At the same moment that she did so a look of pained expostulation crept into the staring slant eyes on a level with her own. The yellow jaw gaped, filled with blood, and the poised knife fell at his side, sticking point down in the flooring. The azure and lemon-yellow that covered the woman's body flamed into sudden scarlet. It was only as the figure with the expostulating yellow face sank to the ground, crumpling up on itself as it fell, that Blake comprehended. That quick sweep of scarlet, effacing the azure and lemon, had come from the sudden deluge of blood that burst over the woman's body. She had made use of the upstroke, Mexican style. Her knife had cut the full length of the man's abdominal cavity, clean and straight to the breastbone. He had been ripped up like a herring.
Blake panted and wheezed, not at the sight of the blood, but at the exertion to which his flabby muscles had been put. His body was moist with sweat. His asthmatic throat seemed stifling his lungs. A faint nausea crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the thought that such things could take place so easily, and with so little warning.
His breast still heaved and panted and he was still fighting for breath when he saw the woman stoop and wipe the knife on one of the fallen Chinaman's sleeves.
"We 've got to get out of here!" she whimpered, as she caught up the mandarin coat and flung it over her shoulders, for in the struggle her body had been bared almost to the waist. Blake saw the crimson that dripped on her matting slippers and maculated the cream white of the mandarin coat.
"But where's Binhart?" he demanded, as he looked stolidly about for his black boulder.
"Never mind Binhart," she cried, touching the eviscerated body at her feet with one slipper toe, "or we 'll get what he got!"
"I want that man Binhart!" persisted the detective.
"Not here! Not here!" she cried, folding the loose folds of the cloak closer about her body.
She ran to the matting curtain, looked out, and called back, "Quick! Come quick!" Then she ran back, slipped the bolt in the outer door and rejoined the waiting detective.
"Oh, white man!" she gasped, as the matting fell between them and the room incarnadined by their struggle. Blake was not sure, but he thought he heard her giggle, hysterically, in the darkness. They were groping their way along a narrow passage. They slipped through a second door, closed and locked it after them, and once more groped on through the darkness.