, Koko. No can get Lee out, Prince Kiang can make Doctor and Little Missy die.”

“Suppose Plince Kiang catchie me this side, makie kill chop-chop.”

“Then you no can do?”

“Me velly old. Little missy velly young. Wintel velly cold, summel hot like hell. All light, can do.”

June gave Harper Lee’s pistol, its black barrel not nearly as grim as his own white lips. Then Koko led the way along the corridor, down narrow black stairs, through many doors and passageways, to a trapdoor that seemed to open into a bottomless pit. But June’s light revealed another flight of stairs, hewn out of the solid rock of the cliff.

“Now we go like mouse,” Koko told them.

No, like moles under the ground. A firefly would have had better light to find his way than this rescue party. June held her hand over the lens of her flashlight, and the faint haze filtering through her fingers seemed to light the damp stone steps as much as intensify the black beyond. Yet at last their groping feet found level floors.

June’s light revealed a narrow tunnel bored into the cliff. Since the world was made no sunlight had warmed these walls, not one gleam of daylight had crept in to relieve its cold and clammy gloom. No wonder the murdered Dalai Lama lingered here, June thought. She expected to meet him at any turn in the passage. There was no sound but the drip of icy water from the ceiling and her pulse drumming in her ears.

Presently Koko signaled to put out her flashlight. Blackness below zero smothered them instantly, but around the next turn in the passage she seemed to see a faint, yellow mist. “Wait,” Koko whispered.

As she stood shivering against the clammy wall, Koko crept forward. She neither saw nor heard him, but presently there was a black smear, the shape of his body against the luminous mist at the turn of the passage. It faded soon, and she heard him breathing at her side.

“Velly bad,” he whispered. “Four, five piecie man have got outside door to room.”

“Must can do,” June whispered. “Think so can go a little more far?”

“Velly bad. One—two—thlee lantel on wall. Any man can see. Makie shoot chop-chop.”

His whisper died away. They stood there in that ineffable blackness, not even their hands touching to give one another comfort. They heard the distant drip-drip-drip of water wearing away stone, but they were silent, impotent.

“We might try throwing a scare into them,” June whispered at last to Harper. “If one of us could play ghost—the murdered Dalai Lama—maybe they’d scoot.” But her heart was too cold and heavy to catch fire and leap at any such fantastic notion.

“Velly good,” Koko remarked blandly.

June had not expected an answer, even a rebuff, and it was as though she had touched a live wire.

“What did you say, Koko?” Harper marveled.

“Tibetan man too muchie aflaid of dead Dalai Lama. All time look-see, look-see suppose dead man come back. So me makie look all same-same Dalai Lama.”

“Good God, Koko!”

“You wait ten, twenty minutes. I show you. When tu-pin lun away, we go chop-chop open door, catchie Plince Lee.”

“Wait. June, it’s a tremendous risk, not only to Koko but to us. The whole project is dangerous in the extreme. If we tell Prince Kiang where to find the jade, maybe he’ll let us go.”

“Maybe he won’t,” June answered, and her whisper was clear and joyful. “When he lets Lee out of here, we’ll be just a sad memory. But Koko, you’ve no call to risk your life for us. You’ve done enough already—”

“You Koko little missy,” Koko answered. “You Koko little missy any time. Jus’ now, I play Lama.”

He showed them a narrow recess in the wall where they could press flat, and perhaps remain unseen if any of the guards passed by. An instant later there was only clammy darkness where he had stood. With their pistols ready, June and Harper waited.

Their fears were not nearly in proportion to the danger—hardly worth considering. They had counted up their losses and written them off, and the slightest gain was velvet from now on. But June held Doctor Harper’s hand.

It was not quite twenty minutes when June saw a dim gleam flickering along the walls from the direction of the palace. It slowly grew, and presently around the bend came a ghostly shape, carrying a yak-butter lamp in its hand. No doubt it was Koko playing ghost, but June caught herself wondering whether the dead Dalai Lama had not overheard their impious plot and was coming in person to admonish them.

The ghost wore the costume prescribed for the Living Buddha. Only when it came within five paces did June see that the pointed hat was paper, the saintly robe a blanket, and the rosary a string of lichi-nuts. Its face and hands were ghastly white in the weird light of the yak-butter lamp; June suspected they had been dipped in rice flour. And for a final and perfect touch, so inconspicuous that at first she did not notice it but which eyes bulging with terror would presently discover, over the specter’s breast was a dark stain, like a grisly relic of the unspeakable sacrilege committed in this passage centuries before.

“All light?” Koko whispered from his white lips. “You come littie more far. After tu-pin lun away, you come my side.”

At once he stalked on. June and Harper crept behind him until he turned into the lighted corridor leading straight to the guarded door. Concealed by shadows, they watched the play go on.

Six men were squatting beneath a lantern fifty paces up the corridor. They were huddled together, their postures tense and alert, and June knew the identical instant that one of them first laid eyes on the ghostly figure moving slowly toward them. He did not start, but his cigarette dropped from his mouth and made a quick red streak in the uncertain light.

The next instant all six guards were on their feet. Leaning forward from their hips, they gazed without a sound. For a moment June thought that Koko had overplayed his role and riveted the spectators to the floor with terror.

But when Koko was hardly fifty feet distant, the rifle of one of the guards slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. It was too much. With a shrill squeal the man turned to run. Instantly they were all squealing, thrusting one another aside, jamming the corridor in frantic flight.

June and Harper waited until the guards had disappeared around the next bend of the corridor, they too ran—flew, it seemed—to overtake the specter. They arrived in time to help him draw back the heavy iron bolt of an iron door. And as June’s flashlight leaped through the opening it shone into Lee’s eyes.

Through what appeared to be a large, well-furnished room cut out of solid rock he came leaping toward them, his sturdy form boldly outlined in the sharp light, his limbs unchained, his power undiminished, and the promise of victory glorious in his face.

“Gimme that gun,” were his first words, Yankee now and forever.

No other word was spoken until the fugitives had gained the rear corridor of the palace, the trapdoor to the stone steps closed and locked behind them.

“This night’s work has just begun,” Lee said. “The guards will get back their nerve in a few minutes, find the cage empty, and give the alarm. So it’s all or nothing now.”

“Tell us what to do, Lee,” June breathed. Then, turning to Koko, “You wanchie come? Suppose Tibetan man sabe what thing you do?”

“Tu-pin no can sabe. Lun velly fast. Me go kitchee just now.”

“Koko, if I live, you need never brew another cup of tea,” Lee told him in Chinese. And June and Harper spoke too. For although the time was short, as always there was enough to give thanks and honor where it is due.

Koko gave them each a quick bow and turned through a side door. Lee touched his finger to his lips and led June and Harper down the dim passage. But they did not turn off toward the rear door of the palace, nor yet cross the great hall to the front door. Instead they tiptoed up the rear steps, along the balcony, toward a suite of rooms overlooking the gardens.

These were Prince Kiang’s rooms. June realized it with one sharp, painful breath. At the door two tu-pin stood on guard.

“Stand aside,” Lee whispered in Chinese.

The two men stared like fish, their Adam’s apples working up and down.

“Stand aside, or I’ll fire,” Lee murmured, with a little wave of his pistol.

“Have mercy, lord—” one of them whispered.

“Harper, stay here and guard them. Shoot if they make a sound or a move.” And translating the command into Chinese for the benefit of the two men, Lee softly opened the door.

“Shall I—?” June breathed.

“Come with me, June. We’re full partners now.”

They crossed a dimly lighted dressing-room. June saw paintings on silk, a jade screen marvelously worked, an image of Buddha dreaming away the centuries; her feet sank deep in soft-colored Khotan rugs. Beyond was another room, shut off by heavy curtains. The room was dark, but Lee pushed through, struck a match, and lighted the lamp on the table. And though this was the great milestone of his life, his first full stride down the new trail revealed by Shen Tao, June did not see the little jewel-like flame tremble in his hand.

Prince Kiang was lying in trancelike sleep on a great teakwood bed. As the light struck his eyelids he stirred and half opened his eyes. Not only light but truth broke in them. With a choking sound he sat upright. Lee continued to gaze at him in eerie silence.

“Lee!” Prince Kiang gasped.

“Yes, it’s Lee.”

“What are you—” He stopped. June saw his will take hold. His face changed before her eyes, a little ripple ran over his body. When he spoke again his voice was suave, almost humorous. “So you got out of the cage I thought would hold you so safely,” he said in Chinese.

“Yes, I’m out. And please speak English, my own tongue. I want my companions to understand everything said.”

“But you know, Lee, why I had you put there. It was just to bring you to your senses—”

“We haven’t time to discuss it. Put on your clothes, Prince Kiang.”

“Are you mad? You are speaking to your father, your prince.”

“Not any more. I am sorry, but you have destroyed all that. Think of me tonight as a merciless enemy. Unless you do everything I tell you instantly, you’ll be killed.”

And he raised the pistol just enough for its black barrel to be trained on Prince Kiang’s body.

The Chinese looked the white man in the eyes. “You do not mean it, my son. Now leave my room before I call the guards.”

Lee returned that steady glance. “I’ll tell you once more—and for the last time—that I am sorry. I have loved you too long to want to kill you. But I will kill you, here and now, if you don’t obey my commands. It’s your last chance, Prince Kiang.” And the hand that held the pistol grew very still.

It seemed to June that a glimmer of admiration came into the cold eyes. At once the prince got up, slipped his feet into sandals, and drew his black robe over his pajamas.

“Plainly you mean what you say. I did not understand how much you loved the girl. What now?”

“Come with us to the landing-field. As we pass the guards, give them ‘all’s well.’ If you call or signal to them, they may kill me but not in time to save you.”

In Lee’s hearing, Prince Kiang reassured the wide-eyed tu-pin, and gave orders that all his men remain within the palace walls. Both guards kowtowed. Lee instructed Prince Kiang to lead the way to the main entrance to the palace.

But halfway down the hall, June stopped and laid her hand on Lee’s arm.

“Let Dimitri come too, Lee. I know he plotted to abduct Doctor Harper, but he was decent enough to try to save me, and since then he’s stood by us both.”

“Doctor Harper, go to his room and tell him to follow us at once to the new landing-field. The guards at the main entrance will have orders to let him pass.”

June, Lee, and Lee’s prisoner waited in the hall until Harper returned from the errand, then with a few words from Prince Kiang they passed the kowtowing sentries, into the gardens. The moon had grown big, June saw. But it was not the orb of love for little Shen-Shan. Shine on her, Lady Moon, June whispered, her heart too full to harbor revenge.

Through the silver streets of the silent town they kept on until they stood at the edge of a newly plowed field, in which stumps, thickets, and great stones showed black and ominous. Prince Kiang looked across it, and a sound that not one of them had ever heard from him, that no one in his kingdom could believe or imagine, escaped his thin, firm lips. It seemed to be a little moan of fear or pain.

“Lee, do you expect to take off from this field?”

“If my plane can land, yes. But you needn’t be afraid. As soon as we are off, you may return to your palace.”

“I pray to my gods that it crashes in the landing and is burned.”

“Naturally you would hope that. You don’t understand that if the plane is destroyed we will ride horses to British India with you as our hostage.”

It was Lee who had failed to understand. Suddenly June knew that the pallor on Prince Kiang’s face, so unfamiliar, so incredible, was not selfish fear.

“Would you be content if Lo, your pilot, takes off the three prisoners and you remain here?” he asked in low tones.

Lee glanced quickly into his face. “So you can return me to my new rooms under the cliff?”

“If you remain, I swear to Lord Buddha that no restraint will ever be put upon you again, in word or deed. I will free you of all allegiance to me and meet any terms you wish regarding Shan-Yu-Shih.”

“It is too late, Prince Kiang. Even tonight, when I sent for my ship, I intended to send off the prisoners with Lo and remain here with you. But when your own tu-pin dragged me off to prison . . .”

“It was my evil genius that prompted the deed. Lee, do not try to fly from this field. If you must go, let me send for horses. I will ride with you, as your hostage, to the British frontier.”

“Only if the plane crashes in landing. I have too much respect for your powers, Prince Kiang, to want your company for four days on horseback.”

“Lord Buddha, have mercy! Lee, don’t you understand? This plowed field affords a rough but reasonably safe landing. But you can’t get enough speed in taking off to clear the trees. And if I have driven my son from my house only to see him die in a burning ship—”

“Your fatherly solicitude comes too late, Prince Kiang.” Lee hesitated, and the moon showed the first sign of compassion in his eyes. “Anyway, you are better off without me. The nobles will never be satisfied with a white prince. And if it will comfort you—the take-off won’t be as dangerous as you think.”

Nothing more was said, as the stars began to fade, the low moon paled, and the serrated crests of Ta-Shuch-Shan began to loom against the eastern sky. It was nearly dawn in Chwanben. It had the same breathless magic as Ohio dawns, June remembered as from a dream. The wild parrots began to clamor in the trees. A jungle-cock crowed shrilly. And up from the town came Dimitri Koslof, shaved, hair combed, immaculately dressed, for his next adventure.

The light cleared so rapidly that the moon dipped behind the hills unmourned. The stumps and rocks of the landing-field looked less formidable now. Smoke rose from cooking fires in the town; there was the noise of gongs and conch-shells from the temple. And now a little wisp of cloud at the peak of the sky turned pale yellow.

“He should be here any moment now,” Lee muttered.

June hardly heard him. She was listening to what might be the hum of a mosquito in her ear or a triple-motored monster miles away. Gazing toward the southeast she saw a speck in the sky that might be a vulture seeking the night’s slain.

“Here the blighter comes,” Dimitri said.

So soon the great ship was soaring over the field. It circled and headed into the wind. Down it dipped, grazing trees at the edge of the field, struck the rough ground, bounced, struck again, all but tipped over, righted itself, narrowly missed a stump and jolted to a stop not fifty paces from where June stood.

Leaving his motors idling, the pilot sprang from his cockpit and ran to meet Lee. The landing must have been more dangerous than it looked, June thought. Lo’s long eyes were wide and shining, and his face looked pale and drawn.

He spoke to Lee in one rush of words. The mask of China that June thought he had cast off forever dropped again over Lee’s face. He asked a few questions in an odd, dry voice, made a little motion with his hand, then turned very quietly to June.

“Whatever happens,” he told her, “you and your friends will be saved.”

June too could wear a mask. Steadfastly she met his gaze. “What do you mean, Lee?”

“You and your friends will be flown straight to Sadiya, just over the border in British India.”

“You—you are coming too?”

“It may be that Lo must take you there and return. Perhaps I must stay here. I do not know yet, June. There is darkness on my ways and in my mind. I cannot tell until the light clears, June. I know only that General Hu is on the march.”

Prince Kiang was talking to Lo and did not hear Lee’s words. June herself heard them in only one ear, for the other was listening to the undying echoes of a former utterance, made that desperate night they had fled together from the Lopa village.

“If General Hu comes, all the face you’ll gain is to see my head on a pole,” Lee had told her. And she had answered, “Well, that’s something.”

Her very words. The gods must have fallen out of their high seats, laughing. Only a month ago, and now . . .

“You climb a mountain,” she said very quietly, “and then you go down into a valley.” And this was the deepest valley of all.

But before she could put into words the thoughts whirling in her head, Prince Kiang turned briskly to his foster-son.

“Good-by, Lee.”

“Good-by?”

“You’d better take off at once. I’ll write you shortly, and then you can decide whether or not you are coming back.”

“Only a few minutes ago you were imploring me to stay—to let Lo take off the prisoners.”

“Oh, my son! I call you that, but you are the son of a white man, and I realize now you must go back to your own kind. You can’t be useful here. Even if you would give it to me, I don’t need your help in repelling General Hu. On the other hand, if you go on to Saigon, arrange the purchase of munitions from the French—”

“I’m not a child, Prince Kiang. It would take weeks to persuade the French to sell arms against a former ally, and General Hu means to strike at once.”

“We can’t be sure. According to the report Lo received, he is taking a roundabout way. Perhaps he has some other objective—”

“What could it be? There is nothing north of Lao Shan but a few yak herds. He intends to envelop this valley, seize all the loot he can find, make us cede the border provinces, and gain enormous face by forcing a marriage with our noblest mandarin’s daughter, Shen-Shan. Your only hope to combat him is a united and brave people. And what chance of that if they know their white prince, the heir-apparent to your throne, has turned tail and fled to British India?”

Prince Kiang’s mouth was piteously drawn, but his eyes lighted.

“Now—even now—would you do this for me?” he marveled.

“Not for you, Prince Kiang. If even a little for you, the Cause is lost in the Red Mist of Anger.” The solemn Buddhist phraseology sounded so strange on his hard-drawn Yankee lips. “But this land has been my home for twenty-five years. Your people have been my people for as long as I can remember. I’m a white man—a foreign-devil—going at last to my own kind but, Lord Buddha, show me the way!”

As if in answer to that prayer, there was a drum of hoofs in the road and a horseman swept up to them from the direction of the town. It was Hsing, the youthful cousin of Prince Kiang, Shen-Shan’s former suitor and next to Lee in line for the sovereignty of Chwanben. He had ridden all night from his hunting-lodge below Lao Shan.

Briefly he confirmed Lo’s news. No, he could not explain General Hu’s roundabout course, but had sent spies some of whom were due to arrive at any moment. And in the breathless silence that followed his report, Lee laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Hsing!”

“My lord.”

“You have small cause to do me favors, Hsing. I have stood between you and your heart’s desire, and between you and my father’s throne. Yet now I ask the greatest favor one prince can give another—the unbiased truth from out your heart.”

“It will be given, lord.”

“I was about to leave Chwanben forever when this news came. Now I stand at the crossroads of my fate. You, Hsing, know the rancor of our nobles toward a white prince, but also you know the hearts of the common people, better than any man in Chwanben. If I remain here till the war is over, will it help or harm our cause?”

Hsing looked him in the face. “Lord, I will speak truth. For my part I would see you go at once never to return. But our common people love you, even as they hate the heavy hands of their masters, the great lords. If you leave us now, they will not fight General Hu but will revolt, only to discover too late that they have exchanged a watchdog for a tiger—law for a slave-ring.”

“A thousand thanks, Hsing.” Lee gave him a low bow. And at once he turned to June and spoke crisply.

“You and your friends get aboard. I’ll meet you later—in India.”

“If we stay too,” June asked slowly, “is there anything we can do?”

“It’s not your quarrel, June.”

“If it’s yours, it’s mine.”

She had never seen a face light up in quite this way. It was as though the sun was ahead of schedule and was shining on it. But he shook his head.

“No, this belongs to the old life, not the new. To China.”

Dazed, she let him lead her up the metal steps of the plane. She heard him whispering brave promises for the future, felt his arms about her and his lips moving against hers. Then he was outside the window, waving.

Lo was racing his engine. The approach to the low trees was soft, plowed land, but he had learned flying from Lee, so he chose for his take-off some stumpy, rock-strewn hard ground sloping to high trees. Down that crazy course he started, pitching and tossing. June was snapped and jerked about, twisted and straightened out, thrown from side to side, back and forth between the cushions and her safety belt, half to the ceiling and down against the chair-springs.

But the roar of the motors suddenly ceased. The ship bumped to a quick stop. Harper was gazing tensely out the window, his eyes shining with excitement.

“What’s happened?”

“As we started to taxi off, a chap came running across the field—probably one of Hsing’s spies. Then Lee waved to our pilot to stay on the ground. The rest you’ll have to figure out yourself.”

June did not try. But it was no little thing that delayed their departure, no trivial news that the thorn-scratched, dust-streaked messenger had brought. She knew this when she saw Lee’s face.

“I was mistaken, June, about you being an outsider in this affair,” he told her from the cabin door.

“I thought so,” she answered simply.

“We’ve discovered General Hu’s objective, why he took what seemed such a roundabout course. He’s after your jade mine.”

June tried to speak, but could not make a sound.

“By some means he heard of our search, and no doubt he already knew the legend of Shan-Yu-Shih,” Lee went on. “Now he intends to claim by right of conquest the whole region of the mine, until now unclaimed except for the shadowy title of the Nanking government. If he can hold it till he finds the mine, or even until he has established stockades he can bargain with Nanking and get concessions that will probably leave you stranded.”

“So instead of being your quarrel alone, it’s ours alone—mine and Doctor Harper’s,” June murmured.

“You don’t understand. After he gets the jade to buy guns and airplanes, he’ll invade us here. And remember the night on the cliff.”

“Okay, Lee. And now what?”

“First, let’s talk to Prince Kiang. Then we’ll decide whether you’d better take off for India. Perhaps you could get help from the English, but it’s doubtful if it would come in time. Perhaps you won’t need their help.”

They found Prince Kiang sitting like a commoner on a stump. There was an expression on his face June had never seen before. If it was possible for a man’s soul to change on him overnight, it was this man’s soul.

Harper sat on a rock, June dropped in the grass, Lee stood on guard a little to one side, Dimitri lingered in the background. “I have found Enlightenment,” Prince Kiang told them solemnly, “but in crystal balls much smaller than Shen Tao, so small that they could hang unseen to the lashes of my eyes.”

June heard her heart go thump-thump-thump; otherwise there was no answer.

“I will not say I wish to make amends for the wrongs I have done you three,” Prince Kiang went on. “You would have every reason not to believe me. So I will say that I wish to salvage all I can of what I have lost by greed and blindness. And this is my chance.”

“What do you propose, Prince Kiang?” Harper asked.

“Take paper and pencil and write out a wireless message to the American consul, telling him you are here seeking your jade mine, and for him to notify Nanking to hold me responsible for your lives. Let Lo take off with the message at once, and deliver it to the nearest wireless station in British India. Lee will tell you that Lo is to be trusted. And the moment he is on his way you will know I am to be trusted—because you have tied my hands.”

“Yes, that would be complete protection, as far as you are concerned,” Harper said. And June knew he spoke the truth.

“At the same time he will deliver two other messages which Lee may read, then return with the plane for scouting. One of the messages is to an airplane company, to rush the combat planes I have ordered, with mercenary flyers, at the first possible moment. The other will be to the Nanking government, my acknowledgment that Winton Harte is the original discoverer of the jade mine, and that I propose to work and protect it under a fair agreement with them and with you.”

Harper nodded, his eyes lighting up.

“But we can’t wait for the answer to those two telegrams before we deal with General Hu. So today I will mobilize all my forces and, with Lee in command, hurl them against him.”

“It’s a deal, as far as I am concerned,” Harper said. “What about you, June?”

“War? You want me to vote for war?” June was white, but she rose to her feet. “There’s no way out of it, is there? I vote yes.”

“Lee?” Prince Kiang’s voice trembled slightly.

“You know already where I stand. This means you are still my foster-father and my prince.”

“I had hoped to shelter you from these dangers, but that too was greed and blindness. Naturally my son must fight for his own. Dimitri Koslof, this is not your affair, so you may leave with Lo for British India.”

“If you don’t mind, Excellency, I’d rather stay for my share in the fun.”

His tone was light, his manner debonair, but June saw the torment in his face.

“I too have somethin’ to square up, y’know. Not too dashed pleased with my performance, at present writin’. So if Lee will let me shoulder arms along with the troops—”

“I wouldn’t dream of letting you off, Dimitri,” Lee broke in.

“Then if it’s all settled,” Prince Kiang remarked when the silence grew too long, “suppose we write out those wireless messages. We have a busy day ahead of us.”

Ten minutes later the tree-tops clutched in vain at the landing gear of Lo’s plane. Soon it was a little black cross in the southern sky. And in another half hour gongs were clanging, conch-shells blowing, signal fires burning, mirrors flashing from the hilltops, and drums were answering drums to summon men to war.

“We might have known,” June told Lee in low tones in a stolen moment beside the ape-god in the garden. “It’s the inevitable end of our great adventure—the fitting end. Chinese war—and we outer barbarians fighting side by side.”

Lee’s plan of campaign could not wait for the mobilization of a large force. With such troops as he could assemble in one day and a minimum of baggage, he meant to occupy a mountain pass that was General Hu’s only gate to the country of the jade mine and stake everything on one savage onslaught. The narrow defile was only ten hours march from the palace and General Hu was due there some time the following afternoon; so unless all signs failed the battle would occur the morning of the second day.

June could not fight in that battle. There was a limit to her adventurings. Nor could she stay and pace the floor of the unguarded castle. If General Hu had learned her identity and suspected that she knew the location of the jade mine, he might make a surprise march into the valley to take her prisoner. Shen-Shan too was to be part of the spoils of victory, so both girls must be quartered in the konkuan of a minor noble three hours this side of the battle-ground.

They started in advance of the troops early the following morning. With them was Harper, Dimitri, native servants and guides, and a small bodyguard. June had known excitement as intense as this ride to her own war, the dust-cloud of a thousand marching men behind her in the sky, but none quite so thrilling. Sometimes she forgot to fear for Lee in envying him.

Her party reached their refuge an hour in advance of the troops. Scouting with some of his officers, Lee did not appear at the konkuan until two hours later. He had only a minute, he said. He just wanted to make sure the two girls and Harper were well sheltered. Yes, and he would like to see June for half a minute alone.

But there was a spy waiting for Lee, with bad news. General Hu had better than fifteen hundred troops. That was all right—they were mostly loot-crazed bandits from the Salween, and Lee would have the advantage of ground and ambush. But also Hu had picked up, heaven knew where, two light bombers, with trained crews, and machine-guns mounted fore and aft. These would certainly scout the pass in advance of the troops, bomb their redoubts, harry and scatter them with machine-gun fire.

“But even the viper has good oil for aching bones.” The spy had other information that gave Lee’s eyes a metallic brilliance June had never seen before. He knew where the two ships would be moored tonight. They had already landed—in a broad valley fronting the pass. General Hu’s whole army would be bivouacked there.

“How many hours on foot?” Lee asked quietly.

“It is a long climb over the pass and down, lord. Starting now, it would be midnight—”

“Then there’s no hope of attacking tonight in force. How many hours on fresh horses?”

“By fast riding, before the moon tops Lao Shan.”

“We must get to the hills overlooking the valley in daylight. We must do the work and be gone before moonrise.” And he gave an order to one of his aides.

June had not understood Lee’s words, but she had seen his face. Wide-eyed and white, she whirled to Dimitri.

“A little jaunt to burn a couple of enemy planes,” he explained airily.

“Oh, Lee—”

“There’s not a moment to lose, June. If we’re too late, we lose everything. Look after her, Doctor. Dimitri, you can overtake the troops—”

“Y’know, Lee, I’d like awf’ly to toddle along with you,” that preposterous man replied.

Lee started to speak, but Dimitri cut him off, and his voice rang. “Don’t refuse me, by the Mother of God. I’m an expert horseman. I can see in the dark like a wolf and walk like a cat. And I’ve nothing to lose, everything to gain.”

Lee looked him in the eyes. “You may come, Koslof, Count Dimitri of Kazad.”

She would never see Lee again, June thought. He would be killed, the culmination of the whole business. This was the reward of adventure. She hated the very word. It was a rainbow with a pot of death at its end. The only thing worth having in life was security, no matter how monotonous and boring. She wished she had never heard of Chinese jade. She wished she were a jellyfish, floating in a tideless sea.

But did Lee care? Did he give one thought to her waiting, weak with fear for him? No, he was riding on to great adventure, his eyes shining, his face bright as a schoolboy’s, drunk with life.

But June’s jealous heart had painted too rosy a picture. The job before Lee and Dimitri was too big, its success too much in doubt, for them to celebrate beforehand.

Their advance was a series of desperate gambles. Once they risked a twenty-minute detour by the home of a minor lord hoping to get fresh horses; and they won. Later they took a chance on the unknown bed of a river when ten minutes’ ride would have brought them to a bridge, and won again. So at sundown they were lying on the crest of a cliff, the tops of their heads imitating stones, gazing down at General Hu’s army bivouacked in the broad valley below.

Prospects were no worse than they had anticipated, perhaps a little better. General Hu had posted sentries, but in the dark they might be avoided or else stalked and knocked on the head. The two ships were well within the camp, but lay close together and no extra guard had been posted over them.

They completed their plans and in the twilight descended the cliff, remounted, and rode to a brush-grown hillside within a stone’s throw of the nearest sentry. Here they left their horses in charge of their guide, and as the light crept out of the valley they crept in. When the only glimmer left was the stars in the sky and the cooking fires dotting the plain, fully half an hour before the moon was due to top Lao Shan, they were crouching in a dry water-course in sound of the sentry’s footsteps.

Their water canteens were full of kerosene. From these they oiled their hands and faces and rubbed in dirt until they were invisible to each other at arm’s length. The rest was like a journey in a nightmare.

They crawled past the sentries and encircled innumerable camp-fires. They collided with someone in the darkness, and Dimitri knifed him as he drew his breath to yell. A man sleeping under the wing of the nearest plane wakened, sprang up, and was knocked out by a blow from a rifle barrel; and since Dimitri had crept away toward the farther plane, Lee must have dealt that blow.

A faint sound came out of the darkness, the breath of a man, and Lee had swung his rifle to strike when he recognized Dimitri. He had found several five-gallon tins of gasoline. It was much better for lighting fires than kerosene, but its fumes would be detected too soon by near-by soldiers and cause an investigation. So they must throw the stuff on quickly, set fire, and run.

“Light up,” Lee whispered.

He gave Dimitri time to crawl to the other plane, then he unscrewed the cap of the can and began to pour the liquid over the rudder and tail of the ship. A match was in his hand, ready to strike, when he saw the flare of Dimitri’s match. Good teamwork, he started to think—and then a new and unimagined hell broke loose.

Lee had seen a snake strike, and a meteor flash across the sky, and lightning zigzag through clouds, but never in his life had he seen anything as fast as this flame. Over the tail and rudder of the ship it wove a pattern infinitely complex in the twinkling of an eye, ribbons of fire streaking every way at once and then meeting in a roaring sheet. Dimitri’s efforts were equally successful; both ships were pillars of fire.

Every grass blade stood out for fifty yards around; the tents showed every seam; the men were caught in all kinds of queer positions, some of them stooping over, some with their hands at their mouths, eating. But fortunately they all began to move at once, some of them toward the fires, some of them turning tail, a wild melee that gave him and Dimitri their one hope for life. The roar of the flame and the yells of the soldiers drowned out the officers’ commands, and the two white men were halfway to the sentry line before a shot was fired.

But the last half! The glare of the burning planes still chased and picked them up, and every soldier in sight who could find a gun was shooting at them. That was fair enough. Chinese river scum like these were poor shots, and the light was dim and getting dimmer. The score or so of ruffians running on their trail were likewise harmless, because they shied from their comrades’ fire, and anyway he and Dimitri were running like stags for their lives. But there were men still farther on, crouched to catch them.

They shot a few, and one diving for Lee’s ankles stopped a comrade’s bullet. Then it seemed—he was half out of his head—that a big Momba got hold of him and gave him some trouble before he could drop his rifle, thrust a pistol against the man’s side, and pull the trigger. After the pistol was empty he believed he used it as a blackjack on a half-naked ruffian who had sprung on Dimitri’s back. But there were still a few between them and the woods, and two sentries.

These enemies were firing at even shorter range. If they could not see their own sights in the thickened dark, certainly they could see the fugitives in sharp silhouette against the flame. But all the tents were behind now. The pack of pursuers had dropped back and scattered. And now Lee snatched up a rifle from a soldier someone had killed, returning the fire as he ran.

Dimitri was likewise running and firing. It is a principle of warfare that attackers have a psychological advantage over the attacked, and Lee and the Russian must have looked large, black, and invincible as they bore down on those two sentries—firing till their magazines were empty, then swinging their guns like clubs—for suddenly there were no sentries in sight.

There was nothing but the empty dark, and a voice that said, “Here, lord.” Lee did not recognize the voice, or understand why the horses were standing there. But he sprang on one of the animals and headed up the trail.

There was scattered gunfire behind him, and a dim dull thud somewhere close beside him, but now he was riding fast and free toward the pass. Both Dimitri and the guide were ahead of him; a cheerful shower of sparks flew from their horses’ feet. They were out of it. They had won.

The wind in his face and the breakneck ride soon revived Lee. His breathing was no longer a series of rending sobs. He began to miss something from the scene—something that should be evident but was not—and was a little startled to discover it was Dimitri’s voice. Unlike the guide and himself, he was not alternately reviling and imploring his horse. He rode in complete silence.

By God, he was a horseman! Lightly he sat in his saddle, light was his hand on the rein, but his wiry little mare gave him her best. Indeed, the animal was overdoing it a little, Lee thought; there was something almost frantic in her long bounds. They had climbed to meet the climbing moon, and Lee’s vision was restored in the first gray flood over Lao Shan.

“Lee?”

It was Dimitri’s voice, debonair as ever, but somehow it threw Lee’s heart back into his throat.

“Yes?”

“Can you pull up for a minute? Didn’t want to stop you while those blighters were pingin’ at us, but now I’ve got somethin’ dashed important to attend to.”

Lee checked his horse. Dimitri pulled up with what seemed the merest lift of his wrist. They were side by side in the trail.

“Jolly good show, eh, what?”

“Great. But Dimitri, we’d better wait a while longer to talk it over. They may attempt some sort of pursuit. What is it you must do?”

Dimitri answered in one word. “Slope.”

There fell a short, heart-stopping silence. “What do you mean, man?”

“Check. Go to old Abraham’s bosom. Give me a hand, will you, old man? The dashed jig’s up.”

“Lord Buddha!” Lee steadied the swaying figure with his arm. “Hold on. Fight. We’ll get you into camp—”

“No fear. Took it in the body—must have snipped an artery inside. Greatest luck in the world! ’Scutcheon cleaned, and no time to spot it up again. What marvelous, amazin’ luck!”

He started to fall, but Lee held him. So it came about that Dimitri, Count of Kazad, alias Koslof, died not only with his boots on but in the saddle.

From an upstairs window in the konkuan where she and Shen-Shan were sheltered, June saw a red glow low down the sky that might be two burning airplanes. But also the wind brought low, snapping, popping, rattling sounds that were undoubtedly—and she faced the music—gunfire.

But you can’t have war, she told herself forlornly, without death-spraying guns. And you can’t have love without fear and pain.

There was no more news that night, none when she wakened at dawn. The time passed. It did not completely stop and give up. When she glanced again at her wrist-watch, at least a minute and sometimes several minutes had gone by. These little driblets finally added up into huge hours.

She tried not to wonder whether Lee was still alive. Once or twice she caught herself watching for signals, trying to tune in on his spirit—if that vulture flew down instead of up, her lover was dead; if that little cloud sailed by the sun instead of hiding it she would see him again. And once alone in her room she called his name—but mostly she stiffened her back and waited. And she did not even tell Shen-Shan of last night’s raid.

Yet the unshared secret made June feel closer to her. It established what was akin to a mother-daughter relationship, protector and protected.

Noon came and passed. June found herself hoping that the battle was already fought and won. Perhaps mountain walls had shut in the sound. . . . Perhaps General Hu had surrendered without firing a shot. . . . But as she was finishing her noonday meal, the servants froze in their tracks, their heads a little raised. Those low, snapping, popping, rattling sounds were on the wind again.

They grew louder. After a while they ran together and made one continuous clatter, like thunder, except it was so harsh and dry. Sometimes it dimmed, once seemed to be dying away, then swelled louder than before.

“Big battle,” said Tuck-Sun.

June went out on the terrace and gazed off toward Lao Shan. She could see no smoke, but that made her vision all the clearer. It was only a little war, waging in the pass. No diplomats would pace the floor of their embassies waiting for its news, no headlines would blazon to the world its tides of battle, lights would not burn late tonight in windows on Downing Street. Yet the sunlight glittered on steel the same as at Waterloo; there were deeds of bravery, bold attack and stubborn defense, tables suddenly turned, reputations made and lost and hand-to-hand fighting—stab, slash, club, and grapple—as fierce as at Antietam. General Hu’s men were out for loot, but they fought as savagely as for the glory of an English queen. And on that little cliff-walled battle-field, a bullet through the head was just as certain death as in Argonne Forest.

She heard the last gun about three o’clock. At five came the first reports of a great victory, but the news-bearer, a salt merchant from Chando, had failed to learn what he regarded as a minor detail.

“No, missy,” he informed June through her interpreter and bodyguard, Tuck-Sun. “I did not think to ask which side is the victor. It might be General Hu; on the other hand it is quite possibly the white prince. But missy may know for the certainty that the victory is great and glorious.”

“Thank you,” June said to keep her own flags flying. “You have consoled me a great deal.”

Half an hour later came a Momba hunter on a shaggy pony, leading three other horses. He had observed the battle from a near-by hillside, he declared. Although he had not remained to see its finish—General Hu’s men were known to be horse-thieves—it seemed that the soldiers of the white prince were winning. Certainly General Hu had not yet conquered their redoubts.

“Was the white prince alive and uninjured?” June asked.

“Some say yes, and some say no, missy. But if he has been killed, be assured he will find Nirvana.”

Swiftly on the Momba’s heels rode what appeared to be a deserter from Lee’s army on a stolen horse. General Hu’s men had scaled the walls of the cliff, he reported, and when last seen were pouring a deadly crossfire into their enemies’ ranks. But Lee’s sharpshooters were picking off the sons-of-turtles, and it would do missy’s heart good to see them hurtling down the canyon walls. There was still hope—if the gods were merciful—that the white prince would win.

“If you thought so, why did you desert his banner?” June asked.

“Missy does not understand. I am a pious Buddhist, averse to taking life.”

The deserter rode on. The next hour brought the twilight and the chill evening wind, but no word from the front. At half-past six Doctor Harper walked down the road to listen for beating hoofs. At seven the dusty track was lost in night.

She must eat supper, June thought. She must save her strength to celebrate Lee’s victory or—for any other need that might arise. And she must set an example for Shen-Shan, white with fear but still trying to smile. So she took the Chinese girl by the hand and started to lead her to their host’s well-spread supper table.

But they stopped and looked quickly into each other’s eyes. Their bodyguard of eight soldiers lounging on the terrace were springing to their feet. There were horses panting in the courtyard.

But the two officers who hurried up the terrace steps and marched into the room had not white faces. One was a young native in a dusty, knife-slashed uniform, conceivably a messenger. But the other, a middle-aged Chinese with brutal jaws and sunken eyes, wore the resplendent trappings of a major-general.

June spoke first. “What do you want?” she asked.

“First, to beg pardon for this intrusion,” the older man answered in good English. “We have ridden ahead of our army except for a cavalry detachment waiting in the road, and have not had time to announce ourselves properly. I am General Hu.”

Oh, don’t weaken. You mustn’t, mustn’t weaken. Don’t let him see you’re afraid. Keep your head up, square your shoulders, look him in the face. Can you speak now? Will your voice hold steady? All ready—carry on!

“I still don’t understand why you should come here.”

“I came to see the lady Shen-Shan. And for both of you I have news which I regret to deliver.”

June stilled her frantic heart and waited.

“My army has won a complete victory over the forces of Prince Kiang. The enemy is crushed and in flight. Among my prisoners is the white prince, Lee.”

Shen-Shan gave one little sob, but June did not make a sound.

General Hu turned to Shen-Shan and began to speak rapidly, with many gestures, in his own tongue. Shen-Shan asked an occasional question. Finally the piteous expression on her face made June speak.

“What is he saying, Shen-Shan? Perhaps I can help you.”

“Nobody in this earth can help me now,” the Chinese girl answered.

“Missy—memsahib—in a way the Lady Shen-Shan speaks truth,” General Hu told June. “Yet she has no real need for concern. I am a rough man of arms and have spoken bluntly, but after the stress of battle and under these circumstances—”

“Will you tell me what you want of her, or shall I ask her to tell me?”

“You may know I have sued for the hand of the Lady Shen-Shan in marriage. It was fitting that General Hu should have as his wife the niece of Prince Kiang, the daughter of his greatest noble, and the most beautiful of all China’s daughters. Now it is a necessity, as a symbol of future peace between myself and my great neighbor.”

“I see,” June said.

“As I must return at once to my own capital, I desire that all formalities be dispensed with, and Shen-Shan accompany me. As a further token of peace, I will then restore to his home my prisoner, the white Prince Lee.”

“And if she doesn’t come with you—”

“Prince Lee stole into my camp last night as a spy and a saboteur. If my offer of peace is refused, the rules of war must take their course.”

June did not answer. It took all her strength to stand. The room was very cold. The lamp-flame flickered and the shadows danced.

“I have every right to carry her off as the spoils of war,” General Hu went on. “I have scores of men within call.”

This threat was exactly the medicine June needed. The light cleared; the lump that was choking her went out of her throat.

“If you try that, our men will fight till they drop,” she said clearly, “and you’ll get their first bullet.”

“I have no intention of using force. I am General Hu, not a river pirate, too tender-hearted for my own good. But you may remind Shen-Shan that her immediate acceptance will not only assure peace between our lands, but save the life of one whom both of you hold dear.”

“How long can she have to decide?”

“Five minutes. Not a second more. Then I must rejoin my troops.”

“Then please step out on the terrace.”

General Hu and his aide withdrew. Shen-Shan did not fling herself into June’s arms but sat down like a queen in a big teakwood chair and smoothed her garments with her tiny, pale hands.

“I do not need five minutes,” she said quietly. “It is not so bad, to be wife of great general. Call him here, will you do this for me? Somehow I cannot say his name. And tell him I go with him.”

June moved to the door, her steps stiff and slow, but her spirit ascended and she stopped, shaking her head.

“You can’t do it, Shen-Shan.”

“I have no choice. Did you not hear him say he kill Lee?”

“I heard him say so. Still you mustn’t go.”

“Then you do not love him.”

“Oh, Shen-Shan! It’s so hard to make you understand. I’m not sure I understand myself. You have no assurance that General Hu will keep his word, then your sacrifice will be in vain. But anyway you mustn’t do it—because you too love Lee.”

“No, I do not understand.”

“He’s a man. He’s a white man. If you love him, as I do, you won’t bring him to shame. Let him stand on his own, Shen-Shan, and not be ransomed at such shameful cost.”

Shen-Shan’s jewel-like eyes opened wide. “I do see—a little,” she murmured at last. “It is why the East and West cannot meet, different gods, different ways. But I must go my own way, by what light I see. So please tell General Hu to come.”

But General Hu came without telling. Surly, almost savage from the delay, he burst into the room. June heard him speak in Chinese to Shen-Shan, saw her nod in reply. June opened and looked into the little bag that hung on her wrist.

Her pistol was there. With one word from its black mouth she could stop this thing. But later she could not stop the vengeance of Hu’s fury-maddened army. So it was no use. Nothing was any use. The higher the mountain she climbed, the deeper the valley beyond. All life was an evil conspiracy. The gods made men brave and then laughed at their futile struggles.

But she was called back from these black deeps by the hurried entrance of a Chinese soldier. He whispered in an excited way to General Hu; the latter’s face changed color and set in hard lines. With a peremptory gesture, he commanded Shen-Shan to precede him out the door.

June’s face flamed. “Don’t go, Shen-Shan!” Her voice rang clearly in the hushed room.

“But he say—”

“It’s all a bluff. He hasn’t any troops in the road, Lee is not his prisoner, he didn’t win the battle. His army is destroyed and he wants to take you as a hostage to save his face. Seize him, Tuck-Sun.”

But before the officer in charge of the bodyguard could spring forward, General Hu whipped out a pistol. Whether she or Shen-Shan was to be its victim June did not know—and she never knew.

For Doctor Harper sprang through the door behind him and grasped his arm. The pistol blazed harmlessly at the floor and gave one of the guards time to grapple with him. The younger officer and the messenger leaped to help him, but the other guards seized them. They yielded quickly, but so desperate was General Hu’s resistance, so furious and terrible his strength, that he might have escaped or sold his life dearly if . . .

If there had not come the clatter of horses’ hoofs in the courtyard and then Lee, fairly bounding through the door, with a full platoon of shock-troops in his wake.

“Oh, June! We were hunting him in the hills and never dreamed he’d come here. We might have been too late.”

“Didn’t need you at all,” June flashed back. “But since you’re here, we’re mighty glad to see you.”

Another night, and the town below the palace was gay with banners. Firecrackers popped, temple bells rang deliriously, and conch-shells screamed. But in the palace of Prince Kiang there was high council, solemnity proper to history making, and the dawn of a new era in Chwanben.

To his slant-eyed lords in their embroidered silks the prince pronounced the succession of his throne. At his death it would not pass to his foster-son, but to his young cousin, the illustrious lord Hsing. And to make his seat secure, on the next full moon he would marry Prince Kiang’s niece, the great lady Shen-Shan.

But Lee, beloved of the common people and of the gods of battle, would not turn his face from his adopted home. He would operate the long-lost jade mines, delivering a rightful share of the green treasure not only to the white discoverers, but to the Lamas, the government of Nanking, and to Prince Kiang’s own treasury. And though he must spend half of every year in Shanghai, when the snows melted on Lao Shan and when the holy lotus-flower bloomed in the warm valleys he would hear the temple bells and return to walk the Eightfold Path beside his own.

So it was fitting that this date should be carved in imperishable stone, and that the nobles should make thank offerings to their own and the white man’s gods, and that the people should revel in the streets. But tomorrow was to be a day of mourning for a great lord of the dead Czar of all the Russias, Count Dimitri of Kazad who had died in defense of his friends.

“But I mourn tonight,” Shen-Shan told Lee, when they stood a moment on the terrace after the nobles had gone, “for another white lord who is dead to me.”

“You will be the bride of Hsing, the princess of Chwanben,” Lee answered. “Your heart should be light.”

“ ‘There are three places hidden from the eyes of man—the caves of the sea, the crevices of Everest, and the heart of woman.’ But it shall be light, as my lord commands. For he is still—will always be—my lord.”

But not June’s lord! Absolutely not. She made this very plain when Prince Kiang took Harper to his study for a little game of chess, and she and Lee were left alone with the moon.

“Don’t mistake me for a submissive little Chinese girl,” June told him. “Whatever we do in the future, it’s fifty-fifty. Mister and Missy—Sahib and Memsahib—Lee and June.”

There was a little catch in her voice when she said that last. She hoped he didn’t hear it! He’d been pandered to all his life, people bowing and scraping, beautiful Chinese princesses throwing themselves at his head; and he must never know that her heart was trembling like a rabbit’s and she could hardly breathe. . . .

“If you obey three commands,” he answered, “I’ll never try to lord it over you again.”

“Humm. Well, what are they?”

“First, call me by the new name that a wonderful old man has given me.”

“Lee Kiang Harper.”

“Second, marry me by Lama rites tomorrow, and by Christian rites as soon as we can catch a missionary.”

“We’ll consider that later. What next?”

“Third, come into my arms.”

“Oh, Lee! You should have said so first. Then I’d have to do anything you say.”

It seemed to her she fairly leaped. So it may be that he had won, after all. And before she could change her mind and declare her independence he was in complete control of her lips. But his arms were about her, the moon was enormous and white, and if the distant chanting of the Lamas in the temple told the truth they had lives on lives to love and strive, conquer and yield, before Nirvana stilled this ecstasy and Brahma ceased to dream.

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 map on the back cover has been added just after the table of contents.

[The end of The White Brigand by Edison Marshall]