"I think the air in here must be a little too close," Helen thought after a few moments. She raised herself and leaned toward the heavy curtain of straw. Then she rolled it partly upward, secured it to the fastenings, and looked out. She was sleeping at the side of the sampan next to the shore. All was quiet. She could see no one. Then she let her eyes glance toward the bow of the boat. Mr. Kit-ze was huddled down in his little boxlike apartment sound asleep.
"Oh," said Helen, "this will never do! I must call my father to awaken him."
But even as she started to move toward her father's apartment, she stopped again, almost transfixed. A hand had cautiously made its way up the side of the sampan, and was now directing itself toward Mr. Kit-ze's breast.
CHAPTER X
AN ARRESTED SACRIFICE
he hand moved nearer and nearer Mr. Kit-ze's breast; a moment more and it had buried itself in the folds of his robe. Even as Helen continued to gaze like one transfixed, ere yet she had the power to recover herself, a face appeared above the hand. But it was not the face she had expected to see—that of Mr. Choi-So. Instead, the moonlight showed her clearly the repulsive countenance of the old mutang.
There are moments when sudden excitement leads us into a line of action our cooler moments would by no means approve, when quick emotions bring impulses that are followed without a pause for reasoning. Such a time had now come to Helen. Mr. Kit-ze was being robbed. She could see that plainly. The thief was the old mutang, and the object of her theft, it almost instantly flashed into Helen's mind, was the red miriok. In truth, even as the intuition came to her, she saw the hideous little image in the woman's hand.
All Helen's energies were now bent toward a frustration of the old woman's design of carrying away the miriok. She, Helen, must recover it ere the mutang got off with it. For if the miriok disappeared, how could she ever carry out her good intentions for either Mr. Kit-ze or Choi-So? All would be frustrated. For would not Mr. Kit-ze be violently angry? and would he not at once charge the theft to Choi-So? And what might not happen? As to poor Choi-So, he would surely grow demented when he found that the image had gone beyond his reach—oh, she felt that he would!