The adventures of Captain O'Shea

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

III

Steamers flying the flags of many nations were anchored in the Woosung River off the water-front of Shanghai. High-pooped junks tacked past them and cargo lighters manned by half-naked coolies drifted with the muddy tide. In a handsome, solidly fashioned perspective extended the European quarter of the city, as unlike the real China as London or New York. Turbanned Sikh policemen, tall and dignified, in soldierly khaki and puttees, strolled through the clean, well-paved streets. English, French, and German merchants clad in white were spun around corners in ’rickshaws pulled by sweating natives muscled like race-horses. Tourists lounged on the piazzas of the Astor House or explored the shops filled with things rare and curious. Unseen and unperceived was the native city of Shanghai, incredibly filthy and overcrowded, containing a half-million souls within its lantern-hung streets and paper-walled tenements.

Near the river, at the end of the English quarter farthest removed from the parks and pretentious hotels, was a row of small, shabby brick buildings which might have belonged in Wapping or the Ratcliff Road. There was nothing picturesquely foreign about them or their environment. Two or three were sailors’ lodging-houses, and another was the tumultuous tavern ruled over by Paddy Blake. Here seafarers swore in many tongues and got drunk each in his own fashion, but Paddy Blake treated them all alike. When their wages were gone he threw them out or bundled them off to ships that needed men, and took his blood-money like the thorough-going crimp that he was.

On this night the place was well filled. A versatile cabin steward off a Pacific liner was lustily thumping the battered tin pan of a piano. Six couples of hairy seamen, British and Norwegian, were waltzing with so much earnestness that the floor was cleared as by a hurricane. Cards and dice engaged the attention of several groups seated about the tables by the wall. In blurred outline, as discerned through the fog of tobacco smoke, a score of patrons lined the bar and bought bad rum with good coin. For the moment peace reigned and never a fist was raised.

Captain Michael O’Shea sauntered in during this calm between storms. The dingy room and its sordid amusements had a familiar aspect. It was precisely like the resorts of other seaports as he had known them during his wild young years before the mast. The bar-tender was a pasty-faced youth who replied to O’Shea’s interrogation concerning Paddy Blake:

“The old man has stepped out for a couple of hours. He had a bit of business aboard a vessel in the stream. Will you wait for him? If you’re lookin’ for able seamen he can find ’em for you.”

“I have no doubt of it,” said O’Shea, “and he will bring them aboard feet first. Fetch me a bottle of ginger-ale to the table in the corner yonder and I will wait awhile.”

The wall of the room was broken by a small alcove which made a nook a little apart from the playful mariners. Here O’Shea smoked his pipe and sipped his glass and was diverted by the noisy talk of ships and ports. At a small table near by sat a man, also alone, who appeared to be in a most melancholy frame of mind. Discouragement was written on his stolid, reddened face, in the wrinkles of the worn gray tweed clothes, in the battered shape of the slouch hat.

O’Shea surmised that he was a beach-comber who had seen better days, and surveyed him with some curiosity, for the man wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, his lip quivered, and once he was unable to suppress an audible sob. To find a sturdily built man of middle-age weeping alone in a corner of a sailor’s grog-shop led one to conclude that alcohol had made him maudlin. But he did not look intoxicated, although dissipation had left its marks on him. O’Shea conjectured that he might be suffering the aftermath of a spree which had broken his nerves and left him weak and womanish. In such a pitiable plight, the contemplation of his own woes had moved him to tears.

Tactfully waiting until the man had recovered his self-control, O’Shea nodded with a cordial smile and indicated a chair at his own table. The stranger shifted his place with a certain eagerness, as if he were anxious to be rid of his own miserable company. His tremulous hands and the twitching muscles of his face prompted O’Shea to say:

“Will you have something with me? I dislike sitting by meself.”

“A small drink of brandy, if you please. I am trying to taper off. God knows I welcome the chance to talk to somebody that is clean and sober.”

The man’s heavy, morose eyes regarded the shipmaster approvingly. Presently he began to talk with fluent coherence, in a kind of headlong manner. He felt that he had found a kindly listener and seemed afraid that O’Shea might desert him before the tale was done.

“I am on the beach and all to pieces again, as you may have guessed,” said he. “My name is McDougal, late of the American Trading Company, but I couldn’t hold the job. This time I went to smash in Tientsin. It was queer how it happened. I had been sober and making good for nearly six months. Ever see a Chinese execution? Well, this was an extraordinary affair. A high official of the province had been condemned for treason, and the government decided to make a spectacle of him as a sort of public warning. The place was the big yard of the governor’s yamen. I joined the crowd that looked on. First came a covered cart with black curtains. A strapping big Manchu crawled out of it. He was the executioner, and a dingy apron covered with dark-red blotches hung from his chin to his toes.

“Then came a second cart, and in it rode an old gentleman who climbed out and walked alone to the cleared space in the middle of the yard. He was bent and feeble, but he never flinched, and his dignity and rank stood out as plain as print. A guard said something to him, and he took off his long, fur-trimmed coat and knelt on the filthy flagging and the wind whirled the dust in his face. He knelt there, waiting, for a long time, motionless except when he put his hand to his throat and pulled his collar around it to keep off the wind.

“A pompous official read the death sentence, but that wrinkled old face showed never a trace of emotion. Then a pair of the executioner’s understrappers leaped on the old gentleman like wild-cats. One jumped on his back and drove his knees into him, while the other tied a bit of cord to the end of the trailing queue and yanked forward with all his might. It stretched the old man’s neck like a turtle’s. Then the big Manchu with the bloody apron raised his straight-edged sword and it fell like a flash of light. The head flew off and bounced into the lap of the fellow that was tugging at the queue.”

McDougal paused for a gulp of brandy. His voice was unsteady as he resumed:

“I guess my nerves were none too good. A man can’t go boozing up and down the coast of the Orient for a dozen years without paying the price. That sight was too much for me. I had to take a drink, and then some more, to forget it. The old man was so patient and helpless, his head bounced off like an apple; and what broke me up worst of all was seeing him pull that coat up around his throat so he wouldn’t catch cold—up around his throat, mind you. It was a little thing, but, my God, what did it matter if he caught cold? And the way they hauled and yanked him about before his neck was—well, I wish I hadn’t seen it.

“Once started, the old thirst took hold of me and I wandered down the coast until I came to, sick and broke, in a dirty Chinese tea-house in Che-Foo. There I lay until one day there came from the street a long, booming cry that crashed through the high-pitched clatter of the crowd like surf on a granite shore. By Jove! it stirred me like a battle-chant. It sounded again and again. I knew it must be a pedler shouting his wares, you understand, but it surged into my poor sick brain as if it was meant for me. It was buoyant, big, telling me to take heart in the last ditch. The words were Chinese, of course, but the odd thing about it was that they came to me precisely as though this great, deep voice was booming in English: ‘Throw-w all-l regrets away-y.’

“I presume I was a bit delirious at times, but this was what I heard very clearly, and it helped me wonderfully. As soon as I got on my legs I looked for the pedler until I found him, and followed him through the streets. Even at close range his call seemed to be telling me to throw all regrets away. It was summoning me to make a new start, do you see? He was a giant of a fellow in ragged blue clothes, a yoke across his broad shoulders with many dangling flat baskets. When he swelled his chest and opened his mouth the air trembled with that tremendous call of his. I trailed him to his tiny mud-walled house, and we got quite chummy. I could speak his dialect fairly well. He earned ten or fifteen cents a day and supported a family of nine people by selling roasted watermelon seeds. He sang loud because he had a big voice, he said, and because his heart was honest and he owed no man anything. He did a lot to help me get a grip on myself, and some day I mean to do something for him.

“I had somehow hung on to my watch, and I sold it and beat my way to Shanghai in a trading steamer, and here I am, shaky and no good to anybody, but I still hear that cheerful pedler thundering at me to throw all regrets away. One has some curious experiences on this coast, and I have had many of them——”

A hand gripped McDougal’s shoulder, and he turned, with a nervous start, to confront a hale, well-dressed mariner with a yellow beard, whose eyes twinkled merrily as he loudly exclaimed:

“It vas mein old pal what I haf last met at Port Arthur. Ho, ho, McDougal, how goes it mit you?”

The speaker drew up a chair, pounded on the table to summon a waiter, and told him:

“A bundle of trinks, schnell, or I bite you in two.”

“I’m delighted to see you again, Captain Spreckels,” stammered McDougal, at which O’Shea introduced himself, and the mariner explained with a jolly laugh:

“McDougal vas a king among men. We haf met only one hour in Port Arthur when I haf told him things what was locked so deep in my bosom dot they haf never before come up. Perhaps we vas not so sober as now, so? What you do with yourself, McDougal? American Trading Company yet already?”

“I am on the beach, Captain Spreckels, and not fit to work at anything for a while.”

The skipper appeared vastly disturbed. Stroking his beard, he reflected for a moment and then shouted:

“My bark, Wilhelmina Augusta, sails for Hamburg to-morrow morning early. She is now at the mouth of the river. I vas come up in a tug to find if Paddy Blake haf three more men for me. McDougal, you comes mit me. It vas the great idea, eh? The sea-voyage will do you so much good you will not know yourself. I vish to haf your good company. My cabin is as big as a house. It will cost you noddings. If you want to come out East again, I can bring you back next voyage. Listen! Give me no arguments. You vas seedy and down on your luck.”

McDougal lacked the will power to resist this masterful mandate. And perhaps here was a fighting chance providentially offered. On the sweet, clean sea, far from the dissolute ports which had wrecked his manhood, he might build up health and strength and throw all regrets away. A fit of nervous weakness made the tears spring to his eyes, and he faltered unevenly:

“You quite bowl me off my feet, Captain Spreckels. I haven’t thought of leaving the East. But I will go with you and I can never thank you enough. About clothes and an outfit, I——”

“I haf more clothes than a plenty for two of us, McDougal. There is beer but no whiskey in my vessel. I do not trink liquor at sea. Come. Paddy Blake haf left word mit his man here dot my sailors vas already sent to the landing mit a boarding-house runner. We will go aboard the tug.”

With this, the energetic master mariner tossed down a gin rickey, said adieu to Captain O’Shea, and whisked McDougal out of the place with an arm across his shoulders. The episode made O’Shea feel slightly bewildered. The unfortunate McDougal had appeared and vanished with an abruptness that savored of unreality. His confession was the sort of thing that might come to a man in a nightmare. McDougal had painted the scenes with a few broad strokes, and yet as O’Shea sat musing, they seemed astonishingly vivid: the aged Chinese official pulling his coat about his neck just before his head bounced off like a bloody ball—the ragged colossus of a street pedler flinging afar his resonant call—McDougal, wretched and forlorn, huddled in the tea-house and fighting off the horrors. He had opened the book of his life and let O’Shea read a page of it, but there must have been many more worth knowing.

These reflections were interrupted by a violent dissension in the vicinity of the bar. A British tar smote a Scandinavian over the head with a bottle and stretched him on the floor. Somebody plucked the piano stool from under the musical cabin steward and hurled it at the aggressor. The missile flew high and swept the bar-tender into his glassware with a most splendid crash. Then hostilities became general.

The combatants were too busy to observe the entrance of a wizened, clerical-looking little man in a black frock-coat and a rusty tall hat. With a shrill whoop, he pulled a slung-shot from his pocket and pranced into the thick of the scrimmage. He was as agile as a jumping-jack, his coat-tails seemed to be flying in a dozen places at once, and whenever his weapon landed a seaman promptly lost all interest in the row and made for the street with his head tenderly held in his hands. In the wake of the active little man peace hovered like a dove.

With magical celerity the floor was cleared of disorder, and the promoter of harmony calmly assisted the damaged bar-tender to clear away the wreckage. Captain O’Shea accosted him when the task was finished.

“Paddy Blake is me name,” the little man replied in a jerky, rasping voice, cocking his head to one side. “The boys will have their fun and I hope they didn’t annoy ye. The place will be quiet for a bit. What can I do for ye?”

“’Tis a matter of private business,” answered O’Shea.

“Then come into the back room, where we can be sociable. I take ye for a shipmaster.”

“Right you are; but I have no ship at present. You might call me a tourist.”

Paddy Blake briskly led the way to a cubby-hole of a room with a very strong door, which he made fast with a bolt. There was a window whose shutters were of iron. O’Shea suspected that fuddled seamen might be tucked in here for safe-keeping when the occasion required. The two Irishmen studied each other with a kind of cheerful, candid appraisement. Each recognized in the other certain qualities to be admired. Paddy Blake was a hardened old ruffian, but he was a two-fisted little man with the courage of a terrier.

“I have come a long way to find you,” said O’Shea. “And it was imparted to me that the business that has brought me to China had best be discussed in whispers. ’Tis a mighty queer yarn——”

“Ye need not fill and back. Steam ahead. I like your looks,” broke in Paddy Blake. “Whatever passes bechune us stays inside the door. Are ye in throuble?”

“Not me. This is about a friend of mine. Tell me, Paddy Blake, and think hard. Do ye recall a strappin’ big man with red hair and blue eyes and a deep voice that used to roll the dice in your place? Hold a minute; I have not done with him. One front tooth was broken so you would notice it when he talked. And he had a crooked little finger that must have stuck out when he held a glass or waved his hand about.”

Paddy Blake puckered his brows and pinched his long upper lip between a grimy thumb and forefinger.

“What was he—a Yankee?” he asked, sitting straighter in his chair and gazing at the shipmaster with puzzled, groping interest.

“He was an American seafarin’ man—a mate most likely. You could not forget him if you cast eyes on him only once. Yankee sailors are scarce in deep-water ports. This one should stick out in your recollection like a light-house in a fog.”

“A whale of a man with a red head and an eye as blue as a bit of the Inland Sea!” vehemently exclaimed Paddy Blake. “And when was he in me place? How long ago was it?”

“’Tis yourself that must answer that question. At a guess, it was more than a year ago.”

The spry little man bounded to his feet and clutched the tails of his coat with both hands as he bent forward with his face close to O’Shea’s and rasped out:

“He has popped into me head like a flash. And a mushy-brained dunce I was not to know him at once. Eldridge ye mean—Jim Eldridge, that was mate in the China Navigation Company’s steamer Tai Yan, chartered to run coastwise. A whoppin’ big beggar he was, but mild-mannered and good-hearted, the quietest red-headed man that iver I saw in me life.”

“Are you sure of that?” demanded O’Shea. “Could you swear to it?”

“I remimber him as plain as I see you,” testily returned Paddy Blake. “He was not in me place often. ’Twas too rough for him.”

“And did you ever chance to hear what had become of him?”

The little man tapped O’Shea’s arm with an eloquent finger and replied in lower tones:

“It comes back to me that there was a yarn about him. ’Twas gossip, ye understand, nawthin’ that ye could put your finger on. Shanghai is a great place for wild stories. The Shanghai liar is a special breed, and he is famous all over the world. Annyhow, there was a voyage of the Tai Yan steamer when he didn’t come to port in her. Shortly after that she broke her back on a reef in the Formosa Channel and all hands was lost, so I never heard anny news from her people about this Jim Eldridge.”

“That was most unfortunate,” said O’Shea; “but I am in great luck to get track of the man at all. And have you anybody in mind that might have known Eldridge when he was sailing on this coast?”

The volatile Paddy Blake who saw so many mariners pass through his place during the year was mentally sifting his recollections which were many and confusing. The big red-headed man had steered clear of rum and riot and was no steady frequenter of this unholy resort. Obviously he had made no more than a passing impression on Paddy Blake, but the old man was honestly anxious to splice the broken ends of the story, and after painful cogitation he broke out again:

“There is one man that ye should find by all means. He may be dead by now, for the liquor had harrd hold of him. I have not seen or heard of him in a long while, but he wint north from here. I mind the last time he come in me place. Pretty well pickled he was, and some o’ the lads were yarnin’ with him, and there was talk of this Jim Eldridge. Be gob! ’twas then I heard the queer gossip, in bits, d’ ye see? There had been a ruction somewheres up beyant”—and Paddy Blake waved a hand to the northward—“and this man I mintion had been mixed in it with Jim Eldridge. But when they would urge him to unwind the story he would turn ugly and shut up like an oyster, half-seas-over though he was. He was a great one for messin’ about among the Chinese, and could patter two or three dialects. A scholar and gentleman was McDougal.”

“McDougal!” roared O’Shea, taken all aback by the coincidence. “Why, man alive, this same McDougal was in your place to-night and left not an hour ago. He has just come down the coast, from Tientsin and Che-Foo.”

“’Tis a pity ye let him get away. If he wanders into the Chinese city amongst some of thim native friends of his ’twill be the divil and all to find him again. So he’s still alive!”

“I sat and talked with him and he discoursed nightmares.”

“He has lived thim,” said Paddy Blake.

“I had him and I lost him,” was O’Shea’s melancholy exclamation. “An oakum-whiskered Dutchman by the name of Spreckels breezed in under full sail and welcomed this McDougal like a long-lost brother, and carried him off to sea before ye could blink. It was comical. And I sat there like a wooden figure-head and let him go.”

“In the Wilhelmina Augusta—four-masted steel bark bound out to Hamburg. It was a lucky stroke for McDougal.”

“And most unlucky for me,” sighed O’Shea. Then he pulled himself together, and spoke in his hearty, masterful way. “Come along, Paddy Blake, and find me a tug. We will chase McDougal down river for the sake of a conversation with him.”

“Captain Spreckels had the Arrow, and she’s fast,” said Paddy Blake. “He has a good start of ye, and his bark will be ready to sail as soon as he boards her.”

“Then we’ll chase him out to sea. I have come too far to lose McDougal by letting him slip through me fingers,” and the demeanor of Captain Michael O’Shea discouraged further argument.

Paddy Blake jammed the tall hat on the back of his head, unbolted the door, and whisked through the bar-room with such speed that the shipmaster’s long strides could hardly keep up with him. They turned into the street that led to the water-front and hastened to a lighted corner of the bund where stood several ’rickshaws. Paddy darted at the drowsy coolies who were squatted on the pavement, cuffed a couple of them, and gave an order in pidgin English. They jumped into the shafts, the passengers climbed aboard, and the vehicles went spinning along the thoroughfare.

As they drew abreast of the lights of the anchored shipping, Paddy Blake looked along the landing-berths of the smaller steamers and exclaimed with an explosion of profane surprise:

“There’s a tug in the pocket where the Arrow ties up. I can’t see to make her out in the dark, but we will stop and take a look. Something or other may have delayed Captain Spreckels. I hope to blazes thim seamen I sint him has not hooked it before he got ’em safe aboard the bark.”

Leaving the ’rickshaws to wait orders, they footed it down to the wharf and were convinced that they had found the Arrow even before she could be clearly made out. The darkness was shattered by the troubled accents of Captain Spreckels, who was proclaiming to the skipper of the tug:

“By Gott, I cannot wait for McDougal no longer. The tide ist turned already. My wessel must go to sea mit the morning flood. It gives me sadness to lose dot scalawag, but he has runned away mit himself.”

O’Shea climbed over the guard-rail and cried:

“How are you again, Captain Spreckels? What’s this I hear about McDougal? I am after finding him meself.”

The master of the Wilhelmina Augusta swung his arms and made answer:

“McDougal was a slippery customer, so? I haf a immense fondness for him. By the landing here he left me to go in a ’rickshaw, sehr schnell, to a room what he haf hired for to-night und fetch some little t’ings what belonged to him, mostly books und some papers mit writings on ’em. He haf come to Shanghai, he tells me, mit a small bundle which he never loses, drunk or sober. While the tug is makin’ steam und haulin’ her lines aboard he will do his errand. It vas an hour ago. I do not understand, but I must not wait.”

“Changed his mind,” suggested Paddy Blake. “Sorry ye are shy a shipmate, but the news will please me friend Captain O’Shea here. You lose. He wins.”

The hull of the Arrow was trembling to the thresh of the screw, and her skipper was bawling the order to cast off. Captain Spreckels shouted farewell as the two visitors jumped ashore, and the tug moved astern into the fair-way. As they walked toward the ’rickshaws O’Shea remarked:

“’Tis no use to go rummagin’ around to-night in search of McDougal, I suppose.”

“No, but I will find him for ye to-morrow,” replied Paddy Blake. “If he has a room in the English quarter ye can gamble he will drop into my place. If he don’t I will sind a bright lad to round him up. ’Tis easy findin’ him as long as he is not livin’ in the native city. What do ye suppose become of him, annyhow?”

“Maybe he flinched from the notion of quitting the East. When it gets in the blood of these tropical tramps, the grip of it is not easy to break.”

“And he lost his nerve at the last minute,” said Paddy Blake. “I’ve seen cases like it. I’m that way meself.”

Declining a cordial invitation to have a “nightcap,” O’Shea told his ’rickshaw cooly to take him to the Astor House. It seemed extraordinary that his quixotic pilgrimage should have so soon disclosed the identity of the derelict who had drifted into the comfortable haven of Johnny Kent’s farm. This, however, did not greatly astonish O’Shea, who knew that the steps of sailormen in alien ports are not apt to stray far from the water-side. The singular feature of the business was that he should run across the sodden beach-comber, McDougal, who was the needle in a hay-stack of prodigious size. The hand of destiny was in it.

At breakfast next morning Captain O’Shea enjoyed overhearing the talk of a party of American tourists at a near-by table. In their turn the younger women did not fail to observe with interest the clean-cut, resolute shipmaster smartly turned out in fresh white clothes. After they had left the dining-room he picked up a copy of The Shanghai Mercury and carelessly turned to the shipping news where these lines caught his eye:

Bark Wilhelmina Augusta, Spreckels master, cleared for Hamburg with general cargo. Sailed Woosung this A. M.

This turned his thoughts to McDougal and he was impatient to find Paddy Blake and begin the search. He was about to toss the newspaper aside when a paragraph seemed to jump from the page and hit him between the eyes. He read it slowly, his lips moving as if he were spelling out the words:

UNKNOWN EUROPEAN MYSTERIOUSLY KILLED

Late last night the body of a middle-aged man was discovered in the Rue Pechili by an officer of the French municipal police. The place was only a few yards from one of the gate-ways of the native city wall in a quarter which is largely populated by Chinese who have overflowed into the French quarter. The man had been dead only a short time. He is supposed to have been an American or Englishman, although his identity was unknown at the hour of going to press. He was clothed in gray tweeds badly worn and had the appearance of one who had suffered from dissipation. He had been stabbed from behind, in addition to which his body was savagely gashed and mutilated. The British police were notified and Inspector Burke immediately took charge of the case.

Captain O’Shea’s second cup of coffee stood cold and neglected while he continued to gaze abstractedly at the front page of The Shanghai Mercury. He was reading between the printed lines. His sun-browned face had paled a trifle. He was not afraid, but he was conscious of that same feeling of physical abhorrence which had taken hold of him when he first beheld the scarred and branded back of the man dubbed Bill Maguire.

He was absolutely certain that he could identify the “unknown European” found dead near a gate-way of the native city. It was McDougal, and he had been slain because in some manner, as yet unrevealed, he had played a part in the tragic mystery of the red-haired sailor. Intuition welded the circumstances together. With this premise O’Shea framed one swift conclusion after another. McDougal had suddenly veered from his purpose of going to sea with Captain Spreckels. With the morbid impulse of a man whose nerves were shattered by drink, he had been afraid lest the German skipper might find him and carry him off whether or no. Therefore he had fled to cover, making for the native city where he doubtless had Chinese friends. Perhaps he had been watched and followed by hostile agents from the moment he landed in Shanghai.

“I have seen others like him,” said O’Shea to himself. “They will run from their own shadows, and their friends can do nothing with them. And I must be getting a bit flighty meself or I would not sit here and take for granted things that are no more than guesswork. How do I know that the dead man is McDougal? The answer is this: ’Tis one of me strong hunches, and they seldom go wrong.”

He passed out of the dining-room and delayed in the office of the hotel to ask a question of the clerk. The atmosphere of the place was so wholly European that the China, with which O’Shea had come darkly, gropingly in touch, seemed almost as far away as when he had been on the farm in Maine. The clerk went to the porch and gave instructions to a ’rickshaw cooly, and Captain O’Shea rattled off to the headquarters buildings of the English police. A Sikh orderly conducted him into the small room where Inspector Burke sat at a desk scanning a file of reports. He was a tall, dark, soldierly man of about forty. The slim-waisted khaki tunic, the riding-breeches, and the polished brown puttees gave him the air of a dashing trooper of light-horse. Glancing at O’Shea’s card, he nodded pleasantly and said with a singularly winning smile:

“And what can I do for Captain Michael O’Shea, of New York? I am very much at your service.”

“’Tis about the man that was found murdered close by the native city last night,” was the reply.

“Ah, by Jove!” exclaimed the inspector, and his pencil tapped the desk with a quick tattoo. “An odd case, that! Most unusual. I was potterin’ about on it a good part of the night. My men report that he was in Paddy Blake’s place during the evening, but the old rip denies knowing him, of course. He wants to steer clear of the case. I’m rather stumped so far. You are at the Astor House? I fancy I saw you there at dinner last night.”

“Right you are, sir. I am more than a little interested in this dead man,” pursued O’Shea in a straightforward manner. “And I will first describe him to ye,” which he proceeded to do with the detail of an observer whose eye was keen and memory retentive.

“That’s the Johnny, to a dot,” cried Inspector Burke, alertly interested. “And when did you last see him?”

“I talked with him last night, but before we go further I will prove an alibi,” hastily answered O’Shea, suddenly realizing that his position in the matter might look compromising.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” was the easy assurance. “You are jolly well out of it and satisfactorily accounted for. This was a native job, not a bit of doubt of it. Suppose we take a look at the body. It is packed in ice in the go-down just back of this building. Your identification must go on the records, you know. Then we can have a chin-chin, and I hope you’ll be good enough to stay for tiffin with me.”

O’Shea took from an inside pocket of his coat a leather bill-case and drew therefrom a sheet of heavy paper folded several times. Spread out, it covered half the desk. Upon it he had drawn with a brush and stencilling ink a life-size reproduction of the great Chinese character that scarred and discolored the back of the red-haired sailor.

Inspector Burke flung his cigarette aside with a quick gesture and stared first at the desk and then at O’Shea. His pleasant composure was evidently disturbed, and he spoke abruptly.

“My word! You know a lot more about this job than I do. Where the deuce did you get that? The poor beggar that was butchered last night had the mark on him.”

“I know he did, Inspector Burke. I was sure of it when I read about the thing in the newspaper this morning.”

They went into the shed and viewed what was left of the ill-fated McDougal, who had tried, too late, to throw all regrets away and make a new start at the difficult business of existence. O’Shea was keenly distressed. The man had won his sympathy. He would have liked to befriend him. Inspector Burke said kindly:

“Did you know him at all well? He must have amounted to something once. Was he ever a chum of yours?”

“I never laid eyes on him till last evening in Paddy Blake’s,” answered O’Shea. “And now I will sit down with ye and spin the yarn of the sailorman that I called Bill Maguire for convenience.”

The inspector listened gravely, nodding comprehendingly now and then as if his own experience might have crossed the trail of the same story. When O’Shea ceased talking, his comment was as follows:

“Most extraordinary! I fancy we can help each other a bit. But, mind you, I don’t pretend to know much about this mysterious murder society that goes about choppin’ people up. I have heard of it, of course, but until now its activities have been confined to the Chinese. We don’t pretend to police the native city. The Chinese governor runs his own show. There are native detectives on my staff, but their work is mostly in the foreign municipality. The case of this McDougal is the first of its kind. And I rather think you have supplied the motive. He knew too much.”

“But what did he know?” demanded O’Shea. “There was this sailor by the right name of Jim Eldridge, ye understand. He got his in the same way. They were mixed up together at one time or another.”

Inspector Burke withdrew from a drawer of his desk a large envelope and emptied out several torn sheets and fragments of paper which looked as though they had been trampled underfoot. Some were covered with handwriting in English, while others held columns of Chinese characters. They were so mud-stained and crumpled, however, that only a few lines here and there were at all legible. O’Shea gazed at them eagerly, surmising what they were before the inspector explained:

“My men picked them up in the street where McDougal’s body was found.”

“Yes. He must have had a bundle of books and papers under his arm, for I heard mention of the same,” cried O’Shea. “Like enough, it was ripped apart in the scrimmage and the blood-thirsty heathen made off with whatever they could lay their hands on in a hurry. If they spied any Chinese writing they would grab at it. What do ye say, Inspector Burke?”

“There are bits of some sort of a diary here, Captain O’Shea, and odds and ends that only a native could make head or tail of. I looked them over early this morning, and one of my Chinese did what he could to help. It is impossible to arrange the fragments in any sequence, but the story you tell me dovetails rather curiously with some of the sentences.”

“There was many queer things stowed away in that noddle of his,” said O’Shea, “and he was an educated man, so he would be apt to make notes of them. And does he make any mention at all of this Jim Eldridge, alias Bill Maguire?”

Inspector Burke carefully smoothed a torn sheet of paper and laid a finger on a few lines scrawled in a shaky hand. They held no reference to the sailor, but several phrases were startlingly familiar to Captain O’Shea. The mutilated passage ran thus:

Very horrid dreams last night—brandy failed to drive them away. Was in a steamer on the Stinking River—the Painted Joss came through the cabin port-hole, squeezing itself small as if made of rubber, and then expanding to gigantic size. It strangled me slowly, making hideous faces. This is a warning—When I dream of the Painted Joss, I am on the edge of seeing things while awake. The fear of violent death is....

Captain O’Shea was vividly reminded of the disjointed monologue of Bill Maguire, who had shown symptoms of a similar antipathy to the “Painted Joss.”

“McDougal wrote down the Stinking River as if it was a real name,” he said to Inspector Burke. “I thought Maguire called it that because it smelled bad. If it is on the map, can ye locate it, and is there by any chance a town with the title of Wang-Li-Fu on the banks of the same?”

Inspector Burke summoned a fat, drowsy-looking interpreter and put several questions to him. After poring over an atlas for some time, this owlish Chinese gentleman vouchsafed the information that a navigable stream known as the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells did indeed flow through a coastwise part of Kiangsu province, emptying into the wide estuary of the old mouth of the Yellow River. There was a city in that region which had been great and flourishing until the Tai-Ping Rebellion laid it in ruins. It was now no more than a wretched hamlet, although in local usage it had retained the name of Wang-Li-Fu, the last syllable of which signified a chief city of a province.

“I say, this is interesting,” exclaimed Inspector Burke. “I am inclined to think that you and I have picked up a warm scent, Captain O’Shea. And here’s another bit of paper we can manage to read.”

They pored over a muddy page of McDougal’s diary and discovered, alas! that it was no more than a fragment of a little Chinese farce called “The Mender of Broken China-ware.” McDougal had picked it up from some troupe of strolling players and jotted down a rough translation of his own, beginning:

“Seeking a livelihood by the work of my hands,

Daily do I traverse the streets of the city.

Well, here I am, a mender of broken jars,

An unfortunate victim of ever-changing plans.

To repair fractured jars is my sole occupation.

’Tis even so. Disconsolate am I, Niu-Chau.”

The two investigators laid this page aside and scanned the remaining scraps of paper. The Chinese writing consisted almost wholly of quotations, lines from the classics, racy proverbs of the common people, and so on. They contained nothing whatever that might throw more light on the mystery of McDougal. In much the same way, what he had written in English concerned itself with his wanderings from port to port and his pitiful failures to hold a position.

“What we want most was lost in the scuffle,” said O’Shea. “The earlier part of this diary may have told the story that you and I are anxious to know.”

“I fancy we know more than any other two white men in China,” drawled Inspector Burke. “If a chap is really keen to find out something about this blackguardly organization, he will make a voyage to the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells and go pokin’ about the ruined town of Wang-Li-Fu. It’s out of my bailiwick. Now, whether I ought to lay this information before the Chinese officials of the provincial government——”

“Excuse me for meddling,” O’Shea broke in with a boyish, eager smile, “but I have come a long way to go rummagin’ about in this mess on me own hook. And do ye think the Chinese government could be trusted to go ahead and accomplish anything at all? This evidence of ours is no more than guesswork.”

“I have thought of that, Captain O’Shea. And the thing would not be done quietly. There would be a lot of chin-chin and clumsy preparation, and a gun-boat and pig-tailed soldiers, and Shanghai getting wind of the expedition. It would be better to do the trick off one’s own bat.”

“My friend, the sailorman with the cracked top, remarked most emphatic about the ‘Head Devil’ when he was spillin’ disconnected language,” thoughtfully observed O’Shea. “’Tis me strong opinion that he tangled himself with the main works of this busy fraternity of man-killers.”

“What are your plans, may I ask? You are welcome to all the information my men may pick up in the native city. What a lark! I wish I might get a leave of absence and go with you.”

“I would ask no better partner,” warmly returned O’Shea. “Well, I will buy charts and study the coast of this Kiangsu province and learn what I can about the inland waters. And then I will find a few good men that will go to hell for wages, and fight for the love of it. And I will charter a steamer that is fit to navigate rivers and we will be what you might call an expedition.”

Inspector Burke gripped the hard hand of Captain O’Shea and exclaimed with a laugh:

“Here’s luck to you! My word, but you’re the most refreshin’ man I’ve met since I came off frontier service in India! I will help you find your men. Nothing easier. Shanghai can furnish you gentlemanly remittance men from England, stranded American soldiers from Manila, time-expired bluejackets from Hong-Kong, broken shipmasters from God knows where, and assorted scamps who will follow any one that will buy the drinks.”

“’Tis cheerful news, Inspector Burke. I will have a council of war with you to-morrow at this time. I wish that you would see that poor McDougal is buried decent in a Christian church-yard and I will be glad to pay the bills. He was a good man once.”