"Heard what she said? What she wants?" Over the shoulders of the crowd she gave Barbara Wallace a venomous look, then came at me.
A little too late. My hand had shot out and snatched the mask from the face of China's monarch. A moment I glared, the bit of black stuff in my grasp, at the alien countenance I had uncovered. Crowding and craning of the others to see. Jabbering, exclaiming all around us.
"Corking make-up; looks like a sure-enough Chinaman."
"No make-up at all. The real thing."
"What's the big idea?"
"Why did he unmask, then?"
"Didn't want to. They made him."
And last, but loudest, repeated time and again, with wonder, with distaste, with rising anger,
"The Vandeman's Chinese cook!"
For with the ripping away of that black oval, I had looked into the slant, inscrutable eyes of Fong Ling. Hemmed in by the crowd, he could but face me; he did so with a kind of unhuman passivity.