“Look about you. See them? Already they are beginning to smoke up again. And it is a dirty smell. I have to go out and roam about the island to get away from it. Dreadful! To give up my throne room to nasty little brass pipes. Ugh!”
While he was speaking the girl stared about her, now better able to see the place and the people in it. There were at least half a dozen men. And all were Chinamen, as far as she could see, although not all were dressed in blouse and loose trousers and wadded slippers—the usual costume of the un-westernized Chinaman.
Two of the men were lying down, and there were tiny lamps sputtering on the low stools, or tables, set close to their heads. They held long-stemmed pipes with small brass bowls, and had begun to smoke something that had a very pungent and disagreeable odor.
Ruth’s mind had begun to clear. She remembered the heavy boxes she and Chess had seen brought ashore, and the Chinaman in the speed launch, and then the yellow-faced woman being taken on this very day toward the American shore. The whole puzzle began to fit together like a piece of patchwork.
Chinamen; a high-powered boat going back and forth across the St. Lawrence; a hidden cave on this supposedly uninhabited island; the heavy boxes; the smoking of this vile paste which she now saw a third Chinaman dip out of a tiny bowl, on a stick, and drop into his pipe in the form of a “pill.”
Opium!
If these men—and the white men of the speed launch—did any smuggling it was not diamonds they smuggled. It was opium. And they were probably running Chinese across the border as well. Ruth knew that she was in a very serious predicament when she had swiftly thought this out, if she had not realized it before.
What would these evil-looking yellow men do to her—and to poor Chess? The latter, she was relieved to feel, was biding his time. But what chance was likely to arise which would lead to their escape from this cavern?
She looked about the place. Two of the yellow men were between her and the passage through which she and her companion had been dragged. If she wanted to, she could not make a dash for liberty.
She turned again to the bedraggled and ragged-haired old man, curiosity about whom had led to this predicament. The King of the Pipes was watching her with eyes that glittered like a bird’s.